Eventually, the luck hypothesis becomes too ridiculous to believe. Suppose you join a poker game and the dealer deals himself a royal flush. Suspicious, but it happens. But then he deals himself another royal flush. And another. And it's all explainable by luck, of course. A million royal flushes in a row are statistically possible. But you would have left the game long before that, because while luck is an explanation, after x number of royal flushes, luck stops being a good explanation. It's trumped by "the dealer is cheating" explanation, which in this discussion is "someone designed it".

Are we in a universe that's beaten those kinds of odds for any complex things to exist? That's what a lot of cosmologists say. The flatness of the universe we observe requires an incredibly precise density of matter and energy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatness_problem

God doesn't harm us, we harm ourselves.

And thus that, it seems to me, is the best and most plausible answer to the question "what is the meaning of life?" The purpose of your being here is threefold. A) it is to protect innocent others from you. B) it is to give you your just deserts. C) it is to rehabilitate you.

I have issues with B. The universe/god/one-true-mind is not revenge-based.

Right on.

Most human effort is chasing idols we think will make us happy (fame, money, youth, beauty, etc.) and distracting ourselves from the true cause of our miseries. Pascal said it best: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone". That's what I want, above all else. Not something for nothing, but to be able to sit alone for 15 minutes without going crazy from boredom. Just be at peace with myself.

I hear you, Outlander. Much of my life is spent pursuing idols and distractions and growing bored with them and moving on. You (in the general sense) wouldn't be on this planet if you weren't like that, but I digress.

"I guess men don't matter that much eh, so hurting them is, not really suggested, but meh, who really cares?"

Since men are the ones doing 80+% of the violence and killing against other men, I think complaining that we carve out a day to recognize victims of our own violence is really pathetic. Especially the one for children. How can you possibly have an objection over an anti-violence day for children???

They get harassed for being white in the wrong area of town, at the wrong time.

That, of course, is different than being harassed by police or turned down for a job or followed around in the store or the other innumerable racist things that happen to POC's in this country by the white ruling class.

And they don't get over looked because their name is unusual, they get over looked because of the distinctly white name, and not allowed into certain programs as they are immediately disqualified due to being white.

Yes, programs that benefit a historically oppressed minority are going to displace/not benefit some members of the dominant culture, who will rail about the injustice of it all. I agree with you, it's not fair that some poor white kid has points taken away on a college application for being white, but I know of no other way to help a group try to get back on its feet after centuries of de jure racial discrimination that people still remember. People seem to forget a salient point: it was OK for the state to treat blacks as second class citizens all the way up to the 1950's (the era, by the way, a lot of white Americans are nostalgic for, but America's not a racist country, not at all).

All lives matter, each as much, or as little, as the next. Anything else demonstrates discrimination.

When someone says "Black Lives Matter" and someone responds "All Lives Matter", what they're saying is "your concerns are equal to mine". They're not. The average black person has much more to fear from the cops than the average white person.

I've had two hernia operations and my appendix removed. I'll take modernity and anesthesia. But will someone two hundred years from now look back in horror at what I tolerated? Probably. So, in the end, I think people are just as dissatisfied with their lives as they ever were.

There are a couple things you can be sure of: you have a conscious mind and it is receiving data from your senses. But that's about it. So, when people naturally assume brains exist, I stop the conversation there and ask, "why are you assuming a brain exists?"

Don, why are you assuming an object external to your mind made of non-conscious stuff (a brain, when you unpack the word) exists? What's that assumption based on?

If thoughts are an emergent property of the brain, how does that work exactly? And we're right back to the mind/body problem.

I agree with all that.

"No, because that's not right. The cup is more than just what I sense."

You're making an assumption here.

If the mind is an immaterial object and not a material object, then one does not have to explain how consciousness arises from material substances, does one? It doesn't.

If an immaterial mind is caused by the brain, there needs to be an explanation for how that works.

The problem is that materialism cannot explain how consciousness can arise from non-conscious stuff (e.g., working brain) when that stuff is put together a certain way. It can't even hint at the framework of a possible explanation. It can try and avoid the problem by claiming consciousness is illusionary, or other such non-sense, but that era is almost over.

