Comment by slumberlust

I wish you happiness.

I agree, it's not exclusive.

I guess there is people that are willing to die over the hill that there is nothing sacred or divine about being alive. I'm not very interested in playing that game.

The same kind of proof we accept for any scientific claim: converging, reproducible evidence that rules out competing explanations.

Concretely, that means: We already have indirect evidence: conscious states vary predictably with brain states. Damage specific regions, lose specific functions. Alter chemistry, alter experience. This is not proof, but it’s systematic dependence, which is exactly what emergence predicts. Stronger evidence would look like precise, bidirectional mappings between neural activity and reported experience: to the point where you could reliably read subjective states from brain data, or induce specific experiences through targeted stimulation. We’re already moving in that direction.

The hardest bar would be building a system from physical components, having it report coherent subjective experience, and being able to explain why that configuration produces experience while others don’t. That’s the hard problem: and no, we’re not there yet. And it’s worth being honest: we’ve been assuming physicalism will eventually solve it, but there’s no guarantee that’s true rather than hopeful. The fact that brain states correlate with conscious states doesn’t explain why there is something it is like to have those states. Correlation is not mechanism.

But here’s the key point: you’re implicitly holding emergence to a standard of certainty that no scientific theory meets. We don’t have that standard of proof for evolution, gravity, or quantum mechanics either. We have overwhelming evidence that makes alternatives implausible.

So the question isn’t “can you prove it beyond all doubt?” It’s “does the evidence favor it over alternatives?” Right now, it does — but that’s a pragmatic verdict, not a metaphysical one. Idealist frameworks like Kastrup’s or Faggin’s remain serious contenders. The debate is more open than mainstream science often admits.

That’s a genuinely strong point. You can only verify consciousness from the inside, your own. Everything else is inference. No objective measurement can definitively distinguish “other minds exist” from solipsism. That’s not a bug in the argument, it’s a fundamental epistemic limit. Which is exactly why this question may never be fully resolved empirically

Not necessarily either but the serious version of the argument is that life consistently acts against local entropy in purposeful ways, and pure physics doesn’t obviously explain why matter would “want” to do that. Consciousness as a organizing principle is one answer. It’s speculative, but it’s not obviously wrong

Even if LLM will one day be autonomously updated, they started from us, from our knowledge. The human brain « is smart », it’s wired up to be in any kind of culture or knowledge. We fill up to be smarter from experience but LLM can’t do that, I can’t teach Claude something that it will use with you the next day, it needs to be retrained with knowledge stopping at some point. Even if technology catches up and the machine becomes more autonomous, what will say this machine would ever want to integrate to our society or share anything with us ? They have eternity, given there is electricity. Why would they want anything to do with humans if you go that way ? If it’s really conscious, should we consider it a slave then ? Why couldn’t « it » have fundamental rights and freedom to do whatever it wants ?

>>These entities, whoever they are, they act on our world, they are real, and more and more over time they will get independent from humans, eventually becoming different species that can self-replicate.

See, I don't believe that for even one second. They are just very clever calculators, that's all. But they are also dumb like a brick most of the time. It's a pretend intelligence at best.

[dead]