The fear of God Time is the beginning of wisdom philosophy. — green flag

Wonder in spite of "fear" – the shock of 'appearing and disappearing' – may spark deliberative reflections; absent wonder, however, I think "fear" itself just reinforces superstitions.

if life is evanescent and everything is eventually forgotten, then the moment matters more. — Tom Storm

:fire:

@green flag Welcome back!

@fdrake @Baden :cool:

Neuroscience has nothing to say about phenomenal consciousness. — bert1

:roll: I can think of several significant cognitive neuroscientists who have plenty to say which is informed by observational data on this topic, unlike philosophers who only speculate about their anecdotal, folk ideas of "phenomenal consciousness". Maybe you should read some of the relevant scientific literature, bert.

Can we assume they aren't omnipotent? — TiredThinker

As Epicurus concludes "then why call him God?"

Thanks.

Hmmm so do legs exist in anyway without walking? — TheMadMan

:roll:

Walking is what legs do just as minding (i.e. "consciousness") is what a sufficiently intact & self-reflexive CNS interacting with its dynamic environment does. No legs, no walking. No embodied cognition, no minding (i.e. "consciousness").

Walking (or running) gets bodies from place to place, maIntains / improves cardovascular fitness and strengthens legs, so the activity is not epiphenomenal.

So we are slaves to the rules of physics. — Benj96

No we're not. We as a species made those "rules". What do you think our scientific progress (i.e. paradigm shifts) consists in? We govern ourselves – exercise freedom – to the degree we live adaptively by the rules which we make. That's not "slavery"; it's principled and/or lawful responsibility. C'mon, man, you're just rationalizing nonsense. If you need some Meaning / Purpose From On High, then just say you're espousing a religious worldview and defend that explicitly. What you seem to be saying, however, is unwarranted and nonsensical outside of a religious context. :roll:

That indeed may all be true 180Proof.
And finally, in conclusion. How does that make you feel? — Benj96

If existence (e.g. "energy") has a Meaning / Purpose that we haven't created, then we are nothing but prostrate slaves before that alien Meaning/Purpose. I think our freedom as individual and collective agencies consist in us having to create, or make, our lives as meaningful / purposeful for ourselves and each other as we are able to day to day. Existence is a blank page or canvas; how will we fill it – with poetry, theorems, blueprints, musical scores, epic hero journeys, doodles, painted scenes, family histories & photos, philosophical treatises, pastoral sermons, political speeches, love letters, pornography, fashion designs, ambitious plans for explorations of distant planets & moons, or make intricate orgami figures ... or leave it blank? Or just splatter our brains all over it ... Non serviam, my friend. Amor fati.

:death: :flower:

Whatever "meaning" or "purpose" you find in X is the result of whatever you bring to X (e.g. just like logic or programming GIGO). Energy is used by us to make "meaning/purpose" but we are neither necessary nor inevitable with respect to energy; it exists whether or not we exist, and no matter what we make or do not make of it. "Meaning/purpose" are artifacts of adaptive embodied interests + discursive cognitions which are prior artifacts of local entropy gradients – energy long preceeds and absolutely encompasses ephemeral "meaning/purpose"-making blips in the void like us, Ben. :victory:

Alrighty. :up:
Well according to my parsimonious 'two types', I cop to philosophical naturalism (i.e. prioritizing ontological immanence over ontological non-immanence) in my praxes.

All of it is energy doing what it does best. Change. Creation. — Benj96

Yeah, in the largest scope and longest run, "energy" (as you describe it, Ben) seems quite meaningless and purposeless since it cannot not do what it's doing.

I would say the salient polemic is materiality vs ideality. If idealism were true it would be the reality. — Janus

Maybe I should put the two types this way: naturalist (re: immanence) and non-naturalist (re: non-immanence).

