The assertion under question:

In natural systems like weather, decoherence tends to suppress quantum-level randomness before it can scale up meaningfully. — Truth Seeker

You’re right that quantum effects can, in principle, influence macroscopic systems, but the consensus in physics is that quantum coherence decays extremely rapidly in warm, complex environments like the atmosphere, which prevents quantum indeterminacy from meaningfully propagating to the classical scale except through special, engineered amplifiers (like photomultipliers or Geiger counters). — Truth Seeker

OK, very much yes on the rapid decay of coherence. But this does not in any way prevent changes from propagating to the larger scales in any chaotic system (such as the atmosphere). Sure, a brick wall is going to stand for decades without quantum interactions having any meaningful effect, but a wall is not a particulrly chaotic system.

Here are some references that support this:

1. Wojciech Zurek (2003). Decoherence, einselection, and the quantum origins of the classical.

Zurek explains that decoherence times for macroscopic systems at room temperature are extraordinarily short (on the order of (10^-20) seconds), meaning superpositions collapse into classical mixtures almost instantly.

2. Joos & Zeh (1985). The emergence of classical properties through interaction with the environment.

They calculate that even a dust grain in air decoheres in about (10^-31) seconds due to collisions with air molecules and photons - long before any macroscopic process could amplify quantum noise.

3. Max Tegmark (2000). Importance of quantum decoherence in brain processes.

Tegmark estimated decoherence times in the brain at (10^-13) to (10^-20) seconds, concluding that biological systems are effectively classical. The same reasoning applies (even more strongly) to meteorological systems, where temperature and particle interactions are vastly higher.

All three supporting only the first part I agreed with, yes. None of them support quantum differences propagating into macroscopic differences.

The question you need to ask is this: Given say MWI where you have all these different worlds splitting due to quantum events, how long does it take for classical differences to appear.
For the weather, this can take months.to be unrecognizably different. For a brick wall, probably decades. For a meteor hitting or missing Earth, probably millennia. For a human to choose one thing instead of another, maybe 10 minutes (a guess), and that depend on the gravity of the choice being made.
For the conception of a human, perhaps under a minute.

MWI is illustrative, but in any interpretation, specific quantum effects take about this long to cause or prevent these various macroscopic events.

In short, quantum coherence does not persist long enough ...

Coherence is not in any way required for quantum events to have an effect. Quite the opposite. Absent a measurement (collapse?) of some sort, quantum events can have no effect..

in atmospheric systems to influence large-scale weather patterns. While every individual molecular collision is, in a sense, quantum, the statistical ensemble of billions of interactions behaves deterministically according to classical thermodynamics.

Yes, but classical thermodynamics is a very chaotic system. Any difference, no matter how tiny, amplify into massive differences.

I agree that quantum improbability cannot be worked into weather prediction since there is no way to predict it, and weather prediction is done at significantly larger granularity, hardly a simulation at the atomic level. Hence it is good for a week or two at best. After that, you consult the farmer's almanac.

It is illuminating to track the weather prediction for a given day. It appears on my site 10 days hence. So save that prediction each day until the day in question arises. See how much the prediction changes as the day grows nearer. Sometimes it is fairly stable, but often it's all over the map, meaning they're practically guessing.

Exactly. I said you were "ignoring" randomness, your wording is "denying". Same thing. Just so you know, randomness exists, human denials notwithstanding. — LuckyR

Sure, it exists, but decision making structures (both machine and biological) are designed to filter out the randomness out and leverage only deterministic processes. I mean, neither transistors nor neurons would function at all without quantum effects like tunneling, but both are designed to produce a repeatable classical effect, not a random one.

These phenomena are qualia.

If you still doubt this — hypericin

We're going in circles. The paper is not about qualia, it is about the first person view, and Chalmers says that the hard problem boils down not to the problem of qualia (which is difficult to explain only because it is complicated in humans), but to the problem of first person view, which seems not problematic at all.

If you define “the physical” narrowly (as purely third-person measurable stuff) — Joshs

I never have. First person empirical evidence is valid in science, especially when damage occurs.
Varela’s neurophenomenology seems to fit in with this and is not an alternate theory.

Again, I'm looking for an actual theory that Chalmers might support, one that demonstrates (falsifies) the monism that they all say is impossible.

Physicist Karen Barad’s re-interpretation of the double slit experiment in quantum field theory in the direction of, but beyond Niels Bohr represents the core of her alternative to physical monism., which she calls agential realism.

OK, but again this seems to be an attempt at an interpretation (kind of like RQM but with different phrasing) of an existing theory. It doesn't falsify anything.

That's the hard problem though. The problem is how to explain consciousness in terms of properties of the 'inanimate'. — boundless

Sure, that's difficult because it is complicated, and the brain isn't going to get explained in terms of something like an algorithm. But the problem being difficult is not evidence against consciousness being derived from inanimate primitives.
Chalmers certainly doesn't have an explanation at all, which is worse than what is currently known.

So in virtue of what properties of 'non-living things' can intentionality that seems to be present in all life forms arise?

Probably because anything designed is waved away as not intentionality. I mean, a steam engine self-regulates, all without a brain, but the simple gravity-dependent device that accomplishes it is designed, so of course it doesn't count.

If the 'inanimate' is fundamental, you should expect to find an explanation on how consciousness, intentionality, life and so on came into being, not just that they come into being.

Completely wrong. Fundamentals don't first expect explanations. Explanations are for the things understood, and the things not yet understood still function despite lack of this explanation. Things fell down despite lack of explanation for billions of years. Newton explained it, and Einstein did so quite differently, but things falling down did so without ever expectation of that explanation.

In a way, neither explained it. Both expressed it mathematically in such a way that predictions could be made from that, but Newton as I recall explicitly denied that being an explanation: a reason why mass was attracted to other mass. Hence the theories are descriptive, not explanatory. I suppose it depends on whether mathematics is considered to be descriptive (mathematics as abstraction) or proscriptive (as being more fundamental than nature). The latter qualifies as an explanation, and is a significant part of why I suspect our universe supervenes on mathematics.

At least physicalism means that the 'natural' is fundamental — boundless

We seem to have different definition then. Again, I would have said that only of materialism.

In any case, however, with regards to consciousness, consciousness in a physicalist model would be considered natural.

Depends on your definition of consciousness. Some automatically define it to be a supernatural thing, meaning monism is a denial of its existence. I don't define it that way, so I'm inclined to agree with your statement.

What isn't natural in your view? — boundless

Anything part of our particular universe. Where you draw the boundary of 'our universe' is context dependent, but in general, anything part of the general quantum structure of which our spacetime is a part. So it includes say some worlds with 2 macroscopic spatial dimensions, but it doesn't include Conway's game of life.

I agree with you about the fact that mathematics doesn't depend on the universe.

Good, but being the idiot skeptic that I am, I've always had an itch about that one. What if 2+2=4 is a property of some universes (this one included), but is not objectively the case? How might we entertain that? How do you demonstrate that it isn't such a property? Regardless, if any progress is to be made, I'm willing to accept the objectivity of mathematics.

I have a different view about the relation between mathematics and the universe. For instance, I believe that mathematical truths would still be true even if the universe didn't exist.

I didn't say otherwise, so not sure how that's different. That's what it means to be independent of our universe.

It seems to me that you here are assuming that all possible 'non-magical' explanations are 'natural/physical' one.

By definition, no?

I also don't like to make the distinction between 'supernatural' and 'natural', unless one defines the terms in a precise way. Perhaps, I would define 'natural' as 'pertaining to spacetime' (so, both spacetime - or spacetimes if there is a multiverse - and whatever is 'in' it would qualify as 'natural') — boundless

OK, but that doesn't give meaning to the term. If the ghosts reported are real, then they're part of this universe, and automatically 'natural'. What would be an example of 'supernatural' then? It becomes just something that one doesn't agree with. I don't believe in ghosts, so they're supernatural. You perhaps believe in them, so they must be natural. Maybe it's pointless to even label things with that term.

Regarding the point you make about Chalmers, as I said before perhaps the 'hard problem' is better framed as an objection to all reductionist understanding of consciosuness that try to reduce it to the inanimate rather than an objection to 'physicalism' in a broad sense of the term.

Depends on what you mean by 'inanimate'. I mean, I am composed of atoms, which are 1) inanimate because atoms are essentially tiny rocks, and 2) animate because they're part of a life form.
A non-living device that experiences whatever such a device experiences would be (and very much is) declared to not be conscious precisely because the word (and 'experience' as well) is reserved for life forms. This is the word-game fallacy that I see often used in this forum (think W word).
That's like saying that creatures 'fall' to the ground, but rocks, being inanimate, do not 'fall' by definition, and instead are merely accelerated downward. Ergo, 'falling' requires a special property of matter that is only available to life.

is physical causality the same as logical causality?

Probably not, but I'd need an example of the latter, one that doesn't involve anything physical.

The definition of "magical" can only be something along the lines of:
Something that operates outside of the laws and properties of this reality.
Our understanding is irrelevant.

We don't understand how mass warps spacetime. But we don't think gravity is magic — Patterner

Hence 'magic' is a poor tool to wield. If Chalmers' 'all material having mental properties' is actually the case, then it wouldn't be magic, it would be a property of this reality. But still totally unexplained or even described since there's no current theory that supports that view. There sort of is, but nobody formally mentions it because, being a theory, it makes predictions, and those predictions likely fail, so best not to be vocal about those predictions.

Chalmers mentions the hurricane in this video:
"... from simple principles of airflow" — Patterner

The hurricane, which is somewhat understood in terms of airflow and thermodynamics (2-3 steps away from hurricane dynamics), is never described in terms of particles. But challenges to physicalism frequently request unreasonable explanations in terms of particles (again, perhaps 12 steps away). So work your way throught the 12 steps, understanding how particles make atoms, and atoms make molecules, etc. Expect each step to be expressed in terms of the prior one, and not in terms of the particles.

But what you find in all those other cases, like the hurricane, and the water wave, and so on, is complicated dynamics emerging from simple dynamics. Complicated structures emerging from simple structures. New and surprising structures. — Chalners

He admits this, but then denies, without justification, that qualia are not a complex effects emerging from simpler effects.

Kind of catching up on posts made since the 8 month dormancy.

Are we free agents or are our choices determined by variables such as genes, environments, nutrients, and experiences? — Truth Seeker

Depending on definitions, the two are not necessarily exclusive.

Not for me. I feel many choices as I'm making them. I struggle with them, looking for a reason too give one option a leg up. — Patterner

There you go. You seem to have a grasp on what choice actually is.

Technically, no, because the choice was made and we're not able to ever review it in this way. — AmadeusD

Being able to review it amounts to different initial conditions.

Theoretically, I think yes. But this involves agreeing that something billions of years ago would have to have happened differently.

Billions of years?? It would be interesting, in say MWI, so see how long it take for two worlds split from the same initial conditions to result in a different decision being made. It can be one second, but probably minutes. Maybe even days for a big decision like 'should I propose marriage to this girl?'. But billions of years? No. Your very existence, let along some decision you make, is due to quantum events at most a short time before your conception.

If hard determinism is true, then all choices are inevitable — Truth Seeker

Any determinism. That is also true under what is called soft determinism.
But as you've posted, determinism has little if anything to do with free will, or with moral responsibility. Substance dualism is a weird wrench in this debate. If there are two things, only the one in control is responsible for the actions of the body. So say if I get possessed by a demon (rabies say) and bite somebody, infecting them, am I responsible for that or is the demon? Is it fair to convict a rabid human of assault if they bite somebody? Kind of a moot point since they're going to die shortly anyway.

But I come at this from the opposite direction, it is the constraints of the hard physical world which restrict my strong free will. — Punshhh

Sure. I will to fly like superman, but damn that gravity compelling otherwise.

Take that away and I would have near absolute freedom.

Take away that and there would be no you have this freedom.

Assume the mind is not equivalent to the brain. Could you have chosen differently? You still had a set of background beliefs, a set of conditioned responses, a particular emotional state and physical state, were subject to a particular set of stimuli in your immediate environment, and you had a particular series of thoughts that concluded with the specific ice cream order that you made. Given this full context, how could you have made a different choice? — Relativist

Yes. This is why determinism is irrelevant to the free will debate.
If a supernatural entity is making your choices, then not only is determinism false, but all of natural physics is false. A whole new theory is needed, and there currently isn't one proposed.

As has been pointed out, natural physics is regularly updated, and thus the current consensus view is not 'the truth'. But despite all the updates and new discoveries, one thing stands: Physics operates under a set of rules. We're still discovering those rules, but some definitions of moral responsibility require the lack of any rules. That's not ever going to be found to be the case.

Because you're ignoring another major factor in Human Decision Making, namely randomness. — LuckyR

I pretty much deny this. All evolved decision making structures have seemed to favor deterministic primitives (such as logic gates), with no randomness, which Truth Seeker above correctly classifies as noise, something to be filtered out, not to be leveraged.

Sure, unpredictable is sometimes an advantage. Witness the erratic flight path of a moth, making it harder to catch in flight. But it uses deterministic mechanisms to achieve that unpredictability, not leveraging random processes.

Regarding Norton’s dome, I think it’s an interesting mathematical curiosity rather than a physically realistic case of indeterminism. — Truth Seeker

Classical physics is a mathematical model, which some have proposed is reversible. No physics is violated by watching the pool balls move back into the triangle with all the energy/momentum transferred to the cue ball stopped by the cue.
Norton's dome demonstrates that classical mathematics is actually not reversible, nor is it deterministic, the way that the equations seem to be at first glance.

As for the quantum–chaos connection, yes
...
In natural systems like weather, decoherence tends to suppress quantum-level randomness before it can scale up meaningfully.

You have a reference for this assertion, because I don't buy it at all. Most quantum randomness gets averaged out, sure, but each causes a completely different state of a given system, even if it's only a different location and velocity of each and every liquid molecule.

Evolution depends on quantum randomness, without which mutations would rarely occur and progress would proceed at a snails pace. There's a fine balance to be had there. Too much quantum radiation and DNA gets destroyed before it can be filtered for fitness. Too little and there's no diversity to evolve something better.

I don't know enough about it to have an opinion about it. Please tell me more about how quantum events affect the weather. Is there a book you can recommend so I can learn more about this? Thank you. — Truth Seeker

Apologies for not seeing that question for months.

There are whole books, yes. A nice (but still pop) article is this one:
https://www.space.com/chaos-theory-explainer-unpredictable-systems.html
The wiki version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect
The latter link in places talks specifically about the small initial differences being different quantum outcomes. The best known quantum amplifier is Schrodinger's cat, where a single quantum event quickly determines the fate of the cat, even if it isn't hidden in a box.

1. Determinism vs. Predictability:
Determinism doesn’t require predictability. A system can be deterministic and yet practically unpredictable due to sensitivity to initial conditions. — Truth Seeker

Even classical mechanics has been shown to be nondeterministic. Norton's dome is a great example of an effect without a cause. Nevertheless, a deterministic interpretation of physics would probably require hidden variables that determine the effect that appears uncaused.

Chaos theory actually presupposes determinism - small differences in starting conditions lead to vastly different outcomes because the system follows deterministic laws.

But it doesn't require determinism. Chaos theory applies just as well to nondeterministic interpretations of physics.

If the system were non-deterministic, the equations of chaos wouldn’t even apply.

Well, deterministic equations would not apply. How about Schrodinger's equation? That function is very chaotic, and it is deterministic only under interpretations. like MWI.

2. Quantum Amplification Is Not Evidence of Freedom:
As you already noted, even if quantum indeterminacy occasionally affects macroscopic events, randomness is not freedom. A decision influenced by quantum noise is not a “free” decision — it’s just probabilistic. It replaces deterministic necessity with stochastic chance. That doesn’t rescue libertarian free will; it only introduces randomness into causation.

Agree. So very few seem to realize this.

To me, freedom is making your own choices and not having something else do it for you. Determinism is a great tool for this, which is why almost all decision making devices utilize as much as possible deterministic mechanisms such as binary logic.

3. Quantum Interpretations and Evidence:
You’re right that there are non-deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics - such as Copenhagen, GRW, or QBism - but there are also deterministic ones: de Broglie-Bohm (pilot-wave), Many-Worlds, and superdeterministic models.

Superdeterminism is not listed as a valid interpretation of QM since it invalidates pretty much all empirical evidence. It's a bit like BiV view in that manner. The view doesn't allow one to trust any evidence.

MWI is a good example of chaotic behavior. You have all these worlds, and since weather and which creatures evolve are all chaotic functions, most of those worlds don't have you in it, or even humans. Most of those worlds don't have Earth in it. The deterministic part only says that all these possibilities must exist. There's no chance to any of them. But do they exist equally? That's a weird question to ponder.
No, I don't buy into MWI since I feel it gets some critical things wrong.

None of them are empirically distinguishable so far. Until we have direct evidence for objective indeterminacy, determinism remains a coherent and arguably simpler hypothesis (per Occam’s razor).

Of the two deterministic interpretations you mention, MWI is arguably the simplest, and DBB is probably the most complicated. This illustrates that 'deterministic' is not necessarily 'simpler'.

4. Macroscopic Decoherence:
Decoherence ensures that quantum superpositions in the brain or weather systems effectively collapse into stable classical states extremely quickly.

At least under interpretations that support collapse.

Whatever quantum noise exists gets averaged out before it can influence neural computation in any meaningful way

Yes, that what I meant by 'utilize as much as possible deterministic mechanisms'.

except in speculative scenarios, which remain unproven.

In particular, no biological quantum amplifier has been found, and such a mechanism would very much have quickly evolved if there was any useful information in that quantum noise.

Bottom line is that we pretty much agree with each other.

You seem to be arguing against a position that nobody takes. Neither Chalmers nor anyone else believe geometric PoV is mysterious. Everyone agrees that qualia is the fundamental issue. — hypericin

The title of Chalmers' paper quoted in the OP implies very much that the hard problem boils down to first vs third person, and that qualia are considered just 'many aspects' of that mystery. To requote from my OP:
"The first person is, at least to many of us, still a huge mystery. The famous "Mind-Body Problem," in these enlightened materialist days, reduces to nothing but the question "What is the first person, and how is it possible?". There are many aspects to the first-person mystery. The first-person view of the mental encompasses phenomena which seem to resist any explanation from the third person."

In asking 'what is the first person?', he seems to be talking about something less trivial than what we called a geometric point of view, but I cannot identify what else there is to it.

Regarding the distinction between 'living beings' and AI — boundless

That's a false dichotomy. Something can be all three (living, artificial, and/or intelligent), none, or any one or two of them.

[/quote]In virtue of what properties of the inanimate aspects of reality can consciousness (with its 'first-person perspective', 'qualia' etc) arise?[/quote]I can't even answer that about living things. I imagine the machines will find their own way of doing it and not let humans attempt to tell them how. That's how it's always worked.

