I don’t understand any of what you’re trying to say here, so let’s start at the beginning. First, what is “mind?” Second, what’s the difference between “mind states” and “brain states?”

If you are equating minds and brains, why are you asking me "what is mind?" I gave you an argument that if minds are brains, then talk of minds is talk of brains. This is patently absurd, seeing as how ancient peoples could meaningfully talk about their minds without meaningfully talking about their brains.

When I think of my mind, I think of my brain. I equate the two, or rather reduce mind to brain. [/quote]

If minds are identical to brains and two people from ancient Greece are talking about their minds, it would follow that they're talking about their brains. The problem is that ancient Greeks COULD have meaningful discussions about their mental states. They could NOT have meaningful discussions about their brain states. They were clueless about the brain. They thought it cooled the blood. Because they could exchange meaningful communication about their minds, while at the same time NOT exchange meaningful communication about their brains, brains aren't identical to minds.

I would agree with that. But I'm an idealist, so I literally believe that people are nothing but thoughts and minds.

I think the grammar maps on to our (correct) intuition that thoughts and minds are things, separate from the brain. The adjectives that describe the brain don't work when used to describe the mind, and vice-versa. This too, reflects the way things really are: minds are not brains.

I tend to agree. If someone says they're thinking, "Thinking of what?" is a valid question and "nothing" would be a nonsensical answer to that question. Can you think of nothing? No. You can think of nothingness, but that's not the same thing.

I'll grant you that we're great at discovering neural correlates of mental states. We've made great stride and will continue to. That's an easy problem.

None of the progress has been made on the causal explanation: How do brains produce consciousness? Also: Why are we conscious? There's an Explanatory Gap. Science hasn't filled it with anything except speculation. Integrated Information Theory and Panpsychism are all the rage, but they're just guesses.

Now, will this gap eventually be filled? I doubt it. If it were, we'd have seen some progress by now. The Hard Problem was ignored for a long time, but the lack of an explanation is starting to bother people.

Yes, there's a strong correlation between brain-states and mental-states and this implies a causation. We've known for a long time that when you damage the brain, you damage the mind. It seems natural to assume that the brain causes the mind as well. The problem is that we're no closer to a causal explanation than we've ever been, and we should have made considerable progress by now. I'm convinced that materialism won't solve the problem. Either something like panpsychism is the case, or we have some kind of soul, or it's all just a dream.

With advances in technology we will have a far more detailed picture for comparing. Hence the gaps in which this uniqueness can hide will become smaller. For example, magnetoencephalography provides a much more detailed spatial map of our brain than EEG. But sure you can always argue that there is "some little unnoticeable difference". Similarly I can say that consciousness is due to a teapot orbiting the sun somewhere with no way to disprove it but that's not a very helpful way to go about it.

"consciousness is due to a three pound hunk of meat orbiting the sun somewhere". Does this make more sense than the teapot?

My non-pithy response: The fact that materialism can't disprove "consciousness is due to a teapot orbiting the sun" is a problem, don't you think? Shouldn't it be able to show the absurdity of such a thing? After all, if I said that "the earth's rotation is due to a teapot orbiting the sun" or "the sun's energy comes from a teapot orbiting the sun", I could easily be disproven.

I think that if science was going to solve the Hard Problem, it would have made some progress by now. But we're still just as clueless about how non-conscious stuff can produce consciousness as we were during Descartes' time.

All evidence supports the idea that “mind” is physical. What evidence is there that anything nonphysical exists?

When you think of your mind, do you think in terms of physical properties? What color is your mind? What shape is it? What's its volume? What does it smell like? What's it made out of? How heavy is it? These are nonsense questions because your mind isn't a physical thing.

The hardcore materialist would answer that minds = brains, but that certainly doesn't map on to our intuitions, and (more disastrously, since counter-intuitive claims are sometimes true) when you press such materialists on why brains are conscious and how brains are conscious you either get a shrug or nonsense answers like, "you're not really conscious, it's an illusion". Like I said before, it was maybe OK for science to collectively shrug about consciousness 100 years ago, but now? To not even have a framework for answering the question how brains are conscious? To not even have a working definition of consciousness? How does materialism survive such a failure? And if materialism isn't the case then it's either dualism or idealism. I find idealism more parsimonious, but for most of my life I was a dualist, so I get the appeal of it.

We can look inside our brains and see. Consider my brain and yours. We undergo fMRI and EEG scans when we are awake and find both of us have similar fMRI and EEG patterns. Now for a given brain state as represented by fMRI and EEG patterns, if I consider myself to be conscious, why shouldn't I consider the same for you when you too have a similar fMRI and EEG pattern as me?

