arken

Art can be a joke, a joke can be art

Well, It also works as a nice allegory for climate catastrophe.

I have done plenty of research, thank you. Of course even more research never hurts.

The hides of giant mutated squirrels

Us guitarists call them blues lawyers.

Er, that’s what I am saying however is that you can observe and measure consciousness.

Going with any definition of consciousness relevant to this discussion, say phenomenality and/or awareness, no.

I am not sure why it’s hard to accept that some living things may not be conscious. Viruses propagate “mindlessly”, they’re neither living nor conscious.

That's not really the point - I don't claim to know what entities possess consciousness. The point is that you don't either.

I also don’t understand why you think emergent properties are a hypothesis. Emergent properties of biological processes are fact

Obviously I'm talking about Emergentism as it relates to consciousness, and the idea that consciousness is an emergent property is not a fact, no. And there are perfectly valid reasons - for example, the "explanatory gap" - why someone might find it unsatisfactory.

So, I'm guessing everyone in this thread has a different conception of what "consciousness" actually is and what we're talking about here, which makes it difficult to discuss casually like this. You seem to have a very exclusive definition of consciousness, which only serves to avoid the argument, really. "It’s possible that same organisms exhibit some parts of consciousness as we have noticed till now, but if those organisms do not exhibit all parts of consciousness then they’re not conscious"...you're splitting hairs. If plants could be proven to be aware, have subjective experience, a sense of self, it would be reasonable to change our definition of consciousness to be more inclusive - simply because such a concept of consciousness would be a lot more useful then.

Emergentism is a popular hypothesis, not a fact. Christof Koch lost the bet, remember? The idea that "all organisms which are conscious have to exhibit the same properties" and "you cannot pick and choose" does not logically follow from anything you've said. These are criteria that you set up yourself. Take the idea of qualia as an example, how could we ever observe that an animal or a plant does or does not experience qualia? Nobody solved the problem of other minds.

Consciousness is nothing like a heart; the function of the heart can be observed and measured. How do you know that you possess awareness? You can only experience it. (Actually, that we are aware is the only thing we can know with complete certainty.)

which we don’t observe in those which lack consciousness.

See what you did there? You assume a priori which entities lack consciousness, and then motivate this by claiming they lack traits that can be observed in conscious entities. That is very neatly circular.

Food service and retail needs to exist, (~~commercial~~ sales) call centers should be banned and their owners shunned from polite society.

I reacted to, paraphrased: "you can't control people with sun worship".

During his reign, Akhenaten instated monotheistic worship of Aten - the sun disc - and did away with all other gods worshipped in Egypt at that time. Whether or not the workers who built his monuments were paid well I do not know - I suspect you have the Diary of Merer in mind, but remember that Khufu's and Akhenaten's respective reigns were more than a thousand years apart - as a pharaoh, Akhenaten could most certainly control people. And if you believe religion can be used as a means to control people, this is definitely a historic example of sun worship being used to this end, wouldn't you agree?

Best and easiest way is to reverse image search from a photo, it's easy to look through the results for yourself and see what actually matches (it's frequently not the first search result). Perhaps there's some kind of AI involved in reverse image search, but searching like this is infinitely preferable to me instead of some bot telling me an answer which may or may not be correct. It's not "convenient" if you actually care about the answer.

I wish I could give this comment more than a simple upvote. I want to mail you a freshly baked cinnamon bun.