I think consciousness will end up looking something like ‘piston steam engine’, if we’d evolved to have a lot of terminal values related to the state of piston-steam-engine-ish things.
I think that’s kind of the key question. Is what I care about as precise as “piston steam engine” or is it more like “mechanical devices in general, with a huge increase in caring as the thing becomes more and more like a piston steam engine”? This relates to the passage of mine that Matthew quoted above. If we say we care about (or that consciousness is) this thing going on in our heads, are we pointing at a very specific machine, or are we pointing at machines in general with a focus on the ones that are more similar to the exact one in our heads? In the extreme, a person who says “I care about what’s in my head” is an egoist who doesn’t care about other humans. Perhaps he would even be a short-term egoist who doesn’t care about his long-term future (since his brain will be more different by then). That’s one stance that some people take. But most of us try to generalize what we care about beyond our immediate selves. And then the question is how much to generalize.
It’s analogous to someone saying they love “that thing” and pointing at a piston steam engine. How much generality should we apply when saying what they value? Is it that particular piston steam engine? Piston steam engines in general? Engines in general? Mechanical devices in general with a focus on ones most like the particular piston steam engine being pointed to? It’s not clear, and people take widely divergent views here.
I think a similar fuzziness will apply when trying to decide for which entities “there’s something it’s like” to be those entities. There’s a wide range in possible views on how narrowly or broadly to interpret “something it’s like”.
yet I’m confident we shouldn’t expect to find that rocks are a little bit repressing their emotions, or that cucumbers are kind of directing their attention at something, or that the sky’s relationship to the ground is an example of New Relationship Energy.
I think those statements can apply to vanishing degrees. It’s usually not helpful to talk that way in ordinary life, but if we’re trying to have a full theory of repressing one’s emotions in general, I expect that one could draw some strained (or poetic, as you said) ways in which rocks are doing that. (Simple example: the chemical bonds in rocks are holding their atoms together, and without that the atoms of the rocks would move around more freely the way the atoms of a liquid or gas do.) IMO, the degree of applicability of the concept seems very low but not zero. This very low applicability is probably only going to matter in extreme situations, like if there are astronomical numbers of rocks compared with human-like minds.
Thanks for this discussion. :)
I think that’s kind of the key question. Is what I care about as precise as “piston steam engine” or is it more like “mechanical devices in general, with a huge increase in caring as the thing becomes more and more like a piston steam engine”? This relates to the passage of mine that Matthew quoted above. If we say we care about (or that consciousness is) this thing going on in our heads, are we pointing at a very specific machine, or are we pointing at machines in general with a focus on the ones that are more similar to the exact one in our heads? In the extreme, a person who says “I care about what’s in my head” is an egoist who doesn’t care about other humans. Perhaps he would even be a short-term egoist who doesn’t care about his long-term future (since his brain will be more different by then). That’s one stance that some people take. But most of us try to generalize what we care about beyond our immediate selves. And then the question is how much to generalize.
It’s analogous to someone saying they love “that thing” and pointing at a piston steam engine. How much generality should we apply when saying what they value? Is it that particular piston steam engine? Piston steam engines in general? Engines in general? Mechanical devices in general with a focus on ones most like the particular piston steam engine being pointed to? It’s not clear, and people take widely divergent views here.
I think a similar fuzziness will apply when trying to decide for which entities “there’s something it’s like” to be those entities. There’s a wide range in possible views on how narrowly or broadly to interpret “something it’s like”.
I think those statements can apply to vanishing degrees. It’s usually not helpful to talk that way in ordinary life, but if we’re trying to have a full theory of repressing one’s emotions in general, I expect that one could draw some strained (or poetic, as you said) ways in which rocks are doing that. (Simple example: the chemical bonds in rocks are holding their atoms together, and without that the atoms of the rocks would move around more freely the way the atoms of a liquid or gas do.) IMO, the degree of applicability of the concept seems very low but not zero. This very low applicability is probably only going to matter in extreme situations, like if there are astronomical numbers of rocks compared with human-like minds.