You tell me, I'm not sure what problem you think is there.

well presumably every time everyone has written anything about consciousness.

Meant to type layer btw.

And nowhere is there an explanation of, say, how consciousness came to be, or even if he thinks consciousness is real. — bert1

He does think consciousness is real - he doesn't think it's downwardly casual. It's casual at it's own level of abstraction. He's not trying to explain what consciousness is exactly or how it comes to be, he's just outlining his view of why "physics is casually closed" doesn't have to mean "consciousness isn't real and doesn't do anything".

Instead, he's laying the ground work for a view where consciousness is real and does do things, at its own level of abstraction.

There's this intuition people have that if something isn't fundamental it's not real. That's a big part of this drive to make consciousness fundamental. I think he's building up a picture for consciousness to be non fundamental, and to be the emergent consequence of physics events, and for it to be emergently real anyway.

And I'm not entirely convinced by his exact formulation, but I think the mission is 100% correct, the mission to allow for non fundamental things to be real. I think human consciousness isn't fundamental, and I think human consciousness is real.

There's talk of weak emergence vs strong emergence - I call this class of views "middle emergence".

no, there's no competition, they're different layers of describing the same reality. Or at least, this is one way of understanding it that I'm partial to.

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2016/09/08/consciousness-and-downward-causation/

This is, I think, a fairly well written article by a physicist on the idea.

But it leaves no evolutionary role for consciousness to play — bert1

The idea that physical closure means there's no evolutionary role for consciousness is another great reason why there needs to be a better understanding of what emergence is and what it means.

It doesn't have to be either/or.

why wouldn't casual closure of the physical imply that consciousness is a consequence of the physical, rather than what you seem to be presenting - that consciousness is external and acausal?

But surely you would agree, some definitions are, as a strict matter of fact, wrong. There have to be. — Outlander

I agree that there are boundaries to what "art" can mean, absolutely. If one person includes more things than another person in their idea of art, I don't think there's anything to objectively say one is wrong and the other is right, but if one person decides the word "art" is synonymous with "mitosis" then... they're just being silly

find this kind of discussion interesting and helpful because it lets me sort out how different kinds of creations affect me in different ways, how I experience them. It's about self-awareness. If you're not interested in that kind of discussion, you don't have to participate. — T Clark

For clarity, I'm not saying "it's pointless to talk about what art means to various people", I'm more saying, "it's pointless to make it your mission to convince other people with different definitions that your definition is the right one", which is apparently the goal of the guy I was talking to. You see the difference?

And I don't think that mission is pointless for ALL words, but I think art is one of the words where it is.

people like to gate keep words all the time. "Is that really metal? Hmmm I don't know" "no, those people aren't actually Christians" "that's not real art"

Maybe there's use in those debates but... it's hard to see, if there is

How is protecting the people from their own and their neighbours' stupidity turning against them? How does it "suit the authorities" to lose revenue while they're having to expend enormous resources on saving people's lives? — Vera Mont

Conspiracy theories rarely consider such variables

But before that, there was a point - a quite large splotch, in fact - when people were happy to work, in teams or individually at all the tasks required for the welfare of their community. — Vera Mont

Yup, I never contradicted that.

I suppose that's because you think the fish are yours, and not public property. — frank

Exactly, and I strongly suspect people felt that way about the shit they worked for, for as long as people have been working for shit. I don't think there's any point in homo sapiens history where someone is happy to lose their days work to a stranger for nothing.

If I spent all day fishing and put my haul down for a moment to take a slash, I'm gonna be pretty upset to find my fish missing when I'm done. I don't think it's that much different. Even apes have a sense of ownership.

edit. I'm probably wrong about that last sentence. Not sure if that affects the rest of what I said though.

And there's no murder until someone invents a law that defines murder and says it's disallowed. Before that, people weren't murdering, stabbing someone was just an "uninvited metallic guest".

I think your wording is giving me the reverse implication of what you meant. I'll reword it to what I think is something closer to what you meant:

They say Lakota women built and "owned" their portable dwellings. I don't think that means they owned it as a protection from someone taking it from them.

The way you worded it makes it sound almost like ownership makes someone taking it MORE likely.

Why would owning something mean someone was likely to take it from them?

