you could say that but it seems like that undermines PSR entirely. You could just say that for anything, and then nothing needs an actual explanation, because everything is just self caused.

Self caused why though? Right? Why did it cause itself?

if everything has an explanation, but determinism is not true, the problem for me is, where's the explanation for the undetermined event?

If we look at some event that, given all the facts about the universe, could have gone one of two ways, and we ask "why did it go this way instead of that way?", well if indeterminism is true then you can't answer that by pointing to any fact about the universe. That seems very anti PSR to me, you know?

idk what's reifying about it. I'm just asking if one idea being true would imply another idea is true. I'm not certain either of the ideas are true myself, but I think they're both intelligible enough to ask the question.

then quantum indeterminacy would seem to imply the PSR is false. — Relativist

For some, perhaps most, interpretations of qm, yes but not all.

But the PSR doesn't have to be true. If a non deterministic interpretation of qm is true, then the response isn't necessarily to revise the PSR, it might just be to reject it. "The world isn't deterministic, and there are things that happen that have no sufficient reason - they just happened"

My own reasoning in regards to this matter is, if determinism is not true - which is to say, if there are events in the history of the universe which, if played back again under the exact same prior conditions, might happen differently - then it seems to me that those events didn't have "sufficient reason" to occur.

A sufficient reason I'm interpreting to be something like "an explanation for why this occurred instead of something else".

find odd that physicalists, according to which ultimate reality is 'natural/physical' object to call themselves as 'materialists'. — boundless

There are a few reasons. One is that materialism also had a completely unrelated meaning, a materialist is someone who seeks wealth and possessions, who only seeks to own more things. It makes sense to not want your position on the ontology of things to be confused with a shallow value system.

Another is that perhaps not all things that physics is concerned with are strictly "material". A physicalist may believe in quantum fields, but are quantum fields "material" or "matter"?

huh?

I'm not sure we can "know reality as it is".

instance, mirages and "bent" straws in water, are only illusions if you do not understand the nature of light. — Harry Hindu

I actually agree with you about those, but not all illusions are like that.

Take this album cover for example

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merriweather_Post_Pavilion_(album)

As my eyes scan across the image, I'm convinced shapes are moving and shifting. Of course they aren't, and I can figure that out analytically, and yet it seems so deeply true of my experience of the image, that I'm experiencing looking at moving shifting shapes.

Some illusions are perhaps conscious misinterpretations, but our experience of the world comes through a lot of filters before it becomes a conscious experience. The existence of those pre-experiential filters, which I think unambiguously exist, prove that we can't just be "experiencing reality as it is".

But these other reasons, are they anything other than competing preferences — bert1

No you've got it, they would be competing preferences I think.

Particular Pete ONLY likes Eccles Cake 1 - therefore, if offered the choice of the three, he MUST choose Eccles cake 1. Is that right? — bert1

uh no not necessarily. someone can of course have reasons for choosing something that isn't their preference.

The conclusion here is that there are gradations of free will, of choice, from particular to absolute, depending on our preferences/values. — bert1

I wouldn't even say that this example illustrates that. Just because someone likes one option more than another doesn't mean they aren't exercising as much free will as another person. I keep on hearing the idea from various people that free will only comes into play when the options presented are equal or near-equal. I don't think that's the case.

If that were the case, then that would mean someone WASN'T exercising free will every time they did something they really wanted to do, or avoided doing something they didn't want to do, and thus they deserve no blame or praise for those actions. So if a rapist really wants to rape, and prefers that strongly above all other options, that means they have no free will in that choice? And thus can't be blamed? Mmmmm I think that misses the mark by quite a lot.

how do we know about any illusions at all?

Well, regardless of the question "how", it's not controversial to state that we DO experience illusions, and somehow we have ways of figuring out they're illusions. That's not controversial at all. It sounds like a failure of your intellectual creativity if you can't figure out ways to determine if any of our experiences are illusory.

so then you've been agreeing with me the whole time, and just being really awkward about it? Classic

yeah that's what I was getting at in my second paragraph

sure

I like this, and agree with the spirit of it, but it's not necessarily literally true - you can want something, but also will not to want it, and turn that will into reality. People who, for example, fight their own addictions can be argued to be doing that.

The reason I agree with the spirit of it, though, is because that higher level drive over your wants isn't infinite, in the way recursive self authorship might require it to be. Eventually, you go back far enough, you're dealing with wants that you didn't choose to want.

It just doesn't match my intuitions about what attributes of things are.

I wouldn't call that an attribute of the piece of shit, no

I don't even think I'm saying something controversial when I say we don't experience reality as it is.

Think about a piece of shit on the ground. It smells viscerally disgusting to you. And yet to a fly, it smells delicious and appetising.

Are you experiencing that shit as it is? Is the fly? What I am saying, and I believe Donald Hoffman semi agrees, is that the shit really exists, but both I and the fly are experiencing it in ways that make contextual sense for us to experience it. It smells viscerally disgusting to me because it's beneficial for me to be disgusted by it, because I could get sick eating it. It smells delicious to the fly because the fly gets nutritional value from it and doesn't get sick.

