At its core, I believe the phenomenon of culture is intertwined with the hard problem of consciousness, which is notoriously circular and self-referential and roughly speaking “how we do/feel things ’round here” is potentially not far from the best we can do.

Cultural baggage, for the lack of a better word, drives how we tend to approach reality (holistically or by dividing and classifying things, monistically or dualistically, materialistically or idealistically, and so on), and reality includes the very thing under discussion (consciousness, culture).

Shared cultural baggage is perhaps the thing that makes us believe another being is conscious (i.e., shares similar aspects of self-awareness). Shared culture manifests itself in an infinity of fine details of one’s behaviour; looking like a human but not behaving like a human can be a great horror movie trope, depending on how carefully shared culture is violated[0].

This carries over to animals, to a degree. A dog is social to an extent that many would consider it conscious. An octopus is legally recognised as sentient in some countries—thanks to it behaving in a way that is vaguely reminiscent of ourselves. Same reason we call ravens smart.

Most humans anywhere on the planet, though, share enough cultural baggage that we do not question whether others have what we consider consciousness; though I think some people are more sensitive to how much shared cultural baggage another human possesses, the small lack of which could lead to fear, cautiousness, and/or a feeling that they are in some ways subhuman (closer than a dog, but not as human as their peers in local community) relative to them, which eventually contributes to exclusion, racism, and so on (well demonstrated in both Japan and parts of the US).

[0] Arguably, “behaving sufficiently like a human while being not human at all”, which we have plenty of examples of now in the last year or two, is another such trope.

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bwfan123 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> culture is intertwined with the hard problem of consciousness

Majority of people are sleep-walking as machines driven by imitation, habit and external forces. We live in a dreamlike, mechanical state lacking the awareness of this itself. apropos: Gurdjieff

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strogonoff 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Very uncharitable and questionable on a few levels. Every human exists in context of society, no human exists standalone—the very definition of self, as in self-awareness, has the existence of other as a prerequisite. People you see are perfectly aware of themselves; it’s just that awareness of yourself does not mean you have to violate societal norms and show how individual you are all the time—at best, it requires a more acute awareness of norms (you have to know what to violate first, cf. all the various counter-cultures), making one more socially integrated and in some ways paradoxicay less individual; at worst (if you are properly disconnected) it makes one less of a human, not more.

	▲	bwfan123 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> People you see are perfectly aware of themselves Are they rote-students imitating or copying memes and as such are driven by inadequate-ideas or are they students who understand the subject from its first assumptions and as such are driven by adequate-ideas. In the quote above, the suggestion is that majority are rote-students.

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fwip 9 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

https://xkcd.com/610/