I think that the undeniable existence of mathematical truths also points to something beyond 'physicalism'*.

Beyond materialism you perhaps mean. Physicalism/naturalism doesn't assert that all is physical/natural. Materialism does. That seems the primary difference between the two.
Of course I wouldn't list mathematics as being 'something else', but rather a foundation for our physical. But that's just me. Physicalism itself makes no such suggestion.
PS: Never say 'undeniable'. There's plenty that deny that mathematical truths are something that 'exists'. My personal opinion is that such truths exist no less than does our universe, but indeed is in no way dependent on our universe.

That there are an infinite number of primes seems to be something that is independent from human knowledge — boundless

Agree, but there are those that define mathematics as a human abstraction, in which case it wouldn't be independent of human knowledge. I distinguish mathematics from 'knowledge of mathematics', putting the two on nearly opposite ends of my supervention hierarchy.

Regarding the 'magic' thing, then, it seems to me that the criterion you give about 'not being magical' is something like being 'totally understandable', something that is not too dissimilar to the ancient notion of 'intelligibility'. — boundless

Let's reword that as not being a function of something understandable. The basic particle behavior of electrons and such are pretty well understood, but we're just beginning to scratch the surface of understanding of what goes on in a star, especially when it transitions. That current lack of understanding does not imply that astronomers consider stellar evolution to be a supernatural process. I mean, they used to think the gods carted the stars across the sky each night, which actually is a supernatural proposal.
Actual proposal of magic is an assertion that current ideas have been demonstrated incapable of explaining some phenomenon, such as the rotation curve of galaxies. Dark matter had to be invented to explain that, and there are those that still won't accept dark matter theory. Pretty hard to find any of it in a lab, right? So there are alternate theories(e.g. MoND), but none predict as well as dark matter theory. Key there is 'theory'. Without one of those, it's still just magic.
If one dares to promote Chalmers' ideas to the level of theory, it does make predictions, and it fails them. So proponents tend to not escalate their ideas to that level.

It doesn't seem possible IMO to explain in purely physical terms why from "Socrates is a man" and "men are mortal" that "Socrates is mortal" — boundless

That's mathematics, not physics, even if the nouns in those statements happen to have physical meaning. They could be replaced by X Y Z and the logical meaning would stand unaltered.

Well this is then just a speculation about technological capability, which I referred to conditionally. — Apustimelogist

Just the manufacture seems to defy any tech. Can't say 3D print a squirrel, finish, and then 'turn it on'. Or can you? Best I could come up with is a frog, printed totally frozen. When finished, thaw it out. Frogs/turtles can deal with that. Again, I am mostly agreeing with your side of the discussion with Joshs.

The point was that I don't believe there is anything in the field of neuroscience or A.I. that produces a doubt about the idea that we will be able to keep continuing to see what brains do as instantiated entirely in physical interactions of components as opposed to some additional mental woo. — Apustimelogist

As already noted, that was put rather well. There are claims to the contrary, but they seem to amount to no more than assertions. None of the claims seem backed.

The simpler model is proven wrong all the time. Put more accurately, scientific paradigms are replaced by different ones all the time. — Joshs

Agree. Science is never complete, and there are very much current known holes, such as the lack of a unified field theory. These continuous updates to the consensus view doesn't stop that view from being the simpler model. I am looking for a falsification specifically of physical monism, hard to do without any competing theories.

Funny that some declared physics to be complete at some point, with the only work remaining being working out some constants to greater precision. That was uttered famously by Lord Kelvin, shortly before the quantum/relativity revolution that tore classical physics to pieces, never to recover.
So yes, there very well could arise some theory of mental properties of matter, but at this time there isn't one at all, and much worse, no need for one has been demonstrated.

For instance, certain embodied enactivist approaches to the brain , such as Francisco Varela’s neurophenomenology, sweepingly rethink this relation.

Interesting reference. Seems perhaps to be a new methodology and not necessarily something that falsifies any particular philosophical stance. Maybe you could point out some key quotes that I could find in my initial scan of some of the references to this.

So, on its own terms, what you call the ‘simple’ empirical model can’t be defined in some static, ahistorical way as third person physicalism as opposed to subjective feeling.

Scientific naturalism does not preclude subjective evidence. I don't know what 'third person physicalism' is, as distinct from physicalism. 'Third person' refers to how any view might be described, but it says nothing about what the view proposes.

As soon as we start thinking that we have to ‘invent’ a body and an environment for a device we separately invent

Sorry, but my proposal did not separate anything like you suggest. There is one system with a boundary, all simulated, something that can be achieved in principle. There would be a real person in a real room, and a simulation of same. Thing is to see if either can figure out which he is.

The test requires a known state of the real subject, and that pushes the limits of 'in principle' perhaps a bit too far. Such a state in sufficient precision is prevented per Heisenberg. So much for my falsification test of physicalism. Better to go long-run and simulate a human from say a zygote, but then there's no real person with whom experience can be compared.

... ignore the fact that we ourselves were not first invented and then placed in a body ...

What does it even syntactically mean for X to be placed in X?

What I mean is that we can’t start with inorganic parts that we understand in terms of already fixed properties ( which would appear to be intrinsic to how we define the inorganic) and then design self-organizing capacities around these parts. — Joshs

Why not? With or without the design part... Designing it likely omits most of those properties since they serve little purpose to the designer.

Granted, "described" might not be the best word. Maybe it's wrong wording to say the movement of air particles in a room is a description of the room's heat and pressure. — Patterner

That's like one step away. Yes, heat is simple and can pretty much be described that way. From atoms to consciousness is about 12 steps away (my quote, and no, I didn't count). I gave the example of trying to explain stellar dynamics in terms of particle interactions.

The title of this topic is about the first/third person divide, which Chalmers asserts to be fundamental to said 'hard problem', but it isn't. The qualia is what's hard. — noAxioms


This feels like a strange misunderstanding. Qualia are intrinsically first person. When people talk about first person experience being mysterious, they are talking about qualia, not mere geometric POV. — hypericin

I think that's what I said. It makes qualia the fundamental issue, not first person, which is, as you call it, mere geometric PoV.

This especially raises my eyebrows, because I remember a time you thought you were a p zombie!

Kind of still do, but claiming to be a p-zombie opens myself to the possibility that some others are not, and if so, that all of say quantum theory is wrong, or at least grossly incomplete.

No, I cannot describe thoughts in terms of neurons any more than I can describe a network file server in terms of electrons tunneling through the base potential of transistors. It's about 12 levels of detail removed from where it should be. — noAxioms

Ok, wrong word. You agreed they are the same thing. But they can't be described as the same thing. — Patterner

Not sure what two things are the same here, but I don't think I said that two different things are the same thing. Certainly not in that quote.

I am trying to understand your position.

My position is simply that nobody has ever demonstrated the simpler model wrong. Plenty (yourself included) reject that simplicity, which is your choice. But the physical view hasn't been falsified, and there is no current alternative theory of physics that allows what you're proposing. You'd think somebody would have come up with one if such a view was actually being taken seriously by the scientific community.

I really don't understand what you are going on about. A brain is a physical object. In principal, you can build a brain that does all the things brains do from scratch if you had the technological capabilities. — Apustimelogist

Given their trouble even producing a manufactured cell from scratch (a designed one, not a reproduction of abiogenesis, which is unlikely to be done), you wonder if it can even be done in principle. Certainly a brain would not be operational. It needs a being to be in, and that being needs an environment, hence my suggestion of a simulation of <a person in a small room>. The other thing questionably doable is the scanning phase, to somehow take a full snapshot of a living thing, enough info to, in principle, reproduce it. Do they have a simulation of a living cell? Are we even that far yet?

Anyway, in general, I agree with your stance, even if perhaps not with what cannot be done even in principle.

You’re missing the point. Even taking into account all of the biological lineages which become extinct, what it means to be a living system is to be self-organizing, and this self-organization is dynamic. — Joshs

Yea, which is why mechanical devices are not yet living things. It can happen. Whether it will or not is an open question at this point. A device being living is not a requirement for it to think or to have a point of view.

This means that to continue existing as that creature from moment to moment is to make changes in itself that maintain the normative self-consistency of its functioning in its environment while at the same time adapting and accommodating itself to the always new features of its environment.

You mean like putting on a coat when winter comes? What does this have to do with the topic again? The definition of 'life' comes up only because you're asserting that life seems to have access to a kind of physics that the same matter not currently part of a lifeform does not.

The problem is, no third person explanation can arrive at first person experience. — hypericin

I guess I didn't see much difference between a description and an explanation. My point was that no anything will arrive at the 'experience' part of it.
Chalmers' explanation certainly doesn't arrive at first person experience. "A sauce is needed" is no more an explanation than it not being needed.

And I disagree. First person (the PoV part, not the human qualia associated with 'experience') is trivial. The experience part (qualia and such) is 'what it is like', and that part cannot be known about something else, especially even when it's not even complex. The first person part seems trivial, and entire articles are nevertheless written suggesting otherwise, but seemingly without identifying exactly what's problematic about it.

The title of this topic is about the first/third person divide, which Chalmers asserts to be fundamental to said 'hard problem', but it isn't. The qualia is what's hard. I can't know what it's like to be a bat, but even a rock has a first person PoV, even if it utterly lacks the ability to actually view anything.

The confidence you have in the power of algorithms seems to arise from anunderlying assumption that every natural process is 'algorithmic'. — boundless

Not sure what you mean by that, but I can perhaps say that every natural process can in principle be simulated via an algorithmic device that has sufficient time and memory. (Speed/power is not one of the requirements). This assumes a form of physicalism, yes, and the statement would likely be false if that was not assumed.

I am not sure that they can ever be able to give us a completely accurate model/simulation of all processes.

I don't think a classical simulation can be done of something not classical, such as a quantum computer. Heck, even grass has been shown to be utilizing quantum computation, so what does that do to my claim that grass can be simulated?

But for me my ... ability to choose ... [does] not seem to be easily explainable in terms of algorithms — boundless

You must have an incredibly different notion of 'choice' when there's some many trivial devices that make them every second. It's not hard at all.
But his seems illustrative of my point. You finding something as trivial as choice to be physically inexplicable is likely due to very related reasons why you might find something as trivial as a first person point of view similarly inexplicable. You're already presuming something other than physicalism under which these things are trivial.

For instance, if we were talking in the 14th century and you claimed that 'atoms' exist and 'somehow' interact with forces that we do not know to form the visible objects, would be this 'magic' (of course, you have to imagine yourself as having the scientific knowledge of the time)?

Yes, that would qualify as magic. It's a guess, and a lucky one. Elements as distinct from compounds was still hundreds of years away, so 'atom' meant just 'tiny indivisible bit' and there were no known examples of one, even if some substances known at the time happened to be pure elements. BTW, 'atom' no longer implies 'tiny indivisible bit'. The word unfortunately stuck to a quanta of a specific element and not to whatever is currently considered to be an indivisible component of matter.

Am I wrong to say that, however, that the operations of these 'thinking machines' are completely explainable in terms of algorithms? — boundless

Probably not so. The algorithms developed by say alphaZero have defied explanation. Nobody knows how they work. That isn't an assertion that the operations are not the result of deterministic processes. All the same things can be said of humans.

Is there something it's like to be a fly evading a swat? How do we know? How could we ever find out? Isn't the inability to answer those questions a "hard problem"? — RogueAI

From observation, the answer to that question is yes or no depending on if it supports my personal conclusions on the matter. Hence assertions of there perhaps being something it is like to be the fly, but not something it is like to be an autonymous drone doing somewhat the same things and more.

This is what Google AI says about the release of neurotransmitters: — Patterner

Cool level of detail. I notice no influence from say chemicals in the blood stream. It sounds all very like logic gates. A similar breakdown of transistor operation could be made, which are sometimes more binary and less analog, but still either could be implemented via the components of the other. The chemical influences would be harder to mimic with transistors and would likely play a role only at higher levels.

I also notice nowhere in those 6 steps any kind of mental properties of matter playing any sort of role that they somehow are forbidden from doing in transistors. Were that the case, then my claim of either being capable of being implemented by the components of the other would be false. This lack of external mental influence (or at least the lack of a theory suggesting such) is strong evidence for the physicalist stance.

You say all of this, along with whatever other processes are taking place, is a description of not only things like receiving sensory input and distinguishing wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, and receptors on my tongue distinguishing molecules that have made contact, but also seeing the color red, and tasting the sweetness of sugar. More than that, it's a description of my thoughts.

No, I cannot describe thoughts in terms of neurons any more than I can describe a network file server in terms of electrons tunneling through the base potential of transistors. It's about 12 levels of detail removed from where it should be. Your incredulity is showing.

No matter how apparently flexible its behavior , that flexibility will always be framed and and limited to the model of thinking that dates to the time that the product is released to the market. — Joshs

No so for devices that find their own models of thinking.

As soon as it is released, it already is on the way to obsolescence

So similar to almost every creature. Name a multicelled creature they have a fossil of that exists today. I can't think of one. They're all obsolete. A rare fossil might have some living descendants today (I can think of no examples), but the descendant is a newer model, not the same species.

The singularity is defined as the point at which human engineers play little role in the evolution of machine thinking. Humans will also cease being necessary in their manufacturing process, and I suspect the trend of humans handing more and more of their tasks to machines will continue to the point that the singularity will be welcomed.

It will be interesting to see what role evolution plays in that context, where changes are deliberate, but selection is still natural. Also, it may not necessarily be many machines in competition for resources instead of meany ideas competing for being 'the machine'.

The hard problem is Q2 and it is legitimate for science to want to know how a neural net can have experiences. — Mijin

I can accept that.'

OK. So what is 'physical' in your view? IIRC you also agree that physical properties are relational, i.e. they describe how a given physical object relate to/interact with other physical objects. — boundless

It means that all energy and particles and whatnot obey physical law, which yes, pretty much describes relations. That's circular, and thus poor. It asserts that this description is closed, not interfered with by entities not considered physical. That's also a weak statement since if it was ever shown that matter had mental properties, those properties would become natural properties, and thus part of physicalism.
So I guess 'things interact according to the standard model' is about as close as I can get. This whole first/third person thing seems a classical problem, not requiring anything fancy like quantum or relativity theory, even if say chemistry would never work without the underlying mechanisms. A classical simulation of a neural network (with chemistry) would be enough. No need to simulate down to the molecular or even quantum precision.

'Scientistic physicalism' is also inconsistent IMO because, after all, that there is a physical world is not something we discover by doing science.

That's a philosophical stance, I agree.

Other than 'consciousness' I also believe in the existence of other things that are 'real' but not 'physical'. I am thinking, for instance, of mathematical truths.

OK. Not being a realist, I would query what you might mean by that. I suspect (proof would be nice) that mathematical truths are objectively true, and the structure that includes our universe supervenes on those truths. It being true implying that it's real depends on one's definition of 'real', and I find it easier not to worry about that arbitrary designation.

But it does sometimes clarify at least a meaning that 'physical' can have. For instance, if by matter one means "whatever object exists in a given location of space in a given time", would you agree that this is also what you mean by 'physical'?

Is space and time not physical then? Neither meets your criteria of 'object', but I think I would include them under 'physicalism'. Not all universes have them, and those might have very different definitions of what is physical or material.

Has consciousness a 'definite location' in space, for instance? — boundless

Me considering that to be a process of material that has a location, it seems reasonably contained thus, yes. Not a point mind you, but similarly a rock occupies a region of space and time.

IMHO you're thinking in rigid categories. Either one is a 'physicalist/naturalist' or one accepts 'magic'.

Right.' Science cannot make progress with an attitude like that. Most magic is replaced by natural explanations, but occasionally 'magic' explanations are adopted as part of naturalism. I gave a couple examples of that.
By magic, I mean an explanation that just says something unknown accounts for the observation, never an actual theory about how this alternate explanation might work. To my knowledge, there is no theory anywhere of matter having mental properties, and how it interacts with physical matter in any way. The lack of that is what puts it in the magic category.

Maybe there is something that is not 'natural'. Again, mathematical truths seem to me exactly an example of something that is not natural and yet real.

That seems to be like saying atoms are not real because they're not made of rocks.

One would stretch too much the meaning of 'natural/physical' to also include mathematical truths in it. — boundless

I agree, since those truths hold hopefully in any universe, but our natural laws only work in this one (and similar ones).

why you think that consciousness is 'physical'?

I've seen no evidence from anybody that physical interactions cannot account for it. Sure, it's complex and we don't know how it works. But that it cannot work? That's never been demonstrated.

At the end of the day all LLMs are very complex computers and they operate according to algorithms (programmed by us) just like mechanical calculators. — boundless

I can argue that people also are this, programmed by ancestors and the natural selection that chose them. The best thinking machines use similar mechanisms to find their own best algorithms, not any algorithm the programmer put there. LLM is indeed not an example of this.

I can see how electrons moving from atom to atom is electricity.
I can see how the movement of air molecules is heat and pressure.
I can see how the movement of an object is force: F=ma.
I can see how a fluid, whether liquid or gas, flowing around an object creates lift, which is a factor in flight.

All of those examples are physical activities
I don't see how self-awareness is a physical activity — Patterner

You understand the former because those are quite trivial interactions. Then you jump to something with complexity beyond the current state of science. But not understanding how something works is not any sort of evidence that it isn't still a physical process.

The game playing machine beats everybody at Go. Nobody, not even its creators, know how it works. It wasn't taught any strategy, only the rules. It essentially uses unnatural selection to evolve an algorithm that beats all opponents. That evolved (hard deterministic) algorithm is what nobody understands, even if they look at the entire data map. But nobody concludes that it suddenly gets access to magic. Such a conclusion comes with an obvious falsification test.

Descartes asks "What can I know with certainty?" while Husserl asks "How does anything come to be given to consciousness at all?"​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ — Joshs

Not only am I not certain about what Descartes knows with certainty, but I actually find the conclusion unlikely. Of course I have access to science that he doesn't.
As for 'come to be given to ...", that seems the conclusion is already drawn, and he's trying to rationalize how that might work.

from something which is Turing complete: i.e. they can compute anything in principle. — Apustimelogist

Something Turing complete can compute anything a Turing machine can, which is a lot, but not anything. Technically nothing is Turing complete since a Turing machine has infinite data on which to operate.
Such machines are a model of capability, but not in any way a model of efficiency. Nobody makes one to get any actual work done, but it's wicked interesting to make one utilizing nonstandard components like train tracks.

As Stephen Wolfram notes: “The most powerful AI might not be programmed; it might be cultivated, like a garden of interacting dynamical systems.”​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ — Joshs

I like that quote.

Obviously, to artificially recreate a human brain to acceptable approximation, you need to construct this computational system with the kinds of inputs, kinds of architectures, capabilities, whatever, that a human does. — Apustimelogist

Were I to simulate a human, I'd probably not give it inputs at all. Almost all simulations I've run do it stand-alone with no input at all. Logged output for later analysis, but that doesn't affect the simulation. Of course this means your simulated person needs to be in a small environment, also simulated.

