Is this an impossible picture?

:up: I first read it as a teenager in translation. Reread it this year, decades later. Barnes & Noble Classics annotated e-book.

One tells only the causal story that one finds interesting — unenlightened

Yes, that's the key to understanding causality.

If all causation is indirect — I like sushi

Says who? Why? What is direct causation?

I couldn't make any sense of your OP - it reads as if it was ripped out of some ongoing discussion. Was this split from some other topic?

Agreed, the very idea of having someone else's experience seems to be incoherent. Perhaps it can be approached by atomizing experience into distinct qualia that could, hypothetically, be imbibed without completely relinquishing your core self. One could imagine, for example, a blind person having a visual experience that would otherwise be denied to them by their own faculties. But the closer you approach someone else's what-it-is-likeness, the less of your self you can retain.

Just for the record, that isn't the standard way of stating the problem, and it isn't David Chalmers' way (he coined the phrase). You can listen to Chalmers describe it here: He defines the problem as "how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experiences in the mind." When we solve this problem (I do believe it's when, not if) we may or may not know "what it's like" to be someone else. That's a separate, though perhaps related, issue. — J

To know "what it's like" to be someone is to experience what they experience. Such experiential knowledge cannot be gained through propositional knowledge of how experience works. There is no mystery or paradox in this, of course, and as you note, this is not the "hard problem."

I think that when we use phrases like "my body", it's mostly indexical, and doesn't ned to have much metaphysical import. A reference mechanism to this body, the one which is typing this post, is what "my body" is, regardless of how I otherwise conceive it. — fdrake

Agreed, "my" in "my body" is indexical and could be replaced with "this body" in the same context. It would still make sense to say "I have a body," meaning that a body is a part of me, rather than being some external possession of mine.

I think this is very true. There are plenty of ways that every person is which are not just bodily or minded, even though the body and mind are involved. Anything the body does is somehow more than the body, but the body is not just a substantive part of the act - the body is not a "substance" of walking.

The person may also be identified with a role they play, irrespective of their body's nature - a barista, a lawyer, a cook. It is the person which is those things, and not the body. — fdrake

By the same token, a person is bodily. Here "is" does not indicate identity, but rather serves to relate a predicate to the subject, as in "Socrates is a man."

I noticed that you have a strong interest in the work of Ayn Rand. — Joshs

what

Welcome, and thanks for a thoughtful post. Not much to add or disagree with, but this is a bit clumsy:

I don't "have" a body, because to do so would require that I am separate from my body. I am not the car that I own. — Kurt Keefner

No, to have something doesn't necessarily imply that the something is separate from yourself - hence why we say things like "my body" - or, for that matter, "my mind." Yes, you are a whole person, with a body, and its various parts, and a mind, and its various aspects.

Do you want to explain why you think this? — Hallucinogen

(1) Existence is not a series (of anything)
(3) The universe does not have numbered "terms"
(5) Does not follow

It's uncommon to see an argument with multiple premises, all of which are false.

anthropic selection — SophistiCat

What is that? — noAxioms

Anthropic Principle is a particular case of an observation selection effect.

Highly? No. Speculative, yes, but all cosmological origin ideas are. This one is the one and only counter to the fine tuning argument, the only known alternative to what actually IS a highly speculative (woo) argument. — noAxioms

I don't think the (theological) fine-tuning argument needs such a counter, because I don't believe it works. There is a related (and somewhat controversial) issue of "naturalness" of fundamental constants in cosmology, for which anthropic selection considerations might offer a valid solution. But perhaps all this is for another topic.

Well, it was stupid to begin with, and then Tarsky (aka @alcontali, I believe) took it to the next level.

Apparently Putin announced a few days ago that Russia is planning to change it's nuclear doctrine:
AP News: Putin lowers threshold of nuclear response

As various commentators have pointed out, the change is clearly intended to make the doctrine more vague. It's also pretty much a direct warning to not allow Ukraine to strike targets on Russian territory using western weapons.

