• Consciousness - Fundamental or Emergent Model
    ↪Eugen
    What's your point?
  • Consciousness - Fundamental or Emergent Model
    What is an ''ontic entity" first of all? — Eugen
    A concrete thing like a chair or brain.
  • Consciousness - Fundamental or Emergent Model
    ↪Eugen
    I didn't say that. But yes.
  • Consciousness - Fundamental or Emergent Model
    ↪Eugen
    Interpreting (explanations of) e.g. "consciousness" is, at best, philosophical; using testable models in order to explain "consciousness" is, also at best, scientific. However, conflating them, as too many contributors to this forum tend to do, is bad philosophy (i.e. obscurant nonsense (e.g. idealism)) and often pseudo-science (i.e. untestable and/or unparsimoniously explaining "too much").

    I think, Eugen, one should seek adequate grounds for ontologizing "consciousness" (or any idea) before, as you do in the OP, interpreting "consciousness" as this or that kind of entity. In other words, what do we know (or do not know) about "consciousness" that presupposes it is an ontic entity? Nothing as far as I (& neuroscientists as well as e.g. Hume, Spinoza, Buddhists) can tell but I'm open to be shown otherwise.

    @universeness
  • Emergence
    ↪universeness
    :up:
  • Emergence
    ↪universeness
    I answered Eugen the only way pseudo/incoherent questions can / deserve to be answered. IMO.
  • Micromanaging god versus initial conditions?
    Are there facts about reality that will forever be beyond the comprehension of humans, like my dog being unable to understand even the elementary aspects of calculus? — jgill
    The first candidate that comes to mind is
    the black box of AlphaGo's 'strategies & techniques' it used to vanquish world champion Go grandmaster Lee Sedol in 2016. The intellect of "AI", which we engineer (so far), is often incomprehensible to us it seems the way pre-calculus is to your dog. :smirk:
  • Micromanaging god versus initial conditions?
    ↪TiredThinker
    I consider deism a subset of theism; so only as far as 'creating the universe' is concerned, they are indistinguishable deity-concepts.
  • Consciousness - Fundamental or Emergent Model
    @universeness
    Haven't heard philosophers using the term ''foundational" in regard to consciousness. — Eugen
    Well then, use 'irreducible' instead.

    Can you tell me the difference between fundamental and foundational?
    To my mind 'fundamental' connotes ontological reductionism (i.e. metaphysics re: entities) and 'foundational' connotes methodological reductionism (i.e. science re: explanations). With respect to "consciousness", is it – I prefer mind – 'foundational', or methodologically irreducible (i.e. cannot be reduced to – explained by – a substrate of processes or properties)? Neuroscientists like the philosopher Thomas Metzinger demonstrate that mind can be explained reductively (e.g. self model theory of subjectivity) – as a system of brain functions, and therefore, is not 'foundational' for knowledge of mind (i.e. metacognition) or even, upon critical reflection, not 'foundational' for subjective experience (re: nonordinary / altered mental states).

    Where is the ''nonsense"?
    It is conceptually incoherent to even ask whether or not embodied mind (synonymous with "consciousness" in the absence of any shred of dis-embodied minds) is "fundamental" if only because embodiment is composite and perdurant. This nonsense – the OP – is what you get, Eugen, from trying to reduce a scientific problem (re: seeking a hypothetical explanation for 'how things are or work') to a philosophical question (re: positing a categorical idea or supposition). Of course, you're not alone in this confusion and exemplify the typical bias of reifying folk concepts and projecting them as stuff, "fundamental" or otherwise. I've already pointed this out in our previous discussion about Spinoza, especially this post ...

    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/520996
  • Emergence
    This seems akin to world lines, do you agree? — universeness
    Exactly. :up:

    ↪universeness
    I'm not aware of @Eugen asking me to explain my own metaphysical or scientific speculations and that I've refused to answer as Gnomon (& Wayfarer) has often done. These are my answers to Eugen's questions of my objections – not questions of my speculations – on his thread:

    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/803218

    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/803300

    Not comparable at all to my exchanges with Gnomon.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    The final nail in Criminal Defendant-1's (aka "Putin's Bitch's") coffin is named Mike Pence ...

    https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/27/pence-appears-before-jan-6-grand-jury-00094310
  • Emergence
    ↪universeness
    "Who am I?" A persona (mask) – a dynamic, virtual assemblage of perdurant bodily, cognitive & demographic data aka "self") – I believe I am: "the name" to which I've learned to involuntarily answer. Who else could I be?

