>A reality exists outside of our minds, that reality is just built up out of intrinsic objects (subatomic particles/quantum fields)

Cool. Those subatomic particles (quarks) make atoms which make things. This is very straightforward and provable. If you want I can walk you through all the supporting evidence showing how stuff is made out of these fundamental particles.

> Everything else is extrinsic and essentially emerges from interactions between those intrinsic items. Which includes anything the human mind can see.

That's...... a social constructionist. The watered down one where "some things" are social constructs instead of everything. You've got two opposing views in your head.

>My view lends some ideas from social constructivism

"Borrow"

>most of such constructivism is just inherently done by the brain, not necessarily defined through social interaction.

A distinction that I'm not sure matters. A solipsistic take on social constructionism isn't really awe inspiring. I'm wholly unimpressed by both. They're misdirection at best. Let's take "the obvious example" of money. If people don't agree something is money (or you personally don't think it is), then it can't be used as money. And yes, something being a means of exchanging wealth does depend upon there being an exchange, implying two entities, and therefore a society. I get the concept. But far far too many people use and abuse this idea to justify the end conclusion of "it doesn't really exist" / "doesn't really matter" / "I just really like post-modernism". Like how social darwinism or eugenics were used and abused by terrible people to justify their murder. The scientific or philosophical application of these ideas is just a cover. A distraction from the real intent. Now, that's unfair to you. And it's unfair to all the eugenicists who want a better species. I am throwing out the baby with the bathwater here because the baby is bad. (haha, it's a eugenics joke. Cmon that's funny.) But social construction (and your idea of solipsistic construction) isn't that useful and has been too far abused to be publicly lauded. Extensions like including things which don't depend on social agreement, or things in general. Which is nuts.

And don't dodge it: If there were no human minds, would nothing exist in reality?

>I also don't deny reality exists

Cool

>Things are simply constructs of the human mind.

Try to reconcile those two ideas.

If there were no human minds, would nothing exist in reality?

See, your whole stance is the philosophical take of social constructionism. Which has been watered down if late. For Berger and Luckmann circa 1966, it was the basis of reality. But this take isn't the defacto standard and I dunno how to tell you this any more plainly than a chupa exists as a chupa even when you don't know what a chupa is.

> There is no real "thing" called a bottle, there's just a collection of particle

That's what a "thing" entails. A collection of particles.

Yes, there is language and words concepts. But even when that gets played with and you call it a chupa, it doesn't change what it really is. The universe doesn't give two shits what's rumbling around your head.or what language you used. It existed long before you and that bottle will be around after your dead and just sitting in a land fill, probably.

Ugh, arguing with philosophers that reality exists. I need another beer.

Part of me is happy that there's space news. Part of me is disgusted at the current state of quality in news in general. We're right next to the rack of tabloids declaring batboy was found on Gliese 581c.

I should start paying for a newspaper again or something.

> Is this improvement or anarchy?

Odd that you'd consider those diametrically opposed.

>At the right dosage people can be awake yet very little to none of their experience during intoxication is stored into memory.

Now that's something. Yeah, similar to "black-out drunk", where they simply don't form any lasting memories of their actions.

KEY FACTOR: They do not RETAIN any memory of events. Hand someone wacked out of their gourd a banana phone and say "ring ring" and they'll answer it. For that to happen they have to have at least some persistence of state between "that's a phone" and "what do I do when I answer a phone". And that state is stored in memory. They're not brain-dead. GHB impairs memory. It doesn't just stop memory all together. ...Yeah, this has been studied. The booze stops the transfer from short-term to long-term memory. Remember what I said about memory being "of any sort"? Even if you later forget, it doesn't mean you weren't conscious when it happened.

I mean, that's a real good try. But the science doesn't back it up.

>How are they different? > both are biomechanistically determined?

...movement? wtf does the mechanical properties of biology have to do with sleeping? We lay still when we sleep? Surely you're trying to talk about something else. Bruh, don't attempt to pull wool with dem dar big'ol words. You're chatting with someone who can call bullshit on it.

>Consciousness seems to be an emergent property of episodic memory

(And sensory input going in otherwise it's all just solipsism. And something to make sense of it. YEAH! Isn't it GREAT when we find out we're all on the same page and agree with each other? )

>and linguistic (or perhaps symbolic?) activation thereof.