Imagine we did agree on what "art" means - what meaningful conversation could you build out of that agreement? You show me that, and I'll show you how to build that conversation WITHOUT agreeing on what "art" means. Deal?

It's a little bit ironic because, 9 times out of 10, I agree with your approach here: 9 times out of 10, I think words SHOULD have a clear unambiguous meaning for a conversation. In most situations, there's nothing I love more than clarity, and what can be more contrary to clarity than a word which means different (and often vague) things to different people?

I think there are a couple places in philosophy where I make an exception for that - where it actually makes sense, I think, to have a more fluid definition of a word. I think EACH PERSON should attempt to concretely define the boundaries for their use of the word, but I don't thinks it's necessary for every person to conceptualize the word the same way or to have the same boundaries as another person.

Free Will is, I think, another word where each person should draw their own distinct boundaries, but two different people can draw their own ideas of the boundaries in different (often extremely different) places. Free Will and Art both have a common feature which makes their fluid-boundary-ness palatable, and that is, they have a more primal experience at the center of them, prior to any concrete definition for the source of that experience. Free Will is an *experience* first and foremost, before it's *whatever some particular philosopher defines it as*. Most thinking people have the experience of Free Will, before they ever come close to trying to define the word Free Will - that experience is more central than any single definition, and I think it makes sense to leave room for different thinkers to define the boundaries and causes and underlying reality of that experience differently.

And perhaps Art is similar - perhaps it's an experience first and foremost, before it's a solidly defined word in Webster's English Dictionary. And because it's experience-centric, it makes sense to me to allow for different people to have different boundaries for how they define that experience.

But if clarity is important, how can we have clarity when words are fluid like this? Well, easy: you clarify exacty what YOU mean when you say it, and get them to clarify exactly what they mean when they say it, and then *avoid debating if things are art* -- because that's just semantics, that's just arguing about the boundaries of a subjective experience -- and instead talk about the things you said are more important. As long as MOST words are more clearly unambiguously defined, the occasional word being a bit fluid shouldn't be a terrible barrier to clarity.

I'm just pointing out that you're spending a lot of time on the things you call meaningless, and apparently no time on the things you call meaningful, and I think that's interesting.

I do think your definition of art is disagreeable, but I'd be roping you into a conversation you've already said is meaningless if I tried to argue that.

so I don't get your "who cares" attitude? If it doesn't matter, the why are you even in this discussion? — Christoffer

The 'who cares?' isn't in response to the entire thread, it's in response to YOU saying YOU would like to have more fruitful conversations that aren't weighed down by the annoying problem of differing definitions of Art. My "Who cares?" response is to that - if YOU want to have those fruitful conversations, the definition of Art isn't stopping you, so why do you care so much? Just go have those fruitful conversations. You were talking as if the definition of art is stopping you from doing that - I'm letting you know, it is not.

Two people disagreeing on the criteria of if a Macdonalds ad being art or not is utter meaningless compared to even the minor meaning of them agreeing it is content and discussing the aesthetical appreciation of said ad. — Christoffer

You're saying the disagreement on the criteria of if it's art is meaningless compared to the discussion about aesthetical appreciation. And yet you're still sat here, post after post, talking about the criteria of if it's art and NOT talking about the aesthetical appreciation of said ad. It doesn't seem like your actions are matching your words, I think that's notable. You can stop talking about the criteria of art and start talking about aesthetical appreciation literally whenever you want.

I think my main point is, if you have a more interesting conversation you'd have, I genuinely want to see what that would look like.

I'm not really sure what you're defending here? What's your argument? That it's better to have lose definitions of terms rather than more defined ones? Why is that even a thing to promote? — Christoffer

Not better, just acceptable. And if you're reason for thinking it's unacceptable is that you get trapped in semantic conversations, I'm just pointing out that that's you're choice - you don't have to argue with anybody if ads are art, you can talk about the other stuff you said was more important anyway.

You could literally do it now. That guy that said a McDonald's ad was art... you could literally have the discussion you said was more important, right now, with him. The wishy washy definition of the word "art" isn't the thing stopping you from doing that.

