• @Cryophilia
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    11 year ago

    Ask yourself

    I mean, as I said, it always gets more complicated. Almost every question you could ever ask can be accurately answered with “it depends”. That’s just the nature of reality.

    The core of my disagreement in this conversation/flyting is when they should have said “I desire more detail”, they instead said “you are wrong”. It gets a tiny bit epistemological, but “electrical impulses in the brain” is broad enough and succinct enough that we can say it is true, for the level of detail the commenter was giving. It is generally understandable for those who wish to understand it. In a certain sense, if you zoom in enough very little is really true/correct since you can find exceptions and additional details etc etc. The earth is round…kind of. The sky is blue…kind of. You can tailor the level of complexity of your statements to match your audience. Almost every “true” statement can have an asterisk next to it. Almost nothing is always true.

    In this case (dealing with the nature of consciousness) past a certain level of detail, we don’t know how it works. But when you zoom out enough, we do. I could zoom out even further and say “consciousness is awareness of internal and external existence”. Or “consciousness is a thing”. Or “consciousness is”. All of these being correct statements, though useless to the conversation.

    So all your additional questions boil down to a request for more detail, some of which we know and some of which we don’t (the “hard problem”). If the conversation had gone in that direction, that’s fine. But it didn’t. It went in the “you’re wrong and stupid, look how smart I am for pointing it out” direction.

    If you had never seen a plane before and you asked me “how does it fly?” would you be satisfied with my explanation of “aviation fuel causes it to fly”?

    Maybe, maybe not. Most people are in fact satisfied with that, or maybe “burning fuel pushes it and wings catch the air and lift it”. Some people go deeper into an explanation of lift. Some go even farther.

    The point is it’s foolish to say that “aviation fuel makes it fly” is wrong. It’s not wrong, it’s just at an insufficient level of detail for you.

    • @[email protected]
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      1 year ago

      Never mind, you don’t seem to be in a mood for considering other possibilities or the dispassionate application of logic. You have already decided that you’re 100% correct.

      • @Cryophilia
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        11 year ago

        Dammit, I actually took the time to give a real response for that one and you didn’t even read it. I’m actually very disappointed. I thought you were legitimately asking.