This seems a fairly big step for Russia, which seems to indicate that they're really concerned about possible long range strikes. It also demonstrates the bargaining power Russia's nuclear capabilities still represent. — Echarmion

What's bizarre is that, according to Russia's official position, Ukraine has been striking Russian territory with Western weaponry for more than a year, since when it first started using it against targets in Crimea. When Russia formally annexed more Ukrainian territories, those strikes expanded accordingly. So, as far as Russia is concerned, there would be no major escalation if Western donors permitted Ukraine to use their weapons with fewer geographic restrictions.

Besides, the Russians have been crying wolf for far too long for such theatrics to look credible. They've been insisting that the West was at war with them since even before the invasion. They've been issuing dire threats against the West since before the invasion. And they've been repeating basically the same things at regular intervals all throughout the campaign. Unfortunately, the West all too often plays an obliging dupe to such crude intimidation tactics.

One day, we’ll invent some superpower, try it out and our planet explodes.

I call it the theory of BOOM.

:rofl:

Quick question, do you find that different languages shape the way you feel? — frank

Not that I've noticed. Perhaps a psychology experiment could tease that out.

As a child and teen, lacking any talent for foreign languages, I was completely unable to learn English in spite of its being taught to me every single year from first grade in primary school until fifth grade in secondary school. Until I was 21, I couldn't speak English at all and barely understood what was spoken in English language movies. I thereafter learned alone through forcing myself to read English books I was interested in that were not yet translated into French, and looking up every third word in an English-to-French dictionary. Ever since, I've always struggled to construct English sentences and make proper use of punctuation, prepositions and marks of the genitive. — Pierre-Normand

I was never good at memorization, so formal language learning wasn't easy. And there wasn't much conversational practice available. Like you, at some point I just purposefully started reading - at home, in transit, powering through with a pocket dictionary. Reread English children's classics with great pleasure, now in the original - Winnie the Pooh, Alice in Wonderland, etc. - then tackled adult fiction. Reading built up vocabulary and gave me a sense of the form and flow of the language. I still don't know much formal grammar - I just know (most of the time) what looks right and what doesn't. I suppose that this is not unlike the way LLMs learn language.

Oftentimes, I simply ask GPT-4 to rewrite what I wrote in better English, fixing the errors and streamlining the prose. I have enough experience reading good English prose to immediately recognise that the output constitutes a massive improvement over what I wrote without, in most cases, altering the sense or my communicative intentions in any meaningful way. The model occasionally substitutes a better word of phrase for expressing what I meant to express. It is those last two facts that most impress me. — Pierre-Normand

Yeah, thanks, I'll experiment with AIs some more when I have time. I would sometimes google the exact wording of a phrase to check whether it's correct and idiomatic. An AI might streamline this process and give better suggestions.

I mean even banning it for simple purposes such as improving grammar and writing clarity. Of course this will rely on the honesty of posters since it would seem to be impossible to prove that ChatGPT has been used. — Janus

One learns to write better primarily through example and practice, but having a live feedback that points out outright mistakes and suggests improvements is also valuable.

As a non-native speaker, much of my learning is due to reading and writing, but that is because I am pretty long in the tooth. Once spell- and grammar-checkers came to be integrated into everything, I believe they did provide a corrective for some frequent issues in my writing. I've briefly experimented with some free AI tools for improving style, but so far I haven't been very impressed by them.

Sadly, I don't know enough to understand your attempt. I'm reading all kinds of things. Haphazardly, since I'm just singing it. So probably unproductively. But maybe I'll get there. SEP seems helpful.

However, the difference between neural activity/consciousness and moving feet/walking is vast. I can't even see any common ground. — Patterner

I intentionally picked a frivolous and perhaps imperfect parallel to sharpen the issue. Perhaps it would go easier with an example from physical sciences, such as the relationship between fluid dynamics and molecular dynamics. But let's just leave it.

The brain's activity could do these things without any subjective experience/consciousness anywhere. And I'm sure we're making robots that prove the point. But let's say we add another system into the robot. Let's call it a kneural knet. The kneural knet observes everything the robot is doing, and generates a subjective experience of it all. We built and programmed the kneural knet, and we know it absolutely does not have any ability to affect the robot's actions.

Isn't this what epiphenomenalism is saying? — Patterner

This is more towards philosophical zombies.

Well, I wrote and lost a long reply to this — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's a shame...

There is a cluster of concepts closely related to potential: possibility in all its forms, probability, powers, dispositions. All of them have reasonable applications in thought. But where is the actual tension with empiricism? It would take an unreasonably austerer form of empiricism to deny all of that.

