But what if the statement about minds and perception are the same as whether or not our physical bodies really physically touch other physical bodies? — Moliere

What? Explain.

A physical entity is part of the P-Region if and only if it is essential to M. This facet is what rules out multiple realizability. If a physical entity can be removed from the system and it doesn't affect M then by definition it in not included in the P-Region. We are now in a situation where P cannot vary unless M also varies (P is in fact defined in terms of M so that this is the case). — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is not true.

Let M be the property of an object P being able to depress a pressure sensitive plate. You can remove or add matter to P, and M still holds. Moreover, you can replace P with a different material with the same mass, and M still holds.

Supervenience defined by P Regions only says that you cannot change the capability of depressing the plate without changing P. But not the converse.

:fire:

If you are defining superveniance with B-minimal properties or P Regions this is not the case. Any change in P, the (relevant) brush strokes (or their properties) would, by definition, be a change in the experience/aesthetic qualities of the painting. Multiple realizability is sacrificed by using these methods to define superveniance. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Is this really true? While I am unfamiliar with these concepts beyond what you wrote, this doesn't seem right.

To continue my example, paint on canvas is what is "incorporating all the relevant physical 'stuff' needed to explain the physical side of the phenomena we are analyzing.", and the reflectance of the canvas is "just those physical properties that are needed to explain" the impression of the painting. And to use your sort of counterexample, suppose we move a molecule of pigment a nanometer to the left. This changes the relevant physical stuff, and its properties, but just not enough to alter the painting's impression.

Physical reality is so fine grained that there is always room for multiple realizability. Even if it were possible to overspecify a supervenience relation to eliminate multiple realizability, this would go far beyond the intent of "supervenience", which is just to specify the sort of relationship where a phenomenon depends on a physical substrate.

To me, these problems (if they are problems) would be resolved simply by defining supervenience as a relationship where "any change in A must be accompanied by an appropriate change in B". What constitutes an "appropriate change" is domain specific, and is beyond the purview of supervenience itself. Supervenience merely indicates that this sort of relationship holds.

Consider a painting of a :flower:. It shouldn't be controversial that the :flower: is supervienant on the brush strokes that compose it. You cannot change the :flower: without changing the brush strokes. But, you can change the brush strokes without changing the :flower: .

But you say, what if I make a tiny dab of paint? Then, any change at all might happen to the :flower: , or it may change into a :death: , and you can point to that tiny dab as the cause.

But, it is already presumed by our understanding of painting that the dab cannot cause this change. All supervenience says is that a change in the :flower: must be accompanied by a change in the brush strokes. Furthermore to supervenience, we understand the sort of change necessary to change the painting is not matched by the tiny dab. Supervenience does not provide this domain specific understanding, you are asking too much of it.

The mechanical act is not identical because the act of writing B takes longer than writing A — NOS4A2

But the act of saying/typing "I promise to pay you back" is identical in both cases.

Consider these two speech acts:

A: I promise to pay you back
B: I told @NOS4A2 "I promise to pay you back", that sucker believed me!

A and B are doing very different things with the utterance "I promise to pay you back", even though the mechanical act is identical. The question "is it one act or two?" is kind of irrelevant. What is important is that these two things, locution and illocution, are distinguished.

What-if the subject to be shoved off the bridge wasn't the disposable fat man, for whom nobody has all that much sympathy anyway, but a gorgeous woman? — BC

The "Fat Man" does indeed contaminate the problem. I know it was supposed to make convincing that one body could stop a trolley, but it is better to leave attributes unspecified and simply state that the person you are pushing will definitely stop the trolley. The relative values of persons is another, unrelated issue.

In 2017, a group led by Michael Stevens performed the first realistic trolley-problem experiment, where subjects were placed alone in what they thought was a train-switching station, and shown footage that they thought was real (but was actually prerecorded) of a train going down a track, with five workers on the main track, and one on the secondary track; the participants had the option to pull the lever to divert the train toward the secondary track. Most of the participants did not pull the lever

This also contaminates the question. Assuming the participants really did believe what was going on (how could the experimenters plausibly pull that off??), was it moral evaluation or simply anxiety and paralysis that prevented them from pulling the lever?

Right. And it's the same whether the transporter kills the original before the duplicate is created, or after. — Patterner

I think the illusion of teleportation's safety relies on the transporter killing the original before, or exactly as, the duplicate is created. If it kills the original after, then it is pretty clear there are two distinct individuals at that time, and that killing the original is murder.

But logically yes it doesn't matter.