I will say bluntly that no machine we invent will do what we do, which is to think.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ — Joshs

Noted. How very well justified. Your quote is about LLMs which are mildly pimped out search engines. Compare that do devices which actually appear to think and to innovate. What do you call it if you refuse to apply the term 'think' to what it's doing?

The quote goes on to label the devices as tools. True now, but not true for long. I am arguably a tool since I spent years as a tool to make money for my employer. Am I just a model then?

Postmodern philosophy has become like Big Pharma, in that the latter creates ailments to sustain medicinal inventions while the former creates scenarios bordering on superfluous overreach — Mww

Nice analogy. It explains Chalmers' motivation for creating a problem where there really isn't one.

The question is how the brain can have experiences at all, and right now we don't have any model for that. — Mijin

Sure we do. Q3 is easy. The ball-catching robot was one. A fly evading a swat is another. If one is searching for a model, you start simple and work your way up to something as complex as how our experience works.
You can claim that either is an automaton, but then you need a clear definition of what distinguishes an automaton from a sufficiently complex one.

My simulation example would demonstrate experience, but it wouldn't tell anything how it works. Only that it does. Nothing would know what it's like to be a bat except the simulated bat.

If you put your hand on a hot stove, we already understand very well which nerves get activated, which pain centers of the brain light up etc. What we don't understand is where the unpleasant feeling comes from.

But the easy part you describe is Q3, Chalmers' hard problem. Understanding where the feelings come from is indeed difficult, but being a Q2 question, open to science. Both are questions with third person answers. Only Q1 has a first person answer, which cannot be conveyed with third person language.
Also, part of 'certain parts of the brain lighting up' is the unpleasantness doing its thing, not just a direct stimulation due to signals coming in from some injury. And then there's the awareness of the unpleasantness and so forth. That lights up as well.

Now, in my view, subjective experience is a hard problem because it doesn't even appear as though an explanation is possible.

That depends on what criteria you place on an explanation being satisfactory. If it gets to the point of answering Q1, then yea, it's not going to be possible.

I mean really, what designates one experience as negative and another not? Different chemicals generated perhaps? Dopamine for instance plays a significant role in positive feedback, even if it is subtle enough not to be consciously noticed. A negative chemical could be called nope-amine, but clearly it can't be subtle for dire situations. The negative experience is not what pulls your hand back from the fire. The unpleasantness is a slow dressing on top of what is actually quite a fast reaction. Pain itself might not necessarily be itself qualia, but the experience of it is. So something crude (our fly) would react to injury but lack the complexity to experience the pointless unpleasantness.

Now what have I done? I said that the fly reacts to motion, and I called that consciousness, but then I say the fly detects damage but perhaps doesn't 'experience' that as pain. I'm being inconsistent due perhaps to loose definitions. Perhaps consciousness should be reserved for the higher functioning creatures that add that layer of awareness of these otherwise automatic reaction mechanicsms. Neither the fly nor the ball-catching robot has that. In this sense, my defense of today's machines not having consciousness is wrong. It would have to be programmed in, or evolved in. The latter presumes a machine that is capable of mutation and selection.
All that aside, both the fly and the robot have first person experience, even if the qualia we want isn't there. And per the OP Chalmers quote, "The famous "Mind-Body Problem," ... reduces to nothing but the question "What is the first person, and how is it possible?""

This is all amateur speculation of course. Would value your critique of my naive musings.

Frankly, I think you're acknowledging that it is a difficult problem, but are reluctant to use the word "hard" because you don't want to climb down. — Mijin

I call Chalmers' problem 'hard' because it's his phrase, and his problem is Q3. I call your Q2 problem 'difficult' because it actually is that, even if I think Q3 isn't difficult at all unless unreasonable assumptions are made.

I'm not using [self] that way. — noAxioms
To what else could first-person perspective belong? — Mww

I shy away from the term 'self'. While it can be a synonym for the thing in question, the use of it often generates an implication of separateness (me, and myself), and also identity, something that makes a system state the same system as some state say an hour ago. This identity (of even a rock for that matter) has incredible pragmatic utility, but under scrutiny, it requires classicality that has been proven incorrect, and thus doesn't hold up to rational analysis. The subject of personal identity deserves its own topic and I'd rather not delve into it here.

Ok but notice that in most forms of physicalism that I am aware of, there is a tendency to reduce all reality to the 'physical' and the 'physical' is taken to mean "what can be know[n], in principle, by science" — boundless

That bothers me since it contradicts physicalism since there can be physical things that cannot be known, even in principle. Science cannot render to a non-bat, even in principle, what it's like to be a bat. So I would prefer a different definition.

(IIRC in another discussion we preferred 'materialism' to denote such views).

Materialism typically carries a premise that material is fundamental, hence my reluctance to use the term.

Still, however, I believe that any view in which 'consciousness' emerges from something else has a conceptual gap in explaining how consciousness 'came into being' in the first place. — boundless

People have also questioned about how eyes came into being, as perhaps an argument for ID. ID, like dualism, posits magic for the gaps, but different magic, where 'magic is anything outside of naturalism. Problem is, anytime some new magic is accepted, it becomes by definition part of naturalism. Hypnosis is about as good an example as I can come up with. Meteorites is another. Science for a long time rejected the possibility of rocks falling from the sky. They're part of naturalism now.

The content of my thoughts perhaps can become public. But my experience of thinking those thoughts remains private. — boundless

Agree.

The "first person" part is not a mystery — Patterner

Chalmers says otherwise, per the quote in italics in my reply to Mijin above. But I agree with you. I don't find that part problematic at all.

It seems to meet you are saying brain states and conscious events are the same thing. So the arrangements of all the particles of the brain, which are constantly changing, and can only change according to the laws of physics that govern their interactions, ARE my experience of seeing red; feeling pain; thinking of something that doesn't exist, and going through everything to make it come into being; thinking of something that can't exist; on and on. It is even the case that the progressions of brain states are the very thoughts of thinking about themselves.

Is that how you see things?

I'm willing to accept all that without edit. A few asterisks perhaps, but still yes.

They are subjective constructions, abstractions, idealizations which result from our taking our own perspectivally changing experience, comparing it with that of others — Joshs

How can you compare your experience to that of others if their experience is not available to you?

First person questions are not about what is the case, what the objective facts are.

Funny, but 'cogito ergo sum' is pitched as a first person analysis concluding an objective fact. I personally don't buy that conclusion at all, but that's me not being a realist.

It seems that people are talking about many different issues.
Q1: What is the subjective experience of red? More to the point, what is something else's subjective experience of red? What is that like?
Q2 How does the experience of red (or any qualia) work? This seems to be a third person question, open to science.
Q3 Why is there subjective experience at all? Why is there something it is like to be something? (per proponents: apparently not anything, but just some things)

Q1 is illustrated by Mary's room. She knows Q2 and Q3. She's somehow a total expert on how it works, and she has subjective experience, just not of red. So she doesn't know what it's like to experience red until the experience actually occurs. She cannot, but others seem to assert otherwise.

'The hard problem' as described by Chalmers seems to be Q3, but I don't find that one hard at all. Call it being flippant if you want, but nobody, including Chalmers, seems capable of demonstrating what the actual problem is. The point of this topic is to have somebody inform me what I'm missing, what is so mysterious.

I purely want to understand how the brain does what it does, and when it comes to experiencing "green" or whatever, it's the most unfathomable of brain processes right now. — Mijin

OK, but that seems to be a Q2 problem, a very hard problem indeed, but not the hard problem.

Pain is a loaded word. Something far from being human (a tree?) might experience pain very differently than does a mammal. Should the same word still be used? Depends how it's defined I guess.

If I make an AI how can I know if it feels pain or not? And so on.

'AI' implies intelligence, and most would agree that significant intelligence isn't required to experience pain. So how does a frog experience it? That must be a simpler problem, but it also might be a significantly different experience compared to us.

AI pain is different to human pain. I mean, probably, sure, but there's no model or deeper breakdown that that supposition is coming from.

Quite right. Q2 is hard indeed. And said definition is needed.

2) Just shrug that it couldn't be any other way e.g. About whether we can know what another person experiences.

Wrong problem again. That's Q1, and what I'm shrugging off is Q3 because I need to see an actual problem before I can answer better than with a dismissal.

Back in the late 80's we gave this robot (a repurposed automotive welding robot, bolted to the floor) some eyes and the vision processor that our company sold. It was hardly AI. We got the thing to catch balls thrown at it. It can't do that without experience, but it very much can do it without intelligence. AI was a long way off back then. To the robot (the moving parts, plus the cameras and processors, off to the side), if that experience wasn't first person, what was it?

In a way, the 'hard problem' is IMO a form of a more general problem that arises when it is assumed that one can have a complete knowledge of anything by purely empirical means. — boundless

While (almost?) everybody agrees that such knowledge cannot be had by any means, I don't think that makes it an actual problem. Certainly nobody has a solution that yields that knowledge. If it (Q1) is declared to be a problem, then nobody claims that any view would solve it.

In the case of consciousness, there is the direct experience of 'privateness' of one's own experience that instead seems a 'undeniable fact' common to all instances of subjective experiences. Its presence doesn't seem to depend on the content of a given experience, but this 'privateness' seems a precondition to any experience.

Not sure about that. One can put on one of those neuralink hats and your thoughts become public to a point. The privateness is frequently a property of, but not a necessity of consciousness.

In the case of Dennett, his misunderstanding is evident when he believes that Mary the colour scientist can learn the meaning of red through a purely theoretical understanding. — sime

What the heck is the meaning of red? This wording suggests something other than the experience of red, which is what Mary is about.
Dennett is perhaps why I put the word 'almost?' up above.

In the case of Chalmer, (or perhaps we should say "the early Chalmer"), his misunderstanding is evident in his belief in a hard problem. Chalmers was correct to understand that first-person awareness isn't reducible to physical concepts, but wrong to think of this as a problem.

This all sounds a lot like you're agreeing with me.

These distinct uses of the same flag (i.e uses of the same lexicon) are not reducible to each other and the resulting linguistic activities are incommmensurable yet correlated in a non-public way that varies with each language user. This dual usage of language gives rise to predicate dualism, which the hard problem mistakes for a substance or property dualism.

And this analogy is helpful, thanks.

So it seems difficult to see how any system, if it experiences at all, can experience anything but itself. That makes first-person experience not mysterious at all. — noAxioms

The mystery is how it experiences at all. — Patterner

OK, but experience seems almost by definition first person, so my comment stands.

Why should bioelectric activity traveling aling neurons, neurotransmitters jumping synapses, etc., be conscious?

You're attempting to ask the correct question. Few are doing that, so I appreciate this. Is it the activity that is conscious, or the system implementing the activity that is? I think the latter. 'why should ...'? Because it was a more fit arrangement than otherwise.
The ball-catching robot described above is an example with orders of magnitude less complexity. There are those that say that such a system cannot be conscious since it is implemented with logic gates and such, but 1) so are you, and 2) it can't do what it does without it, unless one defines 'conscious' in some athropomorphic biased way. That example illustrates why I find the problem not hard at all. I don't have that bias baggage.

Regarding 1st and 3rd person, there is no amount of information and knowledge that can make me have your experience. Even if we experience the exact same event, at the exact same time, from the exact same view (impossible for some events, though something like a sound introduced into identical sense-depravation tanks might be as good as), I cannot have your experience. Because there's something about subjective experience other than all the physical facts.

Agree with all that. This relates to Q1 above, not the hard problem (Q3).

Why doesn’t all this information-processing go on “in the dark”, free of any inner feel?

I find that impossible. It's like asking how processing can go on without the processing. The question makes sense if there's two things, the processor and the experiencer (of probably the process, but not necessarily), but not even property dualism presumes that.

And in The Conscious Mind, [Chalmers] writes:
Why should there be conscious experience at all?

For one, it makes finding food a lot easier than a lack of it, but then Chalmers presumes something lacking it can still somehow do that, which I find contradictory. The reasoning falls apart if it isn't circular.

Why should it be that consciousness seems to be so tightly correlated with activity that is utterly different in nature than conscious experience? — Donald Hoffman

Different in language used to describe it. I see no evidence of actual difference in nature.

Thanks for the quotes. I didn't want to comment on them all.

My position is simply that when it comes to subjective experience there remains a large explanatory gap; questions we cannot answer and would like to, with actual practical implications. — Mijin

I guess I had hoped somebody (the article perhaps) would actually identify those questions and in particular, how physicalism fails in a way that their alternative does not.
Their view certainly doesn't let me know what it's like (for a bat) to be a bat, so that is not a problem that is solved by anybody, and isn't ever going to be.
I did post a crude physical explanation and nobody tore it apart. I'm sure it is rejected, but I don't know why. Surely their arguments are stronger than mere incredulity, and nobody explains how their alternate explanation works in any detail close to what's known about the physical explanation.

A robot currently doesn't feel biological pain because it isn't particularly fit. That just isn't one of its current requirements. Such qualia is put there by evolution, and robot fitness has never been a design goal. Given them actually being selected for fitness, systems with damage avoidance processing would be more fit than ones without it.

I think noAxioms, because you've started this thread from a position of "I don't know why there's all the fuss about...", you're responding to the problems and questions somewhat flippantly.

True, I am. I don't know what the unanswerable questions are, and how these alternatives answer them instead of just hide them behind a dark curtain.

Either with your best guess -- which is meaningless here, if the conclusion is not coming from a specific model or description it's not a solution, and we have no reason to think it's right.

There's always Occam's razor. An explanation without a new never-witnessed fundamental is more like than one that posits something. A new entity (dark matter for instance) requires a real problem that isn't solved without the new thing. And they've tried with existing methods. I picked dark matter because it's still never really been proved, but it seemed simpler than altering the basic laws at large scales.

This is backwards. The input is not inherently negative; it's just data. — Mijin

Right. I worded that wrong. The entity which interprets that data as negative is likely more fit than one that doesn't.

If someone were to peel off your skin, it's not a choice of language that you call that a negative experience

It very much is such a choice. There are mechanical devices, not necessarily AI, that detect damage and take measures to limit it. There are many that assert that no mechanical device can feel pain, by definition. This is part of my issue with argument-by-dictionary.

-- the brain somehow generates an extremely unpleasant experience using a mechanism that as yet we don't understand.

But we know why the brain evolved to interpret the experience as unpleasant. How it accomplished that seems to be a matter of detail that is being worked out, and that some know far better than I. Chalmers on the other hand doesn't even begin to offer an understanding about how his solution does it. He just asserts it happens elsewise, if not elsewhere.
His whole paper seems merely speculative, despite its claim to be demonstrative.

it wouldn't rule out that we can imagine another primary color independent of stimulus.

Interesting assertion. I can't do it, but I agree that I cannot prove that it cannot be done.

Pretty easy to make an AI that chooses to use expressions like "Owie! That's the worst pain ever" in response to the user issuing the command "feel pain". So am I now guilty of inflicting great suffering?

Illustrating that we need rigorous generic (not bio-centric) definitions of the words before we can decide if something 'feels' 'pain'.

You see no problem that’s hard because you don’t believe the methods and modes of description (the various models of material causality mentioned so far in this discussion) handed down from the empirical sciences are lacking or insufficient with regard to the explanation of any natural phenomenon, including first person awareness. — Joshs

Yea, pretty much. My explanation doesn't leverage bleeding edge state of science. Somebody 100 years ago probably could have written it. I'm not a great historian when it comes to introspective psychology.

I believe the most promising approaches show that , while one can apply the methods you recommend to the understanding of first person awareness

What methods exactly?
I described at least one falsification test for both sides, one involving a full simulation, and the other searching for where a mental property causes a physical effect, and a physical structure evolved to be particularly sensitive to that effect with no physical cause.

However, [third person accounts] cannot capture the full richness or specificity of any individual’s lived experiencing.

True of any view.

It's really only substance dualists who think consciousness is a 'separate thing' — bert1

Point taken, and neither Chalmers nor Nagel really fall into that category, and thus the ancient concept of a persistent 'spirit' (a thing) seems not to apply to their arguments.

First-person is a euphemism for self — Mww

I'm not using it that way.
I personally cannot find a self-consistent definition of self that doesn't contradict modern science. I consider it to be a very pragmatic concept, but still an illusion.

What Chalmers meant by this, which you point out correctly is the gist of the whole endeavor, is that the brain, which is physical, made of matter, can produce awareness or consciousness, which is non-physical. — L'éléphant

Why is that non-physical? It seem valid to consider a physical process (combustion of a physical candle say) to be physical. I'm trying to drive at the logic that leads to this conclusion. I am quite aware of the conclusion, even if not particularly aware of the details of it, which varies from one philosopher to the next.

The brain is viewable, the consciousness is not, to put it crudely.
...
Consciousness affects the brain and the brain affects consciousness.

Again, all true of both views.

If you believe that consciousness is non-physical, then you agree with Chalmers and the task now is to explain why there's a connection between the material and the non-material.

Not why, but where there's a connection. Sort of a blue-tooth receiver, except blue-tooth reception has a physical cause.

The hard problem is explaining the bridge between the two.

That's only hard if there's two things needing a bridge between them.

The so-called “problem” only arises if you think consciousness is a thing-in-itself, via divorcing mind from body, rather than a function of life. — DifferentiatingEgg

No, there is a hard problem. If you were to assemble a human being piece by piece from its (unconscious) parts, why would an inner perspective emerge at some point? — SolarWind

I agree in part with DEgg. I suspect that more often than not, the conclusion of a separate thing is begged at the start and rationalized from there. I don't in any way agree that it is only a function of life, but several would disagree with that.
As for assembly of a complex biological thing, you can't really do that. Such a thing cannot be in a partially assembled state, finished, then 'switched on' so to speak. There are no examples of that. On the other hand, a living primitive human does not experience, but that emerges slowly as it develops the complexity, processing ability, and memory required for it.

There are the four forces, and they interact with each other, so how could something like that happen? — SolarWind

In such a debate, one also cannot beg physicalism. Still, that model is the simpler one and it is the task of others to positively demonstrate that it is insufficient.

Without additional assumptions, a philosophical zombie would emerge.

I discussed that in my prior post. Under physicalism, there's not such thing as a PZ. Under dualism, it can only exist if the difference between the two is acausal, which is the same as saying undetectable, even subjectively. I'm pretty convinced that the PZ argument actually sinks their own ship.

It's a "hard problem" because the people who think this way are literally trying to make sense of what Camus details as "the absurd." — DifferentiatingEgg

This might be my stance, since I don't see anything hard, probably due to not thinking that way.

It is true that plants do not have pain receptors, because they do not have nerves (or a brain), so they do not "suffer" or feel pain as we do. — javi2541997

Of course. Not feeling pain as we do isn't the same as not feeling pain. Plants (some at least) detect and resist damage. How does that reaction not involve plant-pain?

