Stage one - boredom
Stage two - trepidation
Stage three - WHHEEEEEEEEE!!!
Stage four - excitement at winning the race
Stage Five - Fear, as it realizes it can’t stop in time and will collide with the large thing in its path.
Stage Six - a major headache
perhaps a “splitting headache”, as it were.
Ah yes… the Deus Ex Hominem theory, also known as the Deus Cum Hominem theory. Always interesting to see the communion rituals. 
Within cognitive psychology, this idea has been given the catchy name of “the Theory of Mind”. It refers to the ability of a child to understand that what they know, feel or want are distinct from what other people know, feel or want; in other words, the point at which a child begins to form theories about other people’s minds. There are various elements of this which develop in stages, mostly between four and six.
Autism is thought, in part, to be a failure to develop proper theory-of-mind capabilities.
Cum?!
Ita, cogno.
lowered blood sugar sending signals to my brain is a stimulus. i am stimulated; i feel it. and then i respond. the hunger that i feel works entirely by physical stimulus-reponse cycles, very similar to a sperm’s stimulus response cycles
what exists in my body that is so different than a sperm? i have nerves? all a nerve is, is something that is stimulated and causes a response. a nerve is just matter–chemicals, energy, electricity, etc.–the same stuff a sperm is
why, in a completely numb, apathetic, and goal-less universe, would evolution create a subjective experience of pleasure and pain? why don’t humans just react to things without feeling them? why can’t we just take in information around us such as light and sound and pressure on our skin, interpret it like a computer in our brain, and react to it–all like a robot–having no actual experience of any of it. why do we have consciousness or subjective experience? if the sperm is just a robot with no cares and no awareness of anything not even it’s own existence, why isn’t a human also a robot?
can’t all of my movements be done without me feeling any of it? if you break it all down, and look inside the body, isn’t it all just a bunch of little particles reacting with each other? it’s all just matter and energy, right? it’s just chemicals and electricity, right? why can’t that matter and energy do whatever it does–do its stimulus response cycles–without any emotion… like a robot?
why don’t we feel like, you say, a roach feels? why don’t we feel nothing instead of hunger? when did hunger evolve into something that is subjectively experienced? when did hunger become something that is painful?
if the roach can experience hunger without feeling any pain, why doesn’t a human experience hunger without feeling any pain?
if a roach can move towards food and start eating it without being motivated by any pain or motivated by a desire of fulfillment from the food, why can’t a human do the same?
what’s the big difference between a human’s hunger and a roach’s hunger?
what’s the big difference between a human’s hunger for food and a sperm’s hunger for the egg?
what good use is it to feel pain and pleasure, if we could just do all of the things we do like a robot, responding to stimulus without even caring? if a sperm is able to move and react to things to get whatever it needs to get done for evolution to continue, why aren’t a human’s movements and reactions the same?
Yes, your brain is just matter, but it’s wired in a way that’s extremely complex, with feedback loops and memory. Its arrangement gives an emergent property that is called consciousness. The simple sperm doesn’t have that property.
You have to be careful with the idea of “purpose” in evolution, but basically pleasure and pain make it more likely that your genes will pass to the next generation.
A brains is a very costly organ to an organism, meaning that a lot of resources have to be dedicated to growing, operating, and protecting a brain, that could otherwise go to gathering food or making babies. In order for a complex brain to have evolved, it would have to provide a survival advantage to creatures who possessed it. And they do - brains are basically ways of managing the other resources in the body in order to maximize the number of viable offspring you make. And if those brains feel pleasure and pain, you have a situation where survival and therefore offspring production is enhanced.
It’s as simple as that.
You think you’d survive without hunger? How? By the very abstract thought of wanting to have and provide for children? Hunger is a simpler and lower-level impulse - more robot-like, and serves us well.
