On the other hand, refusing to procreate alleviates zero suffering, helps no one, does nothing to innovate beyond our current circumstances, so one shouldn’t expect any cookies for it. — NOS4A2

It prevents future suffering, not alleviates current ones. True, it literally helps no "one". The last part is just a straw man argument you are trying to knock down. I never stated how noble people are for not procreating, and how amazingly rewarded they should be. That is your false attribution.

I object to them for preaching. But, really, you are preaching too. — Jack Cummins

I mean I object to people making the decisions for others whether they should create a whole other life, but I mean, other people object to certain political views, not eating animals, and all sorts of things. I wouldn't call it preaching to state those views and the reasons for it. This sounds like special pleading in the negative. Antinatalism is preaching but other viewpoints are just rationalizing their arguments for their claim. Interesting.

Why propose these pussy half measures? Surely the logic of your position demands that all sentience should be ended immediately by any means necessary?

(If you construct a slippery slope argument, there is no valid reason not to slither all the way to its bottom.) — apokrisis

Stop straw manning and red herring this. I'll start misrepresenting Peircean semiotics and then you can see how that feels.

But seriously, preventing birth hurts no one, and doesn't violate other people's consent, rights of choice, things such as this. You know this though. It's not just "here is the goal no matter what the cost". It's not utilitarian aggregate schemes of "the greatest this or that for the greatest this or that". You can argue that in arguments that are actually arguing for that.

The pessimistic outcome is essentially that of antinatalism. The optimistic outcome is the use of advanced technology to eliminate suffering and to achieve artificial immortality. In either case, suffering will be eliminated once and for all. But it is just a question of how much imagination and determination we have as a species. For my part, I fully support the optimistic outcome :smile: — Alvin Capello

But then you are okay with using people to try to get to some technological utopia? People are thus fodder for the "aggregate utilitarian mill" of getting some advanced technology in some far off distant future?

Well, the procreated tend to support their appearance upon the scene.I appreciate that I have had a shot at the deal.
My child is a man now. I don't know what he will choose. The future belongs to him. — Valentinus

But you don't know what will become of the person procreated. Look at this pandemic. You didn't predict that. This one is perhaps not as deadly as it could. Maybe not the next one.

However, lets not wrap the argument around just pandemics. All forms of "enduring" everything from tedious tasks to the most horrible torture awaits new people born. Yet, all we can do to justify it is to say, "Well, my life is good so therefore I should procreate someone else.

Regardless, who are you to "gamble" with a life, be it divine or animalistic. Just someone who can- simply because you can at that moment. What meaning is there at all from that standpoint? — Outlander

Exactly. You don't know. Who are we to gamble. No one expected deadly pandemics to be this extensive. That's on an aggregate scale. Each individual life has its own possible horrors. Even more horrifying is no matter how much you reach out to others, we are the ones who have to endure it. The decision to create someone else is affecting someone else. This is not just an animal that doesn't know what is going on. You are creating someone who knows the situation.

There's no thrills or excitement, no fear of death or injury or failure sure, which of course means, no passion. It would quickly become difficult to distinguish one's own existence from that of a vegetable growing in a garden. — Outlander

I've said this before, but if the universe is one that works like this:

"You need to suffer to not be bored", then we are already off to a bad start this universe. Better off not even start with it.

However, it's not as simple as that. Buddhism has one other belief critical to this discussion viz. that only humans are capable of attaining nirvana - those living in lower realms (hell) overwhelmed by intense suffering and those of the higher realms (heaven) hypnotized by the rapturous delight. Ergo, in order to ensure more people have a shot at attaining nirvana, we should have/make more children. In other words, antinatalism doesn't square with Buddhism. Ending on the wrong note! Ouch! My ears! And Eyes! And Mind!

Paradox! — TheMadFool

Yeah, isn't that convenient that even Buddhism needs an escape hatch for procreation. I do get the philosophy. If everything is "illusion" and nirvana is an "awakening" from this, the multiplicity of birth and individuation of subjects and objects disappear. Thus, all this talk of individual prevention of suffering matters not.

But as far as I know, this reality is "real" enough that suffering does ensue for the individual. Yes, the individual is a construct from the interaction of the person with the world, but this doesn't mean that it isn't how humans function. That being the "reality" of the case, the whole leaving it up to the "awakening" from illusion thing, just seems ineffective. I get where it is coming from. I even sympathize, as it is also a Schopenhaurean viewpoint to some extent. However, the only way I can see actually preventing suffering is to simply not start a new life in the first place.