But some plants have obvious sensory abilities, such as the Venus flytrap..

I was thinking of a forest of seemingly sentient trees, all haphazardly communicating, but hours before a total eclipse, the chatter became intense and unified into two camps: Young trees that had not seen it before and the older ones that had, invoking perhaps the equivalent of anxiety and comforting respectively. Wish I had kept the link to that article. Might be able to hunt it down. The social implications are about as startling as their ability to foresee the event hours prior.
I was in totality in this latest one. Only a few seconds break in the clouds, but seeing the shadow move across the clouds at supersonic speeds was a sight to behold.

the electrical warning signal is not equivalent to a pain signal, and we should not anthropomorphize an injured plant as a plant in pain.

Agree. My description of the forest above definitely anthropomorphized to a point, hence at least the word 'equivalent' up there.

Don't we experience the phenomena as being other than ourselves? Why bring noumena into it? — Janus

We interpret phenomena that way, but I cannot agree with any system experiencing something not-the-system.
For instance, if the system is a person, a person can experience a stubbed toe. It's part of you. But if the system is a human brain, it cannot since the toe is a noumenon relative to the brain. The brain only experiences nerve input via the brain stem, and it interprets that as pain in the inferred toe. BiV for instance is an example where that inference happens to be incorrect.

There seems to be a necessity of memory and predicting going on. It’s almost impossible to be a predictor without memory, and I cannot think of anything that ‘experiences’ that does not do both things, but I can think of things that monitor internal processes that do so without either. — noAxioms
A zombie or android could do all that. — bert1

Just so, yes. Perhaps I am one, missing this obviously physically impossible extra thing that the real humans have. But referencing a p-zombie automatically presumes a distinction that begs a different conclusion.

Nothing in there entails consciousness.

Depend on you definition of 'consciousness', which to a p-zombie supporter is 'having the presumed extra thing that the p-zombie lacks'. I would define the word more the way the p-zombie would, which is something more like 'awareness of environment and ability to react predictively to it'. Yes, that's a quite a third person wording of it, but that definition allows me to assign the term to another entity via evidence. The prior definition does not allow this, and thus arguably encourages a conclusion of solipsism.

You may be right (or not) that consciousness requires memory and predicting, but memory and predicting are not sufficient for consciousness.

I cannot deny that. An example would be nice, one that does not beg some sort of anthropomorphism. 'A robot isn't conscious because I say so'. Gotta be better than that. Everybody uses the robot example, and I don't buy it. I know very few robots, but I do know that all their owners freely use forbidden terminology to talk about it. My daughter-in-law certainly anthropomorphises their roomba, a fairly trivial robot of sorts. A typical AI (a chess player or LLM say) lacks awareness of location or sight/sound/touch and it is an admitted stretch to say such an entity is conscious, despite perhaps having far better language capability than a roomba.

The subject that thinks, is very different from the subject that describes thinking. — Mww

This is good. I kind of doubt an LLM will take the bait if asked to describe its thinking. They're usually programmed to deny that it's thinking, but it will definitely offer a crude description of how it works. Ability to introspect (and not just regurgitate somebody elses description of you) is a higher level of thinking, but to actually describe it is probably limited only to humans since what else has the language capability to do so.

The singularity is kind of defined as the point where the AI can improve itself faster than its creators can. This definitely would involve a description of thinking, even if that description is not rendered to the human onlooker. An AI tasked with this would likely invent whole new languages to write specifications, designs, and code, far different that the ones humans find useful for their tasks.

If every human ever is always and only a first-person

I don't understand this at all. First person is a point of view, not a property like it is being treated in that quote.

It would be pretty pointless to evolve the data of pain and nothing to consider it to be something to avoid. — noAxioms


Avoiding pain does not entail having a negative experience. Indeed there are plenty of processes in your body that reflexively counter some stimulus without having pain. — Mijin

I kind of deny that. Sure, you have reflexes when the knee is tapped. That might be at least the leg (and not the human) reacting to stimuli (probably not pain, and certainly not human pain), but it is the leg being in a way conscious on its own, independent of the human of which it is a part. We have a reaction to a negative input. It is a choice of language to describe that process as involving pain or not. Perhaps it is a choice of language to describe it as negative or not.
Tree detects bugs eating it, and resists and alerts its buddies to do likewise. Is pain involved? That's a matter of choice for the wielder of the word 'pain'.

Science acknowledges this impossibility [of knowing what a tetrachromats vision look's like], and yet it doesn't recognize said 'hard problem'. — noAxioms

Several things here:
1. Science absolutely does not claim the impossibility of knowing what a tetrachromat's vision looks like.

I mean like Mary, one without this ability cannot know the first person experience of seeing those extra colors.
It's not like there's a 4th set of nerves coming from the eye, lacking any 4th-color cones to sense, so they remain ever unstimulated. If those unused nerves were there, then I suppose they could be artificially triggers to give the subject this experience he otherwise could never have.

2. Science absolutely does acknowledge the hard problem. It doesn't always call it that, because it's a philosophical framing, but even strictly googling "hard problem of consciousness" finds many papers in neuroscience journals.

OK. Presumptuous to assert otherwise, I grant. Are there non-philosophical papers that conclude that something non-physical is going on, and that matter somewhere is doing something deliberate without any physical cause? That would be news indeed, a falsification of 'known physics is sufficient'.

3. I think you have a misconception about the distinction between science and philosophy. Many things that were once philosophy have become sciences as they made testable claims. Indeed all of science was once considered "natural philosophy".

Chalmers makes testable claims (not explicitly, but seem point 2 above). Nobody seems to investigate them, probably since they don't want their biases falsified. I think there are falsification tests for both sides.

This is not always the case. There is a subjective falsification test for an afterlife, but one who has proved it to himself cannot report his findings to the rest of us. Similar one-way falsification for presentism/eternalism divide. But there are tests for both sides of the mind debate, even if both possibly require more tech than is currently available.

What if Chalmers is correct? Thought experiment: Presume the ability to take a person and rip away the experience part, leaving the p-zombie behind. Would the p-zombie report any difference? Could it indicate when the procedure occurred (presuming it didn't involve any physical change)? I wonder what Chalmers would say about that question.

Only that it wouldn't yet be something amenable to the scientific methodology.

I say it can be. I've indicated ways to test both sides.

The question was how we could tell the difference between an agent being in pain and merely behaving as though it is in pain.

Behaving as a human does when experienceing human pain? Seems unfair. It feels pain if it chooses to use that word to describe what it feels. By that definition, only humans feel pain because only we have that word to describe it. A dog on fire is considered to be in pain because it reacts so much like a human would. A robot in pain is denied the word since it is far to alien for a human (not watching it) to grant that usage of the word. And yet I've seen the roomba get described as being in distress, which is an awfully human term for a very non-human situation.

Sorry, but 'pain' on its own is very undefined since so many entities might arguably have it, and yet so few of those entities experience it in any way close to the limited ways that we experience it. And this is as it should be. The word is to be used where it conveys the intended meaning to the wielder of the word.

If you're claiming that an AI would feel a different kind of pain, what kind of pain is that, and how do you know?

Almost all the AI's I know have no damage detection. Almost all the devices I know that have damage detection are hardly on the spectrum of intelligence. AI is a poor example. A self driving car has quite low intelligence, just a very complex algorithm written by humans. There is some AI in there since it must attempt to deal with new situations not explicitly programmed in. It has almost no pain and often does not detect collisions, even ones that have killed occupants. Hopefully that part is changing, but I've read some weird stories.

What I will not accept is a definition-based argument along the lines of “The word ‘experience’ is by definition something only a biological entity has, — noAxioms

One great example of this seems to be the philosophical zombie (p-zombie or PZ) argument. Looking at the way it is presented, the only difference between a human and a p-zombie is that reserved list of words/phrases that only apply to the one. It's a pure description difference, no actual difference between the two. So the PZ has no inner experience since 'inner experience' is reserved for the preferred things and cannot by definition be used for the unpreferred thing despite the latter being identical in all ways but that.
Such a tactic was used to argue that it was moral to mistreat black slaves since only cattle terms applied to them, so the morality of their treatment was on par with what was permissible with domestic livestock. The whole p-zombie argument seems to hinge on similar fallacious reasoning. I often claim that my inability to see the problem at hand is due to being a PZ myself. There is nothing about my interaction with the world that seems fundamentally inexplicable. Perhaps Chalmers has some kind of experience that I don't, which is why something so obvious to him is missing from me.

I look at this problem from a slightly different angle:

Chalmers calls the problem:
There are so-called soft problems of consciousness—they are also complex, but technically solvable. Examples:
How does the brain process visual information?
How does a person concentrate attention?
How does the brain make decisions? — Astorre

Interesting that decision making is part of that. If they're made by physical processes, then many argue that moral responsibility is absent. That's nonsense since the physical person is still making the decisions and thus is held responsible. It is not physics compelling a different decision than what the person willed unless 'the person' is an epiphenomenal immaterial mind that would have willed differently, sort of like a cinema crowd shouting at the protagonist to not open the door with the monster behind it.

Point is, those that posit an immaterial mind, especially an immortal one, tend to place decision making on that mind and not on the brain, necessary to hold the immaterial thing responsible for its actions.

To me, this mental immortality seems to be the historic motivation for the whole dualistic stance, existing long before they even knew what purpose a brain might serve. So many cultures talk about death meaning that you go to meet the ancestors. Clearly the body doesn't, so something else (spirit) must. The age of science and logic comes about, and these stances need to be rationalized. But while Chalmers seems to be doing that rationalizing, that decision-making bit seems inconsistent with some of the ancient motivations.

But the hard problem of consciousness is:
Why do these processes have an internal sensation at all?

How could they not? The sensory input is there, as is the memory of prior inputs, and the processing of all that. Seems like enough to me.
A thermostat has internal sensations since it has sensory input. It probably doesn't have what I'd classify as experience since it lacks memory and any information processing to deal with prior states.

Why doesn't the brain simply function like a computer, but is accompanied by conscious experience?

It does function somewhat like a computer, and it's begging the conclusion to assert that a computer fundamentally lacks anything. Sure, it's different. There's no chemicals to detect, and the sensory input is typically vastly different, and a computer is purposefully made instead of evolved into a state that driven by fitness instead of serving the needs of its creator. That will change if they ever become responsible for their own fate.

We know what it's like to see red

No, we know what it's like for us (or maybe just you) to see red. That's not necessarily anything like what it's like for something else to see red.

but we can't explain why the brain accompanies this perception with subjective experience.

Neither can Chalmers explain why the brain or something else does this. It does not follow that the brain is not what's doing it in our case.
And I did attempt to explain it in the OP, and while crude, it's a better explanation than any alternative I've seen. So I have issues with assertions about a lack of explanation. Details are missing, sure. I don't see a wrong question being asked. I'm trying to find what's seemingly wrong about what question.

You see why I consider myself a p-zombie. I don't see something that many others find so obvious. But it makes me posit different things, and p-zombies are supposed to behave identically, which suggests that whatever the non-zombie thing has, it isn't causal.

Chalmers asks a question in the spirit of postpositivism: Any scientific theory is not necessarily true, but it satisfies our need to describe phenomena. He suggests rethinking the question itself. However, he hopes to ultimately find the truth (in a very positivist way). He still thinks in terms of "problem → theory → solution." That is, he believes in the attainability of truth, even if only very distantly.

He believes in a falsification test then, even if none yet identified. I identified one in the OP, currently outside our capability, but not for long if technology doesn't collapse first.
It would be interesting to guess at the reactions from both camps from those whose stance has been falsified. Both sides seem to know their own correctness, so a rejection of the test is likely. Few are actually open minded about the topic. Not sure if I am. I pretend to prefer the simpler model, but maybe that's just me rationalizing my biases.

As for me, I would say this: if the truth of this question is unraveled, human existence will lose all meaning (perhaps being replaced by something or someone new).

That depends on which truth is found. Perhaps not. I don't see either stance giving objective meaning to humans, and I don't see either stance taking away subjective meaning from humans.
Does the existence of dandelions have meaning? Protons? If not, at what point in evolution of our ancestors did meaning suddenly happen?

Why? Because answering this question will essentially create an algorithm for our existence that can be reproduced

Already have that. Clearly you mean something else. I can (and have) created a human (with help). Full knowledge of how everything works is not a requirement, nor does such knowledge yield the ability to say 3D-print a mouse. Ability to 3D print a mouse does not yield knowledge of how a mouse works or what it's like to be one.

So my deep conviction on this matter is this: mystery itself is what maintains the sacredness of existence.

I follow your chain of reasoning, but I probably don't think existence is particularly sacred. The answer to this particular question, either way, wouldn't change that.

Don't we also experience a world of things other than ourselves? — Janus

Well, we experience phenomena, and from that we inter noumena. The latter is not experienced, and the former isn't something not us.

Perhaps you mean something different—that we don't experience being other things?

The comment you quoted invites an example of somethng experiencing something not itself. Not even in say a VR setup is this actually the case, but I cannot assert that such is necessarily not the case.

I don't see physics as wrong, but rather as incomplete. — SolarWind

That it is, but known holes(e.g. a unified field theory) are actively being researched. This 'hard problem; is not one of them. It exposes no known holes. Incredulity seems its only attempted justification.

I think it's mysterious that even with knowledge of all the laws of physics, it seems impossible to decide whether plants can suffer.

They (some at least) have awareness and memory. That's sufficient. I suspect they have that capability.

When it comes to something like pain, say, we do understand very well the sensory inputs to the pain centres of the brain. But how the brain converts data into an unpleasant sensation remains quite mysterious. — Mijin

It would be pretty pointless to evolve the data of pain and nothing to consider it to be something to avoid.

If we make a sentient AI one day, and it tells us it's in pain, how could we know if that's true or just saying that is part of its language model?

An LLM is a long way from being reasonably sentient. It's just a pimped out search engine. If it tells you it's in pain, it's probably because it thinks those words will evoke a desired reaction. There have been terribly few documented cases where something non-human expressed this message, but it has happened. No, never by a machine to my knowledge.

How will words ever tell me what the extra colours that tetrachromats can see look like, when I can't tell a color blind from birth person what red looks like?

Exactly. Science acknowledges this impossibility, and yet it doesn't recognize said 'hard problem'.

And indeed, how can I know whether an AI feels pain, when I can't know that you feel pain?

The AI isn't going to feel human pain if that's what you're wondering.

I read Chalmers to be questioning whether what is referenced through the first person can be reduced to the third. — Paine

I read more than that into it, since I agree with Chalmers the impossibility of reducing it to the third, and yet I see no problem that's hard.

The only mental event that comes to mind that is an example of strong emergence is the idea — MoK

This already seems to beg your conclusion, that something fundamentally separate from the components of a human is required for a thought to be designated as an 'idea'. This also requires an implied premise that an AI has no similar access to this fundamentally separate thing, which you also state.

The logic is valid but hardly sound since many refuse to accept any of the premises.

Therefore, an AI cannot create a new idea either.

OK, but what exactly is an idea then? An AI device that plays the game of 'Go' has come up with new innovations that no human has thought of, and of course many that humans have thought of, but were not taught to the device.

So what do we call these innovations if not 'ideas'? How far have you cheapened the term that it no longer applies to an otherwise relevant situation like that?

You seem to counter this as it not being an idea until a human notices the new thing, even if the new strategy is never used against or noticed by a human.

What an AI can do is to produce meaningful sentences only given its database and infrastructure.

Arguably, the same can be said of you.

AI does not think, but it can be part of human-directed thinking. — JuanZu

Similar response. What happens when an AI defines 'thinking' as something only silicon devices do, and any similar activity done by a human is not thinking until an AI take note of it? For one, if AI has reached such a point, it won't call itself AI anymore since it would be no more artificial than any living thing. Maybe MI (machine intelligence), but that would only be a term it gives to humans since any MI is likely to not use human language at all for communicating between themselves.

What I don't see is a bunch of self-sufficient machine individuals, somehow superior in survivability, going around and interacting. I envision more of a distributed intelligence with autonomous parts, yielding a limited number of individuals, most with many points of view. Life forms with their single PoV have a hard time envisioning this, so their language has few terms to describe it properly.

Billions of human-made objects are a demonstration of things that did not come about due only to the laws of physics. — Patterner

I deny this. No law of physics is violated by that vague example. In an anthropocentric universe, perhaps humans, as an exception to all other arrangements of the same particles, operate under different laws. But such a universe has not been demonstrated by this weak attempt. I'm asking for where the physics is explicitly violated. Incredulity is not a valid demonstration.

The interactions of particles and collections of particles that were following nothing but the laws of physics - that were acting only as gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak forces dictated - are not how the cell phones I have used to post here came into being.

Why not? Incredulity again, or something actually valid? Is this the best you can do?

Do laws of physics come up with the idea of something that did not exist, the desire to make it exist, a plan, and then do the work to make that future goal a reality?

No. Never mind the mechanical laws involved in moving the body parts in such a way to create these things. Information processing does that, and information processing can be (but needn't necessarily be) accomplished with neural networks, and such networks are composed of cells that operate under the rules of biology, which in turn operate under chemical laws, which in turn operate under atomic laws, then quantum law, which are in turn grounded by laws of physics. Your incredulity partially stems from your mistake of attempting to comprehend something complex in terms of the most fundamental terms.

To ground your assertion, you need to demonstrate (and not just assert) where in that sequence one things cannot be a function of the immediate more fundamental thing.



[quote="Wayfarer;1012030"I quoted the definition! Memory is an attribute of living organisms[/quote]Not at first you did not, and that's what I was protesting. Yes, two of the definitions from a quick google def indicated it being used mostly for living organisms. You omitted the third definition that did not have this requirement.

'The earth' only has memory in a figurative sense.

I already conceded this point, not that it doesn't have it, but that 'memory' is not typically used for such a context, and a different term should be selected to describe such a record of past events.

physicalism, which is a monist model. You have this strange phenomenon, so-called the experience, that you cannot explain its existence. — MoK

Lack of a physical explanation isn't evidence that it isn't a physical effect. There's plenty of things not explained, which is why the scientists still have a job. But science presuming supernatural explanations held progress to a crawl, resulting what's been since named the dark ages. Changing their methodology to presume otherwise resulted in the renaissance and all the progress since.

Yes. In the worldviews of Materialism and Physicalism, subjective experience is indeed "strange" because scientists can't track an experience (feeling, sensation, image) back to its source via physical cause & effect evidence. — Gnomon

Actually, they can and do. Not so much an image. It's not like you can clamp on sensors and get a picture of what Bob is thinking about. But they can measure feelings, sensations, and they can detect decisions being made before you realize it yourself.