The explanation is that consciousness cannot arise from non-conscious stuff. It's an absurdity. Since we know consciousness exists, therefore, we know there is no non-conscious stuff.

Now, what do you think the mind-body problem is, and how was it solved?

Yes and yes. And it was solved ages ago. Plato. Avicenna. Descartes. Locke. Berkeley. Read them.

You're saying the mind-body problem was solved? What's the solution?

Athena, we were just talking about serfs and slaves yesterday after watching Simple History's video on "Life in Medieval Times"! We also got into a discussion about political power gradually accruing to the peasant class over centuries. We do a lot of drawing contests, and the one elective they go to every day (I have them all day except for one period is more exact) is computerized automated design (CAD). I highlight classical music with Doodelchaos's awesome Linerider videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIz3klPET3o&ab_channel=DoodleChaos
and similar stuff. I try and give them a rounded education.

Thanks, Athena. I teach 6th grade, which is all subjects. I have the same group of kids all day (virtually, now).

That's funny you mention it, I just had a training on implicit bias. It was very good. No one was demonized. I think we need more of those trainings.

I commend you on your honesty here. How do you deal with it when you do catch yourself? Have you found an alternative way of differentiating grades?

Thank you. Yeah, computerized grading helps. Same with deliberately not looking at names on assignments. This is mostly a problem when I'm doing final grades/subjective grades (e.g., reading fluency) and deciding who deserves a bump up. I just step back and try and look at the student objectively.

Talk about the time you fell for a logical fallacy.

When I'm grading students, and it's a tough call on the grade, I often find myself giving the black students a lower grade. I catch myself doing this all the time.

Good discussion!

That's a pretty cynical view, Kenosha. I'm not sure I buy it. I think I have a pretty good concept of, say, a million. Although, to your point, I have no conception of what 2 to the millionth power is, except it's really big. Even if you wrote it out, it's just "really big". So I grant you that some numbers are "unthinkable" (and what does the existence of unthinkable numbers entail?)

But if math is just a rules game, how did we come up with innovations like imaginary numbers, which have real-world applications? Doesn't that require understanding of math on a conceptual level, rather than something that's just rules-based?

"Because manipulating the final symbol according to a small set of rules learned in childhood is trivial and does not require comprehension of the entire number."

That's true. But your position entails that for any number over 143,672, when we do math we're not really understanding anything, we're just playing a rules game. That doesn't seem right. Do you believe that?

No, because we don't conceive of numbers in this way. We don't have a concept of 143,672ness. We can relate 143,672 to 143,671 by comparing six symbols each one of an ordered set (the decimal base) and noting that all are the same but the last, and that the last digit of the former is later in the set than that of the latter.

When we consider numbers like 9,479,284,479,946,424,742,057,043,748,258,831,164,859,380,423,470,964,125,667,852,865,110,732,989,169,568,826,863,358,101,582 we can't even do that. It's just "a very big number". We can break it down, but at no point are we considering 9,479,284,479,946,424,742,057,043,748,258,831,164,859,380,423,470,964,125,667,852,865,110,732,989,169,568,826,863,358,101,582ness.

I'm going to push back on this. I agree that for any absurdly long number, it's hard to imagine how we can hold it in our minds, and yet, for any number, I can add 1 to it and figure out what the answer is. How am I able to do that if the number is so large I can't properly think of it?

The words and sentences get longer and longer. But you don't need to be able to think of an infinitely long number for this to be a problem for materialism. You just need the existence of X+1 amount of possible thoughts, where X is the number of brain states possible at any given time.

Though I do not think the mind is a brain, I do think “the infinite use of finite means” could provide a way to avoid your problem. Just as a finite number of letters could conceivably be used to create an infinite number of sentences, a finite number of “brain states” could produce an infinite number of thoughts.

No, because the brain is finite in size. It can only be configured X many unique ways. If you had a brain that was thinking different thoughts for an infinite amount of time, you would have an infinite amount of thoughts. It would seem that a working brain at any point in time has an infinite number of possible thoughts it can think of, but that contradicts materialism, which says there's only a finite amount of possible thoughts that can be thought of.

Are some numbers unthinkable?

