>when you Hitchens a Diogenes? Behold, a
>
>chicken

Cool, man. You've read some ancient philosophy somewhere and mish-mashed it with name-dropping Hitchens for some reason. Good stuff and keep those quips rolling, no matter how nonsensical they may be.

Whatever bone you've got to pick from here on out, the bacteria idea you offered earlier wasn't a good one.

Do you know what ad hominem means? Because this ain't it.

You said you don't need evidence because you made a "tongue in cheek" comment on r/philosophy. Which seems to suggest either a) you don't think evidence is important for arguments, b) you don't know what tongue in cheek means, or c) you think r/philosophy isn't a place that requires the above, or some combination of all of that.

How's what working out for me? Calling out a bullshit argument? Not all that hard, really. Feel free to provide support if you don't think that's true, but I'm not sure why you're upset that someone doesn't take your point seriously when your justification is "I don't need shit because my comments are flippant and this is r/philosophy".

"My argument is bad and I don't care/don't believe it anyway."

Gotcha.

Your hunger and thirst sensations are hormonally driven. They don't arise as a result of bacterial activity.

You're making huge sweeping assumptions based on the fact that because the volume of bacteria in the human body is very high, they must "control everything". That's not how our biology works. There's no evidence at all that bacterial function in the body has any sort of causal link to higher-order brain function. Altered states of consciousness can arise as a result of serious infection, but that's not at all the same as bacteria being able to coordinate and "control" what the body does or how the conscious mind acts and reacts.

You'd need a LOT more evidence to even come close to supporting what you're suggesting.

Yeah, sorry if it seemed nit-picky, but I think these are important distinctions when we're talking about where consciousness comes from or the presence of what disparate elements might/might not be necessary conditions for it. Missing the entire limbic system and still having consciousness is almost certainly impossible without some sort of supernatural explanation of the later.

Similarly, with locked-in syndrome, I think there's some argument there about whether we really would know if those patients were conscious in the absence of some sort of external indicator. What does "consciousness" entail, and is it the same as "response to stimuli"? If they really can't "feel, speak or interact with the world" in any way, what is it exactly that serves as independent confirmation that they are actually conscious?

It's an interesting quandary when it comes to AI. I think this professor's argument falls pretty flat, at least the short summary of it that's being offered. He's saying things like "all information is equally valuable to AI" and "dopamine-driven energy leads to intention" which is somehow synonymous with "feeling" and therefore consciousness, but these points he's making aren't well-supported, so unless there's more that we're not seeing, the dismissal of consciousness in AI is pretty thin as presented.

In my opinion, it doesn't seem likely that what we currently know as AI would have something that could reasonably be called "consciousness", but a different reply above brought up an interesting point - when a series of increasingly nuanced pass/fail logical operations gets you to complex formulations that appear indistinguishable from thought, what is that exactly? It's hard to know how we would really separate that sort of "instantaneous operational output" from consciousness if it became sophisticated enough. And with an AI, just given how fast it could learn, it almost certainly would become that sophisticated, and incredibly quickly at that.

In a lot of ways, it doesn't seem all that different from arguments surrounding strong determinism in regards to free will. We really don't know how "rigid" our own conscious processes are, or how beholden they might be to small-scale neurochemical interactions that we're unable to observe or influence directly. If it turns out that our consciousness is emerging as something like "macro-level" awareness arising from strongly-determined neurochemical interactions, it's difficult to see how that sort of scenario is all that much different from an AI running billions of logical operations around a problem to arrive at an "answer" that could appear as nuanced and emotional as our conscious thoughts ever did. The definition of consciousness might have to be expanded, but I don't think it's a wild enough stretch to assume that it's "breathless panic" to wonder about it. I think we agree that the article isn't all that great.

>Urbach-Wiethe disease.

You're misunderstanding the disease that you're referencing. The limbic system is a complex neurological system involving multiple regions of the brain working in concert to perform a variety of complex tasks including essential hormonal regulation for things like temperature and metabolism and modulation of fundamental drives like hunger and thirst, emotional regulation and memory formation and storage. It includes the hypothalamus and thalamus, hippocampus and amygdala. Total absence of the limbic system would be incompatible with life.

Urbach-Wiethe patients often show varying levels of calcification in the amygdala, which leads to a greater or lesser degree of corresponding cognitive impairment and "fearlessness" that is otherwise atypical in a person who does not have that kind of neurological damage. The limbic system is not "absent" in these patients. Rather, a portion of it is damaged and the subsequent function of that portion is impaired to some extent.

That's a really weird comment. Wondering if he's "really a scientist" because he's also a university president doesn't make any sense. One is a professional designation while the other is an academic position.

Whatever else he may be now, prior to this point this guy was a Rhodes scholar and a credentialed physiologist and neuroscientist who spent a decade as the de facto head of a biotech/drug research and development firm. So yes, he's a scientist.

Falsifying data is one of the worst things you can do in the sciences and absolutely calls his entire career into question, but it's absurd to suggest he's not really a scientist because of an academic appointment.