When a young child touches fire, they immediately infer that touching the fire is what caused the pain. The effect/affect is that they form the belief that touching fire causes pain. They are right. — creativesoul

Yes, I agree. The kind of inferential reasoning I had in mind is a little different. Let's say you start from premises A, B, C, ...n, and from these premises you can logically infer certain conclusions. The question would be, are you caused to do so by the premises? Is entailment an effect with a cause, in other words?

So what's not being tested that in principle might be testable then? — noAxioms

Whether a given entity is conscious.

When you say “it’s objectively true that you are conscious,” you’re appealing to an abstract inference that science can register only at one remove. The felt reality of consciousness — what it’s like to be an observer — is not something that can be observed. It’s not one more item within the world; it is the condition for there being a world of items at all. — Wayfarer

An abstract inference . . . is that really what it is? Do you regard it as a fact that you are conscious? Do you think that science will forever be at one remove from that fact? I just can't see why. The felt reality has nothing to do with its factuality. Science doesn't have to observe, i.e., experience this felt reality in order to accept it as a fact, an item in the world. Science can't experience any of the macro- or micro-phenomena of the physical world either. That has never prevented scientists from bringing them under the umbrella of objective reality.

Again, I'm positive that we're somehow at cross-purposes, since what I'm saying seems to me uncontroversial. (And we both admire Nagel!) Don't we both agree that consciousness is a natural phenomenon, a part of the "given world" rather than some sort of intrusion into it? Do you think science is hobbled by its methods so that it can only inquire into certain parts of that world?

the objective sciences proceeded by isolating the measurable, repeatable, intersubjectively verifiable aspects of phenomena — Wayfarer

Yes. And that will happen for consciousness as well, is my guess. I would further claim that consciousness is a necessary postulate for many scientific inquiries; if it were not, you'd have to maintain that psychology, sociology, economics, and game theory are not sciences.

I'm not aware of any math for any other guess about the nature/origin/explanation for consciousness. — Patterner

There's Penrose's conjecture that consciousness depends on quantum phenomena, which are understood (if at all) primarily in mathematical terms. I lean toward the idea that math is the language of deep structure, so if consciousness can be captured scientifically, it may require a mathematical apparatus at least as elaborate as what's been generated by physics in the past decades. Speculation, of course.

But this division is intrinsic. Science depends on the bracketing out of the subjective — Wayfarer

Yes and no. Yes, methodologically. But no, not ontologically. There is nothing in the scientific viewpoint that has to deny subjectivity, or claim that it must be reducible to the currently understood categories of physical objectivity.

After all, isn't it objectively true that you are conscious? Objectively true that you possess, or are, subjectivity? Why would we bar science from acknowledging this? I doubt if most scientists would dispute it. Science is not a subjective procedure, but it can and does study subjective phenomena. It does so objectively, or at least as objectively as possible, given our primitive concepts.

This seems so apparent to me that it makes me think you must mean something else entirely when you say that "scientific method disregards or brackets out the subjective elements of phenomenal experience." Do you mean it disregards them as facts? I don't see why that must be so, except for a very hardcore physicalist.

A harder question, as Nagel points out, is whether "I am Wayfarer," spoken by you, is a fact about the world. If there are truly non-objective facts that cannot be made objective, this might be one of them.

Has the thread met your expectations, assuming you had any? — creativesoul

Thanks for asking. Yes, in great part, it has met my expectations. I was hoping to learn a few new things about this problem, and I have. Probably the most important takeaway, which I've already referred to, is this: Mental causation has to be placed in a larger theoretical framework before posing even apparently simple questions about it. To ask, "Can a thought cause another thought?" is to ask something an intelligent 12-year-old can understand, and relate to their own experience. But the two apparently ordinary terms being used -- "thought" and "cause" -- aren't situated in any one philosophical framework. They invite combinations of construals and relations that immediately plunge us into murky water. As you say, "The very notion of 'thought' is problematic in many ways," some of which I hopefully discussed in this thread. I do think that the Popperian clarification of "thought" into World 2 and World 3 uses is helpful, though as we saw, it opens the door to extremely hard questions about the properties and powers of propositions.

If I had an unmet expectation -- or wish, really! -- it was that somehow we'd come up with a plausible explanation of the unpopular view that inferential reasoning is in fact causative. Probably a bridge too far, though we may have relied too much on ordinary language's verdicts on how "cause" may be used.

What are your thoughts?

They're all trying to preserve the veracity of the scientific model while injecting an element of subjectivity into it 'from the outside', so to speak. — Wayfarer

I think panpsychism is less likely to prove true than some version of consciousness as a property only of living things, but still, I don't agree with this characterization. The problem goes back to this part of what Bitbol says:

the new picture of the world looks like a scientific picture, apart from the unfortunate circumstance that its additional elements cannot be put to test as it would be the case of a scientific theory. — Michel Bitbol, Beyond Panpsychism

"Cannot" is the misleading term. Since we don't at this time have a scientific account of what consciousness is, or how it might arise (or be present everywhere, if you're a panpsychist), it's claiming far too much to say it "cannot" be tested. It cannot be tested now. But if it can be eventually couched in scientific terms, then it will be testable.