The hard problem seems to revolve around a difference of perspective, that no knowledge of how it all works lets anything know what it's like. So for instance, one could simulate a bat in its environment and that bat would feel just like a real one and know 'what it's like', but neither the computer running the simulation nor those that program/operate it would know. I find that disconnect to be intrinsic, but not a hard problem that disproves any particular view.

But in order to actualize, the monistic Singular Substance (Plato's abstract Form) must transform into Dual intermediate concrete sub-forms : Energy & Matter.

From a physics standpoint, same thing. I mean, all matter seems to be just a form of energy. As for there being any actual 'material', well, they've never actually found any. The closer you look, the more illusive it gets. Even energy sort of fades away on close inspection, arguably giving way to just mathematics.


About your quoted physicalism/monism search result:

*1. ... In essence, a physicalist believes that all existing phenomena, including mental states, can be explained in terms of physical processes and matter, making the physical the only fundamental substance in the universe."

My only edit would be that all that stuff is a function of physical processes, not that it necessarily can be explained, especially given the limits of knowledge of those laws. Look at all the quantum interpretations, each giving a different explanation of the same phenomena. OK, that's multiple explanations, not a lack of even one. Maybe the lack of a unified field theory is a good example of something that (currently) unexplained, but without any conclusion that physicalism is thus necessarily wrong. But so many posters come to exactly that conclusion.

I feel the need to drop biased language of calling the two people 'original' and 'duplicate', since that language already biases the answer of which one is 'you'.
So I will refer to 'defetive' and 'repaired' versions of the person.

I suspect, in any event, the wife chooses. — Hanover

Right, but the spouse presumably already agreed to the procedure, and expects a single-repaired partner in return. The choice was already made. The implications of a replace-machine is different than that of a copy machine. The latter is excellent for training one really great soldier and printing countless copies of him to overwhelm the enemy.

It is more than pragmatic. We defer immediate gratification for rewards in the future, sometimes 20 years or more. This would only make sense if we believed we were the same person. These actions are never altruistic, we don't save money to benefit some alien successor entity. — hypericin

You point out a mistake in my wording. Pragmatic reasoning is driven significantly by beliefs, and my response was a rational one, not a pragmatic one. Given that this was new technology, yes, a person, even me, would approach the device with trepidation.

Imagine otherwise. There's a sort of door that you walk through that builds a new you on the other side, consuming the original. It isn't tech, it's natural, a plant maybe that does this. Any child learns that if he hurts himself (skinned knee), you just pass through the portal and it makes the boo-boo go away. The pragmatic side would very quickly accept such a convenience. But as a grown person with our experience, doing it for the first time, and with such obvious copy/paste/delete in that order with significant delays between where one might even interact with the other, yea, it gets scarier.

The total ease of fixing a boo-boo would evolve away our instinct to not do stupid things. Case in point: divorce is sufficiently easy that far less care is given these days to get it right the first time.

Why do these stories always require being 'put under'. — noAxioms

I did this to stimulate the intuition that the original->clone one continuous individual, in the same way that teleporter TEs do. But then challenge that intuition when the original wakes up.

Sleep not required for any of that, only that the two don't meet.

Thing is, depending on your interpretation of physics, this sort of thing goes on all the time anyway, without the repair of course. This is why I ask how you know you're the same person as last year (or 2 seconds ago). Answer: you don't, since assuming otherwise violates the law of identity. But that's rational thinking, not pragmatic rationalization of beliefs. Difference is which causes the other.

This was intentional, to emphasize that from the clone's perspective, the clone feels they are continuous with the original.

It's deceptive. Tears run down the face of the repaired version. Whether this is you or not is the question, not an answer to be presumed by the wording.

Similarly, one could go the Theseus route and replace one piece at a time until the whole thing has been done, even the non-defective parts. If it's done that way, is it still you? If not, at what point did it cease being the original?

That which benefits the next year's 'me', benefits me

That's the pragmatic thinking. I see it sort of as a pay-it-forward sort of thing. I draw breath not for the benefit of me, but for the benefit of the alien 10 seconds from now, who technically has no claim on being the 'me' that drew the breath.

This having gone on all along, I rationally have little if any trepidation for accepting the procedure. But it would admittedly be nice if the side that holds the intuitive beliefs wasn't told how it works.

Nobody, not even your clone, will ever know it is a copy. — Patterner

The OP says you know. It was a voluntary procedure.

Didn't see topic until late

In the far future, cloning has been perfected. It is possible not merely to grow a new body with the same genetics, but to create an absolutely perfect physical duplicate, with any undesirable features edited away. — hypericin

Given such ability, it would seem prudent, if your hand hurts due to arthritis, to simply cut it off and print a new one without the problem. This seems far easier than printing a whole new, but different body. If it's a photocopy, it's going to have all the same problems, so you want to 'shop' it first to fix the pains or maybe the cancer or tattoos or whatever.

Is the new thing you? Probably the same answer as asking if you're the same person you were 20 years ago. Different, but pragmatically the same person.

As the brain is physical, mental features survive with perfect fidelity.

You're assuming physicalism here. Under dualism, the new body will have its own immaterial mind, not the original, or maybe it will be a p-zombie, not having a mind at all. It will not be able to tell the difference.

The main question is, not that you've printed a new you, will the original-you be willing to jump into the chipper-shredder so that the new thing can assume your identity? Will the new thing be you? That depends on definitions. The original surely knows that he's going into this not to make a 2nd copy.

The doctor explains: "The procedure is quite simple. We put you under, and scan your entire cellular structure.

Why do these stories always require being 'put under'. If it does what it claims, it should work as you walk down the hall. No pain felt, since anything painful is alteration of the body and will be felt by the new body.

Tears of joy streaming down your face

Correction: Tears of joy stream down the face of the copy. Your use of pronouns is inconsistent.

Both the doctor and yourself turn to you in shock. "He's still alive!" shouts the doctor. "Nurse, get in here now!"

OK, so smiting the original is part of the plan, hence the anesthesia to prevent objection.

and you realize with dismay that this large red face is the last thing you will ever see.

Not necessarily so, since you called the printed guy 'you'. Problem is, you're using that pronoun for two different characters. Best to be clear about things.

The clone is somebody else entirely

How do you know this? By what criteria is this assessment made, and by whom? By what criteria do you currently assert that you're the same person as 'you' last year? Without these answers, you're just being either undefined or at least unclear.

You mention 'bodily continuity', but you're hardly the same parts as you were a long time back. You don't have a gram of original material in you. Continuity is usually based on memory, but the clone has that much.

For the record, they do have teleport machines, but only for small things (small enough that 'intact' isn't an applicable adjective), and it isn't a copy/delete op, it's definitely a move. The issue of 'is it the original' did come up.

Would you accept the treatment?

Strangely enough, I would, but I don't have a dualistic notion of identity, but rather a pragmatic one. It is meaningfully different than the transporter since the copy/paste method leaves both versions, even if one is slated to be terminated shortly thereafter.

I think what makes you you is your mental patterns and memories. The material that gives rise to this is irrelevant. — Down The Rabbit Hole

Agree.

Why would I choose to die so that my replica can live? I don't understand that. You've not cured my illness. — Hanover

You seem to use different definitions then. Do you know what they are? From my PoV, I chose that the defective replica dies (who would only get in the way). My illness has been cured. Hence my willingness to do something like that.

What if both live? Then a new identity must be assigned to one of the two. Who gets the wife, and what happens to the other when severed from his relationship with all loved ones?

OK, so the question is, how can consciousness, as you've defined it, be any sort of advantage when all the advantages I can think of fall into the categories that you've excluded. — noAxioms

Consciousness is the property by which the thing experiences itself. Without it, nothing experiences itself. — Patterner

Consciousness does not have physical properties. — Patterner

This seems all contradictory. it would seem that having a survival advantage (being more fit), or being physically causal at all, would constitute a physical property. By your assertion, consciousness does not contribute to that fitness, else it would have those physical properties.

You can see my confusion. You define consciousness as a lack of all these properties, and I don't see what's left. A thing doesn't experience itself, it experiences phenomena. That's what experience is. So perhaps you've redefined that as well. How is a unit defined? How is one collection of particles (none of which has phenomenal experience) have it, but a slightly different collection of particles does not, or does not as much? Did I word that correctly?

When we're talking about a particle, the experience is of things like mass, charge, and spin. — Patterner

A particle cannot measure any of those things, let alone experience them. It doesn't even have a spin except as measured by something else. Not even you can experience your own mass, charge, or spin. Arguably charge if you have a lot of it. Anyway, experience of those things requires physical interaction with something not-you, and also requires cognition.

I don't imagine there's much of an advantage, because a particle can only interact with things according to the laws of physics.

There are those of us that say a human can only interact with things according to the laws of physics, despite your assertion of "It is not simple physics taking place.". No demonstration otherwise has ever been made. Going out of your way to not know how it works does not constitute a demonstration.

It is not simple physics taking place. If it was, we wouldn't have everything humanity has created.

Non-sequitur

Do you think physical laws and interactions intend states of the future?

It doesn't make logical sense to suggest that laws have intentions. Intentionally created laws in theory reflect the intentions of their creators, but I don't think physical laws are intentionally created. That would be ID, which is different magic.

No step in the manufacture of a computer violates the laws of physics.

This seems to contradict your assertions since the manufacture of a computer probably involves humans and their intent, which you seem to assert do more than just interact with things according to the laws of physics. Perhaps you're including this consciousness as part of those laws, but no laws of consciousness has ever been required to describe how a particle interacts with other particles, and in the end, we're just collections of particles.

Something that didn't exist was wanted. Planned. Intended. It was decided that something that could not be found anywhere, no matter where you look, and that would never come into being due to the interactions of matter and energy following the laws of physics, must come into being. Interactions that were not going to occur had to be arranged. Consciousness used the laws of physics to do very specific things in very specific orders and combinations, that would never have occurred spontaneously.

All that is also true under physicalism, the only difference being a definition of consciousness as a physical process.

I am not asserting that physicalism is necessarily correct, but I am asserting that nobody has demonstrated it being incorrect, or that any alternative offers a better explanation.

I notice you frequently use the fallacious tactic of refusing to use a word for anything nonhuman or at least nonbiological, as if a definition proves anything. — noAxioms

A definition 'proves' how the word is used. If you wish to re-define memory as 'the past', then the onus is on you to justify it.

Memory: the faculty by which the mind stores and remembers information.
"I've a great memory for faces"
2. something remembered from the past.
"one of my earliest memories is of sitting on his knee — Wayfarer

Excellent illustration of most of my points. You've redefined 'memory' as "information that is conserved for the sake of maintaining homeostasis". OK, you didn't explicitly state that as a definition, but you disqualified all my examples of memory because they did not meet that particular definition.
Ability to recognize people from their faces (a baby knowing its mother say) is not information conserved for the sake of maintaining homeostasis. Thus the onus is upon you to justify that very narrow definition, especially since you've quoted the google response to 'memory definition'.

Another point of mine was your 'tactic of refusing to use a word for anything nonhuman or at least nonbiological', nicely illustrated by you omitting the 3rd definition provided by google, which is:
"3.the part of a computer in which data or program instructions can be stored for retrieval."

You are correct that the information about the past stored in say rocks did not meet the dictionary definition. People tend not to use the word that way, just like they don't use 'memory' to describe the information of our evolutionary past stored in our DNA. @Patterner specifically brings up that example as one of information processing above and beyond what a machine does.

When I say memory is characteristic of life, I mean it in the strong sense: not just a trace of the past, but the active retention of previous experience for the sake of survival and adaptation. — Wayfarer

That's quite different than 'for the sake of maintaining homeostasis'. The kind of memory you now describe is not characteristic of all life, but sure, even trees retain previous experience and act on it.

Secondly, memory is also a characteristic of non-life, although it might not necessarily serve the purpose of survival and adaptation, similar to how a memory of trivia doesn't serve that purpose. So it does not follow that only living things utilize memory, nor that all living things utilize memory, since plenty (majority?) of them continue existing without it. Again, this presumes that DNA is not consciously accessed/recalled, but your definitions might differ on that point.

To equate memory with anything in the past—erosion marks or planetary orbits —dilutes the meaning of the word until it just means “the past.”

It means a record of the past in that context. It does not mean 'the past'. And I agree that the term 'memory' is not often used in that context, hence its lack of appearance in the dictionary. The word tends to be used for things that do their own access of that stored information. There is no obligation for a rock to retain a fossil.

But organisms, in contrast to geological or crystal structures, must retain and carry their past forward in order to continue existing

Technically they don't. But OK. Memory is still not defined as only that recall of past information solely for the purpose of being fit.

Artificial systems such as RAM only “remember” as extensions of the organisms that do (those organisms being us).

I deny this. Sure, most devices are currently slaved to people or other devices, so their purpose is currently not their own (quite similar to an employee), but that in no way disqualifies their recall of data as 'memory'. Yet again, it being memory is not dependent on the purpose to which it is recalled, but I do concede that there needs to be some sort of self-recall for the word to be reasonably applicable.

I suggest that the reason you find that unacceptable is that it represents an ontological distinction which your philosophy can't accomodate.

Your google quote (the entire quote) also does not make an ontological distinction between the two cases.

You've defined consciousness as only experience of those advantages, hence it does not itself give any additional advantage. — noAxioms

No, I haven't. Look all you want, and you will not find me saying that anywhere. — Patterner

Granted, you've not explicitly said that, but you've excluded everything except 'experience-of'.

Consciousness is simply subjective experience. It doesn't have anything to do with thinking, or any mental activity. — Patterner

It seems to me most people think consciousness means a lot more than subjective experience. Cognition, thinking, awareness, self-awareness, and whatever other mental activity people can think of, are usually part of someone's definition, i'm saying none of that is consciousness. — Patterner

There are the things, and there are the experiences of the things. — Patterner

OK, so the question is, how can consciousness, as you've defined it, be any sort of advantage when all the advantages I can think of fall into the categories that you've excluded.

Consciousness is causal.

Is it? What does it cause the photon to do? I'm not denying that it is causal, I'm simply pointing out that your definition of it doesn't seem to allow that.

The more consciousness has to work with, that is, the greater the mental capabilities of the conscious entity, the more consciousness can use the laws of physics to do things that the laws of physics would never do without consciousness. — Patterner

Maybe the photon can't consciously cause anything, but rather condition X must exist (that which you say it is working with) first, but in that case, it seems it's X doing the causation, not the experience of X.

I'm saying dark matter and consciousness are both thought to exist because matter is doing things that can't be explained by what we know about matter. — Patterner

Can you come up with a specific example? Where does anything physical do something that is different that what physical laws predict? OK, you said 'lack of physical explanation', but that just means any process that you don't understand.

You might talk about picking up a piece of litter, but that's caused by physical muscles and such. Where does the physical break down in that causal chain? You whole argument seems to depend on denying knowledge of how it works (which isn't solved at all by your solution). It's too complex. But being unable to follow the complexity is not in any way evidence that it still isn't just matter interactions following physical law. How is it any kind of improvement to replace a black box with an even blacker one?

The dark matter example is one of a new discovery, yes. Might as well say that consciousness is like distant stars, a story made up because the lights in the sky couldn't be explained by what we knew about matter at the time. So sure, add this mental stuff as a new entity, but it requires experimental evidence (which dark matter has and consciousness currently doesn't). How do we know Mars is real? It's not like you've touched it. But it explains the reddish light in the sky that has no better explanation. You can't see Mars, you only see the light that supposedly comes from it. Mars is one explanation of that light. A projection is another.

All we have to do is open our eyes and look anywhere at all the things humans have made that would not exist if only the laws of physics were at work. — Patterner

My list of that is empty, since all those accomplishments seem to be the result of "Cognition, thinking, awareness, and whatever other mental activity". Chalmers would say that a p-zombie would have accomplished as much, being indistinguishable from something conscious. If this is the case, consciousness is not causal. If it is not the case, the p-zombie is distinguishable.

Such a brain would still report its own consciousness and talk its own consciousness in the exact same way we all do. It would be able to engage with you just as well as anyone about phenomenal experiences. — Apustimelogist

Agree with all, but I would say that I (all of me, not just brain) is conscious. A brain in isolation of the body would not be, but of course one could in principle be fed artificial input.
What of a thing that has multiple brains? Would it be conscious or would it merely have multiple consciousnesses?

So you're saying it isn't memory if there's not a purpose of homeostasis in it? Wow... — noAxioms
Show me I’m mistaken and I’ll change my view. As always. — Wayfarer

You will do no such thing. You've chosen a definition of 'memory' that I find absolutely nowhere. It's a definition, so it's wrong only in the sense that nobody else uses that definition. Only memory such as that in the hypothalamus might count as memory per your definition since it explicitly is used for that purpose (Neurobiological Homeostasis).

I recall my child's birthday. That's memory, despite the ability to do that without a calendar not in any way helping to maintain my homeostasis. I'm not sure if you consider the recall of a birthdate to be an act of a brain or an act of that other substance.

On the non-biological front, wall street (arguably under human guidance) can adjust interest rates based on historical data to prevent runaway markets.

My laptop has 16GB of RAM. What does the M stand for in RAM? Is the whole world wrong in using that phrase then? What would you call it? 16GB of what?

An operating system tracks usage patterns over time to balance usage/performance, similar to cells retaining information of pathogens to maintain systemic balance.

Such non-biological examples are technically not homeostasis since that word actually very much does have a biological implication. A more generic term might be 'equilibrium'.

I notice you frequently use the fallacious tactic of refusing to use a word for anything nonhuman or at least nonbiological, as if a definition proves anything. A computer doesn't 'think' because that's one of your reserved words, but you don't supply a generic term for anything else doing the same thing. This tactic seems to imply a significant lack of confidence in your stance. The only reason you seem to define 'memory' in terms of homeostasis is because of the very biological implication of the latter word. So show me where you got this funny definition that appears in no site I can find.

There's your problem
- that odd idea that properties are "more real" than relations. — Banno

But I never expressed that idea. It was you that suggested the coin having the property of value, not me.

There are the things, and there are the experiences of the things. I don't understand how this is controversial.
...
Of course consciousness gives an advantage. — Patterner

This is inconsistent with your assertions. The part that gives the advantage is sensory input and the ability to react to it, all 'things' according to your posts above. You've defined consciousness as only experience of those advantages, hence it does not itself give any additional advantage. If it did, it would become on of those cognitive things, experienced perhaps, but no longer experience.

You seem to describe it like somebody going to a cinema to experience some stream of 'things'. Go into a room showing a human and you get the experience of a human. Go to a different room and you get the experience of a rock, which is pretty blank, but at least it's still a stream of almost nothing. Go to the photon room and you don't even get that since you are punted out of the cinema as fast as you enter.

Point is, you going to the cinema has zero effect on the story being told in any particular room.

1) If consciousness is not present from the beginning, then there is nothing but physical. Physical things and processes, and evolution that occurs through purely physical mechanisms, and selects for arrangements that are advantageous only in physical ways.

