Is a man evil if he has evil thoughts, and good if he has good ones? — NOS4A2

I have intrusive thoughts that are just awful. But it doesn't define me. You have to acknowledge your shadow side, and then tell yourself it's just your ego talking. How you conduct yourself is what matters. There are psychopaths who are very moral people because they choose to live by an ethical code. Are they evil, because they have no empathy and (possibly) violent impulses?

You're correct of course, but I don't think Russia will go for a deal that doesn't give them any Ukranian territory. Putin could not survive that.

Russian mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin said his forces were in control of the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don Saturday morning. NBC News has not verified that claim, but video posted to social media shows armored vehicles on the city's streets.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/live-blog/russia-attempted-coup-mercenaries-wagner-rebellion-rcna90921#rcrd14601

Whatever the outcome of this, there goes any chance of a peace deal. Ukraine is going to assume that if they just hold on long enough and keep attritting Russian forces, they'll win. And this rebellion by the head of Wagner will convince hawks in America and Europe (and a lot of the public) that arms should continue to be sent to Ukraine.

Putin's going to address the oligarchy masquerading as a gas station masquerading as a country.

A fragile situation.

My wife is on Twitter and telling me some weird stuff is going on in Russia right now.

This is from one of my favorite books:

"For the self-control of the warrior, which we observe and admire in his comportment, is but the outward manifestation of the inner perfection of the man. Such virtues as patience, courage, selflessness, which the soldier seems to have acquired for the purpose of defeating the foe, are in truth for use against enemies within himself—the eternal antagonists of inattention, greed, sloth, self-conceit, and so on.
When each of us recognizes, as we must, that we too are engaged in this struggle, we find ourselves drawn to the warrior, as the acolyte to the seer. The true man-at-arms, in fact, can overcome his enemy without even striking a blow, simply by the example of his virtue."

OK

I'm kind of partial to the MWI, but not because I have anywhere near the expertise needed to judge between interpretations. I find it relatively easy to 'picture' an MWI world, as compared to the worlds of other interpretations of QM, and that undoubtedly biases my view. — wonderer1

Doesn't MWI violate the old axiom: Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity? Isn't the following pretty awkward?

"In the Everett version of the cat puzzle, there is a single cat up to the point where the device is triggered. Then the entire Universe splits in two. Similarly, as DeWitt pointed out, an electron in a distant galaxy confronted with a choice of two (or more) quantum paths causes the entire Universe, including ourselves, to split. In the Deutsch–Schrödinger version, there is an infinite variety of universes (a Multiverse) corresponding to all possible solutions to the quantum wave function. As far as the cat experiment is concerned, there are many identical universes in which identical experimenters construct identical diabolical devices. These universes are identical up to the point where the device is triggered. Then, in some universes the cat dies, in some it lives, and the subsequent histories are correspondingly different. But the parallel worlds can never communicate with one another."
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-many-worlds-theory/

It was all so simple before QM.

In summary, the world is at bottom a mindless system of events at the level of fundamental particles and fields, behaving in the manner described by physical laws, and everything else that exists must exist consequentially to what is going on at that basic level. — Wayfarer

This is pretty straightforward, but even this will get bogged down quickly when someone asks, "What, exactly, is a particle?" The materialist/physicalist ontology is very...fluid.

:up:

Those are easy problems, not hard problems. — Philosophim

I don't think so. I think we'll see science continue to flounder, and it will reach a crisis when the Ai's start operating at human levels, which won't be too long from now, and science will have no answer to the question everyone will be asking: are these things conscious?

But maybe you're right and there will be a breakthrough soon. Then you can resurrect this and laugh at me, but I don't think that's going to happen.

The only viable version of the hard problem is it stands today is that we cannot know what another subject is experiencing from that subjects viewpoint. We could take two subjects and stimulate identical brain states to where they both said, "I see a green tree." We could never independently verify what that green tree looked like specifically to subject 1 or 2. No one can. To my mind, there's no theory that ever could either. — Philosophim

That's not the only viable problem. How does consciousness arise from matter? Why is consciousness present at all? Why are only certain arrangements of matter conscious?

If these questions are still unanswered after 1,000 years, no will believe in materialism. Why would they? It will have failed to answer some of the most basic questions.

You can always question and wonder at alternatives. — Philosophim

The alternatives gain more credibility as the mainstream theories fail to explain observations. We see this already with Modified Newtonian dynamics gaining more ground as the mystery of dark matter continues to be unresolved. If the Hard Problem is still around 1,000 years from now, it will be devastating for materialism/physicalism. You're already seeing a resurgence in idealism and panpsychism because of it.

I don't know. You're asking about a fictional reality. We can't make judgements about fictional realities, because they're fictional. Can we create a fictional reality where we decide science is different? Sure. Can we create a fictional reality where we decide science is the same? Sure. Its fiction, so there are no limits on what we can do. — Philosophim

OK, so all the neuroscience that's been done is consistent with an idealistic reality. Why should I then believe that the prima facie neural causation model that you champion is actual causation? I would if the model you describe could explain how things are conscious and why consciousness is present at all, but materialism/physicalism/naturalism has utterly failed to solve the mind-body problem. How long are we going to put up with that failure before we start to explore new theories? What if the mind-body problem is still around 1,000 years from now? At what point do you start to question your metaphysical assumptions?

