Yes, but then I do not believe the distinction in your other post that there are these mental things separable from physical things and have to somehow causally affect them.

It would be easier if you tell me what you don't understand about the post I referred you to.

Maybe you should type yours rather than silly one-line questions.

A quick point is that the kind of dynamics that could even be coupled would have to be in a state of criticality. — apokrisis

Well it depends on how complicated the system is, what it does. But again, the free energy principle applies in principle even to just a description of a normal rock that doesn't overtly display behavior like that.

A balance of geological and chemical forces over many scales of being. In some sense its own model as at some particular distance or horizon, the landscape’s smallest fluctuations become a lower bound blur, and its largest fluctuations become so large the system now appears to live inside a fixed background, captured by its laws. — apokrisis

Not really clear to me what is being said here.

But then you can see how the humble rock lacks that kind of dynamics which brings this systems perspective into things. — apokrisis

Again, you are misinterpreting the theory somewhat. If you look at the paper, they say a rock can be described under the theory and its more or less mathematically proven that the principle can apply to something like a rock. What you are talking about is a special case of system that is highly complicated.

But on a skim, I would say he is trying too hard to explain everything by the self-organising dynamics and being too glib about the self-information or measurement aspect of a hierarchical system. — apokrisis

Can you specify what exactly you mean? Its a mathematical principle that applies generically and is not restricted to self-organizing dynamics.

No, it really doesn’t. The information that the rock contains bears no resemblance to a system of belief.

You can present your evidence to the contrary if you wish of course. — apokrisis

Again, you're interpreting "belief" in a way that is more elaborate than the minimalist version used in the theory which is not much more than Bayesian probability. Bayesian probability is often linked clisely by people to a kind of subjectivist view of probabilities but Bayes' rule holds regardless of interpretation - its just probability theory. If you read the papers I linked you will see it explicitly expressed that even a rock comes under this formulation. If you like you can think of the word "belief" as just a metaphor. Its just saying that the internal system has information about the external system. The internal system is predictive of the external system (predictive define purely in terms of conditional probabilities) - as if the internal system could be said to have beliefs.

A rock doesn’t actually have beliefs about its environment. — apokrisis

It does. Bayesian mechanics and Free energy principle can apply to anything sufficiently complicated. As said in the first paper I linked before: if something persists over time, it must be encoding a model of the relevant environment we have used in constructing or picking out this system. Doesn't matter if its a rock or a person or an ecosystem, a society. Obviously, a rock may not be very interesting though as a kind of dynamical system.

thermo maths. — apokrisis

Information theory. Rather than calling that thermo math, we should be talking about thermodynamics in terms of a statistical mech.. oh wait!

But the rock never had any say in the matter. — apokrisis

Well the notion of model being used is far more minimalist and general than what you're implying. The FEP does apply to any thing, and so provides a generic characterization of any system complicated enough to have anything interesting to say about it, including stones and even smaller, simpler systems for that matter than stones, I should think.

An account that is extremely general, simple but I believe mathematically rigorous, well-defined.

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=7909771384315425233&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=10954599080507512058&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1

(quotes from second paper in abstract and introduction part)

"This monograph attempts a theory of every ‘thing’ that can be distinguished from other ‘things’ in a statistical sense. The ensuing statistical independencies, mediated by Markov blankets, speak to a recursive composition of ensembles (of things) at increasingly higher spatiotemporal scales. This decomposition provides a description of small things; e.g., quantum mechanics – via the Schrödinger equation, ensembles of small things – via statistical mechanics and related fluctuation theorems, through to big things – via classical mechanics. These descriptions are complemented with a Bayesian mechanics for autonomous or active things. Although this work provides a formulation of every ‘thing’, its main contribution is to examine the implications of Markov blankets for self- organisation to nonequilibrium steady-state. In brief, we recover an information geometry and accompanying free energy principle that allows one to interpret the internal states of something as representing or making inferences about its external states. The ensuing Bayesian mechanics is compatible with quantum, statistical and classical mechanics and may offer a formal description of lifelike particles."