If panpsychism is at best an untested hypothesis, that should keep us modest about any claims that it's correct or true. But we also don't have license to say that it's flawed in some theoretical or philosophical way that can demonstrate, now, that it will never be science. Panpsychism as I understand it is not "mimicking a theory of the objective world." Rather, it's saying that if and when we understand what consciousness is, we will discover that our current division of "objective" and "subjective" into areas that can and cannot be studied scientifically, is just plain wrong. Philosophers do seem divided on whether this is even conceivable. I've never had any trouble with panpsychism in this way. If subjectivity is "really in there" in everything that exists, well, then that will be a feature of the objective world. What we lack is a vocabulary of concepts -- or, as it may be, mathematics -- to capture it.

Entailment is a characteristic not of individual sentences, but of sets of sentences. — Banno

This is surely true. So if the move from individuals to sets works at the formal level, then it's justified, since it captures the concept of entailment more precisely than sticking to individual sentences.

One of the ways of setting out a obligation in first order logic is to simply incorporate an operator, O. Op is then just "One ought p" — Banno

I'm still not very happy with this. Don't we need to better understand what "ought" means in ordinary language before we can be sure that "O" (and all the formal moves we can make with O) captures this? Might there not be something about how "ought" works in OL that prevents the "simple incorporation"? Just asking.

I swear I'm not trying to be difficult, but I don't get it. — Patterner

No worries; I found it difficult to explain, and maybe haven't done it well.

How can you learn how to use the word correctly other than by being taught those qualities? — Patterner

That's the key -- whether a definition is needed in order to use a word correctly. Often, that's not how we learn words and concepts. Instead, it's ostensive: Someone points and says, "That's X," and later, "That's one too," and "That's one too," etc. We can recognize what words refer to quite accurately without necessarily being able to put our recognition in terms of a definition. Something like this is going on with consciousness (and life), I think. We've learned how to use the words in the absence of a (clear and precise) definition.

And how can you categorize the shapes without recognizing them? — Patterner

This looks at it from the other angle: We can be uncertain about a shape -- maybe it kind of looks like what we've been taught to call a trapezoid, but not exactly. We don't quite recognize it. So if we have a precise definition (which we do, in this case), we can apply it and see whether the shape fits the definition. If only we had something similarly precise for "consciousness" or "life"!

Does this help at all?

Thanks for the borderline-life examples. The car example invites the reply: "Can be said to" eat, metabolize, excrete, etc.? Yes, that can be said, in the spirit of metaphor. But is it accurate? Is it really eating, metabolizing, etc. Well, what does it mean to "really eat"? Which leads to . . .

One question worth considering: Which way does the argument point? Is it, "Any entity that can do this value-seeking thing will now be defined as 'being conscious'"? Or is it, "We know (have learned/hypothesize) that being conscious means having the ability to do the value-seeking thing, so if it can do it, it's conscious"?
— J
I don't follow. I don't see significant difference between those options. It seems like just different wording. — Patterner

Compare a geometrical shape such as a trapezoid. One might learn how to use the word correctly, and thus recognize trapezoids, without being able to say exactly what are the qualities that make the shape a trapezoid. Or, one might be taught those qualities, along with the word "trapezoid," and then categorize the shapes one encounters.

Which approach should we adopt in the case of consciousness? Do we already know what the word means, so that it's only a matter of finding the entities to which it applies? Or do we already know what's conscious and what isn't, without being able to define consciousness, and hence it's a matter of figuring out what conscious things have in common, and thus perfecting a definition?

That's the difference in "pointing" I had in mind. Roughly, is it "word to object" or "object to word"?

I think consciousness will turn out to depend on biology, but that's not to say that everything alive is conscious.
OK, but then the key that distinguishes conscious from otherwise is not 'is biological'. The key is something else, and the next question would be 'why can only something biological turn that key?'. — noAxioms

Right to all of that. Biology, on my hypothesis, is necessary but not sufficient. My guess is that no single property will turn out to be sufficient. Your question -- which reduces to "Why is biology necessary for consciousness?" -- is indeed the big one. If and when that is answered, we'll know a lot more about what consciousness is. (Or, if biology isn't necessary, also a lot more!)

I would suggest that not even knowing if some random animal is a being or not seems to put one on poor footing to assert any kind of fundamental difference that prevents say a car from being conscious. — noAxioms

Perhaps I should have divvied up the question and answered more precisely. To the question of whether it's a "being": I can't respond, as the use of "being," here and just about everywhere else, is hopelessly ambiguous and/or question-begging. To the question of whether it experiences pain: I don't know. Intent?: As described by Thompson, probably so.

