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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   36334 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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Although I agree that there's a leap from materialism to qualia, that's not something unique to it: no one else has an even vaguely plausible theory of how and when qualia relate to material reality.

And qualia don't really matter when it comes to making predictions about the world. They have no effect on the physical world, which is the only medium through which we interact with other beings who (ostensibly) experience qualia. If an AGI is able to perfectly simulate everything a human can do and more, it really doesn't matter whether it has qualia or not. Most arguments against AI questioning its consciousness or qualia are missing the point entirely.

no one else has an even vaguely plausible theory of how and when qualia relate to material reality

Yeah bullshit, I have like ten religions right here that have theories of exactly similar levels of plausibility.

Religions have no particular answer for why a bullet going through the head affects qualia, or where you'd demarcate having-qualia for the population of every creature that's ever existed on Earth, or how you'd know whether members of an alien spacefaring civilization have qualia. In practice, they'd delegate to material explanations, inadequate as they are today.

But they do, a lot of religions in fact have very specific unfalsifiable explanations for all the examples you give.

In fact I think you must know them given how you're naming things that are almost all famous theological debates.

Exotheology for instance, has been discussed at least since the middle ages in some form or another. And, among others, the Church Fathers certainly did not delegate that question to material explanations at all.

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