I prefer a shocking twist ending:

You are the fat man

And we're not really killing anybody, because the duplicate is still at the other location, right? — Patterner

This is the crux of the problem. From one perspective, the fact that there is a duplicate of you somewhere else in the world seems to have no bearing on your own self interests, and on whether you consent to being killed. In that moment, that duplicate, even if qualitatively identical to you, is numerically distinct. Therefore, that someone else gets to live your life is slim comfort in the face of the fact that you will be killed.

We may use physical features to identify people in various situations. But my identity is my consciousness. We don't care what Bach or Beethoven looked like, or their fingerprints. Their identities are not about their physical characteristics. — Patterner

It depends on context. Casual acquaintances might identify Bach by his appearance and mannerisms. The police, by his fingerprints. Us, viewing him as a historical figure, by his works and influence. But only Bach might identify himself by his own internal state.

Back to the OP. Would you survive a teleportation? I'm still torn on this, I go back and forth on it in my mind. On the one hand, the new body, and brain, is perfectly continuous with the old. The new body certainly thinks it survived. But did the original survive? Or is teleportation equivalent to the death of the original body?

@Christoffer wrote a story where it turned out that sleep was actually death. Consciousness doesn't survive, a new one is born every morning, with memory intact. This bothered me, I think because if seems like a distinction without a difference. So what if I "die" every night? What if every hour, or every second, I "die". What would be the observable consequence? There would be none at all. And so if there is no observable consequence from this distinction, shouldn't we discard the distinction?

Can this same reasoning apply to teleportation? If the original did or didn't "survive", there is no consequence, since the new one feels it survived either way. And so, does the question even mean anything?

Still, the ways we identify our physical selves - things like looks/physical description, finger prints, and retinal scans - stay the same. Yes, we age, which is change. But there is continuity, which is not illusory. If we don't grant continuity in this, then what is continuity? Is the concept of continuity a sham? — Patterner

There are two related but different concepts here, continuity and identity. Continuity, simply meaning things remaining more or less the same over time, is real. Things really do stay the same. Not perfectly, but many features of a object or person persist over time.

Identity however is a concept that has no actual correspondence in the world. It is a human construct used to conceptually organize the world. In objective reality there is nothing corresponding to identity, which is why it is prone to paradoxes at the edge cases. It is just a concept, it is pragmatic, it does useful work, but it is ultimately a fiction. This is what I meant by "not quite an illusion". "Reification" I think is the word I was looking for. We reify the concept of identity, and treat it as if it were a real property of the world.

There's a self that has always been there. — Patterner

It is no different when it comes to conscious beings like ourselves. "Self" is the reification of identity of human beings over time. You have continuity with your earlier incarnations, features persist. It is quite useful to assign identities to individuals, formalized by naming. But there is no ghostly self inhabiting your mind from cradle to grave, which may or may not be confused and dislocated when the body is teleported. This is just reification joining forces with the dualistic instinct.

Once you abandon this error of reification, all the paradoxes of identity resolve themselves.

. It isn't the office -- it's the commute. — BC

FWIW, I didn't return to office, not because of the commute - I didn't mind, and in fact I was lucky enough to be able to work on the bus - but because I deplored spending such a huge chunk of my life in this building. It made me feel my life was being squandered. All the usual distractions there didn't help.

Working from home, I still feel my life is being squandered. But working outside when the weather permits, in the park or beach, taking drumming breaks, smoking weed or drinking if I choose, working vacations in other cities, all certainly help.

Good questions. I wouldn't quite call it an illusion. Here's the way I think it works:

At any short time interval in your life, say one day, the you of today is mostly identical to the you of yesterday. Therefore, for all intents and purposes you are identical. This is true for successive days as well. We have a series of small changes which we don't regard as relevant to identity. Then, by the transitive property of identity, we regard the entire series as identical. Even though, the yous decades apart are very different.


A---B---C---...Z

A =~ B
A = B
B =~ C
B = C
A = C
...
A = Z

By this reasoning, A (say you as a baby) and Z (say you as today) are the same. And pragmatically, it is useful to regard Z as the same individual as A. In reality, Z really is the spatial lineal descendant of A. And yet, Z is also not A.

I think there is only one way to consistently solve these problems. Identity over time is no less illusory for conscious beings than it is for objects. Just like the Ship of Theseus, there is no fact of the matter as to whether a person is the same person at another time. There is only perception of continuity.

Therefore, when the teleporter accident happens there are two Rikers. Both experience being Riker, therefore both are. Kill one, and he dies like anyone else.