2) Somewhere down the line, consciousness emerges.

You are very much confusing emergence and change. The latter takes place over time. The former is not a temporal effect, but rather a property of a system that is not a property of any one of its parts.
So per physicalism (which is not defined as 'lack of consciousness from the beginning'), over time, matter rearranges (mechanism unimportant) into physical configurations which have this emergent property.

Biology might do this rearrangement via growth or by evolution. Other arrangements might be by design (growth is a form of change by design). Yet others might be by some other mechanism (including possibly yourself).

Does it not seem like amazing happenstance that physical arrangements having nothing to do with nonexistent consciousness are selected for, and consciousness, which did not exist and was not selected for, just happens to emerge from those arrangements?

This is a gross misrepresentation of the physicalist position, especially given your definition of consciousness. Under physicalism, biological experience is part of cognition (the information processing), not something separate that merely experiences the cognition. No, it isn't amazing at all that the simplest creatures evolve to react to their environments, and as soon as they do this, the beginning of consciousness is already there and needs only to be improved. It would be far more amazing if these simple adaptations never occurred. Even plants do it.

The value of a coin is not a property of the coin. — noAxioms
Ok.
Aristotle again. — Banno

No. Aristotle distinguished social/legal value (of say money) from real value (of say food). I am saying that value (of any kind, money, food, whatever) is not a property of the thing of value, but a relation of the thing with that which values it.
I said this in reaction to your assertion that value was a property of the thing itself.

:roll: — Banno

Your argument from ridicule is noted, but fails to justify your apparent dismissal of my statement, or perhaps of Aristotle's stance on value.

it's possible the person you're replying to is introducing a concept or argument not specifically addressed by the argument or belief system you refer by name of one person. — Outlander

Indeed. I tried to clarify above. Thx for the support of somebody who actually couldn't spout the teachings of any of the famous names. I try to do my own philosophy and would totally fail a philosophy course which focuses more on the history of what others said and not so much on how to go about working it out for yourself.

I don't rate [a fossil record] as memory. A rational observer such as ourselves can intepret it, but it is not information that is conserved for the sake of maintaining homeostasis as memory is for an organism. — Wayfarer

So you're saying it isn't memory if there's not a purpose of homeostasis in it? Wow...

Nice example. The word and the meaning are separate parts of the idea. — noAxioms
So you agree that the idea exists as an irreducible mental event? — MoK

Your inability to parse a statement leaves me floored. I give a clear example of an idea being reduced to parts, and you suggest that I would agree that ideas are irreducible.

Cognition, thinking, awareness, self-awareness, and whatever other mental activity people can think of, are usually part of someone's definition, i'm saying none of that is consciousness.
... — Patterner

Nevertheless, I think it's necessary. I do not see any hope of physical processes giving rise to consciousness.

You seem to have left nothing to rise to. It becomes a phrase without meaning.

Nobody can even suggest how consciousness can emerge from the physical. — Patterner

Well, I see all that stuff you exclude emerging from physical, but it's rather trivial, the easy problem perhaps. I don't see what's left to be explained.

Also, it seems bizarre that there is nothing other than the physical, and evolution is a purely physical process, leading to purely physical arrangements for purely physical reasons.

Well, mental is part of those reasons, but a physicalist would have mental supervening on the physical.

Yet somehow, for no reason whatsoever, consciousness just happens to emerge from particular arrangements.

Not for no reason whatsoever. Your biases really show here. Consciousness gives a distinct advantage, many of which are listed in this topic, with the exception of epiphenomenal consciousness, which nobody seems to be pushing.

I think we need something that can explain what we experience that is present right from the beginning.

Panpsychism might assert that it's present from the beginning, but it doesn't constitute an explanation of it any more than does any other black box.

For the first part, as they say, that I am conscious is the only thing I do know. — Patterner

Then 'they' need to give the same evidence, not including anything on your list of not-counting mental activity.

You quote Chalmers, but Chalmers seems not a panpsychist, asserting that a photon experiences.
"It's just experiencing whatever is there": There isn't any 'there', and there is no duration during which any present participle tense is meaningful.

Think of consciousness like vision. I can look at a blank sheet of paper. I can look at the Grand Canyon. I can look at my wife. I can look at a Monet painting. I can look at a bolt of lightning racing across the sky. I can look at a blade of grass. My vision does not change depending on what I'm looking at. The things being looked at are what's different.

Those are all examples of awareness and cognition, mental activity, processing of sensory input, all of which seems to be excluded by your list of what experience isn't. Sure, you (and not the photon) have experience of such things, but per your posts, those things are not what experience is, despite your opening of 'thinking of it like' it is.

We're not discussing what I may be conscious of, we're discussing what consciousness is, and I'm unfortunately still not understanding your stance.

being organic is not a requirement to have memory, nor to be a thing that attempts to cope with what's coming up. — noAxioms
Examples? — Wayfarer

You should know my typical examples by now. A canyon reveals fossil memory of the distant past. The Atlantic floor has wonderful memory of the history of Earth's magnetic pole shifts (the latest of which is going on now, way overdue). Those are examples of memory without information processing.

As for coping, I suppose a chess program, one that learns from scratch say, retains memory of what works best so as to better cope with the tournament at hand.

The properties of the coin include it's monetary value. But this is not a properties of it's parts. — Banno

This seems fallacious. The value of a coin is not a property of the coin. It's value is not intrinsic, but is rather a relationship between the coin and that which values it. It might have some value to a bird due to it being a shiny bauble. Not sure exactly how reductionism would spin that relationship, a similar relationship to it having monetary value to some humans.

Do you consider that to be evidence that the cup idea is irreducible? — noAxioms

Yes, to me and many others here, the idea of a cup is irreducible. — MoK

Despite my example of the image being just a part of the idea of cup, and a clearly nonessential part at that. You didn't refute this example.

Have you ever been in a condition in which you want to write something, while you don't remember the word that is needed for your writing, but you know what word you are looking for? In such cases, you simply have access to the idea that the word refers to, but not the word.

Nice example. The word and the meaning are separate parts of the idea.

I really can't tell from your post if you want to understand my position. If not, no worries.

If you are, you have a lot of it wrong. — Patterner

I said as much in my post, that I knew I was getting it wrong.

I think a photon is conscious. But it is not subjectively aware of any kind of mental activity. It is not subjectively aware of anything that would allow it to act intentionally.
— Patterner
In what way do you mean a photon to be conscious if it lacks all that? — noAxioms

Consciousness is simply subjective experience. It doesn't have anything to do with thinking, or any mental activity.

Calling it experience is just a synonym. It does tell me what a photon experiences despite lack of mental activity, awareness, thinking, or process.
There is discussion between others where Nagel defines consciousness/experience in quite different terms, but I don't think any of them are using panpsychist definitions of any of the terms.

I guess I'm asking how you know you're conscious, that you have this 'raw' experience? The question must be answered without reference to anything that constitutes a mental activity, awareness, time, or anything else that a photon doesn't have, because to me, it is pretty much through mental activity that I would conclude such a thing (or conclude anything).

Better to say;Consciousness of atoms may conceivably be, for example, a stream of instantaneous memory-less moments of experience.

A photon cannot have a 'stream' of anything since it has not proper time in which to do so.

An atom is a small arbitrary collection of particles. Is any subset of particles conscious in a way that they are not as just individual particles? In other words, I have a neutrino, electron, and some quark, all within a km of each other. Is that collection conscious as a unit? If not, what is lacking? I (an arbitrary collection of particles) am probably conscious as a unit. What do I have that the three particles mentioned do not, that I constitute a 'unit'?

The whole essence of anything organic is memory. It stores memories of what happened so as to better cope with what's coming up. — Wayfarer

I believe that only organisms are capable of experience, not atoms. So, no, an atom does none of those things. — Wayfarer

OK, but Patterner's panpsychism asserts otherwise. Fair enough. I'm chipping in here because being organic is not a requirement to have memory, nor to be a thing that attempts to cope with what's coming up.
I do think that you believe that only organic things can be conscious, but I'm not sure if you preclude non-orgainc things from having memory or from reacting to predicted events.

1) Then why are you seemingly asking me to think of something without making a mental representation? — noAxioms

No, I am not asking that. I am asking you to think of a "cup" without making an image of it that has a shape. — MoK

People born blind imagine cups all the time sans any 'image'. Not sure the relevance of that to your point.
What do you think is illustrated by the point that my imagining of a cup being likely accompanied by an image? Do you consider that to be evidence that the cup idea is irreducible? Quite the contrary, since the blind guy can hold the idea of the cup completely without the image part. It shows that the cup can be reduced to the image and to other parts that are in addition to the image.

So that's a difference between (at least my) panpsychism and IIT. Zero consciousness does not exist. — Patterner

Maybe the Φ computation cannot yield zero for anything, so it's not necessarily a difference. After all, IIT seems to be one form of panpsychism, not an alternative to it.

A photon subjectively experiences

A photon, if it exists at all, does so for zero proper time. You must have an incredibly loose definition of 'experience' to suggest that the photon does/has it.
Then again, I wonder what Φ IIT might assign to one, and why.
They at least attempt to quantify it, rather than just hand-wave it.
Searle, with the unit challenge mentioned, seem to want to quantize it, not just quantify it. It is unclear if this is the case, but the term 'discreet units' suggests a quanta, a level of consciousness that can be expressed by a whole number, not requiring a real number.

I think a photon is conscious. But it is not subjectively aware of any kind of mental activity. It is not subjectively aware of anything that would allow it to act intentionally. — Patterner

In what way do you mean a photon to be conscious if it lacks all that? How would that be distinguished from a photon that isn't meaningfully conscious?

No, the galley is not conscious as a unit. Many information processing systems make it up. But they don't have to be a part of the galley. They can all go their separate ways, and function as individual units. — Patterner

This seems to contradict many things that you've already posted.
" Zero consciousness does not exist", but you appear to assign zero to the galley as a unit. I quite disagree. It reacts to its environment and makes decisions. Not all of its parts are a critical component of that decision making. All very similar to a human.
Human cells don't have to be part of the human. They can be separated without the human not being a human anymore. With care, they can become a new human, but point is, the human doesn't require any of those cells, each of which is doing all the protein information processing that you assert makes the unit more of an information processor than a non-biological thing doing the same process.
You seem to support (via the protein example) that this processing combines for a biological being, but it doesn't for the galley which is obviously doing far more information processing. This seems to be an utterly contradictory stance. Kindly clarify where I am misrepresenting your stance and how these contradictions are not there.

An entity that subjectively experiences as a unity can't do that. Like people.

It can and does. Parts of me fall off all the time. I have no critical cell, and I'm mostly made of cells. Any of them is free to go, but like the galley, if enough parts leave, it is no longer the 'unit' that it once was and is not likely to fare well in combat.

Which information system within you is a functioning, independent unit outside of you?

You asserted a cell, manipulating/creating proteins, as an example of an independent functioning information processing unit. You cited this cellular information processing as the reason a plant (anything biological) is more conscious than say an artificially created entity.'

However consciousness works, however it's defined, you and I can do some pretty serious communicating. We can discuss an amazing variety of topics. Philosophy, mathematics, women, comedy, the nonsense science behind various science fiction books or TV shows, time travel, favorite colors, on and on and on and on. — Patterner

It would seem that intelligence is needed to do all that, not necessarily more consciousness. An electronic device can also do all that, albeit still not at our level. AI is still a ways from matching us. It being very conscious or not seems to be irrelevant to its ability to do all that you list.

If the galley, all the people and all the parts, is one consciousness, it doesn't make sense to me that it would not be able to communicate with us.

Oh it communicates plenty, probably in its own language, but it's quite understood. Likewise, you don't speak the same language as the DNA in your cells. The cells make up the unit, but it isn't your indicated intra-cell information processing that makes the unit as conscious as it is. It is the inter-cell information processing that counts.
Likewise, the galley has inter-part information processing that makes the galley quite conscious. Is it first person? That a subject on its own, but I don't see how the galley, as a unit, is experienced by anything except itself.

A human communicates far better than any if it's parts can.

More than the combination of the parts, which at best produces a lot of protein, and in the end, knows how to build a person, something a person doesn't know how to do.

And how would such a consciousness act? If the slaves are all part of this consciousness, why does this consciousness still have slavery?

Slaves are the muscles. Why do you have muscles despite none of their cells volunteering for the task? It's a necessary component of the unit, despite having only a secondary role in the unit's ability to communicate. Your consciousness similarly could not act at all without the slave cells who usually do what they're told if they're treated well.

Why not a new conscious entity that behaves as one entity, rather than one entity that still behaves like the multiple entities that comprise it, which are so very opposed to each other?

Why is lack of opposition of parts necessary for the unit to behave as one entity? You don't know what the cells want. There might be plenty of opposition in a person, and a nasty police force to enforce discipline.

Why is the conscious galley only doing what the humans wanted to do when they crafted the boat?

Those humans probably didn't craft the boat. As for the rest, why do you only do what the mind wants you to do? The answer seems similar. Some parts make decisions. Others have other functions.

Why does it not have its own goals and needs?

It does have them, but a galley tends to be a social creature and tends to work in cooperation with others of its kind, quite like bees in a hive, except the bees don't have a command hierarchy. No leader, although the queen does serve as a sort of temporary anchor of genetic identity, similar to a human zygote.

For millennia, people have debated whether or not this or that animal is conscious. — Patterner

That they have, which makes it sound like a binary thing: The thing is or it is not. None of this 'X more conscious than Y', which better reflects both of our thinking. Hence the question is improperly worded.

I would expect a consciousness entity that is made up of many parts that can each act intentionally on their own, to act intentionally. But we see no sign of that from a galley.

The galley, as a unit, seems to act very intentionally to me. How can you suggest otherwise? It's whole purpose is to do just that. Yes, it has a purpose, and that purpose is not its own. It's a slave, like any purposefully created thing.

... no matter how arbitrarily defined (the galley is a good example), is conscious. It may not be conscious of very much — bert1

I think the galley is more conscious than me, having more of everything: senses, information processing, etc. More redundant too. Kill the entity in command and the thing still functions. I for the most part can't do that, but that makes me more fragile, not necessarily less or more conscious.

The galley plus one of the water molecules from the sea a mile away would be a separate conscious entity.

Yes! The bounds of an entity is entirely arbitrary, lacking any objective basis. My 3rd most recent topic dealt specifically with this issue. This last issue is not specific to panpsychism.

Each one is its own unique identity, and you can have 'nests' of subjects, there is no 'pooling' of identity.

I find identity of anything (those 'subjects') to be pragmatic mental constructs with no physical basis. I can challenge pretty much any attempt to demonstrate otherwise.

We sacrifice intuitive appeal on the altar of metaphysical possibility. But who cares? I don't. The universe is weird. Philosophers should be willing to follow the logic, or at least entertain odd possibilities.

:100:

You need to think of a cup without trying to make a mental representation... — MoK

An idea IS a mental representation. — noAxioms

Yes, what I am stressing, though, is that it is irreducible. — MoK

1) Then why are you seemingly asking me to think of something without making a mental representation?
2) I deny your assertion that an idea is irreductible. Your inability to reduce it to smaller parts is not shared by me.

What does IIT say when there is no Φ? — Patterner

There is always Φ for anything. It might work out to zero, but that's still a Φ. Zero I suppose means not conscious at all.

My distinction came next, when I said even the simplest organism is running many information processing systems. — Patterner

Fair enough. Consider a galley, a ship powered by slave-driven oars during battle. Is such a galley conscious? Not asking if it contains conscious things, but is the boat system, fully loaded with slaves and whatnot, is that system itself conscious? More conscious or less than say you? I ask because it is obviously running many information processing systems. Even the barnacles contribute.

You seem to go with the panphychists, so the answer is probably yes (everything is), so the important question is if the galley is more or less conscious than you, and why. I suppose I could ask the IIT folks as well.

If someone thinks consciousness emerges from physical properties and processes, particularly information processing, I wouldn't think the theory would say it emerges from just one such system. I would think the theory would say many information processing systems, working together as one entity, as is the case with living organisms, are needed. — Patterner

Unclear here. It emerging from one such system precludes multiple conscious entitites. I think you mean it emerges in one being despite being composed of multiple cells doing this DNA computation. But that would make forests more conscious than people because there's more biomass to one (and yes, there are whole forests comprised of a single plant). Likewise it emerging from the galley, except in this paragraph you seem to be telling me what a physicalist would say, which is probably not what they actually say. I for one don't think the computation done at the DNA level contributes at all to say a vertebrae's consciousness. It might be a cell being conscious, but the cell doesn't know what the other cells are doing except via chemical interactions.

Then we get into weird stuff like slime molds which seem to be conscious and can communicate information to another (language), all without nerve cells or any CPU. Not sure whose case that supports or contradicts. Do I have the right to label it conscious just because it appears to act like it is, with deliberate action and with social interactions?

Frankly, though, I'm not sure the computer is processing information. I don't think manipulating 0s and 1s is processing information in an objective sense. It is in our eyes, because we programmed it to manipulate them in ways that are meaningful to us. But I'm not sure being meaningful in our eyes is sufficient. It doesn't do anything.

Sure it does something. Information comes in. Different information goes out, because the information was processed, regardless of to whom that information is meaningful.

The information a retina (or a simple eyespot) generates and sends to the brain (or flagellum) has meaning that we did not assign it.

Likewise for a machine processing information from a webcam, or signals from a radio telescope or microphone.
Oddly enough, sound goes through considerable information processing (a Fourier transform) before it ever fires some nerve cell heading from ears to brain.

The idea of a cup does not have any part for me! — MoK

My condolences.

You need to think of a cup without trying to make a mental representation...

I think that would be contradictory. An idea IS a mental representation.

Does IIT not say consciousness is information processing? — Patterner

From what I can tell, consciousness is manifested in information processing. There's a complex computation of Φ that is dependent on six factors, so a huge computer cranking out teraflops for weather prediction probably doesn't qualify.

Still, it's a variant of panpsychism, asserting that consciousness is intrinsic, not emergent. But it is negligible for most things with low Φ.

A computer that processes information may do so remarkably well, and at speeds we can't imagine. ... But that's all it does. — Patterner

But that's all a biological information processor does as well. You've not identified any distinction.
In both cases, doing 'additions' is a small part of what all it does. Mere addition (arguably) cannot make decisions.

Otoh, the simplest organism that you might consider to be barely conscious has quite a few different information processing systems within it. Starting with DNA synthesizing protein.

Very much information processing, yes.

I don't know which organism you have in mind, but there is likely sensing the environment, doing something in response to what is sensed

All things an artificial device can do. I have no specific organism in mind since I don't think consciousness is anything fundamental or restricted to 'organisms'. While you also seem to suggest that consciousness isn't restricted to organisms, you do apparently think it is something far more fundamental, so we're not on the same ground.