The questions were put in terms of what I know, which is very little in this area. If "asserting any kind of fundamental difference" requires knowledge, then yes, I'd be on poor footing. But does it? My position is that, while we certainly don't know the answers to these questions, we can offer more or less likely solutions. I don't know that a car isn't conscious, but for me the possibility is extremely unlikely. Is this because of a "fundamental difference"? Very probably; the car is not biologically alive. Am I asserting these things? Semantics. I don't think they're obvious, or that people who disagree are unintelligent. So if that's what it takes to assert something, then I'm not. . . I know I've used this analogy before, but disagreeing about what consciousness is, in 2025, is about as fruitful as a debate among 18th century physicists about what time is. We can trade opinions and cite evidence, but fundamentally we don't know what the F we're talking about.

Good discussion anyway!

Maybe the key is not what life is made of, but what it's doing. This can apply to anyone's definition. — Patterner

Yes, that's how I would argue it, if I shared your view.

The first thing Sara Imari Walker talks about in Life As No One Knows It is how definitions differ, and how any definition rules out some things you think are alive, and includes some things you think are not. — Patterner

Interesting. Would it be easy for you to cite an example of each? Curious to know what she has in mind.

But the definition of life is famously unclear. — Patterner

Yes, in one sense. But it's also the case that a child will be able to sort living from non-living things with great accuracy, given the currently accepted use of "living." The child doesn't know the definition -- arguably, no one does for sure -- but she knows how to use the word. Do we want to say she's using the word incorrectly? I don't think so. Rather, we might say that her (and everyone else's) use of the word needs to change in order to encompass a more accurate understanding of what it means to be alive.

The entity would be conscious as an entity. — Patterner

One question worth considering: Which way does the argument point? Is it, "Any entity that can do this value-seeking thing will now be defined as 'being conscious'"? Or is it, "We know (have learned/hypothesize) that being conscious means having the ability to do the value-seeking thing, so if it can do it, it's conscious"?

↪J, it is unexpected for me because it seems to be more an issue for psychology than philosophy. — Banno

Yes, that was why I was surprised too, but the SEP article that @javra pointed us to is revealing. It seems there have been plenty of attempts to formalize the family of "self-deception" terms in ways that are tractable philosophically. I like this one: "self-deceivers don’t believe p; they believe that they believe that p, and this false second-order belief—'I think that I believe that p'—underlies and underwrites their sincere avowal that p as well as their ability to entertain p as true." For extra credit: How might a psychologist prove or disprove this hypothesis? :smile:

I would like to say: Therefore, something choosing valuable things in order to endure is living. But I don't think anyone would let me have that. I suspect people will say only biological things are living. I'd say maybe we should expand the definition of living, and divide it into Biological Life, Mechanical Life, and whatever else. — Patterner

It's complicated. There's no alarm bell that rings when philosophy ceases analyzing a concept and starts revising what the concept ought to cover. So yes, we can offer a revision of what "living" means so as to include mechanical things. But what is our warrant? Obviously, we can't say "Because that's what 'living' means" or "That's how 'living' is used" -- the whole point of the revision is to deny that, and suggest an amelioration of the concept. Your suggestion here would be something like, "We should change the domain of what 'living' can refer to because 'choosing valuable things in order to endure' is a more perspicuous or clearer use, conceptually, than the standard version. It captures the idea of 'living' better than 'biological thing' does." That could be true, but you'd have to say more about why.

But yes, I'm impressed by Thompson's ideas here. As I said, he points to the right question: Can an entity, alive or not, do this value-seeking thing and not be conscious? I agree with him that we don't yet know.

I found Harry difficult to engage with, but for whatever reason he was never outright rude to me. Since I therefore rarely read his posts, I have no opinion about his ban-worthiness.

Banning is a difficult decision -- I believe you mods always give warnings to possible infringers? -- and I'm grateful that you and the other mods are keeping an eye. Thank you.

(I don't see the need for more specific TPF rules. The picture of what's inappropriate is pretty clear.)

Glad you got something from Haack's essay. To start at the end (of your post), I think Haack's pluralism is very much in harmony with your OP's considerations, so I hoped you and others who followed the thread would find it interesting.

I liked Evidence and Inquiry very much, and have reread it a couple of times. Yeah, "foundherentism" is an unfortunate coinage. But as you say, something like it is surely right. And when we get into the details, we find some ingenious answers to issues that come up both for the Deferentialists and the Cynics. Her discussions about how to rescue foundherentism from the objection that it is a blurred version of plain old coherentism are really sharp.

As for her list of topics . . . We rarely see a straightforward list of problems that a very good philosopher thinks are the most interesting to explore. That's part of why I wanted to share hers. As you say, any one of them would start a TPF ball rolling. The one I find most unexpected as a philosophical issue is "What the mechanisms are of self-deception and of wishful and fearful thinking?" If anyone, reading this, happens to know where Haack might have written on this topic, I'd like to know.

