I hate this idea that our "self" is the brain and that every other part of your body could be thrown away and you'd still be you if you were just a brain in a jar.
The "self" is a hollistic interaction between all parts of your body. The brain is affect by your guts and digestive system, hormones released into hundreds of metres of bloody vessels, all resulting in different moods, thoughts and feelings at any given moment.
You change a part of the body and you change the effect that part of the body previously had upon the mind.
You can't just remove the mind from the body and expect it to magically function the same way it did before.
The author of the article ultimately rejects the thesis of intelligence existing without consciousness at the end but it does bear some food for thought at least. We can think about other highly intelligent, but very alien animals on our planet like octopuses and consider whether or not they are cognizant of what they are doing, of whether or not they can think and perceive the world around them as we do.
On Watts' part, he presents the possibility that our consciousness is an evolutionary dead end, and reasons that it can sometimes fool us into seeing false information. If you've ever seen a selective attention test on YouTube it sort of gets the point across that your conscious attention inhibits your pattern recognition and some subtle to not subtle at all information will be missed.
Watts doesn't want to lose his consciousness, by his own word. But he also posits that other animals may be evolutionarily successful without one.
There are some other more outrageous things he toys with in his books and blog, namely that we have no free will because everything we do is a result of what chemicals are being produced at any one time in our brain, which is in turn determined by our DNA and the proteins it interacts with. He's polemic and somewhat apocalyptic in his tone and themes (in one short story he surmised the best way to stave off climate apocalypse was to collectively make the entire US, all 300 million, commit mass suicide through a convoluted mind control technique) but all his predictions and speculations are grounded in his experience as a professor of marine biology. He's an odd duck, to be sure
professor of marine biology
Honestly, this explains a lot.
Something doesn't sit too well with me about having black, indigenous and Latino people kill themselves for being "American", despite being the least responsible for the climate crisis we're in. Yes, it could technically work, but that's a lot of people who don't deserve it, and that also deprives those groups of liberation from the hands of their WASP overlords.
Sorry I meant the free will thing I'll agree the US should kill itself one is pretty outrageous.
Aha, gotcha. Well, there's centuries of theology and philosophy ingrained in our collective understanding of the world that shaking off that notion rubs people the wrong way. For my part I think it doesn't matter because either way you have no way of changing it or doing anything about it. It's like worrying about whether or not we're in a simulation; even if that were the case, there's nothing you can do about it, and nothing you can do to influence or change it, so why bother worrying?
This guy would benefit from reading some Douglas Hofstadter, especially I am a strange loop re: the experience of inferiority and its beneficial qualities even evolutionarily speaking (the infinite extensibility of the human mind wrt categories is what enabled us to survive and thrive and is the very same quality that epiphenomenally gives rise to consciousness and "I"-ness).
"Happiness is acting and thinking like a robot on an assembly line. Stop acting and thinking like a human might, it's bad for profits."
intelligence without consciousness
Fucking why tho? Do I really want to understand how quantitatively beautiful a sunrise is without the total sensory experience of it? Do I want to know the geometric curves of my lover's face without feeling why I find them beautiful?
Is your reaction to beauty conscious? Do you make your body feel that way? Are the curves of this face beautiful? What does that mean? Could you differentiate between a beautiful sunrise and an ugly one?
Individual subjective recognition of experience is qualia and qualia is a part of consciousness. Without consciousness, there is no subjective differentiation in regard to beauty, making it objectively calculated, meaning it conforms to a singular standard across all that evaluate it.
Yeah I'd argue that finding something beautiful is fundamentally a function of conciousness - if not, beauty would otherwise just be a set of qualities and quantities you could replicate, and it doesn't really seem to be a certain set of qualities and quantities. Even if we were to look at a painting guaranteed to be beautiful, can you really say that both our subjective experiences result from the painting's features itself without our own experiences influencing why we might find something beautiful? Even if I truly don't experience beauty by looking at the painting, does it somehow invalidate your experience of a beautiful painting?
What if it's good to sacrifice yourself to moloch :soviet-hmm:
