Well heck, that really is a much better retort. Well said.

Enjoy your sense of smug superiority, I guess…?

At the risk of sounding like the kind of edgelord I was calling out initially: Who?

No, seriously, that show was off the air before I was born. I only know what you’re talking about because of this cliche’d line, I’ve never seen the show or anything. Has there really not been anything in the 23 years since they bulldozed his neighborhood that is wholesome enough to guilt me with? Has society really stagnated that much? Is your sense of decorum only anchored by a largely forgotten children’s television show?

And we’re all very impressed.

Not amazed, just depressed.

We can’t do anything except shoot you down. What you want doesn’t exist, not because people are choosing not to create it but because they can’t create it. The ‘paranormal’ isn’t real. Anyone that believes it is is insane, and insane people are not known for their ability to tell compelling stories and hold cameras steadily, nor are they known to pursue and publish media invalidating their own delusions. If you want to see convincingly shot footage, watch the X-Files, it’s a beautiful show. But that’s the best you’re going to get. Because the content you crave does not exist.

In this thread you’ve implied repeatedly that you’re aware of the implausibility of paranormal phenomenon but you’re still going to watch:

“YouTube pranks, edited garbage, and an endless amount of inhumane content”

And if you’re just doing this for amusement, the Why Files does some pretty entertaining stuff reporting on ‘real’ (clarification: these are actual things people believe not just made up for their episode) conspiracies and paranormal events, I can enjoy them even as a skeptic. But if you’re doing this out of actual interest, belief or just to give both sides of the argument a fair shake, I really really really hope that you will take my advice and figure out if this is truly important, or if this is you self-harming out of stubbornness. Because I have been there and it’s really bad for you.

I really think you should reflect on the reason why there is absolutely zero evidence of paranormal phenomenon.

Schrödinger was criticizing the interpretation of quantum mechanics, Tesla generated way more garbage than he did innovations, the Drake equation is a novelty (and Drake repeatedly clarified that it was conjecture until we find any evidence of ETI), SETI is awesome.

Everything you just listed is an example of science investigating the tangible aspects of observed phenomenon.

but no one ever shows proof of anything they claim to be real.

Hmmmmm.

Kamala’s Maw

I get the impression you don’t think this was a good thing to have done, hence the interrogation?

Not very satisfying answers I’m afraid, they were probably 8-10 and I have no idea how we got onto the topic since this was 15+ years ago.

They were actually pretty grateful, feeling it had set them up for a lot of positive realizations down the line. We play D&D now and they’re working on their masters, so I guess they weren’t too badly scarred…

I had a former summer camp kid come up and credit me with having given them their “first existential crisis” (for explaining that when you die, “you just cease”) which I am proud of.

(I am absolutely going to steal the Principle of Objective Things in Space, that’s wonderful.)

There’s a drive philosophers have, to question why things are the way they are, through a very specific lens. Why is it wrong to push a fat man onto the trolley tracks, if his death would save six others? Why is there a difference between the perception of the shadows and the perception of the man with the shadow puppets? Does free will exist, and why does that matter?

These are all the pursuit of meaning, and while they are noble and important questions to ask, they are not questions driven by the pursuit of understanding. Philosophy depends on assumptions about the world that are taken to be incontrovertible, and bases it’s conclusions from there. The capacity for choice is a classic example, as is the assumption of a causal universe, and though they’re quite reasonable things to assume in most cases, it can get mind-bleedingly aggravating when philosophers apply the same approach to pure fields like mathematics, which require rigorous establishment of assumptions before any valid value of truth can be derived.

Which is not to attack philosophers. I want to be clear about that, I bring this up just to emphasize that there are differences in thought between the two disciplines (that occasionally those differences in thought make me want to brain them with a chair is unrelated to the topic at hand). The philosophical study and speculation as to and on the nature of consciousness is perhaps the single oldest field of inquiry humanity has. And while the debate has raged for literal ages, we haven’t really gotten anywhere with it.

