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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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The only thing this sentence communicates is that you have nothing to communicate about pain but would like me to agree.

Are you saying that you don't know what it feels like to feel pain?

But it doesn't follow that I know what pain is.

You claim to know a lot of other things. Most of which seem to have a weaker evidentiary basis than the existence of pain. How are you going to tell me that you know, for example, the necessary conditions for what a possible set of physical laws looks like for any possible universe, but you don't know what pain is?

A rock does not implement anything we can describe as information processing necessary and sufficient for "qualia".

Ok, but - and I have to keep coming back to this - what is your empirical evidence for this claim? How can you empirically observe that the rock does or does not have qualia, or that GPT-4 does or does not have qualia. Or is it "just obvious" to you? If that's the case, then that's very strange. How can it be "obvious" to you what the necessary conditions are for a system to be able to experience pain, when you also claim that it's not obvious to you what pain even is in the first place.

I'm not sure why you felt the need to block me. Typically people just stop replying to a thread when they don't want to continue a discussion anymore. I'd be happy to continue this discussion with you at any time, if you ever decide that you want to.