So we have our own unique experience of that shit, but really the shit is neither disgusting nor delicious "as it is", it's just a piece of shit.

you're asking me questions that have nothing to do with anything I said. Your questions are confused. Do you have anything interesting to ask?

Are you simply saying that we don't experiences those aspects of reality which we cannot experience? — Janus

Nope.

I think you should just read about indirect realism for a bit

good, and you understand that indirect realists aren't saying "brain processes aren't real", right?

Because that question that you asked makes me think you're completely confused about what indirect realists mean when they say we don't "experience reality as it is".

If you don't understand the difference between naive realism and indirect realism, the questions you're choosing to ask aren't going to help you

no, I didn't say our brain processes aren't real.

I'm saying our conscious experience is constructed by our brains. We aren't just raw experiencing reality as it is, we're experiencing a fabricated interface - fabricated from real events, yes, but the experience should never be confused for the real events themselves.

Even our experience of time and the chronological order of events is constructed in our brains: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2866156/

it just feels like your words don't connect to anything. Bookkeeping the consequences of that on me? Mate, are you okay?

I don't see how anything I said lead to that response from you. I have a theory of everything because I believe actions have consequences? What are you talking about?

I just made a case. That's not free of consequences. That's my case.

So we can accomplish all these tasks that we set out to do through the day, but we don't see reality as it is? We can build computers, program them, build rockets to the Moon, get to and from work every day, type a response to a philosophical post we read, etc. - many tasks that do not directly involve survival at all, yet we accomplish our goals. — Harry Hindu

That's right.

We know we don't experience reality "as it is" for same very basic reasons - our visual and auditory ranges are rather arbitrary. Why do you think your vision starts at red wavelengths and ends at violet? Other creatures colour wavelength sensitivity ends at different places, so they're experiencing something different from us - are they also experiencing reality "as it is"? How can we be experiencing drastically different experiences, and yet still be experiencing reality "as it is"?

And consider the colour wheel itself. We experience colours, not as a linear spectrum but as a loop. That's not "reality at it is", wavelengths don't loop. Your brain is fabricating that experience for you, it's not out there in the real world.

I would say we see stuff, we experience stuff, and actually I think Mr. Hoffman is right to call our experience a "UI" or "desktop" - but the stuff we're experiencing still *comes from somewhere*.

UIs aren't the same thing as the data they represent, but they still are a representation of the data, from a particular point of view.

Our experience isn't reality itself, but I think it is still caused by reality itself. It's said by Hoffman that we evolved to have this particular UI - that must mean there's a pre-UI context in which evolution can happen. What is that pre-UI context if not reality itself (or some emergent facet of reality)?

why do you think there are choices that are free from all those things? especially consequences, that seems weird. that's like... anti-physics. "every action has an equal and opposite reaction". it's directly against physics to say that there are choices without consequences.

and what does it mean, then, for free choices to exist? Free from what or free to what?

sounds like a semantic argument.

that question doesn't make sense. Seeing is inherently an experience.

I don't think we "see reality as it is". I don't think "reality as it is" is a visual experience. But I still think there is a reality.

let me put it another way: your support of mind dependence comes from the fact that everything we know has to come through a filter of human consciousness. But that would be true even if the world really existed in a mind independent way.

So since it would have to be true either way, it doesn't support the case for mind dependence.

That honestly feels like a cop out. Of course it's interpreted by us - everything we know and think has to come through a filter of us first. That doesn't mean we have to conclude reality is mind-dependent.

Imagine cockroaches gain sentience in 10,000 years. Everything cockroaches believe will also have to come through their filters, their interpretations. Should they believe reality is cockroach-dependent? I don't think so.

if evolution has shaped us to see reality in a particular way, that implies there was a reality there prior to evolution.

I mean, scientifically speaking, the history of life on earth starts a few billion years after earth came into being. If it's "consciousness all the way down", what does that say about those billions of years prior to life?

I accept that the way WE see reality wasn't "reality" back then (and arguably isn't "reality" right now either), but we still have sufficient evidence that "back then" was as real as right now. So with no conscious agents around to create that reality, what's the story?

(I recognize this isn't the engagement you're looking for, and isn't very great for conservation, but) I really love Wolfram's approach to everything in that second link. I line up with him so much.

Look, you clearly have an intense distrust and dislike for the right wing — AmadeusD

Asking you to justify why right wing morality is "obviously more well developed" isn't about intense distrust or dislike. Someone saying left wing morality is "obviously more well developed" would need similar justification. You haven't justified it. The only thing you've said that comes close to a justification is that their mortalities are more similar to each other, closer to each other, than the myriad flavours of left wing morality. Conformist, or "conformed", morality isn't what most people mean by well developed, and philosophically it's clearly not a virtue. It's not a vice either, it's just nothing, it's meaningless. You can't judge the quality of a morality based on how conformist or not conformist it is.

I'm not. Im answering questions about why the right seem more coherent, and well-developed. I think a well-developed morality can be a virtue, for what it's worth, and I hazard a guess you wouldn't disagree. So what the heck is this question doing? — AmadeusD

You start the paragraph with "I'm not" but end by confirming that you are.

Bonkers