"To address the nature of things, we start by asking how something can be distinguished from everything else. In pursuing a formulation of self organisation, we will call on the notion of conditional independence as the basis of this separation. More specifically, we assume that for something to exist it must possess (internal or intrinsic) states that can be separated statistically from (external or extrinsic) states that do not constitute the thing. This separation implies the existence of a Markov blanket; namely, a set of states that render the internal and external states conditionally independent. The existence of things (i.e., internal states and their blanket) further implies a partition of the Markov blanket into active and sensory states – that are not influenced by external and internal states, respectively. This may sound a bit arbitrary; however, this is the minimal set of conditional independencies" – and implicit partition of states – that licenses talk about things (that possess states). Specifically, it provides a partition that constitutes the ‘self’ in self-organisation. The subsequent sections tackle the next obvious question: what are things? At this point, we deploy the Langevin formulation of random dynamical systems as an ansatz that is recursively self-verifying, when considered in the light of Markov blankets. In brief, the formulation on offer says that the states of things (i.e., particles) comprise mixtures of blanket states, where the Markov blanket surrounds things at a smaller scale. Effectively, this eludes the question “what is a thing?” by composing things from the Markov blanket of smaller things. By induction, we have Markov blankets all the way down, which means one never has to specify the nature of things."

So a system is a thing with a Markov blanket that separates the kind of thing it is from its environment. This can be applied to virtually anything complicated enough, from a rock to a brain to a planetary system to... virtually anything. The internal states of the system can then be descibed as modelling the states if its environment.

the meaning they convey is not. — Wayfarer

What we call meaning is completely explainable in terms of sciences, even if difficult. Its just anoyher thing brains do.

They still fall under the umbrella of science, but they’re worlds away from the hard-edged materialism of earlier generations, precisely because that old framework has proven untenable. — Wayfarer

Statements like this just make me think you are saying a lot of these things not based in any of your own kind of thought out analysis of these issues but just because you have a deep dislike of certain science-like things for no reason discernible to me. You then just pick someone to quote and parrot off their view.

One thing I notice in your posts is the taken-for-granted-ness of many of your responses, and the many arguments you “don’t see the point of.” — Wayfarer

Explain the mystery. Explain why it can't be explained. I don't understand. You then cite biosemiotics which seems likena contradiction.

I suspect you're trying to critique some kind of explanatory reductionism but thats not really the right target because most physicalists or naturalists would say that in principle these things can be or will be explainable in terms if hard sciences but its just not practically feasible or something like that. No one really takes difficulties in explanatory reductionism as strong argument when it comes to something like the mind-body problem. In fact, I'm sure most don't even think explanatory reductionism is desirable, just that it is in principle possible. Showing that there are things that don't have a drilled in explanation in terms of hard sciences now is not sufficient for your point. You need to argue that in principle these things can never be explained. You need to show something like its in principle impossible to model in terms of things like physics, biology, machine learning, the kinds of behaviors, cognition, interactions with the world associated with what we call meaning. Or at least give a convincing reason why it could never be done that is not contingent on something tangential like technology limits.

See this post

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/1009371

We are, however, talking about a case of NDE in which the person does not have any brain activity. — MoK

That is what a flatlined brain is. When they say that a brain has no activity, they mean it is flatlined. The point is that clearly the report of a flatlined brain doesn't necessarily mean it actually has no activity.

And what is the physical explanation for NDE? — MoK

Brain activity... like the brain activity that would cause experiences for someone under psychedelics or from a traumatic injury.

We need them. Experience is an accepted phenomenon in the domain of materialism. Materialists claim that matter also exists and behaves according to the laws of physics. Materialism also claims that matter does not have any experience in most forms, but in the brain. They claim that experience is the result of neural processes in the brain. We are dealing with a kind of strong emergence, as experience is something more than just neural processes in the brain. Granting that such an emergence is possible, we are still dealing with a problem. — MoK

You have not justified the presuppositions, just regurgitated them.