I'm OK with there being a finite number of possible thoughts, given that the finite number of possible thoughts is really very hugely huge. Unless you can actually count all the grains of sand in the world (a very hugely huge finite number) or all the variations possible for snow flakes (no two are alike, supposedly) then the world is not impoverished by a finite number of sand grains or snow flakes. Or possible thoughts.

And it isn't enriched by an infinite number of possible thoughts, sand grains, or snow flakes. Just one of my extremely finite opinions, of course.

That's not my point, though. My point is it seems like there are an infinite number of possible thoughts to we can think of, and that's not possible, given materialism. So either materialism is wrong, or there aren't an infinite number of things we can think of.

I don't know whether there are an infinite number of thoughts.

There are infinitely many possible thoughts, since there are infinitely many numbers, and each number can be thought of (or is that true? Are there some numbers we can't imagine?)

I don't know where to begin thinking about an infinite number of thoughts.

My argument doesn't require that. It just requires there to be an infinite number of possible thoughts, because, if materialism is true, there are only a finite number of possible thoughts.

There are only a finite number of birds possible.

It goes into a new body the next time the universe branches off.

Well I just said, I disagree with the notion that we should give up on a physical model of consciousness. There is no guarantee in this universe of solving any problem in any given time, and we're making faster progress now than ever.

We haven't made any progress on the Hard Problem. For the questionsHow are we conscious and Why are we conscious, science has nothing to say but conjecture. It's panpscyhism or computation or integrated information theory or quantum computations in brain microtubules. The fact that there's not even a framework for an answer to the Hard Problem is evidence of the fact that no progress has been made on it. I expect that lack of progress to continue. I think it's fundamentally incoherent to think that non-conscious stuff can produce consciousness, and that's why you're seeing such frustration on the part of materialists when it comes to consciousness, and why there's a temptation to handwave it all away, like the behavioralists did and people like Dennet still do.

I also disagree about choosing a philosophy by elimination. There's always the possibility that there is another framing that we haven't thought of yet."

Possibly, but from where we're at epistemically, it really comes down to "is there stuff outside the mind, is everything mind/thought, or is it some combination of stuff outside the mind and mental stuff?" In other words, physicalism, dualism, or idealism seem to be exhaustive. I don't think we're going to be discovering another "ism" to add to those three.

No.

I don't think the brain produces consciousness because I think materialism is highly improbable (due to its ongoing failure to make progress on the Hard Problem) and dualism is incoherent. That only leaves idealism, and that entails brains don't exist (at least as physical things).

"You are the one that have asserted that neurology cannot produce consciousness."

This doesn't make sense. I have asserted that it's highly improbable that science will produce an EXPLANATION of how non-conscious matter produces consciousness. I base this on the complete lack of progress so far on the Hard Problem.

I don't accept the brain produces consciousness. The existence of some non-conscious stuff is simply asserted to be the case without a shred of evidence to back it up. Mercifully, the era of materialism is fast approaching an end.

I found this a very interesting read:

https://www.academia.edu/42985813/The_Idea_of_the_Brain_A_History_By_Matthew_Cobb

Our latest theories allow us to create artificial memories in the mind of a mouse. Very recently the theories about memory were highly speculative and all over the map, and now we understand the mechanism (for one kind of memory). I think new knowledge like this will lead to the discovery of the mechanisms underlying conscious experience.

I have a family member working in this field and I'm hoping that he will be the one to make the breakthrough. I reckon people his age can expect to live to at least 120 and to be active at least into their 80s. So I'm confident that within another 40 or so years I can give you an answer.

Solving the memory problem is an "easy" problem, because the answer is simply some brain mechanism. Solving the question: why does a working brain produce the sensation of stubbing a toe, but when I put it in the blender and add some electricity, I don't get anything? So there are three questions that need to be answered: what is it about a particular configuration of atoms and forces that gives rise to conscious experience? How does a particular configuration of atoms and forces give rise to conscious experience? Why are we conscious, what purpose does it serve?

Solving the memory problem won't get you anywhere closer to the answer to those three questions. And if you think there will be an answer in 40 years, you would expect there to be some progress in the short term. I see progress on solving mechanical issues, but I don't see any progress in solving any Hard Problems.

What progress? The theories about how matter produces consciousness are highly speculative, all over the map, and there's nothing close to a consensus around any of them.