You strongly disagree that other intelligent, social, creative animals are built along similar lines to Homo sapiens?
You really think that we’re a special case, that a difference in degree has become a difference in kind?
I personally experience a feeling that I’m conscious subjectively, but I have no evidence that I’m any more or less motivated by pleasure or pain or community than a dolphin is.
Where do we draw the line? What’s the acid test for “yup now we’re dealing with consciousness”?
Why not go the other way and just admit that Descartes gave us the Cartesian plane (among other things) but was at best a product of his time with: “I think therefore I am”.
Descartes was a genius, but he was no Alan Turing, and Alan-fucking-Turing got it wrong on the most famous thing named after him (among the lay population at least). The Turing Test was a great idea, but it’s now trivially useless.
Humans are special to (mostly) themselves and (substantially) other humans.
They are not special to the universe. We’ve had this argument, it was called the “Inquisition” at least once, and we eventually cleared up once and for all what celestial body rotates around the bigger one.
You really think that we’re a special case, that a difference in degree has become a difference in kind?
I personally experience a feeling that I’m conscious subjectively, but I have no evidence that I’m any more or less motivated by pleasure or pain or community than a dolphin is.
Where do we draw the line? What’s the acid test for “yup now we’re dealing with consciousness”?