This seems like a strawman wrapped in speculation. My argument/book isn't relying on "limited amounts of case studies" as isolated anecdotes; it's drawing on millions (100's of millions worldwide) NDE reports worldwide, corroborated by thousands of verified accounts in peer-reviewed studies (e.g., via IANDS, Greyson's NDE Scale, and prospective hospital research like the Dutch study I mention). These aren't cherry-picked "case studies"; they're a massive, diverse dataset of testimonial evidence spanning cultures, eras, ages, and medical contexts. I'm not claiming causality in the narrow experimental sense (e.g., "NDEs cause afterlife belief"); I'm making an inductive argument that the patterns in this evidence (veridical perceptions during flat EEGs, cross-cultural consistency, transformative effects) make consciousness persistence beyond brain activity the most probable explanation. — Sam26

But again, the fact that people report experiences doesn't entail an interpretation unless you can rule out alternatives, doesn't matter how many people report them, and I strongly suspect the great majority of reports nowhere near make claims that are strong enough to make any conceivable challengr to naturalistic explanation: i.e. its probably very rare in the scheme of things where people have near death experiences that involve verifiable claims about things that happened while they were not in a normal awake conscious state. The fact that your instinct is to say that these reflect something supernatural is itself speculation because the studies that rule out alternative explanations or explain what actually is happening during these reports has not been done. Your induction is ignoring the possibility that if more detailed scientific exploration was done, we might find naturalistic explanations.

Your speculation that a "physicalist explanation is possible if we only had more information" isn't evidence; it's a defeater that could be applied to anything to avoid confronting data. Imagine applying this to historical knowledge: "Sure, eyewitness accounts say Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, but without controlled experiments, a physicalist explanation (like mass hallucination or forged documents) is possible if we had more info." We'd dismiss all history! Or in medicine: "Patient testimonies correlate smoking with cancer, but without infinite data, an unknown physical factor might explain it away." This is epistemic paralysis, not rigor. — Sam26

No, you are confused. My arguments are nothing to do with skepticism. My arguments are is that naturalism is very successful at explaining. The supernatural is not successful. The degree to which I am skeptical that Caesar crossed the Rubicon depends on whether I have reason to think him doing so is not likely.

This is not epistemic paralysis, its epistemic confidence, and it makes any skepticism of these supernatural claims very reasonable.

already confronts physicalist alternatives, hallucinations, anoxia, endorphins, temporal lobe seizures, DMT surges, and shows where they fail: they don't account for veridical elements (e.g., Pam Reynolds' accurate description of the Midas Rex bone saw and arterial issues during no brain activity), consistency across non-hypoxic cases, or reports from blind individuals gaining "vision" that's later verified. — Sam26

The problem is that it is widely acknowledge that we don't actually have huge scientific mastery over how the brain works compared to say physics. The fact that these explanations may be limited does not necessarily rule out explanation if we were to gain more knowledge about what is actually happening. Retroactively trying to fit explanations to case studies is not the way to resolve this either. The way to rwsolve this is controlled experiments where you can account for confounding variables, account for statistical "luck", all sorts of things. As I said before, I can find controlled experimental studies that show that brains are still responsive when they are "isoelectric" which is the criteria used to characterize a brain as having no activity. Again, the problem with case studies with verifiable information is that they are extremely rare, and even in the studies like Parnia's where they try to actually do controlled experiments with verifiable information, they couldn't actually get anything from it because reports which contain that kind of information are very rare. These reports come under the realm of anecdotal case studies.

we accept quantum mechanics based on unreplicable (in everyday terms) experiments, black holes from indirect inference, and the Magna Carta's signing from testimonial convergence. — Sam26

Again, this depends on what yoy are studying. Quantum mechanics isn't based on unreplicable experiment.

But the kind of verification you need dependa on what you are studying. Inferring that Jesus existed or the Magna Carter was signed has a different standard to quantum mechanical experiemnts which has a different standard to biomedical studies. Because these are all very different things making claims of different strengths with different confounds. Applying the kind of standard that warrants belief that Jesus existed to experimental trials in medicine would be frankly ridiculous. The claims of NDEs and supernatural arguably require more rigor than any of these and do demand replication.

