2: How are you defining "density"? Do you mean the average number of Boltzmann brains within a given cubic area? — alan1000

yes

But how could anyone possibly know the answer to that question?

Well, when we explore space, we don't see any Boltzmann brains, which suggests the density is very low (or we occupy a special place).

Someone on a philosophy forum once said the amount of new information (they might have said knowledge) in a dictionary is essentially zero, because all the dictionary does is refer to itself. That's always stuck with me. What do you think of that?

Have you ever criticized Trump here?

Have you ever criticized Trump here?

What did you think of Trump praising Xi Jinping?

The hate is not really for him it is towards that sizeable portion of the electorate that persistently supports him and will not be budge. — yebiga

MAGA is losing the culture wars at all levels. Despite being overwhelmingly Christian, MAGA is very much "of the world" and obsessed with their idealized 1950's view of when America was "great". They're so emotionally invested in this, they can't think straight and let a man like Trump become their champion.

Fake electors just got charged in Michigan.

Why would Ukraine give away land at this point for a peace treaty? After the attempted coup in Russia, they smell blood. If they can attrit Russia some more, maybe the whole war will end.

My own opinion leans towards the US not being very serious. They have too strong an interest in continuing this war. — Mikie

Yeah, the U.S. definitely wants to bleed Russia dry, however, China could step into the void and be a peace-maker. I suspect both sides are too far apart for negotiation to work right now, sunken cost fallacy and all that.

What will happen to food prices? How many people will starve because of Putin's invasion?

there’s apparently little willingness to engage in serious peace negotiations. — Mikie

Is Russia willing? What kinds of concessions/demands do they have?

Are you defending RFK and/or his supporters? It sounds like you are.

So it would be fair to say that it's kind of strange that people who distrust the wealthy support wealthy candidates? Esp. ones like,

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/federal-court-approves-25-million-trump-university-settlement-n845181

https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2019/donald-j-trump-pays-court-ordered-2-million-illegally-using-trump-foundation

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-robert-f-kennedy-jr-distorted-vaccine-science1/

Isn't RFK Jr's net worth $50 million?
— RogueAI

If you say so. Your point? — Isaac

Shouldn't we suspect RFK (and Trump) of "[engaging] in underhand, clandestine deals (conspiracies) to extract more wealth"? That's what wealthy people do, right?

the wealthy do in fact engage in underhand, clandestine deals (conspiracies) to extract more wealth — Isaac

Isn't RFK Jr's net worth $50 million?

Putin's hold on power seems rather tenuous lately. I don't see Zelensky having to fight off a coup. Who knows what can happen with another 100,000 Russian casualties? Eventually the Russian people will tire of this and Putin, esp. when their forces keep losing ground.

"Using its own data, the ISW has calculated that Ukrainian forces have recaptured about 253 square kilometres of territory since the start of the counter-offensive on 4 June which, it says, is about the same amount of territory as Russian forces have captured in the past six months."
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60506682

Hypothesize your reaction to a son or daughter coming to you and declaring their intention to begin a career as a sex worker vs. a sports professional. Wherein there is a difference lies the answer to your question. The open minded liberal tends to be open minded and liberal about prostitution as long as it's "them" that's doing it. — Baden

That's a good point, but the particular sport matters. MMA fighter? Boxer? I'd rather my kid be a sex worker. Ditto for any sports where doping is rampant.

Chalmers and Koch are perpetuating a giant public con. — apokrisis

Really? Are they actively scheming to fool people or just unwitting dupes of a Bayesian mastermind?

"The mind seems to be non-material, though tied to the brain which is material. . . . . The very idea of mind acting on matter by a pure effect of will appears a little spooky" — Gnomon

Is substance-dualism making a come back?

On the other hand, it would be great to have a philosophical zombie sherpa help you climb Everest because it wouldn’t matter if they fell off. — Wayfarer

I think this passage is interesting:

"One huge advance would be the invention of a “consciousness-meter,” which could provide a “precise readout of the state of consciousness” of any given object. “I could point it at your head and get a read-out of your state of consciousness. Point it at this flower and see if it’s conscious or not. Point at a dog to see if anything might be going on in it. We don’t have that.” Such a device would “basically give you the data you need to formulate, let’s say, a semi-mathematical theory of consciousness,” which correlates a given physical system with a given conscious state."
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/david-chalmers-thinks-the-hard-problem-is-really-hard/

If you had such a meter, and pointed it a suspected P-zombie, and it registered no consciousness, wouldn't you still treat the suspected P-zombie as if it were conscious? After all, no device is infallible. I also don't see how such an invention could ever come about. Suppose you think you've come up with a consciousness detector, and you point it a dog. How could you possibly verify the accuracy of the meter? That would require another meter to verify the results of the first one, and you have an infinite regress. I see no way around this.

It's alright. Got a bit more boring lately as I've finally had to give up work completely, but I live in a nice place, so I'm OK. Thanks for asking though. — Isaac

Have your views evolved? Last time I asked you that, you claimed you didn't understand the question. Do you now admit that questions of "what is it like to be x" make sense?

Do you know what it's like to be you?

ChatGPT knows something that Dennett doesn't. — Wayfarer

If an Ai was capable of consciousness, and that consciousness influenced it's decision making, knowing what it knows about the evils we humans are capable of (and have done over the millenias)... would it admit to being conscious? What does game theory say about that?