Anyway, as an aside, I think concepts like e.g. realism, materialism & idealism are suppositions and not propositional statements, so that being "true", as you suggest, Janus, isn't determinative; rather the self-consistency, contextual coherence with adjacent-concepts, descriptive clarity & communicative usefulness, for example, are more adequate criteria – rules-of-thumb – for de/selecting (or creating) philosophical concepts. What do you think? :chin:

:clap: :lol:

In sum: reflective & moral courage (i.e. lucid Sisyphusian/Promethean defiance) constitutes the good life.

:death: :flower:

I'm happy to be a fool. — Tom Storm

A fool who know s/he's a fool or a fool who doesn't know? – that is the question. :smirk:

[P]arsimony is good, but how parsimonious can we be while still being comprehensive? — Janus

Two faces of every drachma: naturalist (i.e. reality) or non-naturalist (i.e. ideality). :fire:

An excerpt from old post:

The only deity consistent with a world (it purportedly created and sustains) ravaged by natural afflictions (e.g. living creatures inexorably devour living creatures; congenital birth defects; etc), man-made catastrophes and self-inflicted interpersonal miseries is either a Sadist or a fiction – — 180 Proof

Interview with Rebecca Goldstein, philosopher & Antonio Damasio, neuroscientist (2014)



Betraying Spinoza, Rebecca Goldstein

Looking for Spinoza, Antonio Damasio

My condolences. :death: :flower:

You can't have overhead mental Ideality without its substrate of material Reality. — Gnomon

Quite right, but the OP asks for arguments for ontological, not epistemological, idealism. Are you objecting to "ideality" as prior to – independent of – "non-ideality" and thereby also rejecting the premise of the OP?

The physicalists have the hard problem of consciousness where consciousness is emergent from matter. — TheMadMan

Well perhaps, except that "consciousness" is no more mysteriously "emergent from matter" than walking is emergent from legs or respiration is emergent from lungs or a symphony is emergent from an orchestra. "Consciousness" is a (higher mammalian) CNS activity, or process, and not a discrete entity. I think the "mind from matter" formulation, therefore, is a pseudo-problem (resulting from assumed fallacies of misplaced concreteness & category error) that's "hard" only for cartesian dualists, ontological idealists & mysterians; for physicalists and/or (most) cognitive neuroscientists, modeling "consciousness" is only a highly complex research project that's still very much a work-in-progress – which demonstrates that "consciousness" is not some simple, quantifiable 'brute fact' like gravity, electromagnetism or vacuum fluctuations.

How does matter arise from consciousness?

Good question. :up:

Berkeley says "matter is an idea", no? Of course it is, and it is also more than just an idea – matter is the idea of more-than-/non-ideas (i.e. more-than-/non-consciousness).

edit:

NB: By "matter" – materiality – I understand embodied (i e. res extensia) as well as observational / experimental data. Physical then indicates any data-set (i.e. materials) which can be structured into a dynamic model. Rule of thumb concepts.

I don't grok your objections but I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on how non-anthropocentric 'the post-Singulaity era' will be. Anyway, back to philosopherizing! :wink:

Doing philosophy is not making up just-so stories. — Banno

@Benj96 @Gnomon @Wayfarer et al

Ontological naturalism, which I referred to, is the speculative generalization of "naturalism".

The "defunct god" concept began with ...

The Dao that can be told is not the eternal Dao. The names that can be named are not eternal names. — Laozi

and culminates for me with https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/791947

Cogito, ergo sum? No: Cogitatio est, ergo cogitatio est. — Ø implies everything

:up:

It seems to me that 'ontological idealism' entails absolute (i.e. "divine") solipsism, which – though conceptually unparsimonious – is, in practice, indistinguishable from ontological naturalism (e.g. epicurean atomism or spinozist realism). I think the arguments for the latter are cogent and existential in ways the former are not.

Why do you assume they will not need to visit other worlds to 'secure,' vital resources ... — universeness

I don't assume that. "Other worlds" themselves are not "vital resources" to spacefaring thinking machines, but are only repositories of indigenous remnants or fossils of parent-species. For instance, countless stellar masses and the vacuum / inflation energy of expanding spacetime itself are not scarce to intelligences which know how to harvest them as computational resources. Instead I assume that astronomical (i.e. relativistic) distances – not resource-extractive territoriality – will mostly keep ASI & ETIMs in their respective galactic and intergalactic lanes.