But that's an argument against over-relying on "controlled" science as the sole arbiter of truth, not for dismissing testimonial evidence! My book isn't pretending NDEs are lab-replicable; it's evaluating them epistemologically, where replication isn't the benchmark — Sam26

NDE studies use the same kind of methods as biomedical and social sciences. It is exactly these kinds of methods that have issues with replicability. And if they are not in principle replicable then they are limited in saying anything more than a qualitative characterization of what people experienced. Its fine to have studies doing this. You can have qualitative studies in social science examining the opinions of a certain community, of people's recollections of some historical event. Does this allow you to infer something more fundamental about the world? Not necessarily. And if you're studies are trying to make scientific claims about the world, then they require scientific methods to ensure that they can make reliable inferences. You are making a scientific claim about the way the universe is. Just as physics and biology require replicable experiments to show that their theories are empirically adequate, you need to do the same to show there is no possibility that scientific theories can account for the same phenomena.

If you do not have a strong basis to do so, people are justified in not believing you given a confidence in naturalism.

You ignore how my inductive argument mirrors successful scientific inferences: germ theory wasn't "replicated" in one lab but induced from converging testimonies (patient reports, autopsies). — Sam26

Sure, ans maybe they were sufficient for certain claims at the time. Doesn't mean the same necessarily applied to your theory.

NDEs' veridical hits (e.g., the Dutch dentures case, where a revived patient described the nurse's actions and trolley layout) are replicable in pattern, occurring in ~10-20% of documented cases. Dismissing this as non-convincing requires ignoring epistemology. — Sam26

Again, verification doesn't point to why they were verified. Was the verification because of the supernatural or because of naturalistic reasons, maybe a mix of actual sensory information coming into the brain, maybe luck, maybe other confounds. I am.completely entitled to want to know exactly how this happened and rule out naturalistic explanations. Just giving reports does not do this.

The power of corroborated testimonial evidence—your blind spot—is that it's how most knowledge travels (Chapter 1: birth dates, Antarctica, DNA). When it meets my criteria (high volume: millions; variety: global/demographic; consistency: core patterns; corroboration: medical verifications; firsthand: direct reports), it's not "intuition"—it's justified true belief. Speculating "more info might physicalize it" is like a flat-Earther saying "unknown optics explain away satellite photos." It's not engagement; it's evasion. — Sam26

The issue is that you have a prior inclination for the supernatural so you interpret testimonials that way. My inclination is not that way so I demand stronger evidence because this is not the natural way for me to interpret those testimonials. I am happy to except testimonials on other things where their claim seem justified. None of my criticism isn't about some inherent bias toward a specific method for the study of all things. Simply, in this case those methods are warranted.

flat-Earther saying "unknown optics explain away satellite photos." It's not engagement; it's evasion. — Sam26

These testimonials are nowhere near the evidence that earth is not flat. You don't even have a description of what is happening in the other realm of souls and spirits.

In sum, your comment is ridiculous because it demands impossible standards (lab NDEs?) — Sam26

You literally cited authors who have tried to do this. At the same time, so what? Verifying quantum mechanics would have required standards impossible hundreds of years ago. Doesn't mean it is not the case.

Otherwise, it's just a dogmatic defense, exactly what I warn against. — Sam26

Its no more a dogmatic defence than you. The evidence appears to you a certain way because of your inclinations which is not convincing to most others. If I have string confidence in naturalism for good reason, there is nothing unreasonable about demanding more evidence.

Your appeal to life after death is about as handwavey as my appeal to what future science might say because you dont have any model of what happens after death, there is no reliable empirical evidence of any other realm.