    As for summarizing ... that's all I've been doing in our exchanges on this topic over dozens of posts. We're here to inform, maybe inspire & intrigue, not spoon-feed each other.
  • Consciousness - Fundamental or Emergent Model
    ↪Eugen
    Options (b) & (c) contradict each other – nonsense. And option (a) is an unwarranted assumption that there is something "fundamental". :roll:
  • Emergence
    ↪universeness
    I would not have recommended Metzinger's work several times if I do not find it compelling as corroborating my own speculations. Having not read his books or papers, universeness, I hope that that short video as well as the related wiki articles I've proffered you find interesting enough to read Metzinger's work for yourself since the philosophy of mind devil is in the cognitive neuroscience details. And if not, well then, believe whatever you like about "self" "consciousness" & other folk concepts, my friend, and we'll just have to go on talking – speculating on incommensurable data sets – past one another.
  • Consciousness - Fundamental or Emergent Model
    ↪Eugen
    fyi – I "believe" only what I state I believe.

    What I think, however, is that the OP doesn't make any sense.

    To begin with, at it's heart, there is a false dichotomy of "either X is reducible or X is strongly emergent" (where X initially was "consciousness" and now it's any nondescript whatever). Also, I can't tell whether you're asking about ideas or how things are (or???) – philosophy or science (or???), respectively. The OP's vague notions – confusions – are opaque.
  • Emergence
    ↪universeness
    'Consciousness' seems to function only (or mostly) as a keyhole through which we project our 'self-reflexive confabutions' for adapting our bodily movements to parochial, physical environments; machine intelligences, which are engineered and not naturally selected, more than sufficiently function without this sort of processing bottleneck in order to adapt (i.e. self-learn, or generate their own algorithms). I imagine that what I call "AGI —> ASI" will never anthropomorphize itself, no matter how perfectly it will mimic humans, to the degree it engineers its own 'synthetic phenomenology', in effect, dumbing itself down with a metacognitive blindfold (i.e. keyhole).
  • The Central Tenets of Justice
    Is the perfect justice system possible? — invicta
    What was done cannot be undone. We ought not let "the perfect" vanquish the good that we can approximate or try to do. Besides, in the long run oblivion renders "in/justice" moot.

    ↪Tobias
    :100:
  • Consciousness - Fundamental or Emergent Model
    1. No.
    2. Yes.
    3. No. Yes.
  • Why Monism?
    The abyss is the substance. — bert1
    :fire: Yes – Democritus-Epicurus-Lucretius' void. QFT physicists hypothesize a true vacuum. For Buddhists it's śunyata and Hindus it's Brahman; for Daoists it's the nameless, eternal Dao and Spinozists conceive of it as natura naturans. My own (pandeistic) thinking has strong affinities with the metaphysical (not mathematical) concept of hyperchaos (re: Q. Meillassoux) that posits 'every manifestation of order is a contingent phase-state, so to speak, of absolute, or necessary, disorder' (i.e. speculative materialism).
  • Emergence
    Until they can perceive time, i.e. they develop a temporal mind — L'éléphant
    Expound on this. I've no idea what you mean by "perceive time" or "temporal mind".

    ... becoming self-aware/conscious/sentient. — universeness
    I think "self-awareness" (i.e. real-time self-modeling) has to be built into an artificial system, it's not an emergent (i.e. "becoming") property or capability – and isn't necessary for intelligent performance (e.g. large language models). Why do you assume machines (or synthetic organisms) can, in effect, "wake-up sentient"?
  • Emergence
    o.o
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)
    I'm still sticking with my prediction from a couple of months ago about the Democratic Party's nominee for president in 2024 despite Biden's lame-duck postponing announcenent today.
    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/781912
  • TPF Quote Cabinet
    Plato's zeteticism — Fooloso4
    From what I can tell the word was coined and used by the Flat Earth society in the 19th century and still today (Rationalwiki). Anyway, right, this is not the place to resolve a terminological dispute.
  • In the brain
    ... isn't anything that occurs a phenomenon? Something that happens ... — Bylaw
    Events are phenomena, abstractions are not.

    Maps are also territories ...
    "Maps are" abstract, or imaginary, "territories" like memories. We cannot 'experience' abstractions because our 'experiences' are structured by abstractions. Do you believe that 'real numbers' or a 'map of Middle-Earth" are phenomena?
  • TPF Quote Cabinet
    ↪Fooloso4
    The bodies of both thinkers' works convince me otherwise.
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)
    Tucker Carlson for President in 2024? Watch out Defendent-1, he effin' made you, Donnie! :lol:

    In the US of Absurdia, this shitstorm might get even more furious in the next few months.

