If you want to know more about what I think is going on, research Orchestrated Objective Reduction, developed by Penrose and anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff.

It is the most testable and therefore the most scientific theory of consciousness. It has made 14 predictions, which is 14 more than any other theory. Six of these predictions have been verified, and none falsified.

Anything else would just be me rehashing the argument of the people who actually came up with the theory, and I’m not interested in doing that.

Well, I don’t believe consciousness is computational. I think Roger Penrose’s quantum brain theory is more likely to be accurate. So if an AI told me it was conscious, I wouldn’t believe it. If consciousness arose from complexity alone, we should have signs of it in all sorts of complex systems, but we don’t, and not even the slightest hint of it in AI. The AI people hate his theory because it means literal consciousness is very far out.

I don't. It's the classic "problem of other minds". This is not an issue for Buddhism and the Yogic tradition, however, and ultimately at the highest level all of the mystical traditions, whether Sufism, Christian mysticism (St. John of the Cross and others), shamanism, the Kabbalah etc. What's important to these traditions is what your own individual experience of being conscious is like. More precisely, from a subjective POV, there are no "other minds" - it's all the same mind experiencing itself as what it thinks are separate minds.

If your experience of being conscious is innately freeing, and infinite, and unified, and fearless, and joyous, as they all, cross-culturally and across time, claim the state of being called 'enlightenment' is, then whether there are other minds or not is academic. You help other people to walk the path to enlightenment because they perceive *themselves* to be isolated, fearful, angry, grieving individual minds, that still perceive the idea that there are "other minds" to be a problem.

In Buddhism, the classic answer to people troubled by unanswerable questions is that the question does not go away, but the 'questioner' does. You don't care about the answer anymore, because you've seen through the illusion that there was anyone who wanted an answer in the first place.

We're conscious. Subjective experience is magical. The experience of emotions is magical. Being aware of experience is magical. If that isn't magical to you, then...sucks to be you. What is even the point of existing? You might as well just go through the motions until you die.

There is no evidence at all that AI is conscious.

We all float down here.

People arguing about whether we have free will or not always turns surreal immediately for me. You're *deciding* to argue about whether or not you have free will. (Someone will argue with me about what *deciding* means. It doesn't matter.)

Thank you.

That’s why I think this doodle is generally accurate. The first one is the foundation on which all the others can be built.

I spend every spare penny I have on my health, have run into debt, have fought like hell and it still isn’t enough. I have no career, no family. All these people saying health is overvalued should reevaluate their perspective.

Almost none of these people appear to have ever actually had a chronic illness.

Couldn’t be more true. Most people commenting here have obviously never been chronically ill.

I am, and haven’t.

Yeah. It’s not a hierarchy of values, it’s a hierarchy of needs. As someone with a lot of health struggles who spends all their money on healthcare, yeah, I have no family, no 'career' and can’t pursue my dreams.

This is a family network!

The Naked Gun?

Really immersive, incredible experience of the closest thing to being on another world that there is, to see in the theatre. So people go see it. It’s not complicated. It’s not great art, won’t be celebrated as a milestone in filmmaking like LOTR or Blade Runner, won’t leave people stunned like Amadeus or Schindler’s List, but it’s a really amazing cinematic experience. Again, it’s not complicated.

The YouTuber Man Carrying Thing mocked this exact dynamic: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2_TNubnp4P8

And often it isnt.

No proof, just so much experience with psychic phenomena that it's mundane - except it can only be explained by a nonlocal mind. Or I'm really crazy.

So, crazy it is, eh?

Also, paranormal research meta-studies show a slight positive affect, indicating something interesting is going on. You won't find that on Wikipedia, though: the tiny cadre of editors that act as the gatekeepers of anything to do with the paranormal are hardcore skeptics who quickly delete any evidence from studies that others try to add.

Also, the only theory of mind that has any empirical evidence can be interpreted as allowing for a nonlocal consciousness.

Roger Penrose is probably the most brilliant person alive and he says that we need a new type of physics to explain consciousness.

"I don't believe in any religion I've seen, so in that sense I'm an
atheist. However, [...] there is something going on that might resonate with a religious perspective".

- Penrose

Basically, the kind of dismissiveness with which the subject of consciousness is often treated and the assumption that it's local are both unwarranted.

What proof do you have that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain? If you don't have proof, then don't frame it as a statement.

And even if consciousness emerges from the brain, there is still the huge tiny issue that we have *no idea* how electrical impulses become thoughts and emotions.

As for myself, I have seen and experienced far too many phenomena that we can't explain unless consciousness is nonlocal, so there's no point in trying to convince me otherwise.

Yes, the problem of other minds.

I'm simply conjecturing that if/when we do solve the hard problem, we indeed might actually be able to tell.

It doesn't seem to be the case that consciousness is required for intelligence. Solving the Hard Problem of Consciousness is the only way we'll ever really know if a machine is sentient. Otherwise it could just be - and I expect it to be - that a superintelligent AI will be a philosophical zombie, that is, we won't be able to tell if it is conscious or not because it can mimic conscious awareness.

Nope.

I don't organize meetups. I just have gone to enough of them to see this behaviour, and no, there is no connection to 'more prestigious' events, as I have been to a whole continuum of events from fancy to grubby and 50% of people still don't show up to them regardless of what they are.

Meetups are notorious for how many people bail. Expect 50% of people to bail on even routine stuff like get-togethers and dinners. It's a weird psychology - if you're not going to show, why RSVP at all? People want to have multiple options to choose from on a given night. Dinners are bad because someone has paid for a table that the restaurant could be using for something else. Organizers discovered that the way around the problem was to make people deposit like $50 beforehand - suddenly everyone showed up for the dinner :)

The reality of death can be useful to appreciate life, but I don't believe it is necessary. I think a better way to look at this is by accepting that impermanence and change is woven into the fabric of the universe. We call the impermanence that leads to the cessation of the physical body 'death', but impermanence happens all around us all the time at many levels.

f anything, I think that we don't live long enough to learn what this life is all about. If we became immortal we would be given the time to wonder just what the eff is going on out there, or in our minds, until we have achieved some sort of resolution (enlightenment, in the Eastern traditions) and that is what truly leads to wisdom.

This, other brain-based interventions and psychedelic research will completely change the landscape of human well-being in a few short decades.

It's about time.