Putting idealism aside, yes, we have indirect evidence other people are conscious because they have brains like our own, but there's no way to know for sure if they're conscious. How do I know that there's not something unique to my brain, some little unnoticeable difference, that makes me (and me alone) conscious? How would I begin to even test such a theory?

The idea that an idea has to be proven wrong in order to be wrong is wrong. In order for an idea to even be considered plausible, or worth considering, it must have some justified explanatory power. Can “all is mind” justify its premises? That is question number one. If you cannot answer it affirmatively, there is no need to proceed. If you can, then the next question should be what can it explain better than (insert alternative theory/ies)? Then ask what is left unexplained. Once that is determined, simple arithmetic will decide which idea is best.

Idealism does not fall prey to the Explanatory Gap/Hard Problem of Consciousness, which imo, is catastrophic for materialism at this point in time. Therefore, it's either dualism or idealism, and idealism is more parsimonious: I can be wrong about the existence of matter. I can't be wrong about the existence of mind and thought. Might as well make thought the building blocks of reality, instead of inanimate non-conscious stuff.

That begs another question: why don't we have an agreed upon scientific definition of consciousness yet? Maybe 100 years ago that would have been asking too much, but at this stage in the game? It's remarkable we still can't define what consciousness is, and yet another sign that the phenomenon is outside the "realm" of science.

OK, how would you go about verifying that a computer is conscious?

That's true. We assume other people are conscious because they look like us, and are biological organisms, like ourselves. But we don't know for sure. How can we? That does not, however, change my point about the internal mental states of computers forever being a mystery.

There are other variants of the thought experiment that are an even better fit for this, such as Ned Block's Chinese Nation thought experiment, where a large group of people performs a neural network computation simply by calling a list of phone numbers. The counterintuitive result here is that a functionalist would have to say that the entire system thinks, understands language, feels pain, etc. - whatever it is that it is functionally simulating - even though it is very hard to conceive of e.g. the Chinese nation, as a single conscious entity.

But I think this people-as-computer-parts gimmick is a red herring. Of course a part of a system is not equivalent to the entire system - that was never in contention. A wheel spoke is not a bicycle either. The real contention here is whether something that is not a person - a computer, for example - can have a functional equivalent of consciousness.

Another issue is that the contents of a computer's mind (if it has one) are immune from discovery using scientific methods. The only access to knowledge of computer mental states would be through first-person computer accounts, the reliability of which would be impossible to verify. Whether machines are conscious will forever be a mystery. This suggests that consciousness is unlike all other physical properties.

That begs the question: how does a system of X (neurons, switches, q-bits, whatever) become conscious? And we're back to the Hard Problem.

I like to ask Christians, 'is it possible that what the Bible says could be false?' They usually say no, which proves they are dogmatists, have invincible psychological conviction. One cannot reason with this, one can only refute it.

Are you assuming I'm a Christian? I'm not.

Only that, "if you don't see no matter what," then I don't see the point of discoursing with you. You have already made up your mind.

This is unclear.

You quoted me without saying anything. Did you have a point to make?

Strange you say this, because people are only turning to organized religion in a superficial sense.

Some people are superficial. Some people also get very deep into religion.

Are you really suggesting that people will choose the comfort of the ideal of God over Netflix?

Why do you think it's either/or? Religious people watch Netflix. It doesn't make them any less religious.

Come on son, that world is dying.

The percent of people who identify atheist/agnostic has remained pretty flat over the years: 2% were atheists in 2009. 4% in 2019. If religion is dying, it's a slow death.
https://www.pewforum.org/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christianity-continues-at-rapid-pace/pf_10-17-19_rdd-update-new3/

Further, religion does not answer the questions you posed, it merely pretends to answer them.

Sure, but science is incapable of answering the questions I brought up. It doesn't even pretend to. Into that vacuum steps religion. I don't see that changing, no matter what we invent.

No matter how good technology gets, it won't solve the core mysteries of existence: Why are we here? What's the point of this existence? What's the true nature of reality? As long as those questions remain unanswered, people will turn to religion.

Sorry if I’m being a realist and spoiling the fun.

Someone has to keep things honest.

The massive amounts of addicts in this country? Food, Facebook, Twitter, sex, drugs of all kinds, you name it. If it brings a person pleasure, there's a great chance for addiction. An almost overwhelming chance for addiction.

I remember what my wife said in defense of the button: "If the end goal of this journey is happiness, and that button makes you truly happy, why not do it? Journey complete."
My horrified reaction: "But that's cheating!"

Now, I think that what my wife means by "truly happy" is something different than what the button can produce, which is just raw physical pleasure.