I'm willing to posit that whatever you think "symbolic activation of memory" entails, it might as well be called "intelligence". Consider, an image of a snake. If a cows sees a snake, there's a jumble of electrochemical signals which the cow has been trained to know SYMBOLIZES a danger.

Language though? My first blush is to call that out as just plain silly. What's special about language? Humans (and most social animals) have portions of our brains dedicated to language, sure. But this is a weird thing to hinge consciousness on. Social sharks are conscious, while solitary polar bears are not?

>We can talk ourselves into accessing our memories

I mean, so can smells. Sounds. Being in the dark. We've taught children raised by wolves language later in life and they confirm there's still memory even without language. I mean, how else would anything ever learn. I'm really not following this marriage between language and memory that you've made.

>> Show me how your consciousness is fundamentally different than that of a cow.

>We have episodic memory

Why on earth would you believe cows don't? (You understand "episodic" just means long-term memory that we can review, like an episode, right?) This is real silly for anyone who's ever put a cow inside an electric fence. They certainly learn how the fence works. Likewise, smart cows are a problem in feedlots and such. When one learns how to get a latch open, the others all learn it. And, you know, retain that knowledge. In long-term memory. Which can be handy for the later when they try to open a latch.

>and symbolic language to access it

Animals have language. ...no promises about cows specifically though. I mean, they're pretty dumb. But moving the discussion to crows doesn't change much here.

Yes.

Show me how your consciousness is fundamentally different than that of a cow.

We're probably smarter than most cows, but then again you and I are probably smarter than most people. That's not really a road anyone wants to go down.

You still owe me What drugs makes someone "awake and unconscious"?

C'mon man, I said consciousness is being awake. The obvious rebuttal is explaining how they're two different things. If you're just going to skip over the hard questions, you've already left the conversation even if you're still here.

Well I apologize. A lot of people bring a whole lot of baggage that really makes a mess of the conversation. NOT getting it out the way leads to a whole lot of very unproductive conversation.

>How do you explain the phenomenon of lucid dreaming?

What explanation? You're not conscious. That's not an example of consciousness. It is not an example of, nor explained by consciousness.

How does the 1996 movie Space Jam explain lucid dreaming? It's unrelated.

>It would be more accurate to say it means aware and unaware. You can be awake yet unconscious (there are drugs that prove this) and asleep yet conscious (just ask anyone who's suffers from sleep paralysis).

mmm. No it wouldn't. You're off base here. You're very specifically conscious during sleep paralysis by definition. It happens after sleep. If you are aware, you're awake, and you're conscious. What drugs makes someone "awake and unconscious"? What you are correct about is that it's not an immediate on/off thing. There are stages in between as your brain boots up. You can be "minimally aware". Likewise, dope and alcohol reduce consciousness because they literally impede your senses and your mental functions. Caffeine and cocaine increase it, briefly. But any amount of consciousness would be, by definition, no longer unconscious.

>Correct me if I'm wrong here but you're defining consciousness as

Can do.

Consciousness is any system of active sensors feeding data to memory (of any sort) with any amount of intelligence that can/could act upon it. Remember that ants have some amount of intelligence. Amoeba hunt down their prey.

>Assuming sleep is also a well defined phenomenon when it most certainly is not. Of course we have a practical definition of both what being awake is and what being asleep is that works very well in typical scenarios. But those definitions fall short when you ask what it means to be conscious.

Wow dude you are working REAL hard at arguing with yourself here.

>then is it not conscious and deserving of rights in which all conscious beings are?

No. Just as ants and amoeba are conscious and don't have the rights that people have. Like the concept of "life", it's not all that special. No one in their right mind argues that your gut bacteria aren't alive and yet we don't blink an eye at killing thousands of them routinely. Does AI deserve rights? Maybe. But don't hinge the whole thing on consciousness, even if we could all use the word the same way.

>Or is human consciousness special?

Not very.

>Or is our definition of consciousness incorrect?

Yes. Almost everyone pretends they're special because of ego or ordained by god, but I repeat myself.

>But seriously if you disrespect me again I'm leaving the conversation.

Pft, we're on reddit.

> imagined experiences

I dunno how to explain this to you, but you're unconscious when you're dreaming. That's not an experience you're consciously having. I'm not going to be able to give you definition that includes something it ought not. But you don't like that do you? You're imagining some high-brow phenomenological consciousness which really means "soul", but in like, a fancy way. But there's no such thing. There's just consciousness that's the opposite of sleep. It's a disagreement on the definition.