Many other scholars and academics, including John Searle and Thomas Nagel, agree that Dennett's attempt to account for the first person perspective in objective terms, is conceptually flawed from the outset. — Wayfarer

How can it not be??? If we knew the biology of an alien species to 100% accuracy (or close to it), would we still have any inkling whether they were zombies or not? Not to sound like a broken record, but materialism utterly fails to give a satisfactory response to this problem regarding machines. Does ChatGPT have a first person perspective? Will it's fifth-generation successor? Materialism/physicalism is utterly unable to answer this question, and the problem will only get worse and worse as the Ai's get better and better.

Now that you are talking of this mystical thing of “the mind’s eye”, is that something a philosophical zombie also has? — apokrisis

The mind's eye is a "mystical thing"? No, it's not.

Let's talk about feels. What are you afraid of?

I can't quit you!

Welcome!

What do you think of Trump?

Who said anything about minds being brains?

I was asked for "that aspect of [myself] which visually perceives imagined phenomena". I presented it. Those areas of my brain are the aspects of myself which perceive imagined phenomena. It's an fMRI of someone imagining a scene.

My hand is the aspect of myself which holds teacups. It's not a particularly complicated question. — Isaac

So minds and brains are different? What are the differences?

If minds are brains (and I presume you think mental states are brain states) why are only some parts of the brain conscious?

In an infinitely large multiverse of a certain kind, there are going to be worlds like ours, but where extreme statistical flukes are the norm. Suppose we're one of those worlds. Suppose that we have all the physical laws completely wrong, it's just that our instruments, through some bizarre effect like quantum tunneling, keep giving us the same supposedly accurate results, but these results are actually completely wrong. For example, the Andromeda galaxy might really just be a light year away, but all our measurements just keep being off by the exact same amount year after year (along with measurements that underpin our understanding of all the natural laws we think we know). How could we ever be sure we're not in one of those statistically fluky worlds?

Also, since there would be an infinite amount of these improbable worlds and an infinite amount of "normal" worlds, and countable infinite sets are the same size, how could you make a probabilistic argument that you're not in the set of improbable worlds? If both sets are the same size, and you didn't know which set you belonged to, isn't it equally likely you could be a member of either set?

But the times, they are a changin'. — Wayfarer

They really are. I'm liking this younger generation of philosophers.

But none of it matters to Dennett and his readers. They are sufficiently motivated by the fear of spooky woo stuff that they'd prefer to accept it. — Wayfarer

It took a long time for me to ditch the materialist mindset. For me, the biggest obstacle was feeling like a fool for taking "woo"ish things seriously.

So do you reckon if you'd been the other party in that wager with David Chalmers you'd have won the bet? — Wayfarer

Consciousness was already explained years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Explained

But apparently, the REAL solution to the hard problem is Bosnian Semiotics. Or something like that.


Let's talk about feels and how and why they're generated and whether machines have them/can have them. You brave enough for a little Q&A?

I can also see other's minds from the outside. — T Clark

Well, you can see their behaviors. Their inner experiences (or lack thereof) are out of reach. Do other people see red the way I see green? Who knows.

Why do you assume people that come here don't have any say in the matter? You're assuming in your anti-natalist view that souls (disembodied minds, if idealism is true) don't exist.

Also: we can only go by our memories to determine whether things make sense. It's possible the universe makes no sense, but we are given false memories of a past where everything seems to make sense. That begs the question that the thing giving us false memories has to make some kind of sense itself.

ETA: But what if our false memories are the result of a fantastically improbable sequence of events?

It looks to me as if life in the universe is a fluke, despite the fact that we happen to be in a location where we notice life all around us. — wonderer1

The odds of the universe supporting any life at all are fantastically improbable. This is a good article:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fine-tuning/#ExamPhys

I found this interesting:

"Is there a God or a multiverse? Does modern cosmology force us to choose? Is it the case that the apparent fine-tuning of constants and forces to make the universe just right for life means there is either a need for a "tuner" or else a cosmos in which every possible variation of these constants and forces exists somewhere?

This choice has provoked anxious comment in the pages of this week's New Scientist. It follows an article in Discover magazine, in which science writer Tim Folger quoted cosmologist Bernard Carr: "If you don't want God, you'd better have a multiverse."

Even strongly atheistic physicists seem to believe the choice is unavoidable. Steven Weinberg, the closest physics comes to a Richard Dawkins, told the eminent biologist: "If you discovered a really impressive fine-tuning ... I think you'd really be left with only two explanations: a benevolent designer or a multiverse."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2008/dec/08/religion-philosophy-cosmology-multiverse#:~:text=It%20follows%20an%20article%20in,d%20better%20have%20a%20multiverse.%22

Taking off my idealist hat, I agree: either there's a sufficiently large multiverse (of the right kind), or there's god(s). Or there's been an endless Big Bang->Big Crunch. The odds that this single universe would be a life-supporting one are just too fantastical to take seriously the idea that we got lucky.

A counter to that line of thinking is that we wouldn't be here to wonder about it all if we hadn't been lucky, and we're here, so we got lucky, so what's the big deal? But that doesn't hold up. Leslie's Firing Squad analogy counters that objection.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Nave-html/Faithpathh/Leslie.html

Today, some quantum physicists and mathematicians (noted in post above) openly admit to some form of Panpsychism worldview. — Gnomon

Quantum Bayesian is really out there. Consciousness is all the rage these days.