Your thought experiment is based on septal stimulation and there’s no evidence that it’s as addictive as you now suggest.

People get addicted to gambling, of all things. You don't think they would get addicted to something that brings them constant pleasure to the nth degree? I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who didn't fall prey to it. I spent 20 years fighting booze, which made me feel kind-of-good. I would be no match for "the button".

Sure, will do! ETA: That was a great article: open-mouthed horror. Yeah, that about sums up my reaction. How did the Greeks feel about the Lotus Eaters? Surely they philosophized about it.

I brought this up to my wife the other day, who's very spiritual, and I figured she would recoil in horror from the idea. Nope. I still can't make heads or tails of it. I lean somewhat spiritual but I wouldn't have a thing to do with such a device (so I tell myself). Knowing myself, I would eventually succumb, but the thought of becoming a Louts Eater is just terrifying. It would be soul murder.

I always admired Chmeee in the Ringworld series for his reaction to getting hit with the tasp (aka "pleasure button") for the first time and his disgust when he saw Louis had succumbed. It's stupid to admire a fictional character, but the character Chmeee and his sense of duty, loyalty, and integrity resonate strongly with me. If there is a "good life" to live, those qualities are essential.

"Most other people, in his eyes, live in what to him would be a state of ecstacy"

Why does he think this? Just a cursory glance at what America is going through right now reveals a country of desperately unhappy angry people.

"an intellectual refuge from the complexity and size of a reality that encompasses us, and that we do not control in any way."

You don't have control over reality "in any way"? Sure you do. I'd much rather live in the reality of modern dentistry and medicine than what we had in the 1600's.

I was thinking about that the other day. Some people (and I'm one of them) don't remember a whole lot about their lives. In an interview, the actor Liev Shrieber talked about this: "I don’t remember things about my life. I can memorize a page of Shakespeare, no problem, but could I tell you where I was last week? No." Do such people have a lesser "amount" of personal identity? What if I suffered brain damage and lost half my memories? Would I be any less of a person?

The devil is always in the details. What Harris thinks of as "human flourishing" is probably not the same thing I think of, although there's going to be a lot of overlap on the more obvious trivial stuff, like "more clean drinking water for everyone!". But even there, I can see Sam and I starting to diverge: should countries abandon, say, their space programs and put all those resources into providing clean drinking water for everyone and save 500,000 lives a year? Science can't answer that.

I think you'd have to better clarify the definition of nothingness and the modern ideas behind spontaneous creation from nothingness.

I'd rather not get into that here, but create a brand new discussion on it.

I'll ping you, once I write it.

I guess regarding solipsism and idealism ... there would still need to be a true external world somewhere out there ... but not necessarily the present world.

How would you apply solipsism and idealism as possibilities? I guess I have a few ideas, but I'd have to think about it more.

I'm not the one making the strong claim that something came from nothing. I'm just saying that it seems like there's a contradiction in something coming from nothing.

Just remembered something about 'something from nothing' universe: virtual particles can appear out of nothingness and disappear into nothingness. I guess this provides a lot more support that the universe can create itself out of nothingness.

That reminds of Lawrence Krauss's book "A Universe from Nothing". The laws of nature that allow for virtual particle creation/annihilation are "something". Where did those laws come from? We're not going to cover any new ground that hasn't been covered.

I think to answer the question "What is the purpose of the Universe?" you ought to consider some possibilities of what is behind the curtain:

1) The universe created itself from nothingness. Big Bang led to an ever increasing expansion of the universe. Therefore, in this sense the universe is a non-living entity. A non-living entity cannot have a purpose. (unless you consider human beings who are inside the universe and assign themselves a purpose) Like Ree Zen said, a universe is nonetheless a great idea to study in terms of how something can come from nothing.

That seems impossible.

2) The universe had an intelligent designer. In this sense, the universe's purpose is whatever the ID assigned it. (or if the universe was created in a simulation)

3) The entire universe is "somehow" a living organism or part of a living organism (like a cell of a larger whole and we just can't see that far). Then it's initial purpose is to survive like all living things.

Also solipsism and idealism are possible.

True.

My (anecdotal) experience with racists is they'll seize on anything to justify their racism because even they know, deep down, it's really stupid to be racist.

Yeah, I was thinking along those lines. So, in a societal sense, is research into, say, racial IQ differences worth it?

Do you think certain lines of research should be off-limits for the good of society? For example, there is already a ban in the U.S. on human cloning. I'm not so sure that's a bad thing.

From your link:

"Perhaps the most common attitude for neuroscientists is to set the hard problem aside."