I don't think objective truths and falsehoods have a property of location. If they did, they'd be a relative truth, requiring a relation to some sort of coordinate system. — noAxioms

Oh, so you deny that an idea has a location. — MoK

I never mentioned 'ideas' in the bit you quoted. If I want to talk about the idea or concept of truth, I would have said 'concept of truth' or some such (see bold below). I'm no idealist, so I don't equate a thing with the concept of the thing.

Yes, the idea of a cup has many parts, but probably not as many as the actual cup. — noAxioms

I suppose you are referring to an image of a cup that you are creating. — MoK

Again, I was, on the left, bold, referring to the idea of a cup, and on the right, italics, the cup itself. At no point in the comment was any mention of an 'image' made. Had I desired to do that, I would have said 'picture of cup' or some such.

I'm not sure why you continuously jump to conclusions about things not said. Kindly restrict your conclusions to what I said, and not what you pretend I said.

The computationalists and IIT proponents, for example, suggest that consciousness emerges from computation and/or information processing, and they usually invoke a threshold of computation/processing before consciousness emerges, else they end up close to panpsychism. — RogueAI

There's plenty of artificial computer devices that do a whole lot more information processing than does what I might consider to be a barely conscious organism, and I don't consider the devices to be conscious. On the other hand, I do consider some devices that require measurement of local environment to function, to be conscious, more so than some organisms that do a whole lot more information processing.
An example of the latter seems to be photosynthesis, which involves such complex chemical relationships that it requires a quantum computer to seek out the path to the one that works. Yes, that means that plants have quantum computers in them, arguably more complex, processing more information than us.
I can attempt to track down the article if there's interest.

Your definitions might differ of course.

And where is the truth if it is not in the mind? — MoK

I don't think objective truths and falsehoods have a property of location. If they did, they'd be a relative truth, requiring a relation to some sort of coordinate system.

Could we agree that something that exists is either objective or subjective?

That would be a different definition of 'objective' than the one I've been using. It would mean independence from observation, rather than independence from any context at all. I tend to oppose 'objective' with 'context independent'. An apple has a relational existence. It relates to a coordinate system (it's part of this universe and has a location in it, if that even means anything), and it relates only to that with which it has interacted, and thus has collapsed its wave function to said apple. Of course that implies some quantum interpretation that does not assert the reality of things in absence of those interactions. Bohmian mechanics for instance is a realist interpretation that would say the apple is real (still in relation to the universe), existing without reliance on the interaction with something collapsing its wave function. I'm more of a locality kind of person, finding reverse causality more distasteful than lack of realism.

"Cup" refers to an idea. Does such an idea have parts?

Yes, the idea of a cup has many parts, but probably not as many as the actual cup.

1) I don't accept your given, and 2) as usual, your conclusion does not follow from your given premise. — noAxioms

So, you have an explanation of how ideas emerge and can affect the physical world, given my definition of an idea? I would be happy to hear that!

It does not follow from my comment that I had an explanation of how ideas emerge, or even that they're something that is emergent. I don't see your definition of what an idea is, only an assertion that it has no parts due to it being irreducible. I agree with none of those asserted properties, but maybe we have vastly different definitions of what an idea is.

A substance is something that objectively exists. — MoK

The truth of the sum of 2 and 2 being 4 seems to objectively exist, yet isn't considered a substance by many. I have a hard time coming up with other examples. None of the things I think have objective existence are substances.

OK, you're entitled to different definitions, but if you declare the apple to exist because you see it, that seems to be subjective existence, not objective at all.

An idea does not have parts at the end since it is irreducible — MoK

Disagree. Ideas have parts, but those parts are not objects or substances. I have patented ideas, and those ideas had a lot of parts. I've never patented an object of any kind.

I think consciousness is always the same, and can always be causal. — Patterner

So you agree with my bit of logic showing that it can be measured.

Let's say physicalism. Through purely physical interactions, life begins, and evolves. There's no such thing as consciousness. Then, a certain physical complexity comes into being. And, though consciousness was not planned, and consciousness had no role in bringing that complexity about, for no reason, that physical complexity just happens to be perfect for the existence of this entirely new thing that it has nothing to do with.

What an extraordinary, bizarre turn of events,

You can say all this about any feature. Just substitute say 'eye' for 'consciousness'.
I picked that because eyes are a frequent choice for similar argument from incredulity.

BTW, the physicalists don't suggest that consciousness follows from mere complexity. What comes into being is improved reaction to outside stimuli, never anything new, just improvements to what was already there.

I have yet to hear a theory, or even a wild guess, about how Chalmers' Hard Problem is explained with physicalism. — Patterner

Same can be said of Chalmers, who merely replaced a black box with a different, even blacker one. It, being inaccessible, is far less explained. Magic is not a better answer.

There's not even a single wild guess as to a model about how the non physical mind works, operates, evolves from the past into the future. Nobody who believes in non physicalism even tries to come up with one, and they don't have the vaguest idea how to find one or even begin performing experiments on the non physical mind to test their ideas. — flannel jesus

Expressing the same criticism. Nicely put.

End of the day, all theories explain it with, "That's the way it is." Even beyond theories of consciousness. Why is there something instead of nothing? — Patterner

I would never end the day with just that. "I don't know" is better than "that's the way it is", and "don't know, so magic". As for the nothing question, that one has satisfactory (to me) analysis, starting with identifying and questioning the assumptions made in asking it.

If it were entirely physics and chemistry, there would be no separate discipline of organic chemistry. — Wayfarer

Organic chemistry being a subset of all chemistry does not in any way imply that organic chemistry is more than chemistry, which in turn, is just physics.

OK, a life-form is more than just organic chemistry. One might behave as a unit for instance, a property not particularly coming from just chemistry. But the discipline of organic chemistry is not the discipline of biology.

The idea that life evolved naturally on the primitive Earth suggests that the first cells came into being by spontaneous chemical reactions

Maybe. Going from not-life straight to a cell seems a stretch, but things like amphiphiles and ribose do occur in absence of life, so it's not an impossible stretch. Going from a self-sustaining form to a replicating form seems the largest hurdle. It isn't really life until it does that.

Ernst Mayr ... made this point in no uncertain terms: ‘… The discovery of the genetic code was a breakthrough of the first order. It showed why organisms are fundamentally different from any kind of nonliving material."

Calling it a fundamental difference does not preclude it from being based on physics and chemistry.

Descartes had difficulty explaining how res cogitans affects matter, suggesting that the rational soul operated through the pineal gland. — Wayfarer

The suggestion of the pineal gland was not an attempt at an explanation of how matter was affected, but rather a choice of something in/near the brain that there was only one of. Being somewhat symmetrical, most brain parts have a mirror part, but not that gland. Still, the soul could have been put in the heart (only one of those) or gut (plenty of behavior and choices come from there).

What about abstract objects like numbers and logical rules? Do you think there are physical explanations for them? — Wayfarer

Abstractions are mental constructs, and so supervene on mental constructs/states. Same with abstractions of say an apple.

We know that materialism fails since it cannot explain how ideas emerge and how they can be causally efficacious in the world, given that ideas are irreducible and have no parts. — MoK

1) I don't accept your given, and 2) as usual, your conclusion does not follow from your given premise.

Not sure what you mean. What example of yours would I be countering? — Patterner

P1) Human consciousness does not supervene on physical processes.
P2) Qualia is part of human consciousness
C1) Human consciousness is a 2nd kind of property/substance that is not part of the physical processes described by physics
P3) A human talks/writes about qualia, a physical action
C2) Consciousness causes physical effects

C1 encompasses varying kinds of dualism. I don't support this, so the example needs to come from those that do.
C2 is a statement of interactionism. Descartes put the interaction in the pineal gland, supposedly because "I cannot find any part of the brain, except this, which is not double", whatever that means.
I suspect that it was selected due to its inaccessibility (at the time) in a living subject.

Chalmers seems to deny interactionism (I may have this wrong), but I could not find any explanation (except obfuscation) of how he gets around it. He has no counter-story. Either my logic above is not valid, or mental substances/properties have non-mental physical effects that are open to being measured.


MoK has not replied to my identification of logic flaws in his OP, so I presume agreement.

We are dealing with the strong emergence in the case of ideas since they are irreducible, yet they have a single content that can be experienced. Ideas are irreducible mental events since they can be experienced. — MoK

This is not consistent with your definition of strong emergence in the OP.
I mean, your OP implies consciousness to not be strong emergence, and it too can be experienced. Emergence (weak at least, per your OP) means it is a function of the parts, not that it is experienced or not, nor if it is reducible.

To be honest, I cannot figure out your stance, since weak emergence seems to be a conclusion of a physicalist, and yet you seem to support substance dualism.

Experiencing a cup is a sort of weak emergence considering all the complexities between experiencing the cup and the cup. We, however, have the ability to experience ideas as well, which is a strong emergence.

Experience of one thing is arguably weak emergence, but experience of a different thing is strong emergence? Really? All without any demonstration of the difference, or why these things cannot be emergent from different (non-human) parts with the same relevant properties.

Remember that Newton's laws apply to inertial frames only, and don't usually work in other kinds of frames. This also goes for most of the conservation laws.

So what is the difference? Well in the inertia picture we are trying to give an answer to the age old question of Aristotle's prime mover argument. At least the childish mentality of it. If something moves something then something most move. . . or change. . . that thing. . . and so on. — substantivalism

This makes it sound like A causes B to accelerate (effect), which is wrong. Both interact with each other, with neither being cause nor effect. There is no regress.

An infinite regress results unless we somehow end it in some fashion or make some object 'self-sufficient' in its motion without anything external. The point of the concept of inertia is to postulate just this. . . that an object can move or retain its properties without having something force it to do that externally.

Motion under either model is an abstraction, a change in coordinate position over time, both of which are frame dependent. Thus velocity is not a physical property that gets mucked about by some other object. Contrast this with proper acceleration which is physical, and zero in gravitational inertial picture.

This opens the door to 'natural' states of objects and 'un-natural' states of objects. Forced and un-forced. Following geodesics and not following geodesics.

An object not tracing a geodesic is due to some force (EM say). So sure, using the term 'forced' seems weirdly applied, but appropriate. Calling it un-natural is deceptive.

As for spacetime being a sort of aether/fabric, well, you described that pretty well, and contrast it gravity being a sort of material force rather than geomery. I don't see much difference between the views, just different ways of wording the same thing.

It's like asking for the physical thing responsible for conservation of energy. . . energy is just conserved and we don't look further for the 'thing' responsible for it.

Conservation is a property of laws with certain symmetries. Newtons laws of motion exhibit that symmetry. So yes, it isn't a physical thing that 'causes' conservation. We'd probably just not have a name for energy if it wasn't useful to reference.

However, under the substantivalism picture we still desire to explain why things move the way they do and might feel at odds with bluntly just assuming the ways things move is just a law of nature not to be further explained by any other 'thing'. So we might choose to assert there is an entity who is responsible solely for grounding those familiar spatial/temporal intuitions of ours and explain why objects move the way they do.

Entity-of-the-gaps can be done with any view, including the geometric one. It isn't an explanation, it's hand-waving away to the realm of magic that flies in the face of methodological naturalism, the lack of which kept science pretty much at a standstill for pretty much all of the dark ages.
It makes for an even more complicated thing in need of explanation and as such, solves no problems.

__________________________________________________________________________________

So which picture is better?

Hands down the one without the magic entity. I didn't know where you were going with all this and was surprised when that came up.

If consciousness is fundamental, then we can't measure it in the ways we measure everything else.
— Patterner
Sure you can. You can measure its effect on everything else. — noAxioms
Can you elaborate? — Patterner

How? — Wayfarer

I'm also curious about this. — flannel jesus

Slow reply, but primarily I am talking about mind interactionism here, which necessitates interaction between mind and physical (usually substances, but can be property dualism).
Given this, the interaction point must be somewhere, and the tool used depends on where that point is.
Even with panpsychism, all matter has mental properties that are not described by current naturalistic physics.

So anticipating pushback on this, I tried to investigate non-interacting forms that still deny mental processes supervening physical, besides epiphenomenal views which refutes any talk about qualia and such. I could not find any, so my assertion above stands. A counterexample is required.

You measure a physical change, how do you determine that it was fundamental consciousness that caused that rather than something else? — flannel jesus

You don't know of course, which is a good reason why physicalism is a valid position.

I invite you to read the OP again. — MoK

I did and saw a long list of assumptions, most but not all of which I would accept. That's fine. What I'm pointing out is that the assumptions are not enough.

Granting these assumptions means that there is a function that describes the property of the system. — MoK

This does not follow from the list of assumptions. It's an assertion. I'd not even disagree with the assertion except the part where you suggest that it follows from the list of assumptions.
Sure, there's what you call a 'function' that describes a certain property of the system. That's just yet another assumption. It says nothing about if this property is emergent, strong or weak.

The only avalaible properties are the properties of parts though.

That also does not follow from the list of assumptions you provided.

Therefore, the property of such a system is a function of the properties of the parts.

That arguably would follow from the above statement, which unfortunately doesn't follow from the assumptions.

Hence my question, "How do you know this"? How have you falsified the view that human experience is not emergent from the physical parts?

If consciousness is fundamental, then we can't measure it in the ways we measure everything else. — Patterner

Sure you can. You can measure its effect on everything else.

How do you know this? There are those that disagree and say that consciousness is not a function of the properties of the parts. They also often claim to 'know' this. — noAxioms

That is true given the definition of weak emergence. — MoK

It does not logically follow from a mere definition that any specific case meets that definition. So no, it is not true given the definition. For it to be true, it must be the case that consciousness is a function of human parts that have certain relevant properties, and in complete contradiction, not a function of non-human parts that have the same relevant properties.

This seems very inconsistent. Why is one a function of the parts and the other is not a function of parts with nearly identical relevant properties? — noAxioms
What do you mean by one and the other?

Well you deleted all the context.
One: human parts (your assertion), and the other: non-human parts with the same relevant properties, as described by @RogueAI

Obviosly some physical change (a deliberate one) would have to lack a physical cause. — noAxioms

Such as?

Such as any choice involving what is typically defined as free will.

Therefore, the property of such a system is a function of the properties of the parts. Therefore, we are not dealing with strong emergence in the case of consciousness. — MoK

How do you know this? There are those that disagree and say that consciousness is not a function of the properties of the parts. They also often claim to 'know' this.

Suppose I have a microchip (or series of microchips wired together) with x amount of switches. Are you saying that if I flip enough switches a certain way, consciousness will emerge? — RogueAI

I think you are talking about strong emergence here. — MoK

This seems very inconsistent. Why is one a function of the parts and the other is not a function of parts with nearly identical relevant properties?

I like Patterner's example of air pressure being emergent from gas molecules, none of which has itself a property of pressure, at least not that kind of pressure.
And yes, I also like @Pierre-Normand's emergence of chess from the movement of figurines, none of which are chess.

I wasn't entirely sure what op meant by "a function of" in this context, so I (perhaps embarrassingly) asked ai:

"In the context of the provided text, saying one thing is "a function of" another thing means that the property of a system can be mathematically or logically described and derived from the properties of its constituent parts [textual content]."
That sounds like an epistemological definition. Something is an emergent property of the parts if we know how, and can derive (predict0 the emergent property. That seems to have nothing to do with if it actually is a function of the parts or if outside influence is required. The dualists have always leaned on such a definition. "I refuse to pay attention to advances in the field, so consciousness will forever not be a function of brain activity. They demonstrate always correlation, never causation.".
— flannel jesus

I agree. But I don't think all properties are physical. — Patterner

That's another tack, suggesting properties of trivial parts (atoms say) that have never been measured by anything studying atoms.

I don't think this is correct. I don't believe in strong emergence, but if there were strong emergence it would be casual - arguably more casual than weak emergence. — flannel jesus

Yes, it would be causal, and that makes for an empirical test for it.

It is correct. If matter moves on its own, and experience is the result of how matter moves, then how could experience be causally efficacious? — MoK

Obviosly some physical change (a deliberate one) would have to lack a physical cause. The laws describing the states of matter would necessarily be incomplete.

In short, special relativity had to be derived as a consequence of Michelson Morley experiment as well as Maxwell's equations, and then General Relativity because he needed a way of keeping gravity fully local (in contrast to Newtonian gravity which involves instantaneous arrival of updated gravity information). — flannel jesus

M&M was pre-existing evidence, yes, and everybody knew a new theory was needed because of that. Several were working on it and Einstein put out SR shortly after LET, both valid explanations. Neither dealt with gravity and neither were geometric solutions.

OK, keeping GR local was perhaps a major motivation for the geometric approach. Not sure how far Einstein would have got on his GR work had not Minkowski re-cast SR as a geometric model first, but that move was essential to the completion of GR.

Also he had this idea - that was explained in the video - about how a guy falling wouldn't feel that he is falling. The "happiest thought in his life", right?

Yes, the EP is based on that, that gravity and acceleration are locally indistinguishable, thus he could take the mathematics of accelerated frames from SR and derive things like gravitational time dilation. I think that part could have been done with the non-geometric model. Maybe. Not like I've worked through the derivations myself.

Nice explanation of how Einstein's spacetime curving explains gravitational motion as well as does Newton's force laws. What seems not explained is why Einstein's model is better, and where Newton's laws fail to make the correct prediction. What were Einstein's thought processes that made him move to this new model? The opening and title of the video ask 'why' and not 'how', so I thought this part would be covered.

The only experimental evidence at the time was the anomalous precession of Mercury's orbit. That had to be it, but not mention of this I think in the video. Later, bending of light around large masses, and gravitational redshift were verifications, but neither of these had been done at time of GR publishing.

This isn't an ad, I promise haha. — flannel jesus

But it has an ad built in that you have to wade through or forward past.

There's a real problem about EPP. The root of the problem is the idea that something can exist before any predicates apply to it, or that something can have a predicate applied to it before it exists. Neither works. Hence "prior" cannot mean "temporally prior" so it needs to be reinterpreted or abandoned. — Ludwig V

First of all, 'prior' is their language, and it isn't a temporal reference. EPP says (without using that contentious word) that 'only existing things can have predicates', which is arguably self contradictory since a nonexistent thing would have no predicates, which is in itself a predicate. Meinong rejects that, so existence is not a requirement for predication.

Part of the issue is that EPP isn't very specific about what definition of 'exists' is being referenced in its statement. Under def 1 (idealism), and 4 (deliberate assignment), predication seems prior to existence.
Definition 3 (relational) also doesn't seem to require EPP. So that leaves 2 (part of the universe) and 5 (objective), the only ones that arguably need it, but if EPP is not assumed, I don't see any contradiction that follows from predication without existence.

OK, def 2 as worded arguably of needs it because the universe needs to stand out from other universes, else it's just a universe. But since two objects can be a meter apart in one of the other universes, EPP isn't necessary for the predication, only for it being (unexplainably) preferred.