Can you prove that this is all a dream? That's like saying "Would it all be different if we were all made out of cotton candy?" Its a fun thing to explore, but without providing an argument that we are in fact, made out of cotton candy, its not an argument worth considering in a discussion of facts. — Philosophim

I can't prove it's all a dream. I'm simply asking you if all the science that's been done would necessarily be any different if all this was a dream. Would it?

Also: we dream and create worlds every night. Your cotton candy example is absurd. Idealism is taken seriously by people and philosophers. It can't be dismissed with a hand-wave.

Of course they entail what they entail. All you have to do is show that brain death and a lack of mind are not a correlate. All you have to do is demonstrate how when neuroscientists analyze the brain, they can predict accurately what a person will think or say next up to 10 seconds before they say it. If my points are so easy to counter, then you should be able to easily give a counter to them. — Philosophim

Would any of that be different if this were all a dream?

That's an appeal to authority, not an argument. — Philosophim

That's a copout. We cite books and philosophers in discussions here constantly. It's not a fallacy in informal discussions if the authority is a valid one.

The U.S. has been through much worse times than this. Trumpism will pass.

:100:

It figures you would like that kook.

On the issue of slavery, American democracy failed. — frank

This!

Does consciousness of information constitute additional information? — Pantagruel

Not if one has the belief that mental states are the same as brain states. However, it seems obvious to me that a description of a conscious system (e.g., a working brain) is incomplete unless that description includes "is conscious". What do you think?

:up:

People commonly judge throwing a switch to sacrifice one person to save five as moral. But they judge it immoral to push a large man off a bridge (sacrificing one person) to block a trolley, saving five people. Why the difference when the body count is the same? — Mark S

I wrote a paper on that once, many years ago, although the case I was looking at was Trolley Car vs abducting a person to harvest their organs and save five people. I think in the trolley car cases, we see that as a rare one-off, so we sacrifice the one, but in the other trolley-car like cases where we get our hands dirty (pushing a person, abducting a person), we can see how society could head down a scary path where it starts to actively look for ways to kill people for "the greater good".

The claim is that it is not possible for a full description of the universe at some time T1 to be shorter or longer than a full description at some future time T2. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What if there was no consciousness at T1, but consciousness later emerged at T2? Wouldn't the full description at T2, when there is consciousness, be longer than the consciousless description at T1?

There is no reason to expect them to answer all moral questions that we can think of. — Mark S

It's going to have to say something about Trolley Car.

This is not complicated. If you want complications and endless arguments, join the search for imperative oughts (categorical imperatives in Kant's terms). — Mark S

Would travelling back in time (assume it's possible) to kill baby Hitler be the moral thing to do? What about using data the Nazi's collected experimenting on people? What about diverting a runaway trolley car full of children by pushing one child in front of it? What about aborting a baby one minute for non-health reasons?

What does your proposal have to say about the probability of Last Thursdayism?

So, what does science say we should do about the Trolley Car problem?

Appeal to authority is classically taken as perhaps the definitive fallacy. Classic in contemporary modern is positivist diagnostic criteria. — introbert

And yet, when your car doesn't work you don't take it to a cardiologist and when you have chest pains, you don't go to a mechanic.

If we could see how particles combined in a certain way could lead to liquidity, then we'd understand the theory and the phenomenon. It's the phenomenon which is puzzling, not the theory. — Manuel

Forgive me for butting in, or if it's been covered, but if one knows all the properties of certain particles, can't one predict which phenomena will emerge? For example, if we knew enough about H and O, would H2O's liquid properties be surprising?

I'm sorry, am I questioning the orthodoxy too much? You were the one who linked the article. Don't you want to talk about it?

An octopus is as smart as a three-year old. Don't you think they're conscious?

That's an interesting article. This stood out:

"then consciousness evolved gradually over the past half billion years and is present in a range of vertebrate species."

No conscious invertebrates? Don't they have to deal with lots of information flowing in?

Sensory deprivation tanks weren't part of the environment our ancestors were exposed to. There is no reason to think that there is an evolutionary benefit to how we respond, to an environment that played no role in the natural selection of our ancestors. — wonderer1

What is the evolutionary benefit of consciousness?

Good point. Even 20% of people born without limbs have phantom limb syndrome. What this tells us is the brain actively fires looking for limbs to use. Makes sense since even babies use their limbs all the time. The locus of thought is from the mind to the limb, not from the limb to the mind. — Philosophim

It seems that if sensory input isn't coming in to the brain, the brain will create it's own hallucinatory input to compensate. People in sensory deprivation tanks hallucinate fairly quickly when deprived of external stimuli. What is the evolutionary benefit of this?

People who have dead nerves in certain places of their body cannot feel anything there. — Philosophim

What about phantom limb pain?

If Biden goes down, an old white guy President gets replaced by a black woman. Good.