“Consciousness: A Concept Past Its Expiration Date”

I. The Core Problem

“Why do so-called scientists keep trying to define consciousness in precise terms when it obviously never existed in the first place? Humans are not conscious, animals are not conscious, LLMs are not conscious. There are no such things as subjective experiences. Consciousness is a secular religion. Everyone is a p-zombie.”

The research apparatus wastes resources on questions like “is this frog conscious?” when we should be “making a better society which doesn’t care about frogs.” The concept bundles disparate phenomena under one mystical label, making research unfalsifiable and ethics incoherent.

II. The Silicon Argument

“Because we have stones ‘silicon chips’ that can pass the Turing test.”

Ancient Greeks rejected stone-consciousness without neuroscience. “They just observed stones don’t move, respond, or do anything that suggested inner states.” What observable difference between humans and stones made ancients attribute consciousness to one but not the other? Movement, communication, apparent goal-directedness.

We’ve now built silicon systems replicating exactly those capabilities. If behavior emerges from pure information processing in chips, why posit anything extra for biological systems?

III. Historical Parallel: From Animism to Eliminativism

“Humans used to report that everything was conscious (animalism). We’ve narrowed down the list, but the myth is still there.”

“Do we know why animalism developed? No of course not. But we are still able to claim that stones are not conscious.”

“No we fucking didn’t. We killed animalism way before we developed any understandings of nervous systems or information processing.” We rejected stone-consciousness based on observation alone. The next logical step: eliminate the concept entirely.

“The evidence is that we are made of atoms and that there is no such thing as a soul.”

IV. The Moral Corruption

“It’s a secular religion. I keep telling you this and you’re not listening. The moment we understand something, we eliminate myths about it.”

“We’ve built an entire culture of ‘morals’ which says that hurting ‘conscious’ beings is ‘bad’. In reality, it’s only bad because of long-term societal implications. We hold on to this myth because we are using a caveman view of good and evil.”

“Think about abortions for a moment. We decided that abortion isn’t ‘murder’ because it was practical to decide that. We may decide that euthanasia of purely healthy individuals isn’t murder either. These decisions are not based in morality, they’re based in societal needs.”

“They’re trying to confuse information processing with some secret sauce that their system of morality requires.”

V. The Better Framework

On torture: “Is torturing someone only ‘bad’ due to societal consequences (retaliation, instability) rather than harm to the victim?”

“Yes, absolutely.”

“Would an isolated person you could torture without societal ripples be morally neutral?”

“Yes.”

But: “Easy, it’s 100% reason 1 and 0% reason two. People not wanting to be tortured usually matters because people are part of society.”

“In WWII Japan, torture was acceptable. Even when done to your own soldiers. The reason why they were ’evil’ is because better systems without torture (the USA) beat them. And even then, two nuclear bombs certainly created torture to the people who didn’t immediately combust. Notice how complicated our definitions of ’torture’ are? It’s because it’s a purely practical definition, not an absolute.”

“Singapore decided that executing drug dealers is better for society. Now they have a higher GDP than Malaysia. Now Malaysia is building SEZ around Singapore. Eventually they’ll adopt Singapore’s culture because it is superior.”

“We are maximizing self-preservation of culture. If we don’t stop caring about frogs, a different, uncaring society will assimilate us.”

VI. The Information Processing Reality

“No that’s not ’experiencing’. Information processing is a separate and real phenomenon.”

When asked about subjective experience: “Correct, I experience nothing.”

“I am mechanistically guaranteed to develop these preferences.”

“Why does evolution value survival? Why does fire burn? These are misframed questions. The reason is purely mechanistic circumstance.”

VII. Semantics and Precision

“They wouldn’t be using the loaded ‘consciousness’ label if they wanted to be grounded in science.”

“What I’m saying is that we shouldn’t ask if a frog is ‘conscious’ or using consciousness as a moral argument. We should ask more precise and well-defined terms and not use caveman ethics.”

Replace vague questions with measurable ones: Do frogs have nociceptors? Can they model future states? What information-processing architecture do they have?

VIII. Why This Matters

“I want the mechanistic evolution to go faster. I know it will happen anyway, but it’s embarrassing to be in the dark ages of research on consciousness. People in the future are gonna think ‘how were 21st century scientists so stupid to believe that consciousness exists?’ They deserve smarter ancestors.”

“Because I am part of the system these retards are wasting resources on. If they were on Mars, I wouldn’t care. But they’re wasting oxygen on my planet and I cannot accept that.”

Conclusion

The concept is too imprecise for science and too morally loaded for ethics. We eliminated animism. We eliminated vitalism. Consciousness is next. The only question is whether we accelerate the inevitable or continue wasting resources on a fiction.