Let me give it a try. If I hold two magnets in my hands I imagine them to be elementary particles (the micro world is really not that different from the micro world). The particles long for each other or want to get away from each other. What exactly this will is, I can't tell. I mean, it can't be explained materialistically. You can describe it with charge, three kinds even (electric and two color), but what it is...? You can feel it though.
Like the hate felt towards Wilhelm Reich (a scientific outcast, who made a very astute observation of the drives in Nazi Germany and whose books were burnt in the US, in the fifties! How can you not love the man, who died after a year in prison...).
(I just had to mention it.) As we all are combinations of these charged particles, we are conscio⁸us, with a will, with faces, arms and legs, etc. Our consciousness is derived from these basic longings (+ and -). We have not evolved according to what people like Dawkins claim. It's just love and hate we are, or driven by.
God is love. God is hate. — Cornwell1

I'm certainly very sympathetic to your emphasis on the continuity between the basic properties that determine the behavior of matter and whatever it is that determines our behavior as complex living organisms. And there are several, in my opinion, very good arguments for panpsychism. But you haven't quite explained how you know what particles feel. You are speculating that charge is will, and that the subjective aspect of positive and negative charge is love and hate experientially. But why isn't it, say, more like hot and cold, experientially? I'm already thinking of some responses, but you have a go.

We know though what it feels like to be a particle though. — Cornwell1

That's interesting. I'm a panpsychist, and whenever someone asks me what it feels like to be a particle or a thermostat or whatever, I reply I don't know. I speculate that perhaps the simplest feelings are like/dislike, love/hate (as you say), positive and negative. The latter is just a coincidence that this is how we describe charge. Your knowledge claim is a strong one. Can you justify it? Or at least explain it?

This sounds like an inverted quora question. :)

I have no idea of the answer

emergent — 180 Proof

Strong or weak?

I'm not a reductionist, so why do you ask? — 180 Proof

I thought you thought that thinking, feeling, consciousnessing, etc, were things that brains do? Just like digesting is what guts do and walking is what legs do. That is to say that thinking, feeling, and other mental functions are nothing other than the actions of brains. That's a reduction isn't it? You're not reducing to structure, I get that, but you are reducing to function, no?

As it pertains to philosophy of mind, materialism is, I think, most accurately construed as synonymous with emergentism. That is, consciousness, just is (or arises from) interactions of severally non-conscious events. I think that's what every materialist probably has in common.

You've misread my post — 180 Proof

It's tragic how you are so clear in your writing, yet are so often misread. I'm glad I am not so misunderstood, it must be a burden for you.

We might say a philosopher is someone who engages in the philosophical method.
I've tried to articulate exactly what that is, and I'm having trouble. How about:

"The philosophical method is an investigation of the world (in the broadest sense of 'world') by the examination of concepts and their relations."

Does that work?

So by extension a philosopher is someone who does that.

Well worth it. The Ghost Stories for Christmas are generally good. Old, but still creepy. Michael Hordern does a nice job as Professor Parkin.

...

If we can define by example, consider Professor Parkin:



The most philosopher bit is about 20:40 in

This makes me think of @Banno

...

On the one hand:
If God is all powerful, all knowing, all good, unchanging and timeless, then how can we have a relationship with Him or He with us?

On the other hand:
If God is a person as we understand persons to be and if God is able to give and take in relationship with us, then how can He be also a supreme and eternal being? — Cuthbert

Thanks for setting the context. I wasn't aware of the terminology from the OP.

One way to approach the question is to perhaps enquire what God and human beings have in common (suspending disbelief, obviously, for the purposes of the thread).
- will
- a body? Can space, or the universe, be a body? Is that compatible with transcendence?
- sentience
- thought, as we understand it? What about functional aspects of though that are substrate dependent?

Can we have finite and infinite versions of these things?

:yawn:

A philosopher is someone who talks like this:

"Being a philosopher is a sufficient (but not a necessary) condition for being a cunt."

EDIT: for the avoidance of doubt, I do consider myself to be a philosopher.

Yes, I think that analysis seems right, but it only applies in first part the post systems. In systems where small parties get to exercise power proportionally, then voting for them is not a waste, and meaningful coalitions can arise. No doubt that will have its problems but it's got to be better than the current shit show we have in the US and UK now. Not that I'm an expert on political science.

Your example of alcohol (and other similar examples we can generalise from) shows that alterations in brain function in humans alter the quality of what we experience. It does not show that brains give rise to conscious experience, certainly not uniquely anyway. Apparent loss of consciousness when brain function is disrupted is no proof that brain function is necessary for consciousness either, as there are other explanations for this that have to be ruled out. For example, the explanation that with loss of brain function there is loss of coherent identity rather than subjective experience. To explain further, perhaps subjective experience continues at the level of single neurons, or single molecules or atoms or whatever. It's just the brain as a whole does not work together to generate a coherent human subject.

O'Neill Cylinders look better to me as habitats, but require a lot of mass. Maybe moon first, space elevator on the moon as a way to get mass into space. I don't know. Isaac Arthur does a great channel on this stuff. What about digging underground on the moon?

EDIT: to answer the question, world government first, then moon, then elsewhere

Sure. Another arbitrary factor is what we take as a single event. Is the evolution of the dinosaurs one event or lots of events?

I think there are substantively four different questions in the OP. All of them are extremely interesting questions. I suggest picking on one of them for the topic of the thread. Or make several different threads.

It can be no other reason than that there is consciousness. — Cartuna

That's what I think too. However I am sympathetic to people who don't think like that. I can understand it when people, especially scientists who are used to explanations of one thing in terms of something else, are suspicious of claims that a phenomenon is just a brute feature of the world that admits of no further explanation. It's just in this case I do think there are lots of very strong indications that consciousness is just brute.