This fallacy occurs when a position is structured to be unfalsifiable; any counterevidence is automatically reinterpreted or dismissed as incomplete, with the promise that "more information" or some unknown mechanism will eventually confirm the theory. In your case, speculating about possible physicalist explanations "if we only had more information" seals off the argument from refutation; no matter how much converging testimonial evidence piles up (veridical perceptions, cross-cultural patterns, etc.). This isn't rational skepticism; it's a rhetorical move that begs the question, assuming materialism's truth while demanding infinite proof from alternatives. — Sam26

No, this is what happens naturally in all science and eventually when more evidence occurs or people can no longer defend their views, they change their minds. But this happens because the new theories offer new things that the old theories cannot match. You have not met the standard for me to change my views. You need more concrete evidence. Until them I am entitled to be confident in naturalistic explanations.

But it can't. — Wayfarer

But physics, biology, machine learning explains how we can learn things about the world and interact with it efficaciously, including words and symbols. Where is the mystery? You're aiming at the wrong thing. Meaning isn't problematic in these arguments, phenomenal experience is the big target.

Why doesn't phenomenal experience bother me either? As you would agree, we only perceive the world experientially. My engagement with scientific facts is through my experience, and people can only engage with what science predicts through experience. Using science requires people doing stuff, reading, talking, etc, which they experience. Science is embedded and enacted in the informational structure of out experiences. Science doesn't deal with or characterize something like an intrinsic way the physical world is.

At the same time, no one can give any non-primitive, fundamental characterization of their own experiences or what elucidate further description /explanation of what exactly the phenomenal aspect of experience is. There is absolutely nothing more to experience than direct aquaintance. Science then also just deals with descriptions of structure grapsable in terms of directly aquainted information of our own experiences, like any description or explanation does.

Science represents us our knowledge of the natural world and gives strong evidence of the relationship (or even isomorphism in Chalmer's words) between our experience we are directly aquainted with and at least aspects of information in brains. There is no scientific evidence for phenomenal experience as an independent stand-alone structure in the universe.

There is simply no evidence for dualism, simply put, that phenomenal experience meaningfully represents any kind of independent causal structures or powers that we are not already probing in the sciences of physics, brains, cognition, machine learning. I am no better able to characterize an intrinsic nature of experience as I am some putative intrinsic nature of scientific structures that should be the case under physicalism / naturalism / materialism / whatever your preferred label. There is simply nothing here of fundamental incompatibility between physical science and experiences unless maybe you look at what science says about the physical in the kind of hyper-naive realist, hyper-reductive sense which is just not a plausible way of looking at anything. At the same time, it seems evident to me that part of our perplexity about our own experience could be, should be, plausibly explainable through science itself as a consequence of natural limitations to what brains and machine learning can do. There's no reason to think our opinions about experiences come from anywhere else. Other than that, the perplexity of there being anything that it is like to be a macroscopic thing is not addressed by any perspective on the hard problem of consciousness; but such a question jumps the gun because imo it presupposes a way the world is that is fundamentally incompatible with that, a presupposition that is unjustified because science doesn't actually talk about that. The notion of an intrinsic fundamental nature of the world isn't graspable scientically; nor can I grasp anything meaningful about my own experiences other than I have them, that I see stuff.

It can all be explained in terms of physical events and brain activity. I don't see that as contoversial. There is nothing else additional going on. You think because you have a brain, you act because you have a brain, you talk because you have a brain, you see stuff because you have a brain. I don't see what else is going on.

Yes I have, so what?

plainly and obviously. — Wayfarer

Why? If you can explain vision physically via a brain, why not meaning? How vision would be explained physically and by the brain is not really much less clear than how meaning would be. So meaning is not a counterexample to me.

The "meaning" is not different to the sounds, squiggles and neuronal events in anyway that suggests some inherent divide between physical and mental. Nor is communication, intention, significance, cognition, action. I don't believe you can refute this claim.

Case studies aren't causal, and without detailed imvestigation of possible explanations in a controlled way, there is no reason why someone should not hold the belief that a physicalist explanation is possible if we only had more information, which we can't have from limited amounts of case studies like this.