Two people disagreeing on the criteria of if a Macdonalds ad being art or not is utter meaningless compared to even the minor meaning of them agreeing it is content and discussing the aesthetical appreciation of said ad. — Christoffer

So then why not skip the meaningless debate on if it's art regardless, and go right to discussing the aesthetical appreciation of said ad? You don't HAVE to debate with someone about if you semantically disagree with them when they call it art. You know what I mean? You can skip the pointless debate and go right to the meaningful conversation regardless of if you both call it art or not - choosing to focus on the word is up to you. Don't do it if you don't want to

Just because art can be a business doesn't mean the core values of art is driven by profit. And it doesn't mean that profit-driven content can't be appreciated by the receiver either. It just means that if we don't define art in this way, we run into the problem of "everything can be art", which just renders the term "art" meaningless to even define. — Christoffer

But is it really important that everyone agrees on what art is? I mean we disagree on what things qualify under what categories all the time, why should art be an exception?

Maybe it's okay that one person says "this McDonald's ad is art to me" and another one says "not to me". That doesn't necessarily mean the word has NO meaning, that just means these two people have different criteria, right?

As an aside, what's your criteria?

the picture, when seen by some one else or by the painter himself subsequently, produces in him (we need not ask how) sensuous-emotional or psychical experiences which, when raised from impressions to ideas by the activity of the spectator’s consciousness, are transmuted into a total imaginative experience identical with that of the painter. — R.G. Collingwood

I don't really like this definition particularly because of the word "identical". I'm not being pedantic, even if the above sentence were adjusted to instead say "similar to", I think it misses the mark.

When I'm looking at a painting, I don't have any pretense that how I'm experiencing it is identical to, or in any way similar to, how the painter does. I'm having a relatively unique experience, made unique by my own relationship to the subject matter and the colours and my cultural history and etc.

I don't even think the artists intentions have to be considered to be that important at all, really.

And I really don't think Laplace was trying to convince us that such a demon is likely, or possible. He was just saying, in a universe where everything is deterministic, anything at any point in the future would be, in theory, calculable. — Patterner

That's right

Why are we simulating? Where will Voyager 1 be in fifty years? We don't simulate it's existence for every moment of the next fifty years. We just calculate. — Patterner

Because Leplace Demon is supposed to be able to predict EVERYTHING perfectly, not just simple toy examples. Chaos, right? When a system is chaotic, you can't just do a simple calculation, you can really only find the answer with a simulation.

Here's a conversation on the topic elsewhere:

https://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/s/nsfBtiBGE5

It's almost too intuitive for me to explain..

But think of the counter-consequences.

If a computer could simulate itself faster than it could run, then you could run a faster simulator inside the simulator, and in turn have an ever increasing speedup.

Anyway, the simulator has to do things like fetch memory, but fetching the memory in simulator always takes as long as doing all the prep work in the simulator, then doing a memory fetch in hardware equivalent to what is being simulated.. So basically every thing you do has to be done in hardware anyway, but with more overhead on everything

And here's another one that's probably even more relevant than the above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40071773

If you consider the physically optimal implementation of any function (e.g. the optimal NAND gate), that system cannot be simulated in real time: the simulation will always be slower, pretty much by definition. Insofar that physics optimally implements itself, you cannot simulate reality in general without a massive performance hit (think about the recursive absurdity of the simulator simulating itself).

A quantum computer, or whatever the next step would be, made up of enough particles could calculate the rest of the particles. If there are finite particles in the universe. — Patterner

No, it still couldn't. It couldn't do it faster than the universe. To represent the location and velocity of a single particle, you need MANY particles. Hundreds, probably thousands, maybe millions at minimum. So just to calculate what 100 particles are going to do, you'd need to have hundreds, at minimum, particles per particle you want to predict - and that's just for storing information about them, not even running computations on that stored information.

By the time you start your simulation, the particles you gathered the information for have already been evolving into their future, leaving the computer simulation in the dust, and the simulation will never catch up. It will necessarily be many many many times slower.

In fact there's a real example of this, an example of computing a universe within a universe - Minecraft. People built Minecraft in Minecraft, and that's an amazing accomplishment, but there's that catch - Minecraft in Minecraft always necessarily runs many many many times slower than the first layer of Minecraft.

You can't simulate reality perfectly, faster than reality can do it itself.