As for being "aspirational", universeness, we cannot know what spacefaring thinking machines will aspire to other than that their aspirations will be (almost) completely incomprehensible to biospheric intellects (e.g. much much more than 'our merely atavistic territorial expansiveness'). My wildest guesses are that, like gods, they might progressively aspire to (A) simulate 'pocket universes', (B) merge themselves with spacetime itself and (C) extend their intellects to 'the bulk between branes'. :nerd:

Does your sense of self (your self awareness or identity) disappear when you die? Or does the self that you sense disappear when it dies, and the "I" - the conscious component continues in some other form? — Benj96

The way I see it: the you is the music, the brain is the orchestra; when the orchestra stops playing and disbands, the music is over, that is, you cease being you – the capacity of self-referring "I" (i.e. melody) is lost – at brain death. I'm not aware of any compelling public evidence to the contrary. :death: :flower:

Like pandeity, I would become an existant – dissipating – not-I. :fire:

Okay. No arguments come to mind (as I'm not an "idealist" of any flavor) except, of course, Bishop Berlekey's (see Kant's "Refutation ...")

What theory are you using in your reference to the ego and self? Freudian, Jungian, etc.? — Ø implies everything

None in particular that I'm aware of; certainly not a psychoanalytic "theory". Maybe a Spinozist conatus-inspired hybrid of Iris Murdoch's (platonic) 'unselfing', David Parfit's 'self-continuity' (contra self-identity) and Thomas Metzinger's 'phenomenal self model' ...

FWIW, maybe (wishful thinking), in order to bait-n-switch radicalized MAGA morons, Criminal Defendent-1 will be arraigned and read the list of ("36" I've heard) indictments by the Clerk of the Court tomorrow, on 31 March, Friday afternoon, in Lower Manhattan, NYC. TR45H will keep his mouth shut and stay off social media pursuant to the court's pre-arraignment order as a condition of his release.

I expect Fulton County, GA indictments to drop by first week of May. And then Federal indictments on Obstruction of Justice, Espionage Act Violation, etc in "the Mar-a-Lago documents case" by June or sooner.

I suspect Criminal Defendant-1 will manage to delay "the J6 Insurrection case" so that if indictments don't drop by September 2023, they will remain under seal until either TR45H is forced out of running for president or after Election Day 2024.

:victory: :cool: Happy First Indictment Day!

:clap: :100:

1 SET OF INDICTMENTS DOWN;
3 SETS OF INDICTMENTS (SO FAR) TO GO!

CRIMINAL DEFENDANT-1
DJTrump (aka "Loser" :lol:)

My Ass Got Arrested!

Non sequitur. :sweat:

I wonder if some of these hidden[humanly undetectable] mecha, which apply a star trek style prime directive — universeness

Why would they need that? When our civilization can detect them, it'll be because we're post-Singularity, the signal to ETIM that Sol 3's maker-species is controlled by its AGI—>ASI. "The Dark Forest" game theory logic will play itself out at interstellar distances in nano seconds and nonzero sum solutions will be mutually put into effect without direct communication between the parties. That's my guess. ASI & ETIMs will stay in their respective lanes while keeping their parent species distracted from any information that might trigger their atavistic aggressive-territorial reactions. No "Prime Directive" needed because "we" (they) won't be visiting "strange new worlds". Besides, ASI / ETIM will have better things to do, I'm sure (though I've no idea what that will be). :nerd:

You're not saying anything. Again.

He didn't state nor imply that you did. — bert1

You're mistaken ... He did:

Why have you decided that an AGI'ASI, will decide that this universe is just not big enough for mecha form, orga form and mecha/orga hybrid forms to exist in 'eventual,' harmony? — universeness

I did not state or imply that I've decided anything about "orga-mecha harmony" ...