Biomedical sciences, as well as social sciences by which the required methods overlap, have notorious difficulties with replication as it is, how do you think this is going to convince people. Sure, keep on holding to you wild intuition about the otherside and NPCs, but you haven't presented any smoking gun refutation of naturalistic explanations, which have been far more successful throughout history than things like parapsychology and ghost-ology or even god.

According to my discussion with Sam26, the person does not show brain activity during NDE. So, at least in this case, we are not talking about brain activity near death. — MoK

Yes, but I mentioned brains without activity in the sentence directly before. An example suggesting the plausibility that a flatlined brain can still be responsive to external stimuli.

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=842513144191377109&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_ylo=2021&as_vis=1

And we also have this spiritual experience, which seems common among NDEs. Why do such people have such an intense experience, which is common when they are dying or are basically dead? — MoK

I mean you could give an explanation for this that is completely physical; a physicalist would explain spiritual experiences from psychedelics completely physically too.

Well, the question is, what is the right model of reality when it comes to NDEs and normal life? Physicalism fails to explain the strong emergence of experience. Experience cannot be causally efficacious in the physical world, considering the fact that the physical world is causally closed. Moreover, experience is only a mental event, so it cannot affect the physical world since it does not have any physical properties to affect the physical world — MoK

The problem here imo is presupposing dualism and presupposing some fundamental ontological divide between what happens when we perceive and have experiences, and everything else we know about. I don't believe we need to make this presupposition.

Carroll says: everything we know about quantum field theory rules this out. But that simply restates his physicalist presupposition: psyche must be physical, because everything is physical. That is circular. The real question is whether that underlying assumption is itself adequate to the evidence. And perhaps that will require more than ad-hoc adjustments to the presumption that everything is physical. — Wayfarer

Carrol would say that the mental is nothing m9re than the physical. The issue isn't a blanket denial of the physical. The issue is that other claims about the world where there is an ontological distinction between mental and physical warrant evidence. If there is a distinction between physical stuff and some other mental stuff, there is no evidence for it other than the self-report of people who come to the conclusion, largely via intuition, that the physical and mental are ontologically incompatible. If you take the view that physical and mental are identical, then when looking at the literature of what we know about things in the universe, then you have no choice but to identify it with the stuff that is the subject of our scientific theories... because they are literally the only theories about how the world works that people agree on. Any other theories are unsubstantiated

Lots of possible explanations. We really don't have knowledge enough about the brain to rule anything you. But, for example, you can fins studies suggesting that even when the brain is isoelectric (i.e. flatlined so it looks medically dead), it is still actually responsive to external stimuli. I don't think NDE experiences themselves are necessarily problematic in themselves regarding physicalism; studies of dying brains show there is a lot of activity just before death. What would need more explaining is the claim that people have accurate knowledge about events that are happening. Ofcourse, in order to study this you would want to be able to validate the claim that people can have genuine knowledge of things happening externally during NDEs that are not just lucky guesses or confabulation or other things that would not indicate genuine knowledge.

the bare fact that there's something it's like to be conscious, remains curiously absent from the scientific picture. — Wayfarer

But what does it do in your picture that is left out of the scientistic one?

Do you actually believe the NPC hypothesis?

Perhaps. I know that there are some technical difficulties for de Broglie Bohm's extensions to QFT but I am not competent enough to comment. — boundless

Yes it does. Stochastic mechanics doesn't have the same problems for QFT other than the fact that it is explicitly non-local. However, there is a version of stochastic mechanics which is completely local so this doesn't seem inherently problematic. The thermal interpretation by Neumaier is not really consistent with my perspective.

Agreed with that. But this doesn't change the fact that it seems quite different from the classical case. In fact, I believe that your example is perfect here. In de Broglie-Bohm, changing the experimental context has a nonlocal effect also on the measured system. — boundless

Yes, ofcourse. Interestingly, you can produce bombtester-like behavior in baths of fluid: e.g.


https://share.google/images/jaVQyTd1htud4odMt

For me, a mechanism like this is the most attractive explanation of quantum theory, something already postulated in the stochastic mechanical interpretation and some versions of Bohm. It sounds weird but it seems quite compatible with the ontologies of quantum field theory imo, which additionally also seems to tell us that there is no truly empty space, i.e. vacuum energy and fluctuations.