Perhaps this took place because certain citizens of influence began to be more able through resources available to them to satisfy their own desires and interests, and wished to do so without restraint by others or the government. Philosophical grounds were sought to provide a justification for the unrestrained satisfaction of individual interests. — Ciceronianus the White

Yes, but you would have to really follow the history. Can you juxtapose what came prior to the Enlightenment as more communitarian vs. the individualistic Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment emphasis? So it looks like you are saying Roman law emphasized how one was in relation to the government- duty to be in the army if citizen, how one can access courts or petitioning the Emperor directly, etc. However, there was never an emphasis for the freedoms of individuals. That is to say, how individuals would not be impeded by the government. So freedoms were mainly based on access to civil societies. This changes in the Enlightenment when individuals were no longer binding to institutions like lords and church officials. Rather, people were beholden to the markets, and property was a large part of protecting this new social arrangement. In the middle ages, the producers and merchants took a back seat, but once monarchies aligned with the interests of producers and merchants (mercantilism), and then the free-markets started moving away from the mercantile arrangement of state control to a free-market model, the individual and property became that much more important for individual reasons. Thus life, liberty, and property does seem more important. But there's obviously something more here than economic arrangements. Freedom of speech for example, and freedom of religion. I think it is a reaction to Church stifling of all sorts of speech. No empirical research that contradicts the Scholastics and Aristotle. No speech that does not comply with the Church's doctrine. Then there was what was going on in Protestant countries. Much of it was in response to kings like Charles II and James I and II etc. etc. But who was trying to have their free speech? The merchants of course. The middle classes that started having more of a say in what was going on in the nation. Thus the Netherlands had their various merchant states meeting. The English started moving from an emphasis on lords and hereditary status to merchants having a voice. These merchants made money on technological innovations of sorts.. clothing, steam, coal, etc. They needed to get more open information so they could invent more things to make money. Freedom of speech, press, etc. is needed for this type of exchange.

I don't know, I am just providing some sort of outline.

Natural law to them established, and provided guidance in determining, right conduct. It didn't provide a basis on which various entitlements could be claimed and demanded by each individual. — Ciceronianus the White

So do you have a sort of history of how it went from Natural law as right conduct to Natural law as entitlements? I can think of John Locke perhaps. Life, liberty, property are basic freedoms that should be protected by governments, according to him.

This is chapter one. He talks about causality in relation to a child throwing a stone. He points out that none of the atomic information we may have access to would explain the rock's motion as well as knowing the mental information associated with the throw.

Then he points to the abstential associated with the child's purpose. — frank

Ok, I remember this now. So he introduces the term "ententional" to capture the idea of intentionality in any sense, whether mentalistic (human mental representation of a goal in mind), or more primitively biological (like an organism's "goal" to survive). He wants to introduce the idea that biological organisms aren't just mechanical but end-driven. This he might then tie to an even more general principle of absential states.

I dont know if it diminishes his point, but absence is an aspect of a lot of things, such as a valley or a positive charge which results from atoms that are missing some of the electrons they would need to be neutral. True? — frank

I think he is trying to say that yes, absences actually may be the key in defining what will eventually become end-driven "ententional" states in biological systems.

I'm not sure life and consciousness are exclusice about that, though. A positively charged object is understood in terms of what it's missing. Right? — frank

Is thrre a particular part of book you are referring? Also can you elaborate your last statement about positively charged?

Just to clarify, it does look like you are discussing universal rights of a sort. Rome had an idea of rights as it related to citizenship status. Someone with full citizenship had more rights than someone from the provinces. Full citizenship had greater rights of court, civic participation, etc. Universal rights are a relatively new thing, probably starting close to the Enlightenment. That is to say, the idea of a government existing to maintain rights rather than people existing to maintain government.

A TM is designed so as to be materially divorced from reality. A biosemiotic system is evolved to be intimately connected to the construction of its material reality.

The two ontologies are so wildly at odds that there is no point making "computational" arguments until you can show you get the difference. — apokrisis

I suppose I will read more about this as I move forward in the book. It sounds like he's saying a TM is all form and no matter. Matter drives form and is messier perhaps. Of course, the overriding thing he hasn't gotten to is how absence of material processes create the form, yadayada which I am sure is the bulk of the book. He does a good job priming his main point with a lot of what isn't his theory, which keeps you reading I guess to see what indeed is the his main thesis and how it will spread the gamut to the hard question of consciousness. That is the part I am more skeptical he is going to accomplish.

It just seems to me that at the end, we are going to get a lot of what the machinery behaves like, but then lose how behavior becomes something like the internal colors and textures of our internal subjective self.

I think a lot of the debate is conflating mechanism with experience. The eliminativists want to keep point to one part of the equation and keep forgetting to address the part we are actually trying to figure out which is "what" (metaphysically) is experience as opposed to the matter which is causing or associated with the experience. It seems to me that even behavior patterns of matter and their statistical tendencies for this or that, are still not quite getting at the question. It does provide interesting ideas for how biology can be considered information rather than mechanistic, but that's not answering the question I am interested in.