Roaches are pretty good at doing their thing without a complex brain. We wouldn’t fare so well, we need a brain.
why can’t i react to an impulse without feeling it? for example, why can’t i just have some sort of chemicals or something in my stomach that detects when certain energy or food in my body is low. and then that can shoot an electrical signal to my head that says “move the eyes around and sniff to find something that looks squishy and chewable and emits certain particles with certain features” and move towards that. why can’t a bunch of impulses and chemicals in my body cause me to move towards it? and that’s all. just impulses and chemicals. just matter and energy type stuff. why can’t there just be that?
if there was just that, then i could survive without hunger. because i would just be a robot that completely reacts on small impulses that have combined together to form something complex. there wouldn’t be any feeling of any of it. it would just happen. why can’t it just happen without any feeling of it? why can’t it just happen without any subjective witnessing of it? why can’t it just happening without any pain or pleasure?
why can’t an impulse be sent from the stomach to the brain without something feeling pain?
i don’t see any reason why the feeling of pain is necessary. i can make a robot that works similar to my stomach and checks for sugar in the blood or whatever hunger is, and sends an electrical signal based on that. and i expect evolution should have done the same
doesn’t it make sense, scientifically and objectively, that all of the life on earth could have happened with none of the life having any subjective witnessing?
in a universe full of matter and energy that feels nothing and cares about nothing… doesn’t it make the most sense that it doesn’t matter how you combine this matter and energy together, it’s just going to be a robot. it’s not going to feel anything
if you have a bunch of elements… hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, etc. and light/energy, and none of this has any awareness or feeling or subjective witnessing or goal or misery or happiness… what makes more sense… that you can combine them in some sort of way to make something that has subjective witnessing and experiences misery and happiness… or that it doesn’t matter how you combine them, you’re not going to make anything that actually cares? you’re just going to make a robot?
don’t you see that your scientific arguments say nothing about subjective witnessing?
imagine that science explained everything that happened in the complex human body and brain. it would only be a bunch of impulses and reactions. that’s all the human body and brain is
if we can explain it all as being impulses and reactions, then why would you also say that it can’t be done with just impulses and reactions?
why do you say that it has to be done with subjective witnessing also?
you would break down subjective witnessing as being comprised of just impulses and reactions, right? isn’t that all subjective witnessing is?
so why can’t there be the exact same impulses and reactions that make up subjective witnessing, but no subjective witnessing?
for example, what if i created a robot-computer that had the same impulses and reactions that make up subjective witnessing? would the robot feel?
and why would it be the way of this universe that a complex combination of impulses and reactions create subjective witnessing? wouldn’t it make more sense if that same complex combination of impulses and reactions had the same effect (i.e., the body moving towards food) but with no subjective witnessing of it?
Creatures that are capable of weighing multiple impulses against each other will do better than ones that can’t. In order to do this, observations and motivations must be converted into a normalized form which can be compared.
These normalized forms of inputs are called “thoughts”, and the thing that is doing the comparing is called the “mind”.
Once you get that far, it becomes advantagous to record information somewhere so that you can learn by methods other than evolutionary-developed instinct.
The ability to learn requires the ability to store all your thoughts in a fairly organized and referencable manner. To use these memories requires the ability to abstractly recall memories based on abstract stimulus and assess them and current thoughts from a self-referential persepective.
I think that explains everything.
Sperms feel frustration and hate rejection. Their favorite color is white and favorite bird is a swallow.
it explains nothing, because i can create a robot that does all of that without having a subjective experience of any of it. my robot just has a bunch of responses to a bunch of complex impulses and has no care or concern or awareness of anything it is doing
you have given no reason for there to be any happiness, unhappiness, or subjective witnessing. the impulses that you are describing can all occur without there being any happiness, unhappiness, or subjective witnessing. i can show you this by creating a robot that works in the way you are describing but has no emotions at all. it just looks like it has emotions because all of the impulses it has causes it’s face to respond that way
Why do you say the robot would have no subjective experience of anything? If your robot is in fact emulating the same complexity of analysis and response that a human would, I would say that it is experiencing. That’s all that we’re doing inside our heads, after all. Happiness and unhappiness are emergent properties of the complex ways that we organize our responses to stimuli.
So how can you say that you could build a robot that does the same thing a human does but without doing the same thing that a human does? It’s a flat contradiction.