In regard to observations, I know of no empiricists who would deny being to all but observed instances (sense-impressions)? That's as good as (or as bad as) solipsism. Empiricism goes hand-in-hand with inference, and why not infer towards potential, etc.? There can be particular objections, but I don't see a path from empiricism to denying potential and the like tout court.

Also, walking is moving our feet. For simplicity, it's the word we use instead of spelling out the whole process. I don't say;
While upright, which is possible thanks to visual cues and the delicate workings of my inner ear, I moved my feet, alternating them, always placing the rear one in front of the other, until I found myself at the store.

instead, I just said I walked to the store. — Patterner

Well, that's what identity theorists say about consciousness vs neural activity. There are arguments against identity theory (other than epiphenomenalism), and similar arguments could also be deployed against the identity of walking and putting one foot in front of the other. But whether it's identity physicalism, reductive physicalism, emergence or anything else besides eliminativism, epiphenomenalism is supposed to argue against that on the grounds that consciousness appears to be superfluous if neural activity does all the causal work. My reductio aims to demonstrate that this argument is based on a misunderstanding of causality.

According to the definitions I quoted earlier, epiphenomenalism says mental states do not have any effect on physical events. Walking is a physical event, not a mental event. And walking certainly has an effect on physical events. So I don't know how you are thinking walking is epiphenomenal. — Patterner

I already addressed this. The causal exclusion argument that motivates epiphenomenalism applies equally to physical events in a similar supervenient relationship.

Trying and trying to figure out what you mean, but I'm not getting it. But I feel this sentence is key. Can you explain the relationship between moving your feet and walking? (Of course, we're not talking about sitting in a chair and shuffling your feet around. Or lying on the ground doing leg-lifts. Or pumping your legs on a swing to gain height. Or any number of things other than moving them in the way that produces walking.) — Patterner

Right, just as when you say "neutral activity is wanting to have milk" you don't mean just any random neural activity, but specifically whatever activity is responsible for/constitutes the experience of wanting to have milk.

Similarly, moving your feet in a certain way is responsible for/constitutes walking. I am not sure why you are having a difficulty with this parallel.

In what way does the physical act of walking fit any definition of epiphenomenal? I may be misunderstanding your questions. — Patterner

Originally, epiphenomenalism was indeed articulated in relation to mental/physical relationship. However, the justification for it does not rely on any uniquely mental aspects and can be applied more widely. You have gestured towards this justification earlier in the discussion:

I guess there are those who say the neural activity isn't experienced as wanting to have milk. Rather, the neutral activity is wanting to have milk. Experiencing the neural activity vs. the neural activity being the experience. The latter being the case if we are ruled by physical determinism. In which case, the "wanting to have milk" is, I guess, epiphenomenal, and serves no purpose. — Patterner

The idea, known as causal exclusion, is that if A (neural activity) does all the work, then B (experience) has no causal efficacy. Surely, you can see that this is in no way specific to mental phenomena? So, if moving your feet does all the causal work, then walking is reduced to an epiphenomenon.

I would not think so. — Patterner

Why not? Moving your feet does all the work, so why would we need walking?

I guess there are those who say the neural activity isn't experienced as wanting to have milk. Rather, the neutral activity is wanting to have milk. Experiencing the neural activity vs. the neural activity being the experience. The latter being the case if we are ruled by physical determinism. In which case, the "wanting to have milk" is, I guess, epiphenomenal, and serves no purpose. — Patterner

If walking consists in putting one foot in front of the other, is walking epiphenomenal?

The post was from Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs official account, in case that wasn't clear. Russian government agencies are not banned on X/Twitter, though Twitter is banned by the Russian government (same with Facebook and Instagram).

This thread belongs in the Lounge. What people find interesting or uninteresting in philosophy says more about them than about philosophy.

PS But yeah, antinatalism for sure.

Your question is too general. A lot depends on what decision you are making and which beliefs are influencing it. A decision has to be guided by some beliefs, otherwise it would just be random, and that can't even be called a decision.

Decisions about employee compensation should not be guided by personal likes and dislikes, but they absolutely should be guided by beliefs about work performance and other relevant factors.