@frank@Wayfarer@magritte@Gnomon@apokrisis
I'm at Golems chapter. He is essentially trying to discredit both preformationist and eliminativist theories, specifically focusing on computational theories of mind. Does anyone want to comment on his criticism of computational theory of mind? This would be around page 100 in the edition I'm using.

So there are indeed two contrasting worldviews here - and one of them is still basically reductionist about its emergence. Properties pop out as some surprising collective accident instead of being a more complex negotiation between top-down contextual constraints and bottom-up degrees of freedom. — apokrisis

My problem with top-down causation is that the consequence is already assumed at the top. For example, evolutionary adaptation at the microbiological level is explained by changes at the macro level of the environment. But the environment was already in the equation. Can top-down be a sort of shoehorning or bootstrapping that is illigitimate? It could be a subtle way of shifting the Cartesian Theater again, no? There it is as top-down causality. It used to be integration of neurons, or this or that, but it's the new place for the theater to play.

By the way, are you familiar with George Ellis?

I'm not sure what an observer has to do with any of this. Either that set of bits is heaped or scattered around or whatever, or it's arranged as a boulder. If we're only asking because of the metaphysics -- whether we countenance the existence of the boulder, and in what way -- that doesn't look all that interesting to me, unless it's to call attention to larger system within which boulders play a part. — Srap Tasmaner

Again, how events play out, how things scale, how properties inhere without an observer is the question. Objects on their own are different than objects as we perceive them. This seems simple yet bizarre because it is unusual to think of objects separated from our perception of them. An objects scale, property, and event on its own, is just an odd thing.

The small scale is furiously changing, but that just blurs into a generic statistics from our point of view. Likewise the cosmic scale is making a wild change from the Big Bang to the Heat Death. But that is so large a change that is completely fills our entire possible point of view. We only sample a tiny fraction of that reality during our own cogent moment of emergent existence. — apokrisis

I'm going to pick this quote because it might encapsulate a lot of the rest regarding scale. Let me put these words in succession to show where I'm coming from:

Scale: Can things have scale without a viewer? Where do objects and events obtain in space/time if there is no stage of scale?

Properties: Can things have properties without a viewer? Where do properties inhere if there is no stage of properties?

Events: Can there be events without a viewer? Without scale or properties, what kind of events can happen?

Atoms react with other atoms in their vicinity. — apokrisis

But even this simple statement seems so simple in human understanding and so bizarre outside of it, as an event in itself without a perspective.

will emerge to characterised the atoms as a system with generic properties like temperature and pressure. The system will be thermalised and predictable and so have what Salthe is terming cogency. — apokrisis

Temperature and pressure are measured. They are properties of the observer. What would that be in itself?

Hold on.. I have to read the rest but that was my first read.

Why the anthropocentric perspective? When an actual tree does fall in the forest, humans may or may not notice it but the tree seems to notice, as well as many other critters. — Olivier5

Let's take the critters out of it then.

I'm tired of debating whether an illusion itself is something to be reckoned with. Those who deny the experience as an illusion have to understand that. The illusion itself is to be explained. The origin in its neural configurations is not the question.

I don't know what the metaphysical implication is. The physical one is that you need a frame of reference to describe any event. This is a logical, mathematical requirement to describe any event in any language, whether that language is made of words or x, y and z coordinates and vectors.

Since your rejection of subjective points of view now extends to a rejection of logical frames of reference, no event can be described to you in a logical language.

Nothing can happen in the view from nowhere. — Olivier5

But what stage is the event happening? Panpsychism and process philosophy gives a first person perspective to the object itself. There are "occasions of experience". That sounds weird, so what else is there? We can keep pretending that we are narrowing in on some specific "object in action" from the third person imaginative perspective, but that's not the case.

So yes, it does go back to "If a tree falls in the woods.." that makes the problem no less tricky.

I guess nothing ever happens in the view from nowhere, then. — Olivier5

What would that imply for metaphysics?

Let's try a different route. Maybe the event is the focus. But what is an event?

It rules out action at a distance. — Olivier5

Ah so as suspected, the perspective of the object is being taken in some third person or first person form. But yet if it's not that, what?

Assuming that the laws of nature are local, — Olivier5

I guess then, let's start there. What does this really mean?

Is that an acceptable way to go? — Olivier5

We can use those examples. I'd like to explore the ideas of scale and localized events as they pertain to those phenomena.

Sure! Give me a couple of days. — frank

Haven't checked in for a bit. How is the reading going?