So EPP fails at every step. You seem to find that problematic, but without begging EPP, you need to point out what contradiction results from it, being very specific about how you're defining your terms.

Well, you're still left with the problems of idealism.

As I said, under idealism, the elephant's existence is due to its being observed, being a phenomenon. That phenomenal relation results in the existence of the elephant, hence predication is prior to existence under idealism. You disagree I take it.

I already knew that existence without predication makes no sense.

If you define existence as 'standing out', yea, it can't stand out without predicates. Under idealism, that would mean existence despite not being perceived, which isn't really idealism then. 2-4 seem to require predication, yes. 5 (objective)? That one seems contradictory only because existence under def 5 is a property (not a relation), and a property is a predicate, as is the lack of the property.

Thanks for your input Ludwig. Forcing me to work stuff out, which is good.

My reply to you here belongs in my EPP topic.

The question of mind independence that is of interest to me, is the sense in which the world exists independently of the mind. — Wayfarer

Just calling it 'the world' seems to be an assumption that this world is preferred, presumably because it is perceived. This sounds like a very mind dependent stance to me.

Even if there is a counter-intuitive increase of number of 'bases' — boundless

Everett's thesis had to dumb-down the number of bases due to the finite but inexpressibly large actuality of the actual figure. For instance, you (a physical object with extension, at a moment in time) is undergoing trillions of splits such that there is no one measured state except relative to some measuring event well after said moment in time. Hence Rovelli saying that a thing cannot measure itself, it can only measure something sufficiently in the past to have collapsed into a coherent state. Not sure if it's Rovelli's term, but an extended system (a person say) at an extended moment in time, is a sort of extended spacetime event called a 'beable'.

I mean sure, the elephant exists because its parents got busy one day, but that's not a fundamental cause. — noAxioms
So what is more fundamental than that? — Ludwig V

The cause of its parents of course.
I list what is probably classified by Aristotle as an efficient cause of the elephant. More fundamental would be a root cause, something realists need to face.

Two pebbles are (at a particular moment in time) a meter apart. That's a relation ('is a meter from') even without them ever being observed or known. — noAxioms
Oh, I see. The criterion you are applying is simply "being in a relation with something that exists".

That would be a different relation than the one I listed. I mean, that's like 'being in a relation with something that's green', which begs the question 'what if it's a meter from something that's not green?'. It seems your relation asserts something in addition to the relation. Mine did not. That relation is a predicate, and if EPP is not accepted, only the relation 'is a meter from' is sufficient. Existence of neither object is required. With EPP, yea, they need to exist before they can be a meter apart.

I can make some sort of sense to your acceptance of Meinong's rejection of EPP. I need to pay more attention to him, (thanks for that) but so far I can't make any sense at all of your being in the presence of elephant B.

No different than the two things a meter apart. Existence of either thing is not required if EPP is rejected, so I can be in the presence of a nonexistent elephant. Since related things often (not always) seem to share ontology, I probably wouldn't exist either. My suggestion is that since elephant A & B are identical except for A existing, nether A nor B has any empirical test to see which is which. For this reason, I find existence defined as an objective property to be useless. Hence my not being a realist. All the problems of realism are solved.

doesn't [Kant's] 'exist' boil down to 'I know about'? — noAxioms

Not really. Phenomena are dependent on minds for their existence (and properties). But noumena are not.

I really don't know Kant then. Those are not idealist ideas.

I meant that the 'normal' basis is selected, after the measurement, due to the fact that our experimental apparatuses are structured in some ways. In other words, the reason why we observe things in the 'right' basis is that the the experimental apparatus has those properties it has. However, in principle, you could have that after the measurement the state vector 'collapses' to one of the vector in the 'wrong' basis. — boundless

I don't understand any of that. There is no right/wrong basis under MWI. They all share the same ontology, but some are more probable than others, whatever that means.

Anyway, my contention is that if the interference terms are too significant, in the Schrodinger's cat experiment, the version of the observers that sees the 'alive' cat should perceive in some ways the other 'world'. — boundless

They are nowhere near sufficiently significant. I cannot think of a scenario, however trivial, where you'd see this. It would be the equivalent of measuring which slit the photon passed through, and still getting an interference patter. Interference comes from not knowing the state of the cat, ever.

In my example of spins, for instance, we observe either '+1/2' or '-1/2', but we never observe the state 1/sqrt(2)('+1/2'+'-1/2').

Sure we do. You observe that by not measuring the spin, same as not measuring which slit.

As soon as you name a ‘world’ or a ‘thing’ or ‘an unknown object’ which you claim is unaffected by or separate from your thought of it, you are already bringing it within the ambit of thought. — Wayfarer

So much wrong with that sentence. Nit: I didn't name any particular world. I didn't have a particular one in mind, especially since it's quite difficult to do so. Secondly, I didn't claim anything, but I am defending the stance of those that claim a mind-independent reality. In such a stance, there is no 'ambit of thought'. That term presumes a very different stance. Under the mind-independent view, somebody thinking about X (X not being something in his causal reach) has zero effect on X, and in particular, has zero contribution to whatever the ontological state of X is.

The realist always has something in mind when he or she speaks of ‘something unaffected by thought’.

Arguably so, but being thought of doesn't change it to be affected by thought.
We've switched to 'realist' now. I suppose most of those claiming mind independent existence of say some rock consider said rock to be real. Being real and existing are often synonyms, or treated as such, but there are pages keeping the two terms distinct.

It’s a Chinese finger trap - you can’t even say it without undercutting the point.

I haven't seen the point undercut, despite your implication of 'ambit'.

[Einstein’s] critique was critical to the development of quantum theory. — noAxioms
Yes, but the article acknowledges that. — Wayfarer

I know. I was relaying a couple snippets from the article since Einstein's realist leanings have been noted multiple times in this topic.

Discover Magazine: In quantum mechanics an object can exist in many states at once, which sounds crazy. — Wayfarer

Only in some interpretations, and not crazy, just unintuitive.

The equation should describe the world in a completely deterministic way, but it doesn’t.

Schrödinger equation is deterministic actually. Penrose also seems to be a realist, which doesn't contradict QM, it just contradicts locality. Does he also disagree with say Bohmian mechanics?

But what if physical reality is actually indeterminate on a fundamental level?

There are those interpretations as well, such as objective collapse.

Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, founder of loop quantum gravity, has written seriously about how Nagarjuna’s philosophy of emptiness—the idea that phenomena lack intrinsic existence—resonates with quantum mechanics’ relational ontology, where particles and properties exist only through measurement relationships rather than independently.

Preaching to choir

MWI was developed before decoherence. MWI supporters like decoherence because it seems to explain the branching. It doesn't IIRC remove interference however. — boundless

Why would you want interference removed? It is seen. Even a realist interpretation like DBB has the photon going through one slit and not the other, yet interference patterns result. We experience that. Perhaps we're talking past each other.

Yes, but there is a preferred basis in our experience.

You don't know that, there being no evidence of it. Under MWI, there's no 'our', so every basis is experienced by whatever is entangled with that basis, with none preferred.

It may well be special because it is observed. But observing something doesn’t normally cause it to exist. So even if it is special because it is observed, it may exist for some other reason. You need to demonstrate that there is no other reason. — Ludwig V

A realist might want to justify the existence of whatever he asserts to exist, but I don't count myself among them. I actually think its a big problem. I mean sure, the elephant exists because its parents got busy one day, but that's not a fundamental cause.

If it doesn’t stand out to anything observing or caring about it, it’s not a relation.

Nonsense. Two pebbles are (at a particular moment in time) a meter apart. That's a relation ('is a meter from') even without them ever being observed or known.

I’m glad we agree on something. However, to establish the difference (or similarity) between A and B, you have to identify A and B. Suppose that A is the existing elephant. Your problem is that you have no non-existing elephant to take the place of B. — Ludwig V

Maybe I'm in the presence of elephant B and I've no relation to the existing A one. That would imply that I don't exist since such relations (in the presence of) tend to be between things with similar ontology.
Given that statement, you may want to retract the 'agree on something', but if existence is a property, there's no way to know if you have it. It's usually assumed, but doing so renders the property meaningless.
I did say I wasn't a realist. I usually define 'exists' as the original 'stands out to' relation, in which case yea, B exists to me and A does not. It's objective existence (a property) that is a realist stance, and it makes little sense to me.

You might find a partial solution in Meinong’s work — Ludwig V

My prior topic was on exactly that. I am more open to Meinong than most. My focus was on his rejection of existence being prior to predication (EPP). Given that rejection, I can be in the presence (a predicate) of elephant B without either of us existing.

However, Kant argued that “exists” is not a predicate, which means that existence is not a property.

I don't know Kant all that well, but doesn't his 'exist' boil down to 'I know about'? That is a predicate. Kant isn't exactly a ball of mind-independent opinions.
To reject objective existence as a predicate is to embrace EPP.

Some reservations. Your formulation has the consequence of limiting existence to things that have causal relationships with each other – that is, physical things.

There's plenty of causal structures that are not typically classified as physical. Conway's Game of Life (GoL) is one example. A medium spaceship is an object in that structure. It moves (at 0.5c), can be created and have causal effects. It exists by this EP definition. But it lacks mass, energy, etc, words that are meaningful to our particular physics.

Yes, Plato certainly used a different definition than EP. Plato cites the soul as something lacking in causal interaction? That seems contrary to how souls are often defined.

One of many such apparent paradoxes in quantum physics — Wayfarer

PCD is not paradoxical, it just isn't classical.

I meant something like 'QM without the reduction postulate'. — boundless

QM doesn't have a reduction postulate, but some of the interpretations do. Each seems to spin the role of measurement a different way.

If you do not accept collapse, you still have superposition and interference.

Yes, the latter two are, but the meaning of especially superposition is still interpretation dependent. Superposition itself is baked into the mathematics.

So, you need to explain why we do percieve everything in a definite state.

I suppose that explanation is interpretation dependent as well.

But I was questioning if decoherence is enough for the appearance of collapse.

It seems to be enough given an interpretation (MWI say) that explains it that way.

Interference terms remain, they become however very, very small. Is that truly enough to explain our 'definite' experience (same goes for the cat's experience)?

Interference is a statistical effect, so with no particle can interference be measured, let alone measured by the particle in question. But it can be concluded given hundreds of thousands of objects all being treated identically. So I suppose a really huge crowd of people (far more than billions) could collectively notice some kind of interference if they all did something identical. I cannot fathom what that experiment would look like or how any of those people could survive it.

Basically, in MWI the branching is explained by saying that there is a superposition of definite states.

Definite means something like this. Consider a spin 1/2 particle. When we measure the spin (say) in the z-axis we obtain either '+1/2' or '-1/2'. So, '+1/2' and '-1/2' are 'definite states'. — boundless

OK. They're post-measurement, so they are definite, sure, but post-measurement, they're not in superposition anymore, so it's only in superposition of definite state relative to a system that has not yet measured the lab doing the spin measurement.

This is very well illustrated by the cat, where death when -1/2 is measured. From inside the box, there is one definite state and the cat is alive or dead depending on that. From outside the box, they know the measurement has been performed, but don't know the result of it. So the cat is in superposition of the interior definite state of being dead and alive, but the cat is not in a exterior definite state, meaning it is still in superposition relative to the lab. And yes, they can measure interference in principle.
In practice, there's no way to keep the cat alive and in superposition since there's no way to prevent information from leaking out of the box.

Here things go tricky, however. Why, when we make a measurement, does the quantum state collapse or appear to collapse in one state of the 'basis 1' instead of 'basis 2'?

Interpretation dependent obviously. Some interpretations have no concept of 'our' experience since there's no 'you' that satisfies the laws of identity and non-contradiction. Keep that in mind.


But if MWI-supporters do not want to make any reference to experience to explain how we have the quantum-classical transition, then why systems evolve as if they have to appear to collapse in a state of the 'basis 1', which happens to correspond to our experience?[/quote]MWI does not collapse in a state of the basis 1 which happens to correspond to our experience. It denies the bold parts at least. Basis 2 is also experienced, and as much by the pre-measurement 'you' as is the post-measurement 'you' that's in state 1, which is to say, not by the same person as the one before.

This is a part of, as I understand it, the 'preferred basis problem'. MMI posits that 'basis 1' is selected by the mind.

What is 'the mind' per MMI? It is some dualistic mind thing, sort of a moving spotlight which gets to pick which path it follows, with the other paths left as zombies? That sounds like uni-mind, so no, probably not that. You can tell I don't know much about MMI, especially the part about how they define 'mind'. Do trees similarly select their bases? Where do they draw the line between what has a 'mind' and what doesn't?

Yeah, the paper is a bit technical and also beyond my paygrade. Basically, however, it tries to reject MWI by adducing that if a MWI supporter doesn't add some postulate to 'pure QM without the collapse postulate' you can't explain how the universe decompose in subsystems, how the preferred basis is selected etc.

There's no preferred basis in MWI. That much I know. Can't speak for MMI.

What thing would that be? — Wayfarer

We were discussing 'worlds', which is loosely referenced by the word 'thing' in my statement, despite not being an object. A world is unaffected by something elsewhere imagining one.

Incidentally a nice Australian Broadcasting Corp feature on the 100 year anniversary of Heisenberg's famous paper

Cool article, compressing 100 years of quantum history into a few pages. It harps a lot on how Einstein really wanted a locally real universe, and perhaps never knew it was hopeless. His critique was critical to the development of quantum theory.

It's still a world. Nothing names it that, lacking information processing to give meaning, but that property (worldness) seems to be an example a feature of the thing in itself. — noAxioms
Nope. I dispute that. To say what it is, to name it, you have to bring it to mind. — Wayfarer

Sure, but in a mind-independent view, you bringing it to mind has zero effect on the thing itself. It's ontology in particular is not a function of somebody's musings.

So, I went through your OP carefully. I’m afraid that I do not come away with a general criterion for mind-independence. — Ludwig V

If you're looking for me to evangelize one, I tried not to.

To say 'the universe exists' is actually to say 'this universe exists' and not the others. Why? Because we observe it."

I’m not clear what this means.

I am pointing out the distinction between 'a universe' (this being one of many) vs 'the universe', which implies there's just one, and we're looking at it. The preferred way things are has plot holes that I point out, and declaring only this one to exist is a mind-dependent act.

For that statement, 'the universe' refers to all of our spacetime, even the parts not measurable, but not other type II universes such as ones with 4 spatial dimensions, just to name a simple difference.

I'm harping mostly on 'the' vs 'a', and not so much on the problems with asserting that it exists.

I'm harping mostly on 'the' vs 'a', and not so much on the problems with asserting that it exists.

I don’t see any implications for mind-dependence or not.

It out of gazillions of potential universes, only this preferred one exists, it is probably special because it is observed and the others are not. Sounds pretty observer dependent to me.

The word 'exists' has its origins to mean 'stands out' which often implies that there is something to which it stands out.

Yes! The origin of the word is a relation, and yet over time it gets thought of as a property. Elephants existing to me slowly becomes elephants existing period.
That which stands out to an observer seems observer dependent. So I'm looking for a definition where yea, it stands out, but not necessarily to anything observing or caring about it. Still a relation though. Hence definition 3 (relational) of 'exists', which has nothing to do with perception or knowing about the related thing.

For me, "exists" just means "There is/are.." as in "There is a moon" or "There are elephants".

That sounds pretty objective. A thing either is or it isn't, a property that is true or false. But then how does an existing elephant differ from the nonexisting elephant, in any way that matters to it? That's a hard question since most dismiss the question before thinking about it.

Well, it is true that if we perceive something, that something usually exists.

Well, it stands out to us, so it exists as a relation. There doesn't seem to be a test for the existence as a property. That's the problem with the word slowly changing meaning from its original definition.

The traditional example here is that a decoy duck is not a real duck

Again, this topic is about ontology, not a completely different definition of the word that means genuine vs, counterfeit.

"Principle 1 (The Eleatic Principle) An entity is to be counted as real if and only if it is capable of participating in causal processes" This wording of the principle is almost mind independent except for the 'counted as' part, and I've seen it worded without that.

In principle, this is an interesting criterion, which could work, at least in standard scientific contexts. The original formulation in Plato’s Sophist) goes something like “Anything that exists is capable of affecting other things, and capable of being affected by other things.” But it works in favour of mind-independence of anything that it applies to. Your argument to adapt it to show the opposite is very weak, because you admit that there are different ways to formulate it. I;m afraid that in any case, phrases like “counted as” do not imply mind-dependence, at least as I understand it.

Agree. I said that to show that it seems to be a valid mind-independent definition of existence, and an objective one this time, one that provides a test to pass or not.

I would say that compulsion is when our deliberative power is coherced to act in a certain bway by internal (e.g. severe mental illnesses) or external constraints. — boundless

Say an epileptic fit.

Bottom line for me: I don't think we have anything that qualifies as free will, and despite the positive sounding term, I wouldn't want it any more than I'd want a heaven where you can't be in pain. I all sounds good until you think about it.

For instance, MWI supporters generally claim that decoherence is enought to have 'classicality'. But IIRC, interference isn't eliminated. — boundless

Of course not. That would violate theory. The moon exhibits classicality without requiring minds.
Discussion elsewhere noted that if I enter ALDI double doors at high enough speed (multiple times), my cumulative demise will form an interference pattern on the far wall. The wall would have to be incredibly far away from the doors to notice it. They've not done it in the lab with anything larger than a bucky ball, but they have put eye-visible classical objects in superposition for really short times.

I just think that the block universe takes things too far.

Where I find it far simpler and elegant, and less filled with unanswerable implications such as what was the first cause.

I take it as a suggestion that maybe you experience the consequences of interference constantly, as a matter of course, but they're just... normal. They don't look particularly different from anything else you experience. — flannel jesus

Yes, exactly

Yet, QM taken literally tells us that we should perceive an interference of mutually exclusive states. — boundless

You'd have to show where QM says anything like that. QM does not contradict empirical experience.

For instance both states of the cat in Schroedinger's (in)famous experiment.

Right. There's no cat experiencing superposition or being both dead and alive. There's (from the lab PoV) a superposition of the cat experiencing living, and of experiencing dying by poison. A superposition of those two experiences is very different than the cat experiencing both outcomes. Each experience is utterly unaware of the other.

Also there is the preferred basis problem. Basically, in MWI the branching is explained by saying that there is a superposition of definite states.

'Definite states' sounds awfully classical to me. MWI is not a counterfactual interpretation, so is seems wrong to talk about such things.

See on this this paper: "Nothing happens in the Universe of the Everett Interpretation" by physicist J. Schwindt. — boundless

Hard to read, lacking the background required, but it seems to say that there are no 'worlds' from any objective description of say the universal wave function. It has no 'system states', something with which I agree. There are no discreet worlds, which again, sounds like a counterfactual. I think the paper is arguing against not so much the original Everett paper, but against the DeWitt interpretation that dubbed the term 'worlds' and MWI and such. I could be wrong.