• Mind & Physicalism
    Asking what it's like to sky dive is asking for my affect at the time, the answer is "It was great", or "it was really scary". Asking what it's like to be a bat is not intending such an answer. Nagel would not be satisfied with "it'd be fun", or "it'd be boring". — Isaac

    There is something that it is like to be you (you), and there is something that it is like to be me (me). You would agree? It sounds like you're only objecting about considering what it's like to be things like bats. You concede that "what is it like to be you?" is a question you can answer?
  • Is intelligence levels also levels of consciousness?
    But if someone can be "highly conscious", "barely conscious", and "unconscious", then this suggests different degrees of consciousness. At any rate, there must be increasing degrees of consciousness between unconsciousness and full consciousness, e.g. when we wake up from deep sleep.

    Conversely, when we are extremely tired we may be increasingly less conscious than when fully awake and alert. The same is true when the normal function of our brain or general nervous system is impaired due to illness or other causes.     — Apollodorus

    I get this, but I think even if you're emerging from a deep sleep and extremely drowsy, that drowsiness is just as much a conscious state (quantatatively) as when you're fully alert. Like I said, the conscious experience in those cases (drowsiness vs wide-awake) is just different, and not a measure of quantity of consciousness.

    I think "awareness" is better. You're either aware or you're not. If you're emerging from anesthesia and barely conscious, you're just as aware as if you're amped up on meth, say. I get that that seems counterintuitive. I'm not doing a good job describing what I mean here.
  • Is intelligence levels also levels of consciousness?
    I don't think it needs to be less. It may simply be different. Otherwise, what it is that makes them "disabled"? — Apollodorus

    I agree that conscious experiences are different, but I don't think you can quantify consciousness. You're either conscious or you're not. I don't think, say, a cat is at level x and I'm at level x+whatever because of my higher order thinking skills. I think the conscious experience is just...different for me and the cat.
  • Is intelligence levels also levels of consciousness?
    If consciousness were correlated with intelligence, then the times when I'm wasted, my consciousness should be "less" than when I'm not on drugs. That is not the case. Often, the opposite is true. I don't think disabled people have any less consciousness than brilliant people.
  • Mind & Physicalism
    What exactly do you attempt to eliminate in your "eliminative materialism"?
    — Olivier5

    We've been through this - things like qualia, consciousness (in the sense of 'what it's like')     — Isaac

    Isaac, are you claiming "what is it like to go sky-diving?" is something that needs to be eliminated? Or is nonsensical? Surely you've been asked "what is it like" questions by people before. How do you respond to them? Do you just ignore the question?
  • Opinion
    Get out of the sun of introspection. — jgill

    The unexamined life is worth living?
  • Mind & Physicalism
    Define 'song'. — Kenosha Kid

    Lame.
  • Mind & Physicalism
    I can go one better: I have even written an entire song, lyrics, chords, bassline and all, in the space of a cigarette break without making a peep. But there was still no music playing in my head, no sounds, just mental representations of sounds. — Kenosha Kid

    But you didn't answer my question: have you ever had a song stuck in your head?
  • Mind & Physicalism
    Yes, if by “song playing in your head” you mean that there are air vibrations that produce a certain sound literally emanating or passing through your head. But this is what you must mean in order to make your point. — khaled

    I'm talking about a song playing in my head. It has nothing to do with air vibrations, and of course you know that because in your life I'm sure people have told you they have songs stuck in their heads and you never said to them "but how can that be??? There are no air vibrations in your skull!", so I give up. If you are incapable of acknowledging the trivial fact that people have songs in their heads, what more can I say? The absurdity of your position has been laid bare.
  • Mind & Physicalism
    Question not to me but, yes, mistaken. Very mistaken. In the same way there's no red in your head when you think of the colour red. You have representations of a song, but no actual music is playing. — Kenosha Kid

    Have you ever had a song stuck in your head?
  • Mind & Physicalism
    What are minds themselves in an idealist system? Are they also projections of a mind? Or are they somehow independent and fundamental? If they are the former, whose mind? God’s? Then in whose mind is God a projection? If he’s not a projection in another’s mind, what is he? If the latter, how do they seem to increase whenever a kid is born?

    Sorry for all the questions I just don’t get y’all. And I’ve been trying to.     — khaled

    These are questions that need answers, but they're not indicative of a category error, which is what you were claiming before. In idealism, there's only one ontological category: mental stuff. In dualism, there are two categories: mental stuff and physical stuff, and the dualist claims that one comes from the other. That would be fine if there was an explanation for it all, but in the absence of any explanation (and the problem has been around a long time), I think there's a prima facie case for a category error.
  • Mind & Physicalism
    Having a song in your head and actually hearing a song from the other room are different yet similar experiences corresponding to different yet similar brain states. What’s the issue with this? — khaled

    There is no issue with what you're talking about. This is what I was responding to:

    It seems highly implausible that you actually have a song playing in your head. — Isaac