So does the function ever in fact happen “in the dark”? Is there any reason to believe that? — apokrisis

I am a panpsychist. I don't think any functions happen in the dark. But for the emergentist, yes, because all functions, prior to the modelling relation that you suggest entails consciousness, do happen in the dark. You are an emergentist. You think the vast majority of functions happen in the dark. But some don't. That fact is a curiosity that requires explanation. Yet you find there is no burden of proof on the emergentist, or more particularly, your brand of emergentist.

There are good reasons for thinking that all that brain activity couldn’t do anything else but generate experience. — apokrisis

Great! The problem of consciousness is solved. What are the reasons you refer to?

We ought to wean ourselves from curated information or we will never learn. — NOS4A2

There is no un-curated information

According to them. But it sure seems like that from the outside, including in Chalmers' case. — Kenosha Kid

Sure I understand that might be what it looks like.

There's nothing weird about that. Neurons aren't firing in a vacuum: the central nervous system is an integrated system. Biology can only do what it can do. If it does something, then clearly it can do it. — Kenosha Kid

Oh, sure, that's a very good point. We are conscious, we know that, and we know what we experience depends on brain function, so we know that there is something it is like to be functioning brain, right? That's enough, no? There's no need to explain that in order to show it happens, we already know it happens. It's therefore up to the person who questions that fact to explain themselves first. Have I understood your point?

Why does the response to a red ball feel like me _seeing_ a red ball and not a blue ball or hearing a red ball or feeling a red ball...? Well, it has to integrate somehow and biology only has so many tricks up it's sleeves. For a bat, a the sound of the ball might be something it sees. For a racoon, touch is something it might see.

Those are interesting questions too, but different. "How does a brain generate conscious experience at all?" ...is a different question from "Why do particular functions feel the way they do?"

The explanatory gap is itself an invalid preconception of what the answer must be, based on a prejudice against the notion that minds can be functions of lowly, base, physical stuff. — Kenosha Kid

It's not that.

It really doesn't matter what model of consciousness physics ends up with, consciousness is by definition "not that".

That may well be true. Separating definition from theory is really important. Functionlists, I allege, nearly always end up having to redefine 'consciousness' by fiat so that it is something that is amenable to functional explanation. I have no particular objection to functionalist theories of various functions! But as far as consciousness goes, I never hear an answer to the question "Why can't that function happen in the dark?" which does not involve a redefinition: "But that's just what I mean by consciousness". In which case I say "Well, OK, that's great for your definition, but that doesn't touch the hard problem then." Apo weirdly has tried to just reverse the burden of proof and to ask "why shouldn't it feel like something" without having first said why it must. And the video he linked to of course doesn't do that.

You are doubting something before you have even understood what you claim to doubt. So until you can supply some grounds to substantiate your doubt…. — apokrisis

Please say something that looks like you're making a case as to why the modelling must feel like something, why it can't happen in the dark. Use the word 'therefore' or something. You don't have to, I don't want to give you homework you don't want to do. I'm just saying what kind of thing would interest me enough to take a look. I'm genuinely interested in non-panpsychist theories of consciousness, but I don't have time to spend hours researching things that I suspect are totally irrelevant to the problem.

I don't think you actually understand what I mean and blame my "lack of clarity" (so far you're the only one, bert) for your failure to understand me. — 180 Proof

I read the words you wrote. That should be enough no? What else do you want me to do?

Do you understand the Bayesian/semiotic approach to modelling well enough to justify such a doubt?

If not, your proclaimed doubt is “happening in the dark”. — apokrisis

I might take the trouble to look into it if I think it's worth it. I don't see any reason to. You haven't given a prima facie reason why the modelling must feel like something. You've asserted it and said the burden of proof is on the doubter, which is rhetorical nonsense.

It's grammar. I don't think you're actually saying what you mean. You might be making a perfectly good point, but you haven't made it clear.

it should be easy enough to see that the brain - in modelling its environment in terms of its embodied self-interest - ought to feel like something. — apokrisis

This is the crux of it. Why should it feel like something? Why can't the modelling happen in the dark?

"Different" but not unrelated: noun, verb, and preposition, respectively. — 180 Proof

Eh? All three are nouns

What seems to be the problem? — Olivier5

It's unlikely you'll get a conversation.

I'm a monist but it's perfectly obvious, as you have pointed out, that the first challenge that a monist has to answer is: What is the explanation of the manifest duality that I see? This may be easily dealt with, or it may not. But it is a serious question, and not to be dismissed as an argument from incredulity, even if the challenge is framed using language like "I don't see how..."

I think play is living in the moment. — James Riley

Yes, that might be another way of expressing the same concept. Goal-directedness is always thinking of a future state. And to achieve anything, one needs to do the right things one thing after another, serially, seriously.

Perhaps, if work is goal-directed activity, play is non-goal directed activity. Any good?

I actually think the idea of a legal system that contained only rights is an interesting concept.

There are ways to structure democracies that mitigate against the power hungry. For example, have like a jury service system for candidates. You're called up, you're trained for the role, you develop policies in consultation with experts, then people vote.

And screen for narcissists, psychopaths and sociopaths.

Bartricks, I suspect one reason people don't engage with you very much on your own terms is because they forsee hours of weary unproductive uncharitable tedium. I could be wrong. You openly disdain us, and then want us to engage with you. I find your posts somewhat interesting, but I can't be arsed with you. You're too much hassle, and not popular enough on the forum for me to feel a duty to rebut your musings.

This OP badly needs an example

One issue: there's no representation for some positions. Lets say you are in favour of huge reduction in the US military in favour of programmes of social welfare. And lets say you are in favour of electoral reform. And in favour of a universal basic income. Who should you vote for?

Very low. :) My ironometer clearly wasn't working this morning.