Thompson concludes, according to the synopsis:

"The enactive framework strongly supports a continuity of life and mind, showing that living systems are inherently value-constituting and purposive. However, it does not conclusively establish that all life is sentient in the affective sense. The move from sense-making to feeling remains conceptually and empirically underdetermined."

I think this gets it exactly right (though I'm not familiar enough with enactivism to know whether "strongly supports" is correct). The critical issue is whether, again using Thompson's phrasing, purposive, value-driven organisms feel those values as pleasant or unpleasant. "There's a conceptual gap between responsiveness to value and the felt experience of value."

For me, this is a real step forward in putting some content to the old favorite, "what it's like to be X." We're urged to ask, "Can an entity respond in purposive, value-oriented ways without experiencing anything?" I think the answer will turn out to be yes -- and it's still not like anything to be such an organism, where "be like something" is understood as "do more than respond purposively."

I've recently read an interesting paper by Susan Haack called Formal Philosophy? A Plea for Pluralism, published in 2005. Haack is one of our most pre-eminent philosophers of logic. I doubt there's another living philosopher who knows more about formalisms than she does. So her reflections on the "two ways of doing philosophy" are worth pondering. (She sees more than two.)

Let me call out, in particular, the list of questions with which she closes her essay. Following Peirce, who at one point offered "a small specimen of philosophical questions which press for industrious and solid investigation," she gives her own list:

Whether the grounds of validity of the laws of logic are to be found in language, in conceptual structures, in the nature of representation, in the world, or where?

Whether Peirce’s idea of necessary reasoning as essentially diagrammatic is defensible, or Russell’s distinction of logical and grammatical form?

How Aristotle’s dictum [“to say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, is true”] could best be generalized to arrive at a satisfactory definition of truth? How, if this will require propositional quantifiers, these can be interpreted without using “true”?

Whether a unified interpretation of quantifiers is possible, and if so in what terms?

Whether the semantic paradoxes are a sign of deep incoherence in the ordinary truth-concept, or a trivial verbal trick? Whether these paradoxes must be avoided by recourse to an artificial language in which they cannot be expressed, or resolved by probing the ordinary, informal concept of truth?

Whether Tarski’s definition really advances our understanding of truth beyond Ramsey’s simple formula, and if so, how?

How we are to understand the relation between the neurophysiological realization of a belief and its content?

How belief-contents are best represented? How they should be individuated?

How degrees of belief affect degrees of justification?

How to articulate the desirable kind of interlocking or consilience that gives some congeries of evidence greater strength than any of their components?

How to asses the weight of shared evidence when there is disagreement within a group, or when members give shared reasons different degrees of credence?

What the proper relation is between belief and the will?

What the mechanisms are of self-deception and of wishful and fearful thinking?

How to understand “real,” as applied to particulars? to kinds? to laws? to the world? Whether “real” has the same meaning as applied to social as to natural kinds and laws?

How to distinguish the cosmological role of historical singularities and of laws? How to understand the evolution of laws?

How works of imaginative literature can convey truths they do not state?

Whether vagueness is always undesirable, or sometimes benign or even useful? How the precision sought by a logician differs from that sought by a novelist or poet? — Haack, in [i]Putting Philosophy to Work[/i], 238

Plenty to work on here, no matter which style of philosophy you favor!

this is just to give an alternate formal definition of "future" and "past", as if a sentence were "future" when the outermost tense operator is F. — Banno

This, if I understand it, is an important point. Could I paraphrase it this way?: A sentence with a tense operator does not automatically become about that temporal location. Pp ⊨ FPp is about p, not the future (or the past).

But there is a sense in which this is already to assume Hume's law. To define what we ought do as fragile is to presume that it is distinct from what is the case, that we can clearly seperate normative sentences from descriptive sentences.

The danger is that Russell presumes rather than demonstrates Hume's law. In which case she will have provided a powerful way for us to talk about deontic logic but not have settled the issue. — Banno

Yes. And your reservations about how to formalize "ought" are also significant. So there've been attempts to create a semantics for "ought," but they haven't succeeded? That's interesting. Similar attempts to standardize ordinary-language uses of "ought" also have failed, as far as I know.

You also need to answer the question I asked above, a kind of litmus test for those with your stance:
[Concerning] a Urbilaterian (a brainless ancestor of you, and also a starfish). Is it a being? Does it experience [pain say] and have intent?
— noAxioms
If yes, is it also yes for bacteria?
The almost unilateral response to this question by non-physicalists is evasion. — noAxioms

I don't know. And that's not evasion, just honesty.