    No, it's not implausible to actually have a song playing in your head. I have a song playing in my head right now. Do you think it's implausible? Do you think I'm lying or mistaken?
  • Mind & Physicalism
    The "mind-body problem" is a misnomer. Call it an enigma instead, or a mystery, or simply a question. There are many unresolved questions, like the origin of the universe, what existed before the big bang, how did life happen, and who came first: the chicken or the egg? These are accurately called questions, not problems. Nobody calls abiogenesis a "problem", for good reasons. — Olivier5

    Because, with abiogenesis, we already have a framework for an explanation: life started when chemicals xyz, did abc in environment efg. We're just trying to figure out exactly the environment, steps and chemicals. What's the framework for the explanation "how does consciousness arise from matter?" What does the answer to that even look like? Consciousness is an illusion? Consciousness IS brain activity? Consciousness is information integration? Unlike with abiogenesis, the explanation for consciousness at this point is pure guess work. I think it's a unique problem. You think "give it time". Maybe. But we should at least have the broad outlines of an explanation by now. The fact we don't is good evidence there's something deeper to the mystery.
  • Mind & Physicalism
    Thing is, this science of idealism we've just described --Xism -- is physicalism. — Kenosha Kid

    No, because the idealist says that the cause of your experiences is a mind(s). Everything you experience is a projection of either a coordinated set of minds or a god-head mind, like in Berkeley's idealism. Modern idealists like Bernardo Kastrup talk about a "cosmic mind". In any case, no physicalist would agree that reality is the product of a cosmic mind's thinking.

    But you do bring up a point: science works equally well under idealism as it does under physicalism. Positing the existence of some mind-independent non-conscious stuff doesn't solve any problems.
  • Mind & Physicalism
    You can see it happen here 24/7. The same old tired arguments are being made over and over again on this subject, day after day, month after month, year after year. They think they are arguing but all they do is bang heads. — Olivier5

    Pretty much. But things change. The paradigm is shifting. Consciousness has become a big problem in academia. It's not OK to just sweep it under the rug anymore.
  • Mind & Physicalism
    Well, this conversation has taken an uncomfortable turn for the pathological. Are you saying that you can't tell the difference (even colloquially) between the expressions "there's a song playing in that room over there" and "I've got this song playing in my head"? — Isaac

    No, I'm saying you're wrong: it's not implausible to have a song in your head. It happens all the time.
  • Mind & Physicalism
    It seems highly implausible that you actually have a song playing in your head. — Isaac

    No it doesn't. You've never had a song stuck in your head? Sure you have. People talk about songs playing in their heads all the time. That's one of the problems with the materialist position: it doesn't map on to the way we talk to each other. The materialist has to say, "Yes, we might say "we have a song in our heads", but what we really mean, is neurons xyz are doing abc.". That's a problem for materialism, because when I'm talking about a song being stuck in my head, everyone knows exactly what I mean, and that I'm not talking about my brain.

    Dualism has a distinct advantage in that it maps on to our everyday language the best: we talk about our minds and we talk about our bodies and we don't think they're the same thing. I think if you drill down, you run into problems with it, but dualism certainly seems to be the way things are.
  • Mind & Physicalism
    Having a mind and a body is not necessarily a problem. The duality of form and matter is useful, conceptually and practically. So is the particle-wave duality. — Olivier5

    I know. My position is out there. I think 5% of professional philosophers are idealists (that's from a survey done awhile back). I think idealism is becoming more popular, though. You have people like Max Tegmark saying the universe is made of math, and Christof Koch is a panpsychist. Panpsychism isn't idealism, but it's certainly a step in that direction.
  • Mind & Physicalism
    Indeed.

    Though as ever, I'm intrigued by what you think an answer to "why is it that brains are conscious and kidneys aren't?" would be like. For me the answer is "that's just the way things played out". I don't expect anything to have a reason to have turned out some way and not another. Why is it that you want a reason?     — Isaac

    We're a curious species. We're usually not content with "that's just how things are". We always want to know why. In my case, I think the idea that mental states = physical states is contradicted by the simple fact that I can have a song playing in my head while there's no music in my skull; I can see green, without part of my brain turning green. I think the idea that mental states are caused by physical states is more appealing, but there's no consensus explanation for how that can happen, and for that to still be a mystery makes me think there's a category error going on there.

    I think where the materialist case really bogs down is with computers. Most materialists believe that machines can be conscious. That entails that the pain of stubbing a toe is (or can be reduced to) a bunch of tiny switches turning off and on. That's extremely implausible.
  • Mind & Physicalism
    Yes. — Isaac

    I think we got pretty far defining the physical. Any further posts would be along the lines of "why is it that brains are conscious and kidneys aren't?" and I'm sure you've heard all that and have an explanation you like.
  • Mind & Physicalism
    Yes...ideas. — Isaac

    OK, so we have some attributes for the physical:
    It is sometimes mind-independent (e.g., the sun) and sometimes not (e.g., ideas). Would you agree that the physical is sometimes conscious and sometimes not? For example, your brain is conscious and your kidneys aren't, agreed?
  • Mind & Physicalism
    There are many problems in this world. Thankfully most of us can intuitively feel a difference between dreams, or even hallucinations, and reality. There's a sense of matter being there, being hard and heavy. — Olivier5

