Some extra context for the curious: https://pdf.stafforini.com/parfit-1995-unimportance-identity.pdf
this post was submitted on 27 May 2026
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You have no way to know if the calculator does not
i asked it and it said
okay that's a lie it said 58008
that's exactly my point, if we have no way of knowing if a calculator experiences its information processing, we have no way of knowing a rock or a tree or the sun experiences something in some sense, and thus we have arrived at something like animism (an idea usually considered unscientific, mystical, or spiritual) via the unlikely and unintended route of allegedly scientific ideas like physicalist eliminativism - rather than 'explain away' the 'soul' as an 'illusion' they have created the potential for it to be everywhere! rather than admit that there is something we do not understand, whether about consciousness or something more fundamentally about information processing, the eliminativist would deny that qualia or experience exist at all. it is the height of anti-intellectualism and anti-science attitudes to believe that we already fully and fundamentally understand something when we clearly do not, and this attitude is especially common among so-called '''''AI''''' fans who think that we have already created AGI by badly simulating a fraction of a human's language processing center with simplified mathematical models.