Do you believe you are a typical conscious being or an atypical conscious being?
Let’s try this question out on some other examples of conscious beings first.
Walking this morning, I noticed a small bird on the ground that hopped a few times like a kangaroo before it took off.
I just searched google news for the words “indian farmer”. This was the first article. I ask you to consider the person at the top and center of the picture, standing thigh-deep in water.
OK, I’ve singled out two quasi-arbitrary examples of specific conscious beings: the bird I saw this morning; the person in the Bloomberg news photo.
We can ask about each of them in turn: is this a typical or an atypical conscious being?
The way we answer the question will depend on a lot of things, such as what beings we think are conscious. We might decide that they are typical in some respects and atypical in others. We might even go meta and ask, is the mix of typicality and atypicality, itself typical or atypical.
My point is, these are questions that can be posed and tentatively answered. Is there some reason we can’t ask the same questions about ourselves?
Consciousness is a property of the first-person: e.g. To me I am conscious but inherently can’t know you are. Whether or not something is conscious is asking if you think from that thing’s perspective. So there is no typical or atypical conscious being, from my perspective I am “the” conscious being, if I reason from something else’s perspective, then that thing is “the” conscious being instead.
Our usual notion of considering ourselves as a typical conscious being is because we are more used to thinking from the perspectives of things similar to us. e.g. we are more apt to think from the perspective of another person than a cat, and from the perspective of a cat than a chair. In other words, we tend to ascribe the property of consciousness to things more like ourselves, instead of the other way around: that we are typical in some sense.
The part where I know I’m conscious while not you is an assertion. It is not based on reasoning or logic but simply because it feels so. The rest are arguments which depend on said assertion.
Thought the reply was addressed to me. But nonetheless, it’s a good opportunity to delineate and inspect my own argument. So leaving the comment here.
Do you believe you are a typical conscious being or an atypical conscious being? And does that belief follow from an argument or an assertion?
Let’s try this question out on some other examples of conscious beings first.
Walking this morning, I noticed a small bird on the ground that hopped a few times like a kangaroo before it took off.
I just searched google news for the words “indian farmer”. This was the first article. I ask you to consider the person at the top and center of the picture, standing thigh-deep in water.
OK, I’ve singled out two quasi-arbitrary examples of specific conscious beings: the bird I saw this morning; the person in the Bloomberg news photo.
We can ask about each of them in turn: is this a typical or an atypical conscious being?
The way we answer the question will depend on a lot of things, such as what beings we think are conscious. We might decide that they are typical in some respects and atypical in others. We might even go meta and ask, is the mix of typicality and atypicality, itself typical or atypical.
My point is, these are questions that can be posed and tentatively answered. Is there some reason we can’t ask the same questions about ourselves?
Consciousness is a property of the first-person: e.g. To me I am conscious but inherently can’t know you are. Whether or not something is conscious is asking if you think from that thing’s perspective. So there is no typical or atypical conscious being, from my perspective I am “the” conscious being, if I reason from something else’s perspective, then that thing is “the” conscious being instead.
Our usual notion of considering ourselves as a typical conscious being is because we are more used to thinking from the perspectives of things similar to us. e.g. we are more apt to think from the perspective of another person than a cat, and from the perspective of a cat than a chair. In other words, we tend to ascribe the property of consciousness to things more like ourselves, instead of the other way around: that we are typical in some sense.
The part where I know I’m conscious while not you is an assertion. It is not based on reasoning or logic but simply because it feels so. The rest are arguments which depend on said assertion.
Thought the reply was addressed to me. But nonetheless, it’s a good opportunity to delineate and inspect my own argument. So leaving the comment here.