    I agree. Idealism is counter-intuitive, but it doesn't suffer from a similar problem as the mind-body problem because it supposes that something we already know exists (hallucinations that people can't tell from reality) exists on a massive scale. There needs to be evidence for that, of course, but the claim itself is not susceptible to a category error. I think the mind-body problem is evidence that there's a category error going on, and you can't get the mental from the physical.
  • Mind & Physicalism
    One question asks if the sun is mind-independent, the other asks if the physical is mind independent. The sun is not all that is physical. — Isaac

    So your claim then is that there is some physical stuff that is mind-independent (e.g., the sun) and some physical stuff that isn't mind-independent. Can you give me an example of physical stuff that isn't mind-independent?
  • Mind & Physicalism
    Right, there wouldn't be labels for anything, but the stuff would still be there. I think we're agreed. So the physical is mind-independent. Agreed?
    — RogueAI

    No, I don't think that follows.     — Isaac
  • Mind & Physicalism
    The sun (or the external states which we interpret as 'the sun') are not caused by minds and would continue to exist if minds didn't. — Isaac

    So, the sun is mind-independent? You didn't agree with this before, and here you are literally saying the sun is not dependent on any mind. So, the sun is mind-independent, yes?
  • Mind & Physicalism
    delete
  • Mind & Physicalism
    That is not true for me. I can feel the difference quite well. — Olivier5

    I'm sure you will grant me the existence of people who cannot tell their hallucinations from reality, and this causes them tremendous trouble in life. You are not one of these people, OK.
  • Mind & Physicalism
    There are clearly lots of physical things produced by minds, all those things would obviously cease to exist of minds ceased to exist. — Isaac

    Did you mean to say the bolded? Aren't you talking labels here? Is your position then that the sun's existence is dependent on whether minds exist??? And what "physical things" do you think minds produce???
  • Mind & Physicalism
    But dreams and reality are different. — Olivier5

    Hallucinations and reality are often indestinguisable rom each other to the person experiencing it. Idealism is the argument that reality is a hallucination. Idealists always say "dream", but hallucination is more accurate, because, as you say, there are obvious differences between the dreaming and waking world.
  • Mind & Physicalism
    So what would my body be made of? Ideas? — Olivier5

    What is it made of when you dream at night? Ideas, yes.
  • Mind & Physicalism
    No but we can play with ideas, analyse them, communicate them — Olivier5

    I agree. I think it's evidence that they're obviously not physical things. Playing with an idea and playing with a physical object are two very different things.
  • Mind & Physicalism
    We'll solve it one day. In the meantime, I'd rather have a mind-body problem than have no mind or no body. — Olivier5

    Idealism doesn't entail you don't have a body. It entails that that body is not made of physical stuff.
  • Mind & Physicalism
    ↪Isaac
    Right, there wouldn't be labels for anything, but the stuff would still be there. I think we're agreed. So the physical is mind-independent. Agreed?
  • Mind & Physicalism
    ↪Isaac
    All right, let's pin the basics down on "physical". What would happen to the universe if all minds dissappeared? Would planets, stars, galaxies, etc. still be around?
  • Mind & Physicalism
    In between these two extremes lies the not-so-new idea that there's no matter without form and no form without matter. — Olivier5

    But then you have the mind-body problem, which seems insolvable, at this point.
  • Mind & Physicalism
    Therefore ideas are empirical, and can be considered as physical. — Olivier5

    Do you think your ideas have physical attributes? Size, weight, texture, etc.?
  • Mind-Matter Paradox!
    If there were no observers there would be no observations of white triangles; that seems obvious and I see no reason to assert any more than that. — Janus

    That's not what I asked. In a universe of no minds, would there be any white triangles? Not "observations of white triangles". Just "white triangles".
  • Mind-Matter Paradox!
    Sure you need an observer to observe something. — Janus

    Would you agree that an observer is a necessary condition for the existence of the white triangle? That is to say, in a universe where there are no minds, there are no "white triangles"?
  • Mind-Matter Paradox!
    I see both the white and black triangles on the screen. Both triangles have portions of their boundaries missing. Beyond that I don't know what you are asking, or what you think you are trying to prove. — Janus

    Neither triangle is an actual triangle. They both require an observer to give them the label "triangle", particularly the white triangle, since it isn't even made of line segments and is defined by its relation to the other objects.

    This is a problem for materialists who believe in the possibility of simulated consciousness. If the existence of the white triangle is dependent on an observer, then simulated consciousness is also going to be dependent on an observer- flipping little electric switches on and off in a certain way isn't sufficient to simulate consciousness. You would need an observer to assign a meaningful label to whatever pattern of switching operations is (supposedly) conscious, just as we need an observer to interpret the relationships between the objects in the image Gnomon posted and determine the empty spaces form a white triangle. And what's true of switching operations is true of neural activity: without an observer to give meaning to what the neurons are doing, it's just meaningless arrangements of matter interacting and moving around. Obviously, there's no little observers in our brain, so the brain alone is not a sufficient condition for consciousness.
  • Mind-Matter Paradox!
    Do you see the white triangle with your mental imagination or with your physical eye? Is the meaning of the word "see" the same in either case? — Gnomon

    That drives the point home very well.
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