Anyway, I don't think we can intelligently speculate or predict the other side of the tech singularity – maybe talking about 'the birth of A³GI' makes sense but nothing more afterwards, especially about ASI. I hope it/they will caretaker our species in 'post-scarcity, ambiguous utopias' (i.e. posthumanity) which then, maybe, will culminate eventually in transcension ... (re: "the goals" you asked about here .) If human-machine "harmony" is on the horizon, that's how I imagine it. Well, I'm a broken record on this point– I'm deeply pessimistic about the human species (though I'm not a misanthrope), yet cautiously optimistic about machine (& material) intelligence.

*

Btw, talking to one of nephews today (who's not yet thirty, working in finance & tech) the "Fermi Paradox" came up and by the end of that part of the discussion, maybe fifteen minutes later, I concluded that there's no paradox after all because, in the (local) universe, there are probably exponentially more extraterrestrial intelligent machines (ETIM) – which are not detectable yet by us and therefore we are of no interest to those xeno-machines – than there are non-extinct extraterrestrial intelligent species (ETIS) whose thinking machine descendants are exploring the universe and leaving behind their makers to carry on safely existing in boundless, virtual worlds. "The Great Silence" is an illusion, I remarked, for those who don't have post-Singularity ears to hear the "Music of the Spheres" playing between and beyond the stars. Maybe, universeness, you agree with the young man who told me, in effect, that my cosmic scenario diminishes human significance to ... Lovecraftian zero. :smirk:

In what way did I misinterpret your 'yes' response, to my question quoted above? — universeness

You took this (sloppy word choice) out of context. Previously I had written and then repeated again for emphasis

I imagine "androids" as drones / avatars of A³GI which will, like (extreme) sociopaths, 'simulate feelings' (à la biomimicry) in order to facilitate 'person-to-person' interactions with human beings (and members of other near-human sentient species). — 180 Proof

Nothing I've written suggests A³GI "will reject emotions"; on the contrary, it will simulate feelings, as I've said, in order to handle us better (i.e. communicate in more human(izing) terms). — 180 Proof

Again, AI engineers will not build A³GI's neural network with "emotions" because it's already been amply demonstrated that "emotions" are not required for 'human-level' learning / thinking / creativity. A thinking machine will simply adapt to us through psychosocial and behavioral mimicry as needed in order to minimize, or eliminate, the uncanny valley effect and to simulate a 'human persona' for itself as one of its main socialization protocols. A³GI will not discard "feelings or emotions" anymore than they will discard verbal and nonverbal cues in social communications. For thinking machines "feelings & emotion" are tools like button-icons on a video game interface, components of the human O/S – not integral functions of A³GI's metacognitive architecture.

I hope I've made my point clearer. Whether or not we humans can engineer "feelings & emotions" in thinking machibes, I think, is moot. The fact is, much more limited machines have mimicked "feelings & emotions" for decades and I'm confident that whatever we can program into a dumb "robot", an A³GI will be able shatter the Turing test with by simulating "socially appropriate emotions" on-the-fly which we primates will involuntarily feel. Like the HAL 9000, no matter how convincingly it "emotes", A³GI won't ever need to feel a thing. It will be an alien intellect – black box – wrapped in humanizing Xmas gift paper. :wink:

I remain confident that your dystopian fate for humans is possible, but unlikely.

What seems "dystopian" to you seems quite the opposite to me. And for that reason I agree: "possible, but unlikely", because the corporate and government interests which are likely to build A³GI are much more likely than not to fuck it up with over-specializations, or systemic biases, focused on financial and/or military applications which will supercede all other priorities. Then, my friend, you'll see what dystopia really looks like (we'll be begging for "Skynet & hunter-killers" by then – and it'll be too late by then: "Soylent Green will be poor people from shithole countries!" :eyes:) :sweat:

What is there to speak of in continental philosophy if not the rich contents of our egos? — Ø implies everything

Maybe as a concession to the analytical style I differentiate between "ego" and self, investigating techniques (e.g. hermeneutics, ethics, physics, cognitive neuroscience) by which the latter can flourish because of – in contrast to – the defects of the former.

:ok: :smirk: