I'm a bat in a vat. — Tom Storm

What is it like?

Yes.

I'm a brain in a skull in a body in a social ecosystem in a natural ecosystem in a planetary biosphere ... Too much unnecessary detail for a sim. — 180 Proof

You just think you are. Introspection is unreliable.

I don't need God. Idealism does! — madfool

Idealism just needs other minds, not necessarily god.

But I put it to you that you are indeed reading this post, and further that you also know you are reading this post. It follows, by reductio, that any argument that says otherwise is wrong. — Banno

Berkeley would agree I think. And Berkeley also thinks we have direct unmediated contact with the world. Your views on the relationship between language and the world seem strikingly reminiscent of idealism to me, even though you repudiate idealism.

I do think that a reader's understanding of a post is primarily the responsibility of the writer of that post. You, Apokrisis, 180 Proof, and other regular posters, all blame readers for not understanding you. Apokrisis particularly was strangely unable to perceive how his posts came across to many others. Having said that I'm grateful for your response. It is interesting and I haven't read Davidson and I should. I will do that. :)

The rats in my house are developing quite a sophisticated civilisation.

May I disagree with your description of the Berkeleyan perspective? — Nelson E Garcia

Yes

But then comes the surprise, the atom microscope was developed and his Immaterialism became a scientific fact. — Nelson E Garcia

I don't understand what you are referring to there.

The Berkeleyan subjective idealist empiricist intuition is that the external world is made up of lots of properties - that is how we experience it. However all these properties depend on a point of view for their them to be as they are. Therefore the world in general, in so far as it is composed of these properties, is also so dependent on these points of view. I'm not at all sure that this is right. But it is not enough to say "Oh but this is just to say we can't think about something without thinking about it." Is there anything we can say about the unexperienced world which isn't question-begging? Any why? More work needs to be done to deal with the idealist challenge.

Stove's Gem - again, again and again. — Banno

But aren't you a kind of linguo-idealist? Sometimes you say things along the lines of language structuring the world. But we can't talk about the world without talking about it, can we? Why doesn't that fall foul of a version of Stove's gem?

No doubt I've mischaracterised your view here, but I'm interested in the correct version.

Oh, keep in mind that what you don't know can still kill you. ;)
Anyway, I'm certainly not going to universalize self-dependence.
Kind of haphazard, unwarranted, questionable, ... — jorndoe

If idealism is so obviously wrong to you, why do you think people believe it? I'm asking for philosophical reasons, not psychological or cultural ones. I've never seen you really engage with the philosophy of idealism, despite repeated mockeries and hints at ridiculousness.

While I think the Bible can be a good inspiration or starting point for doing philosophy, I'm not sure it really contains much philosophy without the need for pretty heavy interpretation first. And discussions of Biblical philosophy are unlikely to get past arguments over interpretation. Better just to not mention the Bible and skip straight to the idea you want to discuss. Opinion bomb from bert1. You're welcome.

This sounds somewhat Lockean, with the concept of force replacing Locke's primary qualities. I'm honestly not sure what I think of it. I'm open to the possibility. I think it might well be right. A lot will depend on what is meant by 'force' of course.

They're not stable. Gravity has changed. Just taking my case, I've steadily got heavier over the last 40 years.

Mental Capacity Act 2005 - UK legislation
Waterland - Graham Swift
Contributions form a Potential Corpse - Eugene Halliday
Article 12 of the UNCRPD (and General Comment 1)
The Once and Future King - T. H. White
Defence of the Devil - Eugene Halliday
The Silmarillion - Tolkien
Loud Hands - collection of autistic writing
The Jungle Books - Kipling
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell - Blake
The Grey King - Susan Cooper
The Farseer Trilogy - Robin Hobb (and all the books set in that world)

Most of these affected me profoundly both emotionally and intellectually.

...

The re-education camps are intended to destroy a culture. You don't need to kill to effectively cause genocide. — Benkei

I read Cuthbert's post as ironic, but I could be wrong.

"Everybody wants to go to heaven
But nobody wants to die" — 180 Proof

:scratches head:

To go to heaven in the religious sense you have to die. But the transhumanist is saying we can have a heaven on earth AND not die. So the lyric is inapt.

Because I'm better at it than those who worship it. — Mystic

You haven't done any yet. Do some and you might not get banned.

Mystic, why are you on a philosophy forum?

Also, I don't think there's any goalpost moving going on. I might grant you that "is x conscious?" might get bogged down in definitions, but "is x in pain?", won't. Everyone knows what that means. — RogueAI

If anyone is unsure, one way to learn is to hit one's thumb hard with a hammer. That's pain, and from that one might further intuit the concept of consciousness.

is stuff good because it is loved by god — Banno

Something is good if it is willed/loved by any agent, from that agent's point of view, god or not. Counterexamples welcome.

