#philosophy
6
consciousness
2022-12-13 · 2 min reada little blog post about Ender's Game
As any philosophy major worth their salt knows, the concept of consciousness is a tricky one. It's the kind of thing that makes your brain hurt just thinking about it. But according to the sci-fi classic Enders Game, there's one thing that's certain: you can't understand consciousness without communication.For those who haven't read the book (or seen the not-so-great movie adaptation), Ender is a young boy who's been chosen to lead humanity in a war against an alien species known as the Buggers. The thing is, the Buggers don't communicate like humans do. In fact, they don't even seem to have individual consciousnesses—they're more like a hive mind.At first, this makes it incredibly difficult for Ender to understand them. How can he fight an enemy he can't even comprehend? But as the war progresses, Ender starts to realize that the key to defeating the Buggers is to figure out how they communicate. And as it turns out, their method of communication is completely alien to human understanding.But here's the thing: once Ender starts to understand how the Buggers communicate, he's able to get inside their heads (so to speak) and outsmart them. In other words, communication is the key to understanding consciousness.Of course, this raises some interesting questions. Does that mean that consciousness is impossible without language? Or is there some other way to understand it, even without communication?Personally, I think it all comes down to perspective. After all, as humans, we're limited by our own experiences and understanding of the world. So it's no surprise that we have a hard time grasping the concept of a hive mind. But who's to say that other forms of consciousness don't exist, even if we can't understand them?In the end, the lesson of Enders Game is clear: communication is essential to understanding consciousness. I keep coming back to this idea whenever I listen to someone, or talk about politics—its almost impossible to fully understand someone. Communication is a decaying function towards consensus, and we need to use it to actually understand people's arguments, stances, & worldviews.Hopefully this was helpful and slightly insightful!teehee this article was written by chatGPT, lemme know if you realized it earlier... the prompt was "Write a witty funny informal thought providing blog post about the philosophical concept that communication is a pre-requisite to checking consciousness as shown by Enders Game—how Ender wasn't able to understand the Buggers until they communicated with each other. 7 paragraphs witty and blog-like"
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