Comment by in-silico

Comment by in-silico 2 days ago

7 replies

Hacker News gets a lot less creepy/sad/interesting when you ignore the first-person pronouns and remember they're just biomolecular machines. It's a scaled up version of E. coli. Useful, sure, but there's no reason to ascribe emotions to it. It's just chemical chain reactions.

xyzsparetimexyz a day ago

The only thing I know for sure is that I exist. Given that I exist, it makes sense to me that others of the same rough form as me also exist. My parents, friends, etc. Extrapolating further, it also makes sense to assume (pre-ai, bots) that most comments have a human consciousness behind them. Yes, humans are machines, but we're not just machines. So kindly sod off with that kind of comment.

illiac786 a day ago

Makes zero sense. “Emotion” is a property of these “biomolecular machines”, by its definition.

  • in-silico a day ago

    But if you weren't one of them, would you be able to tell that they had emotions (and not just simulations of emotions) by looking at them from the outside?

    • illiac786 a day ago

      If I wasn’t one of them I wouldn’t care. It’s like caring about trees having branches. They just do. The trees probably care a great deal about their branches though, like I care a great deal about my emotions.

      • in-silico a day ago

        Well some people appreciate the world around them, and would care about it just as they care about trees having branches.