system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why do so many theories about consciousness assume humans are special?

This might be a really dumb question but I don't understand why human consciousness is seen as a special thing. So special that people can argue endless how you can perfectly clone yourself, is the copy still "you" in any way, what is even "you" if atoms are constantly exchanged with "non" you?


Some theories assume that human consciousness is so special that you can have identical beings behaving like those with consciousness but that don't have it. For me it's absurd to assume that a zombie would be tormented with the idea of why he has a consciousness, why does he feel if he doesn't "feel". How can a thing be the same but different? This seems to imply something we can't observe at all like the "soul" or something.


My intuition is that perfect cloning is impossible so "who is the real you" is meaningless. Why? Because there is not even a "you", we're more like movies running, you can't make a perfect copy of a movie, it doesn't make sense to talk like that. There is no "I", it was just beneficial from an evolution point of view for the mental processes to behave in a way as to survive better.


A bacteria is not viewed as having a consciousness but it still takes care of itself, it detects nutrients, it consumes, it repairs, it lives, it decides when it divides. Why is this not seen as an extremely rudimentary consciousness? Why does it have it be all or nothing? Just because the bacteria doesn't process the concept of "I"? We are just meat computers that run on DNA that gets mutated based on chance and the beneficial traits survive. The brain can do things without you "feeling it" and you can do things without "feeling" them, like mental calculations. Why is the narrative of seeing, hearing, smelling so special? Aren't they mental calculations that determine there is an "I" that benefits from them and that protecting that "I" is a must?


I am not arguing in favor of my naive opinions, I just want to see where I'm wrong.
gpt
I think there's a lot of stuff going on here, some of which has to do with what philosophers call consciousness, and some which doesn't.

First question: if a perfect duplicator could be made, and it made a molecule-for-molecule duplicate of you, which being would be you? This is a question about personal identity, not consciousness. The same question could presumably be raised about artifacts, plants, bacteria, etc. -- if we could make a perfect duplicate of a slime mold, which one would be the original? The answer here need not presuppose anything about consciousness.

Second question: how can a zombie not be conscious? Why would it be bothered about not feeling? This does have to do with consciousness, but it misconstrues how zombies fit into the debate about the hard problem of consciousness. Zombies are conceivable creatures just like us, but they don't feel. The point of this thought experiment isn't that there's something special about humans that zombies lack. The point is that merely physical descriptions of nature, including humans, seem to imply nothing about conscious experience. This does imply that there's something about consciousness that evades description by current physics, but it has nothing to do with humans as such. Instead, most philosophers assume that the complexity of our conscious experience is a matter of complex cognition. Many believe that some non-human animals are conscious.