And then, recently, scientists (especially computer scientists, but many other fields as well) have shown up and gone “hey look, we can see what the brain looks like, we know how the discrete parts work, we can even simulate it! Look, we’ve got the behavior right here, and… well, maybe… when we get right down to it, it’s just not all that deep?” And philosophers have embraced this, enfolded it into their considerations, accepted it as valid work… and then kept right on asking the exact same questions.

The truth is, as I’ve been able to study it, that ‘consciousness’ is a meaningless term. We haven’t been able to define it for ten thousand years of sitting around stroking our beards, because it’s posited on assumptions that turn out to be, fundamentally, meaningless. It’s assumed there is another layer of abstraction, or that there’s a point or meaning to consciousness, or anything within the Theory of Mind. And I think it’s just too hard to accept that, maybe, it all… doesn’t matter. That we haven’t found any answers not because the question is somehow unanswerable, but because the question was asked in a context that invalidates the entire premise. It’s the philosophical equivalence of ‘null’.

Sufficiently complex networks can compute and self reference, and it turns out when you do that enough, it’ll start referencing The Self (or whatever you’d like to call it). There’s no deeper meaning, or hidden truth. There’s just that, on a machine, a simulation can be run that can think about itself.

Everything else is just… ontological window dressing. Syntactic sugar for the teenage soul.

Can’t, but I suspect not for the reason you’re hoping. The consensus, at least among computational neurologists (the field that, among other things, studies how brains work mathematically), is that “consciousness” as a concrete thing isn’t really… real. It’s just a term humans created to loosely describe a phenomenon that arises from any sufficiently complex well-ordered network. If you want to know what it really looks like, you can run your own OpenWorm robot! The human ‘mind’ looks just like that, only around a dozen orders of magnitude more complex.

The problem is that you’re asking mostly meaningless questions. Even the loose definitions of consciousness aren’t definable to the ‘atomic level’ - a mind is a mathematical construct. It’s like asking where the files on your computer live; I can point to the sectors of the harddrive where a program is encoded, or even hand you a really really massive stack of punched tape, but neither of those actually are the computer program. What we call the program is the interaction of a grammar consisting of logical rules and constants running within the linguistic and computational context of an automata. It’s the same as with a mind - it’s the abstract state of an unfathomably complex machine.

Alas, philosophers answer questions about the interrelation of minds, but not what a mind actually, chemically, is. They can extemporize at great length on the tendencies of a mind, the definition of consciousness, the value of thought, the many many vagaries of morality. They cannot, unfortunately, sit down and draw a picture of a mind. Many good and important questions can be answered by philosophers, but not every problem can or should be assessed with the tools they have.

You may be conscious, and you may have many long and deeply opinionated thoughts about what it means to be conscious, and how you can know that you are in fact conscious, but you cannot tell me what consciousness looks like. And to be perfectly honest, I don’t really care.

I don’t know if you’ve ever done this, but you should sometime present an engineer with the trolley problem. I’ve done this many times, and the invariable result is that they will ask endless questions to establish the parameters and present endless solutions within those parameters so that nobody has to die at all. It is, in short, a problem. Not an ontological tool for unlocking hidden understanding, which falls under the purview of your ‘philosophy’, but a practical problem. Like how you’re going to prevent some big mean mother-hubbard from tying you to the hypothetically metaphorical trolley tracks. And the solution? Is a gun. And if that don’t work, use more gun. Like this heavy caliber tripod-mounted little old number designed by me. Built, by me.

And you best hope, not pointed at you.

We can see what it’s sending to facebook though, and it’s not constant. There’s a bunch that it does send and receive, but this isn’t hypothetical speculation, like, we can just see that it’s not using your microphone for that, or sending anything like audio data. You can check this yourself, wireshark is free and packet specifications are available.

Setting aside confirmation bias (idk, because it’s boring?): So people you’re in a book club with, an established group which it is very easy to associate you with, were discussing Dell laptops… and you think it’s strange you got looped in? If three people from your book club all looked up dells later, or earlier, or etc. etc., why wouldn’t they figure you might also be interested in dell laptops? An approach that doesn’t require NLP of god only knows how much hypothetical audio taken from pockets, and works much better?