You can simulate it imperfectly faster - we do that all the time, it's easy. But not perfectly.

So, classical in-universe Leplace Demons are strictly impossible, I don't see any way around that - so if one wants to allow for a supernatural or extra-universal Leplace Demon, that shakes things up a bit.

If we had a demon outside of the universe, it could predict the future even given Quantum Mechanics - the catch is, if we live in a quantum universe (and I think we do), its predictions must be probabilistic (probably). It could in principle perfectly predict the probability distributions of various future states.

Although some interpretations of quantum mechanics go a step further, like Bohmian Mechanics, and say that actually underneath it all there's a true single deterministic path to the future, so if that were the case, that type of QM would still allow for a normal Leplace Demon, who can still perfectly predict a single future.

It's a supernatural being in a thought experiment — Patterner

So it doesn't sound like you're disagreeing with me then, when I say "it can't exist in the universe it's predicting". If it's predicting a universe of atoms, it can't just exist in that universe as a thing made of atoms and also be able to perfectly predict the future faster than it happens - it has to be "super natural" - super meaning ABOVE, meaning above the nature of the universe it's supposed to predict. I agree, it has to be SUPER to the nature of the universe it can predict.

did we not just say in a physicalist determinist universe? If this demon is in this universe, then yeah.

If neither of my guesses was correct, what is the reason you think that, even in principle, the demon cannot exist inside of the same universe it's capable of predicting, even if that universe is 100% physicalist and 100% deterministic? — Patterner

Let's imagine a super simplified case. Forget quantum mechanics, imagine the world is classical, space and time are Cartesian, the world is composed of atoms which are more or less like tiny little billiard balls bouncing around.

Why, in such a simplified world, could an LD not possibly be able to predict the future with perfect accuracy?

Well, our LD is made of atoms, is he not? Some fraction of his atoms are for his brain, the rest are for his body. Even just to calculate his own future, only 1 second into the future, he would have to know the precise location and velocity of every atom inside his own body and brain, and know the location and velocity of every atom that's going to interact with his body in the next second.

He doesn't have enough atoms in his brain to store all that information, never mind do calculations on it.

And then you've got the computing speed problem - you can't compute the universe faster than the universe can compute itself, from within the universe . I mean there are some scenarios maybe where you could jump ahead because you know this particular thing is flying in a straight line and won't interact with anything, but mostly you don't have a bunch of simplified things like that, you have thousands of things bouncing into thousands of other things all the time. Not a lot of space for computational shortcuts available.

So a leplace demon is impossible to exist inside the universe - you could have one outside the universe looking in, but not inside

I have no idea what the first thing is that you're disagreeing with

It should be noted, and maybe already has, that even in principle the demon cannot exist inside of the same universe it's capable of predicting, even if that universe is 100% physicalist and 100% deterministic.

It is just one way of thinking about the universe. It may be useful, but is it true? What is the evidence one way or the other? — Ludwig V

"Closed" just means "everything that matters for calculating the future of this system is here." So what's the evidence that, regardless of whether the physical universe is closed itself, there's SOME closed system that contains the uinverse? Well, I don't have scientific evidence, but consider this intuition: there is a set of things that are the answer to the question, "what are all the things, physical or otherwise, that go into deciding future states?"

Future states are, in fact, realized, so something must realize them, so there must be a set of things relevant to the process of realizing the future. That set of things is "the closed system", whether that's exclusively physical or also contains other "realms".

The alternative is the claim "there is no set of things that go into deciding the futre states".

he says it right after quoting me. If it's not for me, who is he directing the question "what is your evidence" towards?

"IF the universe is a closed system.." we can make all sorts of deductions and predictions. But is it? What's your evidence? — Ludwig V

That's... now what I said. That's not even a response to what I said.

meant to say strictly, and don't call me auto correct

Ty, fixed

it doesn't strictly have to, though.

Suppose something is casual on our physical world, but outside the physical world - perhaps a mind or spirit realm, wherein mental and spiritual events occur. And suppose there's bidirectional causality between the physical realm and this mind realm.

One need not think of specifically the physical realm as a closed system, one can instead imagine (physical realm plus mind realm) as a combined closed system. And an LD that's fully aware of what's going on in all the relevant realms of the combined closed systems is still conceivable.