> because we've yet clearly defined consciousness to begin with.

We've yet to agree upon a definition. Plenty of people have proposed their own personal pet definitions. Some are even clearly defined.

The hold-up isn't technical in nature, it's getting all the religious nuts to accept an answer.

> but sissiparity definitely works better than reproduction with a partner

Bollocks. Asexual reproduction depends on mutation to bring in new genetic material. Sexual reproduction reaps a geometrically increasing history of tests. You really need to read up on this more.

>their large bodies making their cancer having cancer a probability to why they don't die as much as we do for it.

. . . what?

>but keep the arguments with the traits of animals, and not the cancer one because that would relate only to mutations and genome errors unlike the selected mutations of the traits.

oooooooh. Dude. Whales (and all larger animals) have a better system of screening and checking for "mutations and genome errors". This is literally one of their "selected traits". They don't suffer from cancer as much as they ought given they have so many cells.

You REALLY have to learn more about these things before you start trying to stir up philosophical questions about the nature of man.

> So the question is why any other animal's DNA (except the hydra) doesn't do the same when it's cut.

Because that's not part of the design in the DNA, except for hydras. (And some lizards tails, salamander legs, starfish... Here we go

>why hasn't this particular regenerating factor been selected [in other animals, like humans. I want to regrow a limb!]

Evolution. It's not selecting what's best or what's coolest, it's just whatever works. Like how it's be really nice we didn't get cancer as often, like whales. But the species gets on just fine without that. Or polarized vision of the mantis shrimp. Or the echolocation of bats. Just on and on and on and on. Species envy is real. For every neat trait though, there's typically some drawback. Did you know cat vision is blurry? They sent the light through their sensors twice, and have great lowlight vision, but it makes things blurry. Humans having to work out for their muscles is actually a FEATURE to survive lean times. Ugh.

No, this is only interesting to people who don't know how evolution works. Which, admittedly, is a depressingly high number even among "educated" people. If talking about it helps people get some learning in them, then all the better. But posing it as "haha, humans are magical creatures with souls and special purposes instilled by God because we're so special" is just plain bollocks. The post is literally anti-science. It's questioning the well known and obvious answers that science hass provided. Hey, this is r/philosophy, the place for question. But it's like questioning if the Holocaust happened. Some people are going to take offense. Please mind your lane and keep the philosophical drivel out of the science's territory. Or you will be told how wrong you are.

It's the worm's DNA. A blueprint for what the thing is supposed to built.

The dude's post saying "Nuh-Uh!" does not a legitimate argument make.

The frog skin isn't cognitive like a brain, it's reacting as it ought as if it were on a frog. Which, hey, could be useful.

EDIT: GEEEEEZE, if you ask for an answer TAKE IT when it's given to you instead of saying "NUH UH!" over and over.

>It's our culture that makes us unique

>- social structure,

Uh, wolves are highly social. Bees and ants are eusocial. That is, MORE social than humans. We don't have a monopoly on social structures at all.

>language

Bees dance location data to each other. Birds sing and communicate. We've taught English to apes. Yeah, this one is bollocks too.

> psychology

Any psychology? I mean, anything with a brain has some psychology to it.

NONE of that makes us unique. What, you going to try and say "tool use" next? You're about 70-100 years behind on this debate. Humans are just another animal. It's just egocentrism telling you otherwise.

EDIT:

WOW.

You abuse the moderation system to just censor posts you don't like? That's low man. Real low. It's the rules here to actually argue your position. If you just can't stand someone disagreeing with you, then this sub isn't for you.

Religious anti-science in sheep's clothing.

When philosophers, humanities, religion, or witch doctor step into the realm of science they're usually pushing some malignant agenda to the detriment of all. Science provides you the truth, as best we can, in the least wrong way possible. It's the witchdoctos and preachers and humanitarians' job to accept that and keep all the guys from trying to cannibalize each other with that knowledge or whatever. If they reject the science, I assume they're just sharpening their own cannibal fork.

Sorry. So far we've only done it for cats.

> Why doesn’t evolution adapt an insect of the past to maintain its giant form despite the pressure from the environment? Couldn’t it have figured out a way to maintain itself?

What? That's well known. The O2 content of the atmosphere.

This whole post is just bollocks appealing the to mysticism of the unknown. But bro, other people know more than you and have answers.

I get where you're coming from, but that's really just word games and doesn't support "is not reducible to our brains and biology".