But I also don't think that the right answer to that question reveals much about the larger problem. I think consciousness will turn out to depend on biology, but that's not to say that everything alive is conscious. If we could eventually determine that a bacterium isn't conscious, that would say nothing about whether the beings that are conscious require a biological basis in order to be so. In other words, being alive might be a necessary but not sufficient condition for consciousness.

I've also generated a synopsis which will be helpful in approaching the essay. — Wayfarer

Thanks, I'll read it.

No worries. Sorry I couldn't be more helpful.

If both work the same, it's all the same. — Millard J Melnyk

I'm not sure what you mean. They work quite differently, as I tried to show.

Please explain how the distinction matters. — Millard J Melnyk

It may not matter at all, for the points you want to cover. But as @Ludwig V has elaborated, any theses involving "think" and "thought" need to be carefully laid out so as to show which uses and concepts you mean to refer to.

"You're beautiful."
"I think you're beautiful."
"I believe you're beautiful."
"I know you're beautiful."
"I whatever you're beautiful."

You can see the differences, right? — Millard J Melnyk

Sure. But consider these:

I think it's raining.
I believe it's raining.

Wouldn't you agree they're nearly synonymous?

The point is, all these usages are linguistically dependent. They approach, or recede from, synonymy depending on context. And in another language, I'm sure the various usages would be different.

"I think" and "I believe" are semantically different in specific, consistent ways — Millard J Melnyk

They can be, and sometimes they aren't. Context again.

This takes us back to your OP premise:

Epistemically, belief and thought are identical. — Millard J Melnyk

I hope it's clear now why that's only true in the cases in which they are understood to be identical by language-speakers.

a rhetorical shift from “I think” to “I believe,” — Millard J Melnyk

Well, yes -- when the use of "I think" means "I believe", that shift often takes place. It doesn't have to. Not to belabor the point, but we can think many things without necessarily believing them. We can also think them in ways such that they're not even possible candidates for belief (such as my Case 2, above).

my topic question, while framed as a first-person issue, is actually not why you're in that 'difference' group, but why the non-difference group is necessarily wrong. — noAxioms

Yes. And I'm in no position to claim that any view on consciousness is necessarily right or wrong. We're dealing with educated guesses, at best.

There will always be those that wave away any explanation as correlation, not causation. — noAxioms

Hmm. I suppose so, but that wouldn't mean we hadn't learned the explanation. :smile:

we'll learn that you can't have consciousness without life."
Which requires a more rigourous definition of consciousness I imagine. — noAxioms

Absolutely. If a biological explanation turns out to be the correct one, I imagine it will also show that most of our rough-and-ready conceptions about subjectivity and consciousness are far too impoverished. It would be like analyzing 18th century views on "time" and comparing them to relativity theory.

Yes to all of that. So the idea that "think" and "believe" are synonymous is a non-starter. The OP would need to be much more specific about which uses of "think" are equivalent to "believe."

Yes, that too, but the equivocation I referred to shows up a lot. It's just how we use the English language. Sometimes "I think" is uttered to state something the speaker endorses; other times it's a report about a mental event, something "entertained" but not endorsed.

Came in late on this, so forgive me if the following point has already been made.

There's an equivocation going on between two senses of "think":

Mary thinks the house is on fire.
Mary thinks, "The house is on fire."

The first usage is more or less synonymous with "believe." It refers to the content of a proposition. The second usage, however, is completely separate from the issue of belief. It refers to a mental event, a thought, that Mary is having at the moment. She may be having it for any number of reasons, some of which will have nothing to do with a particular blazing house. (Perhaps she's remembering a line in a poem she likes.). It is this usage that @Banno refers to when he says:

We can certainly entertain thoughts that are not true - that's where things like modality and error come from. — Banno

Mary, in the second usage, is "entertaining" the thought. Consider the different ways she would respond if you asked her, "Do you believe the house is on fire?"

Case 1: Yes, I do.
Case 2: What house? Oh, you misunderstood me. I had that thought for a completely unrelated reason, sorry. I was evaluating scary sentences, trying to decide how I felt about this one.

These two usages of "thought" and "think" are taken up in much more detail in the thread, "Can a Thought Cause Another Thought?".

Somehow I managed to miss all of these over the last several days. Sorry for the crickets -- I will catch up.

As J points out, some of us do not hold out for an ontological difference between a device and a living thing. — noAxioms

I did indeed point that out, and I think it's important to understand why. I hope I also made it clear that I am not one of "non-difference" group. I find myself being the devil's advocate in this discussion, largely because I don't think we'll get anywhere if we don't thoroughly understand why the ontological difference is not obvious or axiomatic or whatever other bedrock term we care to use. As philosophers, we're watching something exciting unfold in real time: a genuinely new development of a consequential question that the general public is interested in, and that we can help with. That said, I'll say again that when we eventually learn the answer about consciousness (and I think we will), we'll learn that you can't have consciousness without life. But that conclusion is a long way off.

Reason is not just a pattern of inference; it is an act of mind, shaped by actual concerns.

