What’s up with the word making a comeback tho?

Maybe people are just realizing that magic words don’t actually exist. There are infinite ways to be an asshole in the world without ever uttering a forbidden phrase.

It measures you information processing capacity - not wisdom. High IQ people quite famously aren’t always the nicest ones to be around.

If you pay the 2€, remember to unsubsribe from the monthly subsciption that those sneaky bastards sign you up for.

If the IQ test were a true indicator of intellect the score would be fixed each and every time it is taken regardless of outside influences.

This is the case with professional IQ tests. They’re among the most repeatable measures in the entire field of psychology.

They’re not bullshit - you just don’t like them or understand what they actually measure.

It’s a highly studied field with tests that produce repeatable results that correlate strongly with certain real-life success metrics.

You can say that, but it doesn’t make it true. I don’t think most of them are evil, and given their position they’re probably above average intelligence as well.

True evil is when causing harm (or suffering) is not merely a means to an end, but the end itself - the person derives pleasure or satisfaction from the act of harming others, independent of any larger goal. They don’t rationalize it as “necessary” or “for the greater good.” The suffering is the point.

People often say that psychopaths act like they do because they don’t know how it makes people feel but the opposite is actually true - they know exactly how other people feel which is why they’re so good at manipulating them. They simply just don’t feel bad about taking advantage of that.

I want to believe.

This comment section gave me brain damage.

officials claimed that more than 14 million people had joined. It was not immediately possible to verify that figure or how many people were taking part, although initial images showed dozens involved at each location.

Something between 14 million and few dozen.

This seems to be more about knowing where people are rather than preventing them from leaving. The law in Germany dictates that nobody can be conscripted against their will. It’s a volunteer based system still.

I’m not sure how I feel about this but I am of the opinion that if a war breaks out and a service aged man escapes the country to avoid it, I don’t want them let back in once the war is over. And I’m strictrly talking about defending your own country - not attacking others. The russian who escaped the country to avoid being sent to Ukraine did the right thing. Same for any US soldiers refusing to fight in Iran.

While definitely not the cheapest and probably not hugely efficient either, just getting one of those Ecoflow, Jackery, Bluetti style power banks and hooking it up to a solar panel would likely be the easiest solution and comes with the benefit of being able to easily be moved elsewhere and the powerbank itself is a good off-grid power source to replace a generator.

I see no GenAI content here whatsoever except for what’s posted on communities specifically meant for it.

There’s also the concept of consciousness without memory. What’s that like? Being able to experience the current moment but having no memory of any past experiences - including your experience one second ago.

Or here’s a scary thought: what if general anesthesia doesn’t actually switch off consciousness but simply blocks new memories from forming? You could experience the full horror of being awake during surgery but remember none of it. From the perspective of “now,” that would be functionally the same as never having experienced it at all.

Then there are those extremely weird recordings from split-brain studies. Back when grand mal seizures were treated by cutting the corpus callosum - the bridge between the two brain hemispheres - to stop the “storm” from spreading. On the surface these patients seemed completely normal after the operation, but some really strange stuff shows up when you start testing them properly.

There’s a way you can communicate with each hemisphere independently without the other one knowing. The left hemisphere controls the right side of the body, the right hemisphere the left side. You can flash text on the left side of the visual field (which only the right, non-verbal hemisphere sees), then hand them a pen and let the left hand (controlled by the right hemisphere) answer questions by writing. Turns out that the two halves often don’t agree on things. Ask the right hemisphere what it wants to do for a living and you’ll get a different answer than what the left hemisphere says out loud. Or you can give the right hemisphere a task - “go get a glass of water” - and when you ask the left hemisphere why it did that, it just makes up an explanation. “I was thirsty,” it’ll say, even though the researchers know that’s not true. It genuinely seems like there are two separate consciousnesses running in the same brain at the same time. The big question is: were they there all along, or does the second one only emerge once the connection between them is cut?

