Will Smith & Jada Pinkett

Wow. I apologize for the confusion. I absolutely do not believe these two situations are comparable. My bad.

Is it amoral? Yes, for sure 100%. But as a global community, we barely punish those who engage in this kind of tactic, and when we do, it’s for some kind of political theater. More Palestinian civilians will die in this conflict by a factor, if you’re going to criticize Hamas for this, I’d like to see the same standard applied to IDF.

Israel continues to expand their occupation of Palestinian land, though. Do you think Palestinians in Gaza have no stake in the well-being of other Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank?

Do you consider Hamas the aggressor in the overall context of the Israel- Palestinian conflict?

If France was in support, it wouldn’t have been called the Coalition of the Willing since the war would’ve been approved by the UN. It was only named that since it was an illegal aggression against another country by the international standards, hence the need to get other countries involved to legitimize it.

I’m really not exactly sure what qualifies, but the existence of an emergent system so has to be there. Does fungus communication give rise to a system that can build some kind of memory and refer to it to develop more complex behavior? If not, then it’s lacking the level of complexity to be considered consciousness. (But that’s just where I personally draw the line)

Eusociality has its own context. It’s possible for a hive to show complex organized behavior, but so would an infinite paperclip machine if it was to consist of a swarm of collector drones. A myriad of units with a set of pre-determined instructions can have complex organizations, which still wouldn’t qualify as consciousness.

Now, the brain scenario would definitely count since it consists of the necessary “hardware” to start generating its own abstract contextual model of its experiences.

Honestly, that what businesses want because it checks off a box in their cyber insurance application. They don’t care as long as their ass is covered.

The point of emerging systems is that they tend to be more than just a sum of their parts:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gestalt

Depends on who you ask I think. Emergentism makes more sense to me because if you take consciousness as humans experience it, make it derivative of material structure (neurological activity), and assume the appearance of some kind of uniformity as synthesis of different parts of that neurological system, the only way consciousness may exist in that framing is in organisms that posses a nervous system.

This does inevitably leads to the problem of where to draw the line on the complexity necessary to qualify as consciousness, and im.not gonna pretend like I have the answer to that, but at least it becomes more of a scientific question rather than purely philosophical I think.

Another aspect of this conversation was what was posited by the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis. The experiential differences in perception of color can also be attributed to differences in culture / upbringing which influenced one’s processing of the stimuli itself. I tend to oversimplify it to the firmware analogy. Sometimes you get raw input and the languages provide different libraries for comtextualizing this input.