Regardless as I agree that meaning is subjectively applied and made, I’m not going to lie to myself and think Elon is some Renaissance Man out to uplift the species.

The Great Man hypothesis has been bankrupt for a long time, and he’s just a mediocre computer programmer that is good at hyping investors with a start from daddy’s money. If he wants to be altruistic, he can start with better compensation for his employees.

That’s the thing though. I don’t find consciousness to be profound or significant, just the navigation system we’re stuck with.

Yes, it really not that profound. We’re liminally bound. There are obviously the possibilities and even likelihoods of phenomena present in the universe we are not aware of or only aware in part of, even our instruments just being a way to extend our senses.

The solutions you’re speaking of aren’t really any different from the pattern detection we seek in the universe through our empiricism to begin with. If we can’t find direct effects, sometimes we settle for looking at downstream or indirect effects.

The blind speculation though I can do without. There may or may not be other phenomena we’re familiar with. I’ll worry about it when they have an interaction with reality that is within our ability to study.

I don’t know if it really that is interesting though. To say that we can’t infer anything without being conscious is as deep as saying we can’t investigate anything else once we’re dead.

1. Is there though? That doesn’t seem self evident or settled considering there’s a whole tradition and sub-camps of empiricism, a posteriori knowledge completely dependent on the pragmatic acceptance of consciousness as the only lens we have.

2. “If there is” seems like the first would need to be settled first before this conditional can be pondered.

3. Since we can’t get past the first premise, there’s no real reason to grant this conclusion.

And no, it really doesn’t seem that profound once deflated.

You’re only struggling to see that I’m struggling with how your central point is anything to really take note of.

As someone else already said above. That, being conscious is really the only way we are aware of the phenomenon of consciousness, just seems a tautology, a restatement of obvious practical limitation. They were also right that its our only way of being familiar with anything.

That being said, with all importance being deflated finally, trying to infer further metaphysical claims from it seems dubious.

And I think they do have a bearing on the post if one is trying to make metaphysical claims from observations. We can argue them, but I think any kind of proposition making a metaphysical statement can rightly be deflated when the justification is lacking.

I guess I really don’t find it that profound, just a pragmatic necessity as it is. Not to stop anyone from asking these questions, because we always will, but just accept it with a structural-functionalist interpretation. It exists for a biological function. Any further understanding of it is just bonus. I’m ok with our understanding being a little on the fuzzy side, content that a rock doesn’t have the structure because it has no need of metabolizing or replicating.

We can’t know of consciousness even while being conscious. We know a seeming of a phenomenon we’ve labeled.

We can however compare the empirical correlations of everything we know bodily and neuronally about it with each other and similar in other organisms.

We can assume we share a reality, and we can assume all organisms have to navigate their reality with some levels of awareness. Then we can also see the rather diverse wetware options that embody this phenomenon.

It’s no more special to ask what it’s like to be me than it is to ask what it’s like to be slime mold. The same epistemic, practical limitations exist.

We can look at physical correlates, or internally analyze, thinking about it with some mental inquiry like Heidegger.

Nothing seems to ever actually produce a ‘certainty of knowing’.

No meaningful impact is going to come from whether people decide to have children or not. As someone else already previously said on this post, the changes have to be systemic, driven on the government,corporate and industrial scale.

The world population has been in decline and will likely continue to do so. Why speak of some alarmist anti-natalist, eco-fascist position when we should be holding corporations and capitalism at fault for most of this?