And yeah, this is all stuff I’ve absorbed from podcasts covering these topics - mostly from Sam Harris. I’m just naturally really curious about the human mind, and I’m pretty experienced with meditation as well, so I probably pay attention to my day-to-day conscious experiences about 1% more than the average person. I’m however not in any way expert on this. It’s not even remotely related to what I do for living.

I can only assume a fetus likely has some faint level of consciousness while a rock has none, but again, this is all just speculation. I couldn’t possibly know for sure. Consciousness and qualia are entirely subjective experiences. There’s no evidence of them in the universe outside our own direct experience of it. If I wasn’t conscious myself, I wouldn’t even have any idea that such a thing exists.

What it is - I have no idea. If I had to bet, I’d say it’s an emergent feature of a sufficient level of information processing and therefore a physical process, but that’s just my speculation. Nobody actually knows.

Illusions are experiences. That’s why I say consciousness cannot be an illusion: the very fact that you’re experiencing the illusion proves that the space where that illusion appears exists - and that space is consciousness.

I’m also not talking about any human concepts we layer on top of feelings, nor the thoughts we have about those feelings. I’m only talking about the raw sensation itself that our brain then interprets as hot, wet, green, bitter, and so on. The fact of experience itself. If I were to switch places with a bat it would most likely still feel like something to be that bat but if I were to switch places with a rock it would be equivalent to dying. The lights would go out because there’s no consciousness. It’s like nothing to be a rock (probably).

The sense of self implies some kind of center of consciousness or thinker of thoughts. I don’t buy that. Thoughts just appear - nobody is authoring them. I speak of “me” or “I” as a being in the universe, but that’s just because it’s the only way I know how to refer to these things. I don’t know how accurate my view of the universe really is. Like I said: I could just be a mind living in a simulated universe. I don’t think I am, but it would be perfectly compatible with my experience.

How can we know it’s like anything to be anything

Because it undeniably feels like something to be in this very moment from the perspective of my subjective experience. In fact, I’d even go as far as to claim that it’s the only thing in the entire universe that cannot be an illusion. I could be a mind living in a simulated universe on an alien supercomputer, with every person I’ve ever interacted with just being a convincing AI, or I could be a Boltzmann brain - but what remains true despite all that is that something seems to be happening.

I think the closest we can get to true unconsciousness that you can still come back from is general anesthesia. It’s nothing like sleep. It’s like that period of time doesn’t even exist. It’s like the time before you were born.

I have quite the extensive list I’ve been building over the past few years and so far my record is only 3 posts visible on the frontpage. Most of the time it’s nowhere that bad though, but I do notice that it’s putting in a lot of work.

It’s not enabled by default. I too just learned about this recently.

Edit:

On the topic of uBlock Origin, you can also use it to filter out content on the web version of Lemmy since it doesn’t have a native keyword filtering feature. Just add to “my filters” and swap in your own instance.

For comments:
feddit.uk##article.comment-node:has(div.comment-content:has(p:has-text(/elon/i)))

For posts:
feddit.uk##div.post-listing:has(span:has-text(/elon/i))

For urls:
feddit.uk##div.post-listing:has(a[href*="elon.com"])

It’s the fact of subjective experience - the warmth of a campfire, the bitterness of lemon, the greenness of green. We’re essentially talking about consciousness here. The fact that there’s something it is like to be.

While nobody knows what consciousness is or how it comes about, what I mean by it is best captured by the philosopher Thomas Nagel in his aforementioned essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”

Nagel argues that consciousness has an essentially subjective character, a what-it-is-like aspect. He states that "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism – something it is like for the organism.

I can only suppose that of other people as well. There’s no way to measure consciousness. The only evidence of its existence is the fact that it feels like something to be me from my subjective perspective. Other humans behave the way I do so I assume they’re probably having similar experiences but I have no idea what it’s like to be a bat for example.

However, answering the question “what it’s like to be” is not relevant here. What’s relevant is that existence has qualia at all.