> [Waves] but cannot be reduced to the properties of a molecule.

If you studied how water molecules interacted with each other, ie the fluid behaviour that really does come from their physical properties (as dictates by their nuclear properties) then you'd be able to extrapolate how the wave pattern form. The potential for making waves is certainly because of the molecules and we can point to the exact part which dictate it. (It's a phase diagram).

It's for sure a lot easier to see at the macro scale and simply observing a puddle, but saying that emergent properties aren't reducible to their base components is disingenuous.

Here in this context, it amounts to "humans are unique not because of our biology, but because of how our biology is out together." Both of those are within the set of "because of our biology".

I mean.... A weapon that threatened Moscow from Ukraine would quickly make the war massively unpopular in Moscow. All this dicking around us equivalent to weapon testing. What's the end goal here? Bring Moscow to the peace talks, restore Ukraine, bring them into the western fold. Dragging it all out just craters Ruasia and Ukraine further into the ground.

Does anyone think Russia is actually going to be able to win? Are they just trying to push Ukraine into letting go of Donbas and Crimea? It's just not worth it. Keeping Putin in power? Geeze, that's a lot of suffering for one guy.

Well there's the pretty obvious reason you "just don't get" a lot of things.

Read more. It'll help. Best of luck out there.

Hoo, haven't had someone step into the ring and just openly attack atheism in quite a while.

>I don't get militant atheism.

I'd prefer dissenting rather than militant. I'm not out to kill or conquer you, but I certainly disagree and I'm up for debating it. But it comes from dealing with theists.

>It's not as if there isn't a crazy conundrum no matter what you believe.

Except it's NOT crazy if the rules are consistent and jive with everything else. From all the other rules, to everything we see, to everything everyone else has ever experienced. ESPECIALLY if it's useful. A rational belief isn't crazy, that's a false equivalence trying to drag me down to your level. And what IS "crazy" anyway? It's when you can't understand someone's irrational reasoning, and that happens very quickly when they believe in things that can't both be true at the same time.

>E.g. it's about equally crazy to believe the universe has lasted forever,

Sure. Crazy. Especially when you look at how entropy behaves. We've observed this all over the place and it's fundamental in thermodynamics, your refrigerator, all the power plants you benefit from in your daily life.

>that it was created from nothing,

AND HERE IT IS. The tired regurgitated lie. This is absolutely NOT what the big bang theory says. But it's what the christian propaganda has spread about the globe in an effort to poison people's brains. Want to know why I dissent? It's the LIES. Lie to me and I just double down on my distrust and skepticism. Where there's a propaganda campaign organized against a particular belief I re-question everything I've ever heard about it and try to figure out where the lies end and the truth starts.

But yes. The genesis of energy would be VERY crazy considering what the big bang theory tells us, and the observable iron-clad rule of conservation of energy. People are worked very hard for millennia to violate it and failed.

>that a god existed forever, or that a god was created from nothing.

Yes, both very crazy. No observable evidence what so ever. Unless you're being poetical or playing some word games.

You know what isn't crazy? SCIENCE. There's plenty of bits which we don't know the complete truth yet. The difference between how much light we see (and how we think galaxies form) and how much gravity we feel and how fast stuff is spinning around the milky way. But rather than put on some bravado con-man bluff, we can acknowledge that we don't know, and hunt down an answer. All our ideas about how all this stuff works aren't going to be perfect, but if we repeatedly get less wrong than before, we'll approach the truth FAR better and faster than any religion ever will.

>Additionally, the majority of religious belief, seen through the lens of atheism, is the formalization of conventional wisdom by people who lived out their entire lives centuries ago.

That I'll agree with. Religion is important to study if you want to know anything about anthropology. Before we knew better it was a strong driving force in a lot of law, medicine, economics... just a whole lot. And it's important from a sociological angle to know how and why pockets of a population are going to be irrational. Where the conventional wisdom is quite foolish, like where they flagellate themselves, you'll find a lot of irrational behavior.

>[religions enforce] lifestyles in favor of one that promises stabler, more long-term happiness

Except, you know, the ones that REJECT hedonism. Which is many of them. Most religions are a pile of rules that helped and supported whoever was in power. If telling people they would be happy in the afterlife let them work harder and behave while they were alive, that was a message the rulers could get behind. What helps the nation really does have a lot of overlap with helping the people within the nation. And any nation with a religion built around self-destructive actions tend to, you know, self-destruct on a larger scale.