I am going to try and interpret this in my own language, if you don't mind. Correct me if I am wrong. The question would translate in my language as: is scale only in the eye of the beholder, an arbitrary choice of the viewer, or are there events (e.g. related to causality) that objectively happen at a certain scale and not below or above that scale? — Olivier5

Did I understand the question? — Olivier5

Yes, that above paragraph very much so..

To precise even further: are the laws of nature -- as seen or even designed by a hypothetical all-knowing god, not the laws of nature as we feeble humans apprehend them but the noumenal laws, if they exist -- the same at all scales, or are there certain laws, certain forms of causality that only crank up and become applicable at certain scales, and not below? — Olivier5

This actually, has a few assumptions baked into it, leading to certain kind of answers, so I'd rather focus on paragraph one.

You are asking the wrong guy. The view from nowhere and everywhere is the view of God, and I am an atheist. — Olivier5

So was Schopenhauer.

It doesn't have to do with God as a necessity. So where do events localize?

In other words, could you clarify your perspective? Seem you are making many assumptions here that you are not aware of, assumptions that you are not prepared to challenge or even explore, and as a result you can't arrive at a clear question. — Olivier5

It's to do with the view from nowhere and everywhere. What event is localizing at the level of objects? And I said:

The viewer is baked in. Next it's going to be shoehorned in by some generic level of "forces" but what does that even mean without the epistemic viewer? Then people will make the odd epistemic imaginative leap to pretend they are the first person view of a localized physical event that combines forces and matter. Nope. — schopenhauer1

Are you making some assumption about emergence here, that would require this question to be asked in the case of emergence but not for a tree falling in the forest? — Olivier5

No its all intertwined. We can view emergent events. But at what level do emergent events occur? It's like matter and forces are given extra layers of epistemic value that are not there. You are going to constantly either give me the third person or first person (as imagined by the object) account, but do you see how that's not right?

Is this another version of "if a tree falls and no one sees it fall, did it really fall?" — Olivier5

As telated to specifically emergence question.

Make sense? — Olivier5

Nope. I think we are so used to having a view of emergence that we don't know that is epistemic, not metaphysically happening. Emergence has a view from one thing to another. I'll call it a an epistemic leap. In fact, I don't even know if there was a view to start from that leaps, so perhaps nothing is leaping anywhere.

I agreed with you. It also think some kind of perspective-taking is baked into the concept of emergence. That's not to say there not something there regardless of our perception of it which we capture with the concept. Just that it doesn't make sense to try to look at it completely divorced from any perspective... because the concept is invented so that we - who necessarily view things from a certain perspective - could make sense of the world. — ChatteringMonkey

Correct, so can you see where this fits in with things like mental phenomena "emerging"?

This is a contradiction in terms, because "epistemic" implies a viewer. More generally, there is no such thing as a view from nowhere. — Olivier5

If there is no view from nowhere, then "what" is happening? Can one speak of this?

I wonder if there are several errors going on:
1) People don't recognize the dualism of the "fiction" of experience vs. the "reality" of the scientific description of the event. It doesn't matter what it's called- it becomes a dualism. The hallucination and the reality. The illusion and the really real.

2) People misplace a debate about origins with a debate about the nature of the event. They displace a debate about causation with a debate what is nature of the phenomena itself. What are mental events is the question, as it is compared to physical states. If you just deny mental events, well I guess it's like Trump denying any news that he doesn't like :rofl: . It's just fake, right? But unlike Trump, the very thing used to call the news fake (experience) is being denied. The goal post moves from the nature of mental events compared with physical to "Well, I'm not denying it per se.. just that it isn't what we really think it is". But that's not the question!!

I have a feeling this is going to end up being neo-Kantian, but I'm happier with it than the last book I read on this topic, which was an evolutionary angle on the emergence of consciousness.

Any other thoughts? — frank

Yes, can you provide Deacon's account of Cartesian Theater, gollum legend, and Homunculus fallacy?

So at what epistemic level is a non-viewer based emergent event happening. You keep giving me the human picture of how emergence looks. The viewer is baked in. Next it's going to be shoehorned in by some generic level of "forces" but what does that even mean without the epistemic viewer? Then people will make the odd epistemic imaginative leap to pretend they are the first person view of a localized physical event that combines forces and matter. Nope.

It is just arrangement of matter. Solid, liquid and gaseous phases are well known physical concepts about how atoms "connect" or not with one another. — Olivier5

I guess I should say, at what perspective is this happening? I presume, you the human has a set of images of this playing out.. some sort of latice forming from free flowing links, or chemical looking diagram or 3D graphic in your head.

So one level of solidity is chemical. — Olivier5

When is this binding solidification though and not just arrangements of matter?