this picture will never not be funny
just the absurdity of donald duck putting out that statement (which even makes some sense and fits donald’s overall depressed mood) and mickey mouse being the sly one and contradicting donald, coming out with the upper hand from the argument, is just so amusing.
This sounds like the kind of stupidass discourse you get when Jordan Peterson sits with Ben Shapiro with Joe Rogan trying sniff both their butts.
Seriously. Why are chemicals absurd? Answer: They are not absurd. They are arranged and tuned to your relations with your surroundings. They are sensory organs. Ignoring your senses is a choice I guess, especially when they are badly calibrated or misinformed by fake inputs (social media, rage bait, w/e)
I think most people have gotten over this fallacy when it comes to organic intelligence these days, but people still make it with regards to machine learning. They say LLMs are reducible to an equation (which is an oversimplification) and therefore they can’t have any subjective experience.
But if your math is complex enough to reduce an LLM to an equation (something no human has ever done, but is theoretically possible), then you’d be able to do it to humans too. Unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics, and all that. So yeah, humans are just a mathematical equation. A human brain is just a machine that predicts the most likely action to help you eat food and have sex.
And if you believe talking creatures can lack subjective experience, well congratulations, you’ve invented p-zombies. Which I think is dangerous. We don’t need millions of people walking around who seriously believe in p-zombies.
Yeah - reducing things to material components isn’t absurd and doesn’t destroy subjective meaning.
Like, I don’t believe in free will, but that doesn’t mean I don’t find life meaningful - it’s just a fact about how the world works. I still perceive choice, I perceive meaning - it’s a subjective and phenomenological matter, not an objective/material one.
I think it is also about the terms of the debate and definitions of self. For me the absurdity is to propose invisible essences that transcend physical reality. My body is my self and I kind of own or rent the material that makes me work. The processes are physical as well, but they are mine too. I freely make decisions all the time, all by myself. There is no other self worth talking about.