Autor: tstadmin
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On theories of sentience: a talk with Magnus Vinding
Magnus Vinding is a philosopher focused on reducing suffering. In his works, he has covered topics such as effective altruism, anti-speciesism, suffering-focused ethics (about which he was writing a book at the time of this interview), and issues of personal identity and ontology, such as open individualism and physicalism. He has a degree in mathematics…
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In every country people think that others are less happy than they themselves say
In every country people think that others are less happy than they themselves say. In every single country, the average estimate of happiness is far lower than actual reported happiness. Every single country!… Read more
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Against Wishful Thinking by Brian Tomasik
Some people hold more hopeful beliefs about the world and the future than are justified. These include the feeling that life for wild animals isn’t so bad and the expectation that humanity’s future will reduce more suffering than it creates. By feeding these dreams, optimistic visions of suffering reduction, while noble, may in fact cause…
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Robots need civil rights, too
If «consciousness» is a similarly broad concept, then we can see degrees of consciousness in a variety of biological and artificial agents, depending on what kinds of abilities they possess and how complex they are. For example, a thermostat might be said to have an extremely tiny degree of consciousness insofar as it’s «aware» of…
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What is the problem of consciousness?
The problem of consciousness can be formulated as follows: how is it that, from a purely material basis (a brain or a centralized nervous system), consciousness emerges? This is what the problem of consciousness really boils down to. Answering this requires answering the question, what structures must be present in an organism and how would they…
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Plants live in a tactile world, perceive light, have a sense of smell, taste, and respond to sound
Are plants sentient? We know they sense their environments to a significant degree; like animals, they can «see» light, as a New Scientist feature explains. They “live in a very tactile world,” have a sense of smell, respond to sound, and use taste to “sense danger and drought and even to recognize relatives.” We’ve previously highlighted…
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The big lie
People wonder about the cause of poverty when scarcity is the natural state of things. Why is scarcity the natural state of things? Because we are “designed” (metaphorically) to survive and reproduce our genes as much as possible. Not to discover reality. Not to enjoy. This is why evolution has selected in us the fear…
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Discussion on the concept of sentience
drugmonkey said: You may have noticed a rash of posts around the ScienceBlogs decrying the ARA terrorist extremists who have vowed, again, to target the children of a UCLA neuroscientist. Dario Ringach famously gave up his nonhuman primate research in 2006 because of threats against his family. His participation in last week’s dialog held at…
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Consciousness and self-consciousness
Consciousness is being aware. Self-consciousness is being aware of oneself. Being conscious, rather than self-conscious, is the key concept in ethics. Consciousness can be defined as the state of having experiences. Conscious states, or mental states, are situations in which one is having any kind of experience, be it a sensorial experience, a thought, an…
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Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
«—we need both the science and the philosophy to get a theory of consciousness. The science gives us correlations between brain activity and experience. We then have to work out the best philosophical theory that explains those correlations. In my view, the only theory that holds up to scrutiny is panpsychism. When I studied philosophy,…