Did I really kill him of is he still alive as Thomas Riker? It seems that if there is no body-soul dualism, the latter is true. But is, in that case, before I kill him, Will's consciousness both in Wil and in Thomas? — Walter

Interesting that you suppose monism and then immediately use explicitly dualist language(consciousness in). You have to be very careful, since dualism is the default, intuitive perspective.

It is easily proven that teleportation is equivalent to death.

Assume teleportation involves the destruction of the original body A and the recreation of an identical body B at a different location.

As far as B is concerned, B is A. But what about from A's perspective? For A, his body is destroyed. Does he really care that a copy is created somewhere else? I say, he does not.

Suppose there is a glitch, and A's body is scanned, but not destroyed. The mistake is eventually caught, and the terrified A is brutally killed.

<--------A's Lifespan--------->
_________________<-----------B's Lifespan--------->
_______________(overlap)


During the overlap, A is certainly not B. After A is killed, does he magically get transported over, becoming B? By what mechanism? No, A's life ends, whether or not a B exists somewhere else in the universe.

If the teleportation fails with an overlap, it fails as the overlap becomes infinitesimally smaller, until there is no overlap at all.

TELEPORTATION IS MURDER!!!!

If I said, "surely you currently believe the earth is round" and you replied "no, I wasn't thinking of it on that moment", your reply would be more wrongheaded than pedantic.

People seldom if ever truly get these definitions "right", which is why we can't merely refer to them. These seem to only weakly support the association of belief with conscious awareness anyway. The strongest one,

A mental state, representational in character, taking a proposition (either true or false) as its content and involved, together with motivational factors, in the direction and control of voluntary behaviour." — Lionino

Still seems to accommodate unconscious beliefs.

What you refer to as cognitive seems to mean neurological, which can be explained mechanistically. — Lionino

Not neurological, I mean it to refer to the information processing capacity of the brain. A belief is an informational state where a proposition is held to be true. This informational state can be instantiated by a human brain, a p-zombie brain, and the right kind of AI. Whether ChatGPT has beliefs is truly hard to say.

it reminds me of "The game" or "You are now breating manually" of 2000s internet. — Lionino

The Game, the movie? Nice, one of my favs. I'm glad I never saw that meme, I had a horrible spell when I was young where I "forgot" how to breathe automatically and so I couldn't sleep for 11 days!

belief is a conscious process — Lionino

5 minutes ago you believed the earth was round, but had no conscious awareness of this belief.

Also, I believe p-zombies can lie, just as some future robot/AI might. That is, they can say something that contradicts their own beliefs for some instrumental aim. This is all cognitive, none of it depends on consciousness.

Maybe not. I was thinking of the case of a p-zombie living among humans.

Would they have subjective experience or self-awareness beyond that of a robot that we can build that reacts to stimuli? — Patterner

By definition, no.

Do you think they would have beliefs and knowledge? — RogueAI

I think so. I think these are cognitive, not dependent on subjectivity.

I say the TE is invalid. If they were only receiving imput from their senses, from inside and outside their bodies, and only reacting to the stimuli as the laws of physics allow and require, they would not be thinking of consciousness, or saying they have it when asked. — Patterner

They are "thinking", in the information processing sense, the same way that we are. It is just that these thoughts are not accompanied by the same phenomenal experiences ours do (i.e. vocalizations, visualizations). Their thoughts may take the form of sentences ("I will take a shower soon"). They just don't experience these internal sentences, any more than they experience external sentences.

Do they think about consciousness? They would be puzzled by the concept, that is for sure. But so many here are puzzled by it too. No great difference. They might equate it to awareness. They are aware of external stimuli, because they respond to them, and they are aware of internal stimuli, because they act upon them. Therefore, in their "minds", they are conscious.

This argument still seems very relevant today because I would think that most people who embrace computational theory of mind or integrated information theory very much would like to compare the mind to a harmony or melody. It is an "emergent informational process." But for that emergence to be causally efficacious, you need some sort of "strong emergence" that gets around Plato's trap, and that is hard to come by. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Harmony or melody is not really an adequate metaphor, and as you say it implies epiphenomenalism. A much better one I have seen is virtual machine. Mind is to the brain as a virtual machine is to the underlying physical hardware. When the virtual machine is running, it is in control of some or all of the operations of the computer, even though everything it does is causally reducible to operations of the underlying hardware.