-- @Wayfarer

This begs the question, doesn't it? Yes, if reason is (exclusively) an act of mind, then only minds can reason, but that's what we're inquiring into. You offer a definition, or conception, of what it is to reason, which demands "an inner sense of value or purpose"; things have to "really matter to them." God knows, there is no agreed-upon definition of reason or rationality, so you're entitled to do so, but we have to be careful not to endorse a concept that must validate what we think about aliveness and consciousness.

So, why the relationship between life and consciousness? — Wayfarer

For me, this is a crucial question, and I very much like your thoughts about it. Life is indeed purposive, and consciousness may be, in a sense we don't yet quite understand, an expression of that purposiveness. (This also connects with your idea of reason as purposive, but let's not confuse reason or rationality with consciousness; they needn't be the same.)

Why do you [think] it must be alive? What aspects of life do you think are required for consciousness? — Patterner

And this connects to the discussion above. I'd endorse @Wayfarer's speculations, and add quite a few of my own, but it's a long story. Maybe a new thread, called something like "The Connection between Life and Consciousness - The Evidence So Far"? And yes, if panpsychism is valid, that would appear to contradict the "consciousness → life" hypothesis.

Although you have to give it credit for its articulateness. — Wayfarer

:lol: But there remains a serious question, which I raised when you previously quoted a modest AI: What would you conclude if the alleged entity said it was a subject of experience? The point is, you're applauding it now for its truthfulness, but would you change your mind about that if it said something you thought wasn't true?

I’m pretty much on board with Bernardo Kastrup’s diagnosis. He says, computers can model all kinds of metabolic processes in exquisite detail, but the computer model of kidney function doesn’t pass urine. It is a simulation, a likeness. — Wayfarer

This seems a straightforward refutation of the idea that a computer could be alive. The awkward difference, with AI, is that it doesn't just model or simulate rationality -- it (appears to) engage in it. Putting it differently, only an imbecile could get confused between a model of kidney function and a functioning kidney -- as you say, the telltale lack of urine. But what's the equivalent, when talking about what an AI can or cannot do?

I return to my idea that only living beings could be conscious. If that is ever demonstrated, and we accept Kastrup's argument as a refutation of alive-ness, then the case would be made. But as of now, it doesn't matter whether the AI is alive or not, since we haven't yet shown that being alive is needed for consciousness in the same way that being alive is needed for producing urine.

It is a kind of idealised entity, not subject to the vicissitudes of existence - and part of us wants to be like that, because then we would not be subject to illness and death. — Wayfarer

Good insight. They're also dispassionate in a way that is impossible for all but Mr. Spock -- something many people idealize as well.

If we ever make a device with as many information processing systems working together with the goal of the continuation of the device? — Patterner

Yes, that's the question we don't know how to answer: Would such a structure result in consciousness or subjectivity? Is that what it takes? Is that all it takes? My initial reaction would be to ask, "Is it alive?" If not, then I doubt it could be conscious, but I have no special insights here. Many years of thinking about this incline me to believe that consciousness will turn out to be biological -- but we don't know.

"Everything"? Surely not. — Patterner

I meant the types of experiences that @Wayfarer listed -- sensory awareness, memory, knowing you exist. But you're right to narrow the target. We currently care a lot about this question because of some specific recent developments in artificial intelligence. It's those devices about which I imagine these issues being raised. They may not "experience everything we do," but neither does a bee. The question is whether they can, or could, experience anything at all. My educated guess is that they can't -- they can't be subjects -- but it seems far from axiomatic to me.

@Wayfarer, I wish you would say more about what you see as the critical difference between a so-called artificial intelligence and a living being, and what implications this has for consciousness. I'm fairly sure I would agree with you, but it's good to lay the whole thing out in plain terms. Maybe that will make it obvious. "Forgetfulness of being" is all very well as a diagnosis, but the advocates for intelligent, soon-to-be-conscious AIs deserve something less dismissive. If for no other reason than this is becoming one of the central philosophical/scientific/ethical tipping points of our age.

That devices are not subjects of experience is axiomatic, in my opinion. — Wayfarer

I would like this to be true, but I don't see how it is. One objection I would raise is simply, "If it's axiomatic, why are increasing numbers of not unintelligent people doubting it?" Maybe you mean something different by axiomatic, but for me it's a cognate for "obvious," and I would apply it to a postulate or process that's needed in order to do any thinking at all. In fairness, do you really believe that rationality breaks down in the face of the possibility that AI's may be, or will become, conscious subjects of experience? As for "truths that have no opposites," well, the opposite of "only living things are conscious" would be, quite coherently, "some non-living things are, or may be, conscious." You can make a good case for the axiomatic nature of, for instance, first-person experience, but again, that is not being questioned by my hypothetical proponent of "device consciousness."