And this is a very important bit. Where they were once useful tools and steering people into behaviors that helped the group, the religions abide by evolutionary processes themselves just as much as species do. The self-destructive ones die out, the ones that don't spread themselves die out, the ones that conquer and infect others survive. The evolutionary process has left us only with the old-time religions that SERVE TO SELF PERPETUATE THEMSELVES. Now a days, religions are more about helping themselves rather than the people within the group.

Coincidentally, old-time religions are dying out because they're incompatible with the current modern society. The only survivors will be the ones that don't butt heads with rational thought and flee off to the god of the gaps or refine themselves strictly to moral conundrums. (Game theory and sociology are coming for you too).

>Religions are all about human nature,

Religions are all about everything. You can't just cherry pick the bits that talk about psychology. If you're okay with tossing out the garbage bits like genesis, any depiction of the super-natural like walking on water, virgin birth, coming back from the dead, reincarnation, multiplying fish, burning oil without consumption, everything the church did to Galileo and Turing, and on and on and on... oh and what the church said about tectonic plates. Even that was controversial back in the day. It's like a constant ball and chain holding us back. But if you're okay with just ditching all claims made by all the religions that aren't strictly psychological or sociological, then all the more power to you. It's a step in the right direction.

I wanted to toss in the crusades, Muhammad's pedophilia, the treatment of women, everything most of them say about homosexuality, whatever nonsense was going through those guys' heads on 9/11/2001.... but that IS what religion suggests we do as far as "human nature" goes. I dissent.

>No one will be passing on your negativity generation to generation

My children are free to believe what they want, but so far when it comes up in conversation they're not believers. What I'm really pushing onto them, and this isn't up to them, is rationality.

> know-it-alls

This really isn't the insult you think it is. I strive to know all I can. What exactly is wrong with that and why would you treat knowledge as negative? That, I think, is the most telling thing about your entire rant.

EDIT: Oh, a snarky late update while saying you're too lazy to read anything?

>I'm sorry if your day-to-day thinking is dedicated solely to simplifying everything that makes other people human. You'll likely find, once you age beyond 18-25, that you were mistaken here. It happens to all sorts of people, and it's generally social/life inexperience that promotes such swift simplifications in regards to everything and every argument and every conflict. I'd bet you ignore other tough problems like war. "It's so simple just stop killing others and be fair." Thanks, genius, we know. There happens to be more present than that.

Simplifying everything? Yes. The simplest explanation that jives with everything else is the best explanation.

Beyond 25? I'm hitting 40. Geeze, another attempted low-blow swing and a miss. You're really not good at this.

War? ...War sucks. You know what REALLY sucks? All the religious war that was fought over absolute bullshit reasons. But you want a real solution to war? Nukes and trade. The threat of nuclear retribution has kept the gits at the top from invading each other and trade has stopped them from attacking to their own detriment. Violate those rules and suffer, as Russia is showing us. (And, sadly, that Ukraine really should have kept the nukes)

I'll have you know this is free range organic contempt with fair trade loathing. And occasionally bespoke disgust.

Ugh, you ever dealt with a religious fanatic Buddhist? It's a trip.

Any group that buys in a little to much into Confucianism is likewise pretty messed up.

Taoists are the most annoying though. They can talk a lot and say very little.

To best understand non-western cultures, understand they have their own flavor of messed up, just as we have baptists, fundamentalists, mormons, and Catholics. A Christian and a Buddhist might both be mind -body dualists, but they're approaching it from different angles.

It's all just fashion.

> The thing is in all those cases a human built and trained an Ai to do those things.

The terms you're looking for is supervised learning vs unsupervised / self learning.. Both have been heavily studied for decades. AlphaGo learned on a library of past games, but they also made a better playing AlphaGo Zero which is entirely self-taught by playing with itself. No human input needed.

So... NO, it's NOT "all those cases". You're just behind on the current state of AI development.

Yes. "The singularity" has been tossed about by a lot of people with a lot of definitions, but the most common usage talks about using AI to improve AI development. It's a run-away positive feedback loop.

...But we're already doing that. The RATE of scientific progress and engineering refinement has been increasing since... forever. On top of that rate increase we ARE using computers and AI to create better software and faster AI and faster learning AI, just like Kurzweil said. Just not the instant magical snap of the fingers awakening that too many lazy hollywood writers imagine.