Essences are everywhere to study in your statement. — Fire Ologist

So essences is just giving definitions.

I think that this is what is going on. But none of that means “there is no such thing as essence.”

And no one, not Aristotle, no one says defining the essence of some thing is easy. Looking for essence is an easy method of saying HOW to say what things are, but there is no need to ever say we’ve ever listed every necessary and sufficient condition essential to some thing (especially if the thing is a physical thing, subject to change). Understanding and saying what is essential is the goal. We can know something essential about some thing in the world, but we have much more to know if we want to say we know the entire essence of that thing.

We all live in the same world of muddle for the senses and use and misuse of language. Essences help us organize it and speak about it. — Fire Ologist

I think my main issue is just that, given how my views toward scientific realism and anti-realism have evolved over time, I just don't see the point of this area. I don't see what it is doing anymore. It just seems like a pointless field of study - trivial, redundant, not informative, not interesting in light of my perspective on the world.

but not seeing the point of an argument is not a rebuttal, and nothing you’ve said indicates that you see the point of the argument. — Wayfarer

I think not seeing the point is a rebuttal. If something doesn' have any interesting consequences then I don't see a reason to uphold it.

Some are saying you call this thing a “cat” and you call that thing a “squid” because people just do. And like things are in flux, what people do is in flux.

Others are saying you call this thing a “cat” because of something about the thing, and you call that thing a “squid” because of something else about that other thing. — Fire Ologist

For me, when we say that people just call things "cat" just "because people do" its alluding to the fact that we are very good at identifying, recognizing, picking out patterns and commonalities in the world, but often this is much more intricate, subtle, flexible than one can possibly articulate. To me, essences just seems like an easy way of being over-reductive about things in the world when often we can't even characterize what we are talking about in a way that is unambiguous, precise, unique, informative enough to deserve the name "essence". The whole thing seems completely redundant. If I want to learn about cats, I will look at the field of biology for facts about cats and all the subtleties which, from where i'm standing, don't seem easily compressed into a simple essence. Essence just seems like unnecessary inflation that has the connotation that there is something more to cats than the underlying physics from which they emerge. There is no homogenous, self-contained entity attached to the word which has "catness" in virtue of itself. "Cat" is more a kind of label to bundle together structures and properties that will often co-occur -but not in any strict, rigid, deterministic way -and to communicate our inherent abilities to identify, distinguish, predict those things. If I want to learn about those things, I can talk to a scientist. Essence is unneeded baggage, vestiges of antiquated world views.

I don't think Its mudslinging because I have made responses to your perspective befote where I have basically said that. I don't think there is any meaningful, actionable content to this mysterious noumenal-phenomrnal divide.

A lot of people seem to think that anything in one's mind must be mind-dependent. — Ludwig V

Yes, this conception seems to be trivial and have no interesting consequences most of the time which is why I think Wayfarer's crusade is largely vacuous and pointless. If something that we perceive clearly has a consistent mapping to something in the outside world, maintains a certain invariance (or perhaps covariance), then thats something that is genuine information about somrthing that exists independently of our minds.

From my perspective, no one here is saying cats don't exist. But the idea of bundling up the characterization of cats neatly in terms of essences feels ridiculous when if you want to be as veridical and precise as possible about it, cats are clearly emergent structure from impossibly intractable physical processes. Yes, we can obviously identify commonalities, structures, properties, patterns that cohere under the "cat" name we have chosen to use in their vicinity. Is this what you mean by essence? Well it doesn't deserve the name because rarely are things in here either neat or essential, especially not without coarse-graining over very real details and invoking vagueness and fuzzyness into one's characterizations. The whole notion of essence just seems seems either over-reductive or completely redundant in its vagueness. There certainly isn't an essence of cats that wouldn't suffer these criticisms, and there are probably various posaible candidates.