I also suspect that it is rather a straw man version of what idealist philosophy really means. — Wayfarer

Very possibly

In any case, thanks for you comments, appreciated. — Wayfarer

:up:

I think that is one version, which I call "strong". Which is not your version, as I pointed out.

That without mind, matter is not scattered about in space in any way at all.

Or maybe in your version, that reality is so bound up with subjectivity that there is nothing we can say about the matter?

Either way, these don't seem to correspond to the Pinter quote, which you nevertheless cite as an exemplar of your position. Hence my feeling that you vacillate.

Is that ‘indirect realism’? — Wayfarer

To my understanding, yes actually.

Without minds, "Matter is scattered about in space in the same way as it is now", but "Objects ... have no shape, color or individual appearance, because shape and appearance are created by minds."

I think it is empathy. I suspect humans, as a social species, are hard wired for empathy which is likely foundational to morality and human rights. I — Tom Storm

Not empathy, or not just empathy. Remember that empathy is hard-wired, based on mirror neurons. Whereas our notions of social equality have changed radically in mere decades and centuries.

I think moral progress is social, and primarily consists in expanding the circle of who gets to be a moral agent, worthy of empathy. Moral regression is just the opposite, constricting that circle.

The poor are always a hotly contested area in this regard. There are always those who consider them unworthy, unimportant, deserving of their condition, and fundamentally unequal with their economic betters.

What about that equation ‘looks spherical?’ Rhetorical question of course but makes the point that a sphere can be perfectly described by an equation as can all of the primitive elements described by mathematical sciences without ‘looking like’ anything. Its appearance as spherical is imputed by the observing mind - which is not to deny that it is spherical, but to recognise the constructive contribution of the observer. — Wayfarer

Is this not just indirect realism? We agree that appearance is mind-created. Here we also seem to agree that the appearance is a perspective on mind-independent reality.

But contrast with:

hat is one example of an empirical fact. As I said in the OP I don't deny empirical facts. What I'm criticizing is the attempt to absolutize them as self-existent in the absence of any mind. The nature of the universe absent any mind....well, what can be said? — Wayfarer

Why is the equation describing the sphere mind independent, but the equations describing planetary orbits somehow dependent on there being minds?

Methodological naturalism can be, in fact should be, circumspect with regards to metaphysical questions, of which ‘the role of the mind in the construal of experience’ is an example par excellence. — Wayfarer

Sometimes I feel you vacillate between a kind of (weak?) idealism and indirect realism. An indirect realist would also emphasize the ‘the role of the mind in the construal of experience’, while acknowledging external reality. You do as well. Is the difference between your position and indirect realism just a difference in emphasis? An emphasis on the mind's role, and a deemphasis on the determining role of external reality?

How do you think that something other than a mind could mark a frame of reference? — Metaphysician Undercover

In the sentence "the Earth is further from the sun than Venus" , the sun is the frame of reference in which the relation "further" operates. It takes a mind to formulate any proposition; in this one, the Sun is marked as a frame of reference, without which "further" would be meaningless. But does the proposition hold independently of minds, or not?

Isn't positing 'a frame of reference' without their being a mind to conceive it, merely speculation? — Wayfarer

Speculation? I don't see how. It takes a mind to mark something as a frame of reference. But it takes a mind to formulate a proposition at all. Does that imply that the truth of all proposition are mind dependent? In what sense would "the Earth is further from the sun than Venus" no longer be true when sentient life is gone?

The little dots do not conspire together to give rise to Grandma’s portrait. The portrait comes to exist in visual awareness when the whole of it is seen from an external perspective. The existence of an object as an individual whole is always something external to the object, not inherent in the object itself. — Mind and the Cosmic Order, Charles Pinter

How is it then possible for the picture to inform? Suppose I have never seen Grandma, and the portrait includes the hairy mole on her cheek. Now I know it is there. If there is no mind independent feature of the picture as a whole, how can it tell me something that was not previously in my mind?

Similarly I had know foreknowledge that you would reply to me exactly as you did. Now I know your reply. Does that knowledge come from me alone, merely my personal interpolation, when in truth the words on my screen are just assemblages of pixels?

So what is thought to be 'inherent in the object' such as its perceived roundness, does not exist on the level of the primitive constituents of that object as described by science, but is imputed to it by the observer. — Wayfarer

This division between "simples"/primitive constituents, and "Gestalts", seems to be doing exactly what this quote says is impossible:

it is altogether impossible to make a neat distinction between those parts of our beliefs that reflect the world “in itself” and those parts of our beliefs that simply express “our conceptual contribution.” — Husserl’s Legacy: Phenomenology, Metaphysics, and Transcendental Philosophy, Dan Zahavi

For my part, I don't see why the roundness of the bowling ball should not be included among the " primitive constituents of that object as described by science". The roundness determines its Newtonian behavior, after all.

