why do we enjoy poetry From the perspective of neuroscience?

[The Grand Nudger]

Well, it's a matter of how far I should take pragmatic assumptions.  Maybe someday, I'll be surrounded by nothing but robots, and my life won't make much sense unless I take them as actual existent, sentient beings.  That's kind of a creepy thought.

It wouldn't be much different than today, though, lol. 

I assume humans feel and think, because I do.  And because human behaviors evoke emotional responses in me, and I have an irrational sense that they are "just real," without being able to prove any of it, I act as though they do.

That's not the only reason.  We act like we do, as do many other creatures.  It's pointless to omit this huge range of observations, of so many creatures.  This thread has found a bunch of ways to assert that we can't "prove consciousness"...but that's not actually true.  We can prove that we're conscious to exactly the same degree and by the same standards as we can prove any other assertion about the world.  The proposition that we don't or may not think or feel, between the two, is the absurd one.  

This is propped up by intuitively pleasing arguments that are, themselves, fundamentally flawed.  We posit, by way of asserting exactly what we wish to conclude, that there are robots "faking it", for example.  Acting like we do.  To a person who wishes to make this sort of point that seems like a dead ringer, but it's not.  We're silently assuming that what the robot is doing is different in kind, not just in type. 

What we do know of the subject, regardless of what we don't.......strongly suggests that this just isn't the case.  

If we wish to posit a robot that convincingly acts like us, what follows is not that we can;t prove consciousness, but that we must allow for at least some sort of rudimentary experience in their case. That they have an internal world. Maybe not an internal world exactly as ours is, but an internal world by any rational description nonetheless. We already posit this in the case of other creatures that act this or that way...and, to be blunt, it's highly unlikely that my internal experience is exactly like yours anyway. There's disparity between our prime subjects, even.

I have moments of philosophical crisis when I seriously doubt that anyone exists, myself included, in anything resembling the way in which they seem to.  But then I get bored of quivering under the covers with my blanket over my head and I go out and play existential dress-up until I forget that I had doubts at all, if just for a short while.  Rinse and repeat, tbh, with pretty heavy moments of either solipsistic confidence or a suicidal sense of cosmic alienation interspersed.  I'm deep like that.

Doubting that we exist in the way that we think we do is just good practice..but it's not exactly the same as doubting that we exist - and the same is true of thinking and feeling.  I mean hell, we already know that we don't think or feel the way that we thought we did.  There's more robot "faking it" than little man behind the eyes, up in here.