:up: :100:

Good post and article. Simple but effective. Should put the whole thing to bed.

Apparently, there is a field of plant neurobiology, ha!

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsif.2017.0096?__cf_chl_tk=EnNihJj2VrCqoJY2sK39jDo75tEsHCXRvnIbXj6piEo-1755233088-1.0.1.1-hwG6qkhXRhpNzX1sA2p0De1fz9QOQx0R02eiQSs4ALE

Yes, sure. LLMs don't encounter information in the same way we do, they cannot choose how they encounter information in the way we do, they don't have aversion or reward afaik.

Do you mean that they are capable of engaging in rational discourse without the benefit of human consciousness? — Ludwig V

They are capable of intelligibly talking about experiences even though they don't even have the faculties for those experiences. An LLM has a faculty for talking, it doesn't have a faculty for seeing. The structure of language itself is sufficient for its intelligible use.

Wittgenstein’s private language argument is a case in point, and recent philosophy has been much concerned about Dennett and others who seem to claim that our perceptions are all illusions. — Ludwig V

I don't think either of these philosophers claim that what you experience doesn't exist in some sense though. Dennett I believe is just refuting our conception of experience as representing something that transcends and is separate from, over and above, our biology. Wittgenstein is talking about how language is used, and I think it is more salient now than ever that his pointis correct given how LLMs are probably as good at talking about things like colour as we are. We can even learn things about colour from an LLM even though the LLM doesn't experience colours.

LLMs are demonstrating his beetle-in-box argument.

The way to view it is that in quantum mechanics the statistics of complementary variables have to abide by uncertainty relations in all physical situations. If you change the physical situation in a way that allows it to behave differently, it still has to obey those uncertainty relations.

Measurements are physical interactions and they are designed to induce sharp correlations with the measured system which have to obey uncertainty relations. This is why disturbance occurs. Its not because measurements are special; the disturbing properties of measurement are just a special case of disturbing propeties that can occur for any physical interaction.

This assumes measurement is fundamentally about one physical system causally interacting with another physical system. — Wayfarer

Its hard to interpret this differently. You have a double slit scenario and you throw particles through the slits; they will form an interference pattern on the screen. Now you insert the measuring device in the scenario; the particles no longer show fringes but clumps. This is an unambiguous physical change in the behavior of a physical system.

The "disturbance" language already smuggles in a particular metaphysical picture - that there are definite physical properties in existence that are disturbed by measurement. — Wayfarer

But you can prepare systems to have definite properties and then disturb them. You can prepare light so that it has a specific, definite polarization in one direction; you can then out it through polarizers which will then evince disturbance of the systens properties.

In any case, the so called 'interaction-free measurements' are ways to get new information without getting 'positive' results. — boundless

But "interaction-free measurements" work because there is a physical change in the system behavior due to a change in the experimental context, analogous to closing a slit in the double slit experiment.

Because registering a measurement result requires the measuring device to physically interact with the system you are measuring. The stronger the measurement interaction (i.e. correlation), the stronger the disturbance. Closing the slit is arguably no less mysterious either because its not obvious to most why the closing the slit would change the behavior either.

The measurement problem depends on your interpretation on QM. But the physical effect measurements have is regardless of interpretation. Saying the wavefunction isn't real can be a solution to the measurement problem but the solution or interpretation would still have to account for how measurements to have a disturbing physical effect.

aren't puzzling features of physical reality that need to be accounted for — Wayfarer

But they are. They are obviously physical events happening out in reality. If you do a double slit experiment and close or measure one of the slits, it will physically change the results you see of where particles are hitting the screen at the end of their journey.

Edit: And to be clear, by "physically changes the results", I just mean the system behaves differently in different situations.

Spelling/Grammar corrections.

non-locality was not as "straightforward" as you imply. — Gnomon

I was implying the realism was straightforward (specifically in the Bohmian mathematical description). The non-locality may not be given that it is problematic for relativity under naive understanding. But maybe alternative understandings can come up? Who knows.