Maybe this doesn't need repeating, but my own view is that it will turn out to be the case that only living things can be the subjects of experience. But I believe this is far from obvious or axiomatic.

As for LLM’s, ask any of them whether they are subjects of experience and they will answer in the negative. — Wayfarer

An interesting test! What would you conclude if one of them said, "Yes, I am"?

The question of the nature of being is the subject of Heidegger’s entire project (and phenomenology generally. Consider Sartre’s in-itself and for-itself). It could be argued that it is the central question of philosophy. — Wayfarer

It sure could. If I had to paraphrase "what is it like to . . ." I might go for "what is the experience of . . .", and as you point out, such a formulation requires the concept of experience to get off the ground. (I'm not sure I agree that "being as such is not an object of experience," but the very fact that it's possible to have two reasonable positions on this only highlights the centrality of the issue.)

As to whether I can, or should, explain what that means. I can’t prove to you that there’s something it’s like to be you. — Wayfarer

No, probably not. But that's not what my hypothetical questioner is asking. They want to know, "Why couldn't it be the case that everything you describe as pertaining to yourself, and other living beings, also pertains to devices, AIs, et al.? Why is it obvious that they're different?" We could extend the question to all objects if we wanted, but that's arcane; the question comes up relevantly in the context of our new world of ostensibly intelligent or even conscious entities, which are causing a lot of people to demand a re-think about all this. Philosophy can help.

There is 'nothing it is like' to be a car, because a car is a device, an artifact - not a being, like a man, or a bat. — Wayfarer

Welcome back. I agree with the quoted statement. But those of us who do hold out for an ontological difference between a device and a living thing should be careful about two points:

1. "What it's like" defies precise definition, relying on a (very common, I'd say) intuition conjured up by the phrase. Does this work in other languages? How might the intuition be expressed in, say, Japanese?

2. To you, to me, the difference under discussion is obvious. But it isn't obvious to everyone. The fact that I believe something to be obvious doesn't let me off the hook of trying to explain it, if someone questions it in good faith. Explaining the obvious is a quintessentially philosophical task! Both of us should welcome questions like, "But why can't a device have experiences?"

This is particularly helpful, as is the whole idea of thinking of it in terms of an asymmetry. I think that's where my "intuition" wants to go astray; perhaps we naturally conceptualize in symmetries until shown otherwise?

Got it. My only question is a natural-language quibble: When you say "We find that we cannot derive sentences about the future from sentences about the past," that hinges on a certain strict understanding of "derive" (and maybe "about" as well). Nothing prevents us from saying either 1) "The sun is overwhelmingly likely to rise tomorrow" or 2) "It is logically certain that, if the future resembles the past [in the relevant respects], then the sun will rise tomorrow." These are surely true sentences about the future, based upon knowledge of the past, they just aren't "derived" according to a model that takes into account terms such as "likely" or "resemblance." This has no bearing on what Russell is demonstrating, of course.

Ah, I get you now. I thought you had a typo because I was considering the case where one knowingly chooses the worse over the better, not vice versa; hence my confused response. I agree, Kant makes a crucial point here. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Good, and sorry if I added to the confusion.

Plato's point is similar to Kant's . . . — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes. One of the things I dislike about the "pre-modern -- modern" distinction is that it tends to imply that there's no continuity in problematics or thought between the ancients and ourselves. (People like MacIntyre, read loosely, seem to reinforce this.) Certainly Plato knew about this question, and equally certainly, Kant had read his Plato and was not entering the conversation de novo.

. . . although I think more nuanced, in that he sees this desire for the "truly best" as known as good as what allows us to transcend current belief and desire, and thus our own finitude. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I see lots of similarities between Plato and Kant on this issue (and of course Platonic Christian philosophy is the bridge between them). P and K both see a sharp divide between types of motivation, and both situate this divide as a question of immanence versus transcendence. For Kant, the vocabulary is "autonomous will" versus "heteronomous desires." In the heteronomous world, pushed and pulled, acted upon and reacting to, we find ourselves with desires particular to ourselves, as individuals. But by virtue of our participation in the autonomous world of rational freedom, the "kingdom of ends," we discover an entirely different order of motivation which is the same for everyone, though we are free to act or not act upon it. It is this motivation, or will, that Kant believed had moral value.

Your thoughts about Kant and freedom are interesting, but is it really possible for any philosopher to have a view on freedom that doesn't depend on "metaphysical assumptions"? Surely the ancients were no different. Also, I'm not sure I agree that Kant's autonomy is "bare, inviolable, individual." Mountains have been written about this, and I've only read some of it. I would say that Kant (who was a Christian apologist, though he tried to avoid being seen that way), did see individual freedom, understood as the power to choose, as an unavoidable human condition, influenced but never conditioned by social circumstances, and roughly analogous to the free will (and possibility of sin) of Christian theology. The twist here, though, is that Kantian autonomy is meant to represent a denial of a certain sort of individual freedom. It's only when we abandon our heteronomous orientation for what is categorical and valid for all humans (or rational beings) that the possibility of truly acting freely can arise.