The ball valve allows the dishwasher to be disconnected. — Banno

Ah, I know what you mean. Ball-cocks or float-valves are sometimes call ball-valves, but not any more it seems.

Enter the philosopher, who can get down beneath the sink and sort out the bottle trap and ball valves. — Banno

There's something funny going on under your sink if there's a ball valve there. That reminds me, you might want to check out Murun Buchstansangur.

But there are still people who believe mental states are identical to brain states. For them, a mental state isn't emergent, it just is a physical brain state. — RogueAI

Yes I see what you mean. I guess the physical brain state still has properties that its constituent neurons, or even molecules, do not have, for example it is the property of a whole system that it can see red, but the constituent parts don't have that property/capability. So there's still emergence there in that sense.

This is one of those cases where materialism goes down a rabbit hole into absurdity. — RogueAI

I broadly agree with your posts in this thread I think. I prefer to avoid the term 'materialism' as it is vague and has a lot of baggage. It's also unclear to me how it is different from 'monism'. I think a more precise word to use is 'emergentism'.

So continuing the analogy, you cannot have a change in an electric field without a corresponding and completely determined change in a magnetic field: this is evidence that they are "two sides of the same coin".

Same goes for the neurological correlates of consciousness: you cannot (refering back to prior discussions on this thread) have the "I see Halle Berry's face" experience without the Halle-Berry's-face-detector neuron firing and, conversely, you can't have the neuron fire without seeing Halle Berry's face. (There's citations on the older thread, can dig them out with some patience.)

This as far as I'm concerned makes the claim that they are distinct things, not the same thing from two perspectives, in need of justification, in the same way that if you turned an apple 180 degrees and expected me to believe it was a distinct apple, I'd expect a good justification. The model that fits the evidence is the one in which they're the same thing. — Kenosha Kid

OK, thanks. That experiences supervene on the physical is compatible with any theory of mind, including substance dualism (I'm not a substance dualist). To spell it out in terms of substance dualism, just to make the point, there might be a lawlike relationship between physical stuff and mental stuff, such that any change in the mental stuff corresponds to a change in the physical stuff, in a consistent, lawlike way. Substance dualism is wrong for other reasons, but it's consistent with the evidence that physical neural events correspond in a very regular manner with that subject's experiences.

Regarding the view that there is one thing with two perspectives, the problem just pops up again. Lets take a rock. No neurons, no wetware, no behaviour similar to human behaviour that would allow us to infer consciousness, no? So how many perspectives on the rock are there? Just one, presumably. It has no first person perspective, the only perspective that exists is the perspective of the conscious creature looking at it. Now lets take a neural function roughly corresponding with a subject tasting some coffee. You're saying that consciousness just is that thing. The neural function looks like a bunch of readings on a brain scanner of some kind from the scientist's point of view, but from the subject's point of view, those same functions are the experience of tasting coffee.

The question now is, why does a neural function have two perspectives, and a rock only one?

In other words, in claiming an identity in order solve the hard problem (the mental just is a physical function) it becomes necessary to re-introduce a dualism in order to be able to talk about subjective experiences as distinct from neurons firing, namely, the distinction between two perspectives. But now we're back to square one. How can functional interactions of things with only one perspective result in something with two perspectives?

It is nothing more than a way of soothing the fear and desire for immortality. — Fooloso4

Do you actually think that?

How can headway be made? By what means can consciousness after death be measured? — Fooloso4

I don't think it can be measured at all, even in a living person. Other minds can be inferred though. And by examining the arguments for inferring other minds in uncontroversial cases (e.g. other humans) one might (or might not) arrive at the conclusion that similar inferences can be made about anything at all. I haven't rehearsed the arguments here, just indicating how we might end up thinking that corpses (or their component parts) have experiences.

It is nothing more than a way of soothing the fear and desire for immortality. — Fooloso4

I think the question is interesting and possibly headway can be made. Does that mean that I am afraid of death and desire immortality?

Does philosophy have a valuable function do you think?

Regarding figuring out the nature of the world I do think philosophy is all we have to tackle consciousness in a theoretical way.

Yes, you're right regarding Tononi, I was unfair. I was generalising but should not have included Tononi in that.

Yes I did end up with a clearer expectation. I'm a fan of Tononi, I just think he's wrong. It's great that he started with phenomenology and his theory is interesting.

