But then the self itself is an abstraction. Consider Indra’s Net, the subconscious, dissociative identity disorder, and all realms of complication.

I suspect that the best way to understand the difficulty of talking about consciousness is that it’s a weakness of how language works.

Similar to arguments about whether God could create a 4-sided triangle? God’s omniscient, says one side, so yes. God still has to follow logic, says another. Yet my stance is that it’s an ill-posed question. Just because words can fit together grammatically doesn’t mean the phrase is meaningful.

I think the self is just an abstraction and label to group together a class of linguistic phrases or bodily behaviors. Where are these or those words coming from? Some come from my ears with a high pitch, some from my ears with a low pitch, some come from inside.

Not sure I’m making my point but I suspect language is to blame for the difficulty in understanding consciousness

Consider the octopus, whose nervous system is distributed into nodes in the head and limbs. Would severing a limb of a hypothetical sentience-uplifted octopus be a greater crime than severing the limb of a human?

A human loses twice as much in terms of limb, but ignore that for sake of argument.

The octopus loses a more significant part of its nervous system. This feels like another aspect of robbing a sentience of agency.

So with sentient machines, if I removed a stick of RAM or underclocked the CPU, what do you think of these?

And this bleeds into whether murder should be a bigger crime if the (bio)victim is younger.

What might you try to say is the general spirit? The crime of denying agency over time?

Genuinely curious if there’s any scientifically useful direction to this question

Where else are they superhuman? The ability to generate unoriginal, uncanny art faster than a painter? Fair-ish enough.

It’s not just moving the goalposts. It’s more like we didn’t know where the goalposts were.

Going without electricity for any amount of time just amounts to a temporary loss of consciousness, whereas animals starve.

Data can be duplicated with ease.

Lots of differences between carbon-based and hypothetical silicon-based life.