AnDoLiN

But I think healthier longevity is pretty clearly a plus.

Based on what?

Your cellphone may not actually make your life better, but having your cancer detected and treated early certainly can.

May not make it better. It may. Could. Or maybe it can’t.

And more academic modeling has certainly improved lives with much less food scarcity throughout the world, and much improved healthcare.

You are just elaborately saying “we have soap now”. But have you quantified the subjective experience of suffering between people who live now and people who lived before soap?

Does it? Animals seem to do well without modeling reality. Can you show me across the ages that humanity in general experiences that the quality of their lives has clearly improved? And understand the question. I’m not asking you, a modern human to look back to antiquity and say “we have soap now”. I’m asking what universal human experiences have fundamentally changed for the better? We still have disease, war, hunger, heart break, suffering. We have average people living the life of fantastic luxury, and yet the desire to fill the void doesn’t seem to go anywhere. We have more stuff, we have amazing intellectual frameworks to model reality with but still, most people are very clearly unsatisfied. And the more stuff we have, the more stuff we want. The early humans weren’t fretting about getting a new smartphone, they were fretting about where to get their next meal. We fret about the meal AND the smartphone.

I’m not saying tech is bad. I’m not saying building models is bad or wrong. We have so much beauty because of it. But it’s wise to know what the end goal is and ask if the methods of getting there are actually effective.

To what end? What happens when you understand and can make predictions?

Again, define useful/useless? To what end do you create these models?

A model is an understanding of how it works.

“Models work because they help us make better models, and we know better models work because… they’re better models.”

You can try to build a model of the universe based on any gibberish of feelings, but it isn’t useful in any way.

Useful to what end? The very idea that you need to build a model is based on believing in a system that thinks the model is important.

Thing is that science cannot prove matter is prior either, yet that is taken as the core assumption that all other assumptions must align to.

This is the scientific version of Christians saying “god is real, says so in the bible, and because bible was written by god, it must be true”.

“Say, let’s admit consciousness is the result of a physical process.”

Let’s not. I don’t have any proof of that. Everything obviously exists inside consciousness. Why should I believe it arises from matter? Even a brain cell under a microscope exists inside consciousness. You’d need to have some kind of an objective view that exists outside consciousness that can show matter creating it. But then you wouldn’t be able to know about it because it’s outside consciousness. Everything you know must exist inside consciousness. Else you wouldn’t know about it.

Also consciousness studies are very much a thing

https://scienceandnonduality.com/videos/donald-hoffman-consciousness-and-the-interface-theory-of-perception/

It’s autism vs. psychopathy