As I said at the outset, we can imagine an empty cosmos, but that imaginative depiction still relies on an implicit perspective, or else there is nothing nearer or further, larger or smaller. — Wayfarer

Are you conflating a frame of reference with a mental perspective? Nothing can be nearer or further, larger or smaller, independent of a frame of reference. But a frame of reference is not a mind, even though a mind can furnish one.

A boulder and a stump is not inherently nearer or further. But if I drive a stake in the ground, the boulder might then be nearer to it than the stump. Similarly, the stake might be taller than the boulder and shorter than the stump. But a stake is not a mind, merely a frame of reference.

Objects in the unobserved universe have no shape, color or individual appearance, because shape and appearance are created by minds — Introduction

It is clear that appearance is something created by minds. But shape? I struggle with that. Shapes unlike colors have properties that are mind-independent. Bowling balls roll by virtue of their shape, whether or not a mind is there to observe it.

What their existence might be outside of any perspective is meaningless and unintelligible, as a matter of both fact and principle. — Wayfarer

Meaningless to us, whose every thought is conditioned by our perspective. We are perceptive and limited creatures with central nervous systems, and as you point out perspective is deeply woven into the fabric of our understanding. But just because we cannot truly think beyond perspective, isn't it injudicious to thereby conclude that reality itself is incoherent outside of perspective?

We might be talking past each other a little bit.

My point is that "emergence" in itself offers no explanations. Nothing happens because of emergence. Rather, emergence describes a situation where nontrivial dynamics between simpler components produce surprisingly complex effects. This situation happens all over the place in nature, but "emergence" doesn't explain anything. It merely describes. You still have to understand how it can be that the complex effects can emerge from the simpler inputs.

Lacking explanatory power, I don't really see what emergence has to offer in this thread's argument. It does nothing to bridge the explanatory gap. If a crude dualist argument were offered, that "like must come from like", emergence could be deployed against that. But I don't see anyone doing that. Therefore, afaict emergence just seems to cloud things with a false veil of mystification.

So far we've only asked a few short lived heads: — Christoffer

I've always been skeptical of that. People pass out from far lesser interruptions to cerebral blood flow than the total catastrophe of beheading. More likely it was some involuntary muscle contractions, fancifully interpreted.

We do not yet know if it is impossible to predict or merely that the prediction is too complex for us to compute it. If it were, would that then be an explanation? — Christoffer

No, why would it? The only thing at stake would be whether the term 'emergence' would be used, which is not super rigorous.

It only becomes a description if we can conclude it fundamentally impossible to be predicted. — Christoffer

It is only ever a description. Name one physical phenomenon where emergence functions as an explanation.

Emergence is a giant red herring in this discussion. Emergence is a description, not an explanation. If a complex phenomenon manifests properties that are not present in its components, and could never have been predicted by studying the components, these properties can be described as emergent. But this doesn't explain anything at all.

If physicalism is true, conscious is undoubtedly emergent from neural activity. But so what? This just characterizes the relationship between consciousness and neural activity. You still have to explain how consciousness can emerge from neural activity. Emergence itself is totally incapable of doing this. In all other emergent phenomena the explanation is known at least in principle, "emergence" is never an explanation.

But this isn't really a challenge to physicalism, since plenty of people who would claim that information is ontologically basic would also go with Landauer's principle, "information is physical." — Count Timothy von Icarus

It seems like you can make a strong case that it is not, that it is more akin to mathematics. Consider digital information. Two digital objects are identical iff their sequence of bits is identical. Sequences of bits are just (potentially enormous) binary numbers.

What is constant as information moves from one media to another is numerical. Everything that is not constant is physical.

One of the enjoyable aspects of natural and real life is the challenges and adversity it can sometimes present and our ability to deal with such adversity which would help an individual build character and resilience. For me then the simulation would be a cop out. — kindred

This sounds good, and there is probably truth to it. But I'm not sure people actually act according to it. By this logic, you should refuse a gift of a million dollars, because that would automatically resolve a lot of valuable adversity. Most wouldn't even if ideologically they value adversity.

Moreover, you have total control of the character of the simulation. You can absolutely build in adversity, the kind of adversity that is most suitable for your personal growth, rather than the actual adversity that can so often tear us down.