    Nice move, Rupert. :shade:
  • Why Monism?
    ↪Fooloso4
    :up: :up:
  • Is truth always context independent ?
    It's sentences that are true or false.

    What a sentence says is dependent on it's circumstances (context, language, purpose, consequence, and so on)

    Hence it is sentences that are "context driven"; not truth.     — Banno
    ↪Banno


    :100: :fire:

    Thanks (even though its lost on most of them).
  • TPF Quote Cabinet
    ↪Fooloso4
    I'm skeptical of your assumption that 'being skeptical of X' makes one a skeptic in a philosophical sense. Neither Freddy (perspectival-fictionalist?) nor Plato (concept realist?) seem to me to be philosophical skeptics such Academics or Pyrrhonians, Cartesians or Humeans. Maybe I'm reading too much into your remark?
  • In the brain
    ↪universeness
    :up:
  • Is The US A One-Party State?
    ↪Tom Storm
    :up:
  • Knocking back The Simulation Theory
    ↪invicta
    Why assume "the simulation" had a "creator"?

    Why not assume this simulation" is a fractal of an infinite continuum of other fractal simulations that is self-organizing (à la 'eternal inflation')?

    And even if this simulation was "created", so what? – nothing existential changes for us simulated inhabitants.

    I guess I don't see the point of this thought-experiment – it's like asking 'What if there are an even number of grains of sand on this planet's beaches or odd number of stars in the Milky Way?'
  • Is The US A One-Party State?
    Yes, of course it's a one-party state – "the establishment" – with the two wings colluding to protect America's fundamentally rigged poltical-economic system (i.e. plutonomy).
    After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. — Calvin Coolidge, 1925
    i.e. "The Business Party" (Chomsky).
  • Knocking back The Simulation Theory
    ↪invicta
    Okay, so then the OP's question is moot.
  • Knocking back The Simulation Theory
    What existential difference does it make whether or not the universe is a simulation? If I am a simulation, then the simulation of the universe I inhabit is real (i.e. ineluctable).
  • In the brain
    ↪universeness
    :cool:
  • Are sensations mind dependent?
    I agree that the sensations that we experience are nervous system-dependent. But the question is how. — lorenzo sleakes
    This is a scientific problem and not a question philosophers alone can answer, or even pose adequately, insofar as philosophy's domain is conceptual-interpretive, not theoretical-testable.
  • In the brain
    ↪universeness
    Very good response. I think it's best to pause here, not because we're at an impasse but due to us both looking through different ends of the tele / micro scope – you from a computer science background and me from a cognitive science (& philosophy of mind) background. It seems we're on the same page though, namely that the computational-mechanical model of perceptual / (meta)cognition is insufficient, or completely wrong. Notions of 'extra stuff', however, are incoherent and render speculations on (meta)cognition – its "emergent properties" as you say, universeness – theoretically DOA. In other words, I'm not any flavor of mysterian, mind-body dualist, panpsychist or idealist.

    Anyway, apologies for dumping a reading list on you; I just wanted to share possibly common points of reference since the devil is definitely in the details here. I suspect 'human brain functioning' will be the toughest nut to crack by a (hybrid classical-quantum computing) AGI, though whether or not human neuroscientists & philosophers will be intelligent enough to comprehend AGI's 'brain model' or have to accept it as an explanatory black box that nonetheless gives us orders of magnitude more neurocognitive control, I suppose, remains to be seen. I suspect (hope?) the status quo, my friend, is about to be smashed by converging devepments of AI-tech, nano-tech, bio-tech & cognitive neuroscience. No doubt, AGI will know more about our minds than we will ever comprehend about its thinking (thus, as I say, artificial-autonomous-alien general intelligence, of A³GI). :nerd:
  • Life is more than who we are?
    So a person's identity is all that matters? — TiredThinker
    A "person's identity" is the precondition of "all that matters" to her.

    Life isn't about more?
    IMO, "life" isn't "about" anything "more" than living-as-an-end-in-itself (like e.g. health, playing, caring, flourishing, etc).
  • TPF Quote Cabinet
    If the ignorance of nature gave birth to such a variety of gods, the knowledge of this nature is calculated to destroy them. — Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach, System of Nature, or the Laws of the Moral and Physical World (1770)
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