Kant is getting at something important here, I just don't see how it is missing from the earlier tradition, whereas he also misses that the good person ideally desires the good because of its goodness. — Count Timothy von Icarus

An important issue to raise. I'd say Kant doesn't so much miss this point, as reject it, and offer what he feels is a better description of ethical action. The good person (not a term Kant often used) is the person who acts from a good will. Is the good will a desire? That's the rub. Most interpret Kant as saying it's something else entirely, whereas the Greek/virtue ethics framework must interpret it as yet another desire, so that the "ordering of desires" idea can be preserved, and linked with an anthropology.

One place where I do see an overlap between Kant and some of the classical thinkers is this: It's possible to read Kant's discussion of autonomy and ethics as an argument for conforming to what is human nature, or at any rate rational nature. Read this way, it isn't so different from any ethics based on a view of what is essential or natural to humans, using an allegedly established or obvious definition. I go back and forth on how accurate a reading of Kant this is. The problem, as we know, is that the categorical imperative seems to depend on an anthropology no less rigorous than Aristotle's. The difference would be that Kant tries to establish his view of human possibilities on various arguments from self-contradiction. These are notoriously tricky. What counts for Kant as a "contradiction" seems to vary in meaning and implication, depending on which part of the cat. imp. we get a handle on. But anyway . . .

I am working on a project that compares modern character education literature to late-antique philosophy and it's almost like two wholly different Aristotles! — Count Timothy von Icarus

This sounds interesting. I'd like to learn more about how to rescue Aristotle and the virtue-ethics tradition from the charge of selfishness. Or, for that matter, how to repair the gaping hole that seems to be there when it comes to Christian virtues such as compassion and mercy.

the higher required ever-increasing conformity to the Good, which of course involves the willing of the Good for its own sake — Count Timothy von Icarus

See above comments. Notice that you don't speak about desiring the Good for its own sake, but of willing it. Kant would reply: "Excellent. You've just passed from the heteronomous world to the autonomous world!"

, there are many possible reasons for choosing the better over the worse,
— J

Such as? — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is where Kantian ethics makes a real contribution to the discussion. As I'm sure you know, Kant believed that only the good will was truly good, in an ethical sense. Put another way: My motivation for acting is of paramount importance; what I do may actually be ethically insignificant, but why I do it will always matter.

So, to your question: I may choose the better over the worse because I want to be seen as someone who chooses the better over the worse. (This is only one example; there are many we could consider.). Have I indeed chosen the better over the worse? Yes. Have I done so knowing it is the best? Yes. But have I chosen it for the right reason -- do I have a good will? No.

We can particularize this to an act of charity. I may correctly see that helping an effective AIDS charity is an act of goodness, or the right thing to do, or in accordance with spiritual principles, or however one cares to phrase it. But if I do so because (though I absolutely agree that it's good to help AIDS patients) I enjoy the attention and the gloss to my self-esteem, Kant would call the action ethically worthless. I wouldn't go that far, myself, but Kant is raising an important point. Isn't there a huge difference between the person who does the right thing for the wrong, or equivocal, reasons, and the person who does it because they want to do the right thing? (An interesting subsidiary question, by the way, is whether "wanting to do the right thing" can be stated in non-Kantian -- that is, non-procedural -- terms, or whether the Kantian conception requires some version of the categorical imperative as the basis for discussing ethics.)

Like everything in ethics, this is nuanced and endlessly complex. I don't think deontological ethics offers a knockdown argument to virtue ethics. In fact, I think they work best in tandem. But one can certainly point out that the question of motivation in virtue ethics needs a lot of elaboration. Is "wanting to be a 'good' human" (in the pre-modern sense of "good human", where it's the same sort of usage as a "good hammer" or "good poem") a sufficient motivation for ethical action? Doesn't it matter why one wants this? Or must we disregard motivation entirely, and merely speak of good or right actions, or the human good as a kind of correspondence with what is essential or natural to humans?

if the good is being qua desirable (what is truly most fulfilling of desire) . . . — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not sure I get this. Can you expand?

Why choose the better over the worse? Why choose good over evil? These seem extremely obvious to me, so I am not sure how to answer. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I sympathize. Explaining what seems obvious to you, to someone for whom it isn't obvious at all, is difficult. I won't press you. I'll just say that, from my viewpoint, there are many possible reasons for choosing the better over the worse, only some of which are ethical reasons. And for what it's worth, the question "Why choose good over evil?" seems to me to be a different question entirely.

I don't quite understand this. Are you saying that, for those without the inclination or capacities for respecting social norms, there is no argument that can be made that what they're doing is wrong? Not necessarily an argument that would convince them, but a general argument showing that there is an ethical sense in which they ought to behave differently?