Its not really a theory of consciousness, in my view, since the hard problem is being ignored, and in being ignored only half of consciousness is being calculated. It seems more of a proposal of a way to calculate cognition. So on the basis of this I'm not going to analyze it further. — Pop

Yes that's the conclusion I came to as well. There's no answer to the question "OK, by why can't integrating information happen in the dark?" As if often the case with functionalist views, they come to an interesting point, but when faced with the problem of 'Yes, but why does that result in an experience exactly?" they tend to abandon theory and opt for definition by fiat instead. They say "Oh, but that's just what 'experience' means. There is nothing more other than that." Which is nonsense. I certainly do not mean 'integrated information' when I talk about consciousness.

I do think the IIT is an interesting theory of something. Maybe it is a way to define conscious individuals, and that would solve a problem that besets a lot of panpsychist views, namely Searle's question "What are the units supposed to be?" Maybe the conscious subject is that system that integrates information. And maybe the more information the system integrates in interesting ways, the more varied and rich the associated experiences of that subject are. But as you say, it just doesn't touch the basic question of why we should think that integrated information is consciousness, why it creates a first person perspective at all.

I am interested in other people's thoughts on the question of what becomes of consciousness at death? — Jack Cummins

My view is that nothing happens to consciousness at death. What is lost is identity - temporary functional wholes (e.g. a human body and brain) disintegrate, cease to function in a co-operative organised way as they do in life. Also what is lost are particular complex ideas, feelings, desires, memories, all the make-up of a person's psychological identity, all of which are dependent on that functioning whole. There are still feelings, sensations in the leftovers, but these will be of a complexity and interest level corresponding to the structure and function of the remains. Identities are broken up, shifted and changed.

I might have misread you, sorry. I thought you were asking for the evidence that science proceeds on the basis of evidence, which read like a destruct button. I think the "that claim" is the claim that a neuron firing identically is the "having an experience"? — Kenosha Kid

Yes! Sorry I was unclear. My bad. I'll get to the rest of your reply later, thanks.

I don't think this conversation is going anywhere constructive, which is a shame as it started out interesting. — Kenosha Kid

I'm interested in your views. In particular I'm interested in the relationship between neural events and particular experiences and what we can conclude from that about consciousness, if anything. That's central to this issue, no? The logic of this is interesting - arguments from analogy, tacit assumptions, alternative conclusions etc.

But science doesn't proceed prima facile, it proceeds on the basis of evidence. — Kenosha Kid

Sure, then there must be evidence to support this claim. Please give some examples of the evidence.

You cannot get from "what it is like" to an experiment — Kenosha Kid

In a broad sense of 'experiment' you can, I think. I can ask myself the question, "Is there something it is like to be me?" and I can consult myself and answer in the affirmative.

If you believe there is a difference between a neuron firing and the owner having an experience, yes, there will be a logical difficulty. Personally I think that the logical difficulty lies in justifying that belief. — Kenosha Kid

This seems backwards to me. Prima facie, a neuron firing is a neuron firing, and a conscious experience is a conscious experience. The first step is to give a reason why we would think these two things are, in fact, the same.

I agree with the sentiment (talking about the same thing from different perspectives) — Kenosha Kid

But there is a logical difficulty here in talking about a first person perspective from a third person perspective. Describing subjectivity in objective terms seems like a nonsense to me.

Just as describing objective reality from my point of view is also a nonsense.

As @Wayfarer has correctly said (imho), or quoted someone as saying, science typically proceeds by eliminating the subjective as much as possible in order to arrive at an unbiased, objective, point-of-view invariant view of the world. And that's great until the 'object' of enquiry is subjectivity itself. How are scientists supposed to proceed here? By eliminating subjectivity from the enquiry into subjectivity? Or do we have to do something other than science?

Either way, the scientific definition can't contradict other definitions, or else scientists and laymen would be talking about different things. — Harry Hindu

Indeed. Assuming we actually want to discuss the same thing, of course.

We can talk about water as it appears from consciousness as a clear liquid, or as a combination of hydrogen and oxygen molecules as it appears from a view from nowhere. We're talking about the same thing but from different perspectives, but not contradicting ones.

Can we do the same thing with consciousness? Can you talk about how consciousness appears from consciousness and as it appears from a view from nowhere? Your consciousness appears as a physical brain that drives various actions from my conscious perspective, which is not how my consciousness appears to me so how do I know if you or I are actually conscious or not? What is concsciousness like from a view from nowhere?

These are all excellent questions to begin an enquiry into consciousness. :up:

Are you fibberfab? — Harry Hindu

No, he's RogueAI. I'm bert1 and you are Harry Hindu.