On the other hand, a decision about a dinner invitation may well be guided by your personal feelings towards the people you wish to invite.

I have observed more than a few people argue that potency/potential is best left out of natural philosophy because it is, in principle, not empirically observable. Only act can be observable, hence, being good modern empiricists, we have no need for potency. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Could you perhaps unpack what you mean by potency/potential in this context? Perhaps this is a well-trod ground for some, but I, for one, am not sure what exactly we are talking about. Is it specifically a question about Aristotelian philosophy and its applicability to modern science? Or something less historically and exegetically constrained?

If it is potentiality in the most general sense, I would think that force or energy fields - concepts that became very central in physics and other physical sciences after Newton - are all about potentiality*. The field concept is philosophically interesting indeed, but I don't see it being seriously attacked by empiricists.

* I am not talking specifically about potential fields. Though the term is suggestive in this context, its meaning is more constrained than what I had in mind.

I haven't read any of the discussion - just wanted to note that "Dr" Joe Dispenza (he has a chiropractor degree from something called Life University) is a former New Age cult teacher, an author of self-help books, and a purveyor of quantum healing and other kinds of woo.

I'm just trying to understand why 'we never see material things directly' is qualitatively different from a claim like 'we only ever digest what we consume'. — cherryorchard

... For instance, is 'we only ever hear sounds' a meaningful statement? — cherryorchard

I think the difference here is in how the sentences are structured. In "see... directly" the word 'directly' does not mean anything on its own. Instead, it is supposed to function as a modifier for the word 'see'. So, there is one thing here, not two: see-directly. That prompts the question: what does 'see-directly' mean? How is it different from just 'see' or 'see-indirectly'? Failing to find any plausible contrast, we realize that the modifier 'directly' doesn't do any work here: it is meaningless.

In the other two examples (digest what we consume, hear sounds) we are not introducing any new words or constructs. We are making statements that relate already well-understood words in conventional ways. The fact that the statements are self-evident does not make them meaningless. To make the latter statements more like the former, we would need to construct something like 'digest-via-conumption' or 'sound-hearing'. That would indeed raise the same issues that we had with 'see-directly'.

The problem with Ayer's direct/indirect seeing is not that he is stating something self-evident, but that he is saying something obscure.

I think elements of it are more appealing today given the possibility of humanity hitting the singularity increasing. It is within reason that if such an extraordinary event was to happen then practically everyone would have access to what would be limitless resources. Therefore, within Communist ideologies there could be some useful applications for such a transition. — I like sushi

All the people who take seriously the possibility of "humanity hitting the singularity" could probably fit on one city square, whereas the people who sincerely subscribe to some kind of Communist ideology are a substantial fraction of the world's population (no, I don't have the numbers to back this up, but this is the premise of the OP, which I am willing to grant). So, explaining the latter in terms of the former is inapt.

And now when even the CCP looks more like fascist than communist and time has past from the days of the Soviet Union, things seem even more nostalgic. — ssu

Was there ever a time when Fascism and Communism did not have a lot in common? Both are totalitarian ideologies right out of the box, and in their practical implementations they always gravitated towards each other.

In that sense we would say, "If language is to have meaning, then the Contrast Theory must hold." The relevant contrast here is the scenario where language has no meaning, and authors like Aristotle to not deny this at least as a logical possibility. — Leontiskos

Indeed, the challenge for the Contrast theory to meet its own criteria or meaningfulness would be to point out actual or potential instances where language fails to meet its prescriptions. The challenge would be met with examples like Austin's:

Austin spends quite a lot of time in 'Sense and Sensibilia' explaining that there is no point in claiming that we only ever see things indirectly, just precisely because, if that is the case, we no longer have any idea what seeing directly would even mean. There would no longer be any such thing as 'seeing directly'. And thus (Austin argues) the term 'seeing indirectly' when used in this way appears to mean something but actually doesn't. — cherryorchard

(Some ordinary language philosophers leveled a similar criticism against the realism vs nominalism debate.)

