So as an American I can assure you not everyone is aware. You are very lucky (I would say privileged but the term has been ruined) to even have a cursory familiarity.
I mean, now you do sound like a metaphysical dualist.
So this is where I really have to challenge you because I think you have drawn this line fairly arbitrarily. You don’t really give a precise criteria but this seems close:
I feel like they’re on much more shaky ground and require you to buy into belief system and discussing them doesn’t get you any closer to any truth
This is probably two slightly different points, but I don’t really want to play any more into the role of pedantic philosopher so I’m just going to say I don’t think these support your distinction. What is “culture” but a belief system (or rather a bunch of often conflicting belief systems in a trench coat)?
That’s a good question, I am not particularly defending the soul concept specifically (or any version), just defending the legitimacy of “non-empirical” concepts in general in any discussion about the value of a particular practice (like growing living tissues in vats and giving it someone’s job). Full disclosure, I have a phd in philosophy, so I may be axe grinding a bit here, but only to the extent that I hate to see attempts at philosophy shut down because they are not “provable” when we all depend on philosophical concepts at the end of the day, just the ones we like, not the ones we’ve “proven” or even really thought about very deeply. I’m not a luddite, just a disgruntled former academic.
It’s a great irony that I would guess, if forced at gunpoint, most people on the forum, maybe even most english language sites, would call themselves utilitarian if forced to at gunpoint, when meanwhile the trolley problem is perhaps the internet’s most beloved punching bag (most professional philosophers tend to clown on it as well, just not typically ones who would call themselves utilitarians).
I mean, now you do sound like a metaphysical dualist.
Do I? I’d say that things I’ve describe as “real unreals” are abstraction layers on top of consciousness. They’re real in a sense that you’re experiencing them and that they can be composed into something like “culture”, but they don’t exist as a separate “plane of existance” (which is what I thought dualism implies). I’d say they’re all subjective and not objective truths of the world.
Maybe I’m just thinking about dualism wrong
So this is where I really have to challenge you because I think you have drawn this line fairly arbitrarily.
I’ll try to think how to better describe distinction between the two. Maybe my previous description of “abstraction layers on top of consciousness” is more useful here. I didn’t think about it in quiet some time (good that this conversation happened and gave me something to think about again). I guess I’ll let my thoughts on the topic marinate a bit.
I hate to see attempts at philosophy shut down because they are not “provable”
No disagreement here. I’m only opposed to dragging religious concepts (like soul) into such conversations as I think that they’re much more loaded and they’re not useful nor necessary here. Other than that I’m very much interested in discussions of self consciousness of AI, moral/ethical side of AI usage (like at what point if any do we grant the thing any rights) and anything around it.
I am ahead of the curve, I downloaded a Quake2 mod back in 1998-1999, set to “adaptive” difficulty level and observed the bots, especially how they tried to not die. One of them even discovered rocket jumps by itself! It was one of the things that made me even more interested in programming (at that point I was already an overconfident hobbyist).
To me that mixes philosophy with empirical evidence; if something is able to self-improve all the way to the point of either completely solving a problem or admitting the lack of tools (like our quantum physicists hit a limit where they can’t influence particles below a certain level) then that thing is IMO self-aware by extension of the observable fact that it can observe its attempts at something fail and then self-correct.
It’s a bit of a stretch, granted, but it’s a good working / draft definition.
As for soul or self-awareness, well, as some cyberpunk anime movies and series dialogue goes:
(Human) Are you real? Are you pretending so well so as to be mistaken for a human?
(Android) If I pretend up to the point of perfection, then does it matter if I pretend? And is it a pretense at all if it’s perfect?
That too does not go 100% there f.ex. the AI robot can pretend perfectly but only temporarily. But eh. We need some working definitions, even if imperfect.
Or, one can also read Descartes wrote almost 400 years before “cyberpunk” was a thing:
But then if I look out of the window and see men crossing
the square, as I just happen to have done, I normally say that I see the men themselves,
just as I say that I see the wax. Yet do I see any more than hats and coats which could
conceal automatons? I judge that they are men. And so something which I thought I was
seeing with my eyes is in fact grasped solely by the faculty of judgment which is in my
mind.
Would it matter if they were automatons? How could that possibly be a empirical question? It is the empiricist in us that precisely wants to know, _is_ it a man or a machine. But what does that tell us in end? It’s just a taxonomical classification. Whether it’s “true” probably starts to matter about when we decide whether the guy in the coat would make a good slave.
But if we prefer the genre of cyberpunk to philosophy, I’ll take Blade Runner:
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.
Not an empirical question, unless you enjoy going around in circles.
Well I was mostly interested in narrowing down “self-awareness”. I don’t get your point about Descartes vs. cyberpunk. As long as the takeaways are the same then the source does not matter.
My point was that philosophers have been trying to “narrow down self-awareness” for a long time, and I don’t think the takeaways are quite the same. I love art of all kinds but it does not substitute for reasoning. Maybe it was not your intention with your line about mixing philosophy with empirical evidence, but simply pointing out that something is not observable fact does not make it useless or worthless. The argument your android seems to be making hardly seems to be a case for empiricism. In the case of Descartes it is precisely an argument for idealism, that truth can never be obtained empirically.
edit also worth noting that famous empiricist and anti-Cartesian Hume fully agreed that truth in the sense most people mean, indubitable, certain, eternal, etc cannot be derived from empirical evidence. His conclusion is that we just give up on truth (or redefine it as matters of fact). So, morality as well, sadly, is just vibes so make of that what you will.