If your robot has no awareness of wht it is doing then it is explicitly not comparing and choosing amongst external stimuli, and it expliclity is not what I described.
“happiness” and “unhappiness” map directly to value-reactions to situations and stimuli. Any robot that lacks these does not have the ability to react the way I was describing. Similarly, any robot that is incapable of percieving its thoughts in a subjective way is not what I was describing.
You can’t make a robot that works in the way I describe that does not meet your crieteria.
stealth, because even if a human and a robot do the same thing does not mean that the human and robot feel the same
i’m not saying that it’s not possible to create a robot that does feel the same as a human, but that wasn’t the hypothetical situation that i mentioned. the situation i mentioned, which is not contradictory at all, is that the human and robot have the same stimuli and responses, but the robot does not feel any of it. wouldn’t you agree that that’s possible?
it is very possible to compare external stimuli without subjectively witnessing it. there’s no reason for you to believe otherwise. just because our brain compares external stimuli and we subjectively witness it, does not mean that comparing-external-stimuli and subjectively-witnessing is the same thing
why do you jump to that conclusion? you have no reason to believe that it’s not possible for a comparison of external stimuli to occur without there being a subjective witness
i can create a computer program that compares external stimuli but doesn’t subjectively witness… doesn’t feel anything… doesn’t feel happiness or unhappiness. if i put a heat sensor on each side, and checked if the heat on one side is higher than the heat on the other side, would i create happiness? comparisons don’t mean anything. comparisons are not the same as happiness/unhappiness/subjective-witnessing
No, I wouldn’t agree that that’s possible, at least not in a meaningful sense. Our subjective experiences, our feelings and desires, are exactly how we organize and execute our responses to stimuli. If you program a robot to respond the same way a human would, you have programmed the robot to feel.
Unless you’re talking about doing something like hard-coding a certain set of specific responses to a certain set of stimuli. For example, wire it up so that its eyes water and it says “ouch” when you poke it with a needle. You might even program it so that if you do it again, it says “Hey! Stop that!” But giving it a finite set of pre-coded responses to expected stimuli isn’t anything close to giving it human-like reactions, and I’m not really sure what your point would be in that case.
I wouldn’t agree. If the robot has the same responses, it must have the same feelings. Otherwise, they’re NOT the same.
for all you know, nobody else in the entire universe feels anything. only you have feelings. nobody else has ever known happiness or unhappiness, only you have. there is no way to prove that anything other than you has feelings, because you don’t experience what anything else experiences. you can only experience what you experience. would you agree that, although it is probably unlikely, that it is possible that nobody else in the entire universe feels anything?
science helps us build an objective understanding of the way matter, energy, chemicals, etc. move and react, but it can make no claim on the way anything feels, because that is a subjective experience outside of ourselves that we can never touch
you can’t measure the way something else feels. you can only measure stimuli and responses. equality between two objects would include everything about those objects, including their position, so no two different objects are ever truly equal. if you want to say that two objects are identical in every aspect other than their positions, you would need to compare all of their properties… the stimuli, the responses, and the way the objects actually feel
no, they’re not the same. only the responses are the same. the feelings are different. if feelings and responses are two different properties, then it is completely possible that two different objects could have all of the same responses and feel completely different. there’s no way of measuring the way anything else feels, so there is no way to make the claim that two objects with identical responses have the same feelings. you are making an assumption that responses are the same as feelings, but there’s no reason to believe that assumption
Yeah! You’re turing logic on its head!
And yet, here we are trying to answer the question: what does a sperm feel.
Cognitive scientists are not 100% sure what subjective consciousness is, or where it comes from. I have heard philosophical arguments about potential worlds identical to ours (with all the achievements and terrors) but where all the organic life has no subjective awareness.
However, like others are saying, subjective awareness probably evolved because it allows the user/operator to evaluate the merits of various contradictory pieces of information and then pick the best one, which will offer advantages over instinctive ‘if x, do y’ type of reactions.
However for that to be true, free will has to exist. And I have no idea if it does or not.