But maybe Gellner is right that this doesn't hold. If a child asks me what my coffee machine is for, I will explain that it makes coffee. And this explanation strikes me as perfectly valid, even though it is not possible to imagine any other kind of coffee machine. We simply have no concept of what such a machine would be like. That doesn't mean my explanation was wrong, does it? Or that I was using language incorrectly? — cherryorchard

No, I think you were right the first time when you pointed out that the contrast theory of meaning does not require that the opposite trait be exemplified for the exact same object under discussion. A meaningful word should pick out a particular instance or species (a "non-empty proper subset," as mathematicians would say) from the universe of discourse. In this case, the universe of discourse would include all kinds of machines (or all kinds of things), and we can readily come up with examples of machines or things that do not make coffee.

Just seen About Dry Grasses, the latest by the Turkish master Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Long, slow, and depressing, just the way I like it :D Kidding about depressing, sort of.

I had seen two earlier films of Ceylan - Distant and Climates. There is much similarity between them, but I found Dry Grasses to be the most challenging. I still need to process it. There are different streams running through the film, and they sometimes undermine one another. The film ends with some rather uncharacteristic run of a philosophical inner monologue set to a mournful classical score - not unusual in a film with pretensions to artiness... except that this self-narration by the main character doesn't sit comfortably with what we see of him over the preceding three hours. But neither is it entirely phony nor ironic. As ever, Ceylan's portrayal of the protagonist, with whom he seems to partially identify (in all three films the main character is an amateur photographer, like Ceylan himself), is nuanced and unsparing, helped by a top-notch performance by the actor who plays him, as well as the rest of the cast. But here he is also revealed to be an unreliable narrator, as emphasized in one bizarre scene that briefly breaks through the fourth wall. There is plenty of beauty in the film, not least its cinematography, but here even beauty can be in tension with its canvas.

An interesting new study. NDEs have been compared to effects of psychedelics before, but those comparisons were "inter-subject": they compared reports of NDE experiences and psychedelic experiences in different people. For this study, the authors surveyed subjects who had experienced both.

Mystical-like states of consciousness may arise through means such as psychedelic substances, but may also occur unexpectedly during near-death experiences (NDEs). So far, research studies comparing experiences induced by serotonergic psychedelics and NDEs, along with their enduring effects, have employed between-subject designs, limiting direct comparisons. We present results from an online survey exploring the phenomenology, attribution of reality, psychological insights, and enduring effects of NDEs and psychedelic experiences (PEs) in individuals who have experienced both at some point during their lifetime. We used frequentist and Bayesian analyses to determine significant differences and overlaps (evidence for null hypotheses) between the two. Thirty-one adults reported having experienced both an NDE (i.e., NDE-C scale total score ≥27/80) and a PE (intake of LSD, psilocybin/mushrooms, ayahuasca, DMT or mescaline). Results revealed areas of overlap between both experiences for phenomenology, attribution of reality, psychological insights, and enduring effects. A finer-grained analysis of the phenomenology revealed significant overlap in mystical-like effects, while low-level phenomena (sensory effects) were significantly different, with NDEs displaying higher scores of disembodiment and PEs higher scores of visual imagery. This suggests psychedelics as a useful model for studying mystical-like effects induced by NDEs, while highlighting distinctions in sensory experiences. — Martial, Charlotte & Carhart-Harris, Robin & Timmermann, Christopher. (2024). Within-subject comparison of near-death and psychedelic experiences: acute and enduring effects. Neuroscience of Consciousness

Story collections by Julio Cortázar. There is a clear influence of Borges in a few "high concept" stories, which I generally don't like much. I actually liked Cortázar better than Borges in such stories - the latter can feel like a dry intellectual exercise, but Cortázar is never dry. The themes and the style vary. One of my favorites is "End of the Game," written from the point of view of a young girl.

Now reading Carlos Fuentes' "The Death of Artemio Cruz"

Anyone read these, any or all of of Pratchett? Thoughts? — Amity

I liked Pratchett. I don't read much fantasy, but I found his style and humor appealing. I was introduced to Pratchett by a college buddy who was a big fan. Later I was gifted a set of audiobooks and I would often fall asleep while listening to them in bed :) (not because they are boring, it's just that audiobooks have this effect on me).

The first book in the series is rather unlike the rest in tone and pacing. At that point, he probably didn't anticipate a big success and a long series, so he went all-out. Later books are more measured. Many of the books have reappearing characters and places, so it probably helps to read those in sequence, but it's not essential.