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I think quite a bit of this phenomenon should be attributed to how young adults choose their education/career path. We're still in the "you can be whatever you want" and "if you make your passion into your work, you won't work a single day in your life" phase of the civilizational boom/bust cycle. Do high schoolers familiarize themselves with the supply and demand per field or do they wing that part/ignore it? For the fields that they feel pulled to, do they consider which people become financially well off after graduating in it? E.g. is it mainly authors, public speakers and professors, all basically in educational roles, making the field a government subsidized ponzi scheme? And do they on an ethical level consider which layer of society's hierarchy of needs their future expertise will feed into? As in, does the subject revolve around pleasure maxing in the upper echelons, or will it be useful for infrastructure, supply chains, defense, health,...

It seems that most people wing most of those points in a pursuit for what they think their life's passion to be at 18 years old. And neither do any governments in America or Europe really step in to incentivize socially benefitial choices, at least afaik, instead relying on the import of immigrant experts while at the same time experiencing massive brain drain to better off countries, e.g Germans moving to Switzerland en masse.

Even if the entire universe is a pseudo-brain, that doesn't mean you'll get to experience its conscious stream. I'm pretty sure that when a neuron in a brain dies, it's just dead. When a blood cell dies, it doesn't merge its consciousness with yours. When you and I die, we don't become the sun, nor the entire universe. At least I don't see a case for that at all. Imo we also know much more about consciousness than various philosophers are letting on. We know how to alter it (drugs, brain trauma), disable it (narcotics), and when those things happen naturally (senility, coma, sleep,...). We also know that split brain patients can develop two independently addressable selfs. It's just so obviously all about the brain. And the difficulty in defining consciousness is the same problem as defining what a complicated recursive function does, or if you will, defining the shape of a fractal. We just happen to be stable systems where part of our output feeds back into different input points, whether it's via the senses or inside the brain itself during thinking processes, or subconscious mechanisms that e.g. regulate hormones and vital organs. And those feedback loops/vortexes adapted evolutionary to yield results that are reality aligned enough to allow living organisms to navigate the world and recreate. To the question of why something can be experienced at all, I think that's like asking why a camera can take photos, or why chemical reactions exist. I guess some panpsychists would argue that THAT is the consciousness they mean, the sensing per se, the quantum of pain shooting through your nerves, or the signal that enters your brain after a single photon hit the retina just right. But the thing is, all kinds of such reactions also take place while you're in totally unconscious states like deep sleep, even absent-mindedness, and there remain unnoticed. Not to mention the constant biochemical reactions and highly organized changes going on inside the kidneys all the time, which we're never going to consciously tune into.

- If consciousness is as simple as sensing, why don't senses reliably lead to experience?

- If everything is conscious, why is there a disconnect between you and other things?

- If consciousness is fundamental, why can yours be deactivated?

It's irrelevant and I even explained why, just in case you'd be extra slow - yet here you are... Do you hate all LLMs? Do you hate technology? Do you fear change? Answer me. I'm like building a really strong case here!!

The panpsychism fad seems like late Millennials'/Gen Z's cope with death. My greater point is that the same way you "are" your kidney today (or how you "are" the nearest mushroom, or microchip) is the same way you will be those things when you're dead: Utterly unnoticable, aka not at all. Not to mention that your memories will be wiped and that's not even controversial to a panpsychist. The problem is that panpsychists assert consciousness as something independent of memories, which is an indefensible position imo. A memory-less stream of impressions would be equivalent to death. Every moment would be your first, totally disconnected from all else, just to instantly vanish, never to be processed. That's the opposite of consciousness. Some kind of memory feedback/storage/processing is needed. And your ability to generate that lies in the shape of your brain, where it doesn't matter which electrons flow through it - you're not the specific electrons.

To equate irony with whatever is being satirized is blatant BS. If you think coming up with a single example proves a rule, you got it backwards.

Not only is this perfectly cyberpunk, but it's also weirdly hopeful with respect to the constant fight against AI crawlers and spam.

Scare-crawl maybe

What is it like to be your left kidney? Your brain is connected to it through nerves, which ofc are conscious too in your worldview. If fungus and rocks are consciously linked, there should be a conscious link between your brain and your kidney. Yet, you have no idea what your kidney is experiencing every day, it certainly doesn't have any deep thoughts. And when the kidney gets taken out of your body, your conscious experience won't change. When your brain gets surgically or violently altered on the other hand...

Ironic speech is the main way people make jokes. Sure, ironic violence or something like that isn't a thing outside of WWE, but you shouldn't equate all "bad" behaviors.

In the past we could have said that we shouldn't expect an internet forum filter made of regex patterns to detect irony, but with LLM's as viable modding tools, I'm not sure that we shouldn't raise our standards...

Levels of Darwinism thought impossible

Unless OP already solved p=np...

True.

It stands out as not too common a sight for books, so having two like this, more or less in the same style, on the same topic, both posted in this thread, is amusing. Maybe it's not that rare and I'm just not reading enough books from academics for whom a book is like a weird long paper with hand-holding for amateurs.

Funny, both books scream default LaTeX