If that's the case, the QC computer endeavors are still worthwhile since while failing to scale them we may develop another piece of a more complete model of reality.
> Fix death please, that's a good way to prevent the fear.
Even if you were able to postpone your non-existence to some late stage of the Universe, it's all but assured you will have to end eventually in light of postulated Cosmological denouements. In other words, you will not exist forever due to physics.
That being said it would be nice to know it's possible to get at least a few hundred years of healthy and happy living in. Yet, would the fear of the end grow even greater then?
If you redefine "you" and "exist" I'm not so sure. What if "I" am just my conscious being, and what if I "exist" across many systems that have a ~0% chance of failing catastrophically.
Anyway, this is going all scifi and silly. My point is really that death sucks, trying to say "oh but you can't fear death because it's not a thing" doesn't seem helpful, and we can probably do massively better than a ~125 year max lifespan.
A world of only perfect beings does sound pretty boring. I'm not sure if anything worthwhile would actually happen in such a place. That being said, mental (rational) tools that help one recognize the origin of anxiety and reduce its deleterious effects are quite welcome. I think this article could help programmers/founders do just that.
> nominally has a meaning of merely being aware of, and responding to, the environment, but this is not the self-aware consciousness that is currently unexplained
I was thinking of something simpler: the flexibility of meaning of the word 'consciousness' -- for example, in Merriam-Webster:
1a: the quality or state of being aware especially of something within oneself. (my emphasis.)
If you regard 'especially' to indicate that the emphasized clause is optional (edit: or maybe even if not), you could arguably say (and people do) that anything alive fits this definition, as do even things like thermostats. This, however, is not the consciousness that the science and philosophy of mind is concerned with: it is specifically concerned with the sort of consciousness that we exhibit, which is aware that it is an agent in the world, aware that it has this awareness, and aware that other people are also aware in this sense.
Update: I may have misunderstood your question. The nature of consciousness in other animals is also an open issue and is being studied. It would be very odd indeed if there was nothing like it in any other species, but, at the same time, no other living species on earth has it to the extent we do. I don't think these observations justify the extremely broad definitions of panpsychism, and I do not think panpsychism helps with studying these animals any more that it helps with humans.
Nagel's point is, I think, rather tangential - he is arguing that we probably will never know what it is like to be a bat, as it is likely too far from any experience we could have. I think he is probably right, and again, panpsychism will not change that.
Nagel's was a negative assertion, his viewpoint is the one that needs defending - how can we not be sure we can't understand the bat's perspective?
If taken to its logical ends, constructs like the crayon box and human fucking empathy are off the table too - I cannot and do not have any idea of who or what you are being, therefore I cannot comprehend consciousness? What?
> then you get a picture of an extraordinarily complicated system, and the nuts and bolts of exactly what that system is running on fall away into irrelevance
I think this is a common failing of thought experiments. Gedankenexperiments help us ask better questions and design better real experiments, but if you're trying to use them to make fundamental conclusions about reality in an a priori way, you're likely going to fail.
It's interesting that the image used for the article, from the windward side of Oahu, shows only invasive species (or maybe that's the point). Ironically, the biodiversity of plants on the Hawaiian Islands has increased tremendously since the arrival of man. The graphic shows 79 species of plant lost. Anyone that's been to Hawaii knows there are far more than 79 introduced plant species.
I'm not saying this is a good thing by any means, but it's interesting to see that novel forests of invasive species are still maligned even if they contain a greater number of species/area than what was displaced. If anyone is interested in this comment, I can unearth at least one paper that examines these values.
In the end, I suppose we value the total number of different species in existence, and as that number decreases, there is a Great Loss. Yet I do like to mull over why conservationists favor native species that are struggling to survive over the introduced that are flourishing, often at great economic cost to control said invasives.
Note: this comment only considers plant species, which probably makes it very uninformed and bad. Take it with a grain of salt.
> The graphic shows 79 species of plant lost. Anyone that's been to Hawaii knows there are far more than 79 introduced plant species.
But these two things are not directly comparable. On the one hand, you have species that have gone extinct -- no individuals of these species are known to grow in the wild anymore. This does not count species that are declining towards extinction. On the other hand, most lists of introduced plants for Hawaii only count species that are invasive. These are plants that not only grow and reproduce in Hawaii, but whose populations are increasing.
While species diversity as a whole in the Hawaiian islands is likely increasing, due to introduced species, the diversity at smaller spatial scales is likely decreasing as endemics become rarer.
> But these two things are not directly comparable
Correct. You simplified my comment nicely here (though I'm trying to find papers about smaller scales):
> While species diversity as a whole in the Hawaiian islands is likely increasing, due to introduced species, the diversity at smaller spatial scales is likely decreasing as endemics become rarer.
How do conservationists make value judgements in cases like this?
