bloodfoot

Solidarity!

Literally the death of the American dream.

Or the borg achieving time travel tech was an inevitability and Janeway destroying them was a necessity to keep the borg from assimilating all life in a manner similar to First Contact (thus negating the existence of the temporal police).

Well said. I wish I could be half that eloquent when discussing things in real time.

Science is built upon repeatable experiments that can be used to test hypotheses. It is not built on axioms and logical extrapolation- those are used to form new hypotheses but they are insufficient by themselves. We don’t decide something exists, we hypothesize that it exists and make predictions based on that hypothesis. If experimental results line up with our predictions then we call that a theory. If new data contradicts the theory or hypothesis then we revise and try again.

So how do you measure qualia? What is it made of? How is it actually defined? How do you detect if qualia is present in something other than your own head?

I stand by my statement that qualia is simply an artifact of our cognitive architecture. You are welcome to disagree but the arguments you are presenting fail to convince me in the slightest.

So our subjective experience must “exist” because we experience it? This seems rather circular. My personal take, consciousness is an artifact of how our brains work. It’s not a thing that exists in any physical sense, it is simply part of the model our brain structures the stimulation it receives throughout the course of our lives.

Your opening statement is incorrect. Observation in the quantum mechanics sense does not have anything to do with consciousness. Observation is really just a form of interaction.

I think the real issue is with the fact that consciousness is not particularly well defined. Something can be more or less conscious than something else but what precisely does that mean? Has there ever been a means of measuring or detecting consciousness in anything?

Interesting but I struggle to see how this hypothesis could ever be proven or disproven. If it can’t actually be tested then I don’t see how it presents more scientific value any other religious or superstitious belief.