You want me to tell you what to do in every case? — Banno

More of just an example or two, because I'm just trying to imagine a scenario where treating people equally is bad, and what would be the better alternative to that.

Everything interesting about 'what it is like to experience X' happens outside, beyond this question.

Merleau-Ponty has some beautiful passages trying to get at this: — StreetlightX

That is very much like the point I'm trying to make to distance myself from what Jackson thinks he's proved. The first-person experience of phenomenal consciousness, the so-called hard problem of consciousness, is really a complete trivialism; yet still not something to be denied. Like how, to a naturalist like me, calling something "natural" is a completely trivial descriptor that adds nothing of note; but at the same time, that doesn't mean we say that the thing is not natural. Just that it being natural doesn't really mean much. And there being a first-person experience of phenomenal consciousness doesn't really mean much. It's functionalist access consciousness that's important and differentiates things meaningfully from each other, and that can be studied in the third person because a thing's function is also observable in the thing's behavior, not just in its experience. But there is still that first person experience. There's just nothing more interesting to say about it.

what specifically would you have people do differently in what circumstances to avoid doing the bad thing you’re against? — Pfhorrest

Acknowledge and accept differences rather than denying that they exist. — Banno

I expected an answer like this, but it's still not clear to me what you actually want people to do to do that.

Like, I meet two new friends, one of them black and one of them white. What should I do to "acknowledge and accept differences", besides simply not "denying that they exist", which I already wouldn't be doing just by treating them the same. I presume you don't want me to awkwardly announce my perception of what race they are and the presumptions I have about the difficulties or privileges I expect they have likely faced on account of their race?

If one of them tells me about hardships they've faced, I'll believe them (within reasonable limits of course), sure... but that's true of either of them, the black one or the white one. If one of them asks for some kind of help on account of those hardships, I'll do what I reasonably can... but that's true of either of them, the black one or the white one. Maybe the black one is statistically more likely to have accounts of such hardships and request such help, sure, but if I'm already believing those accounts and helping as I can without discrimination in either case, then I'm still treating them the same.

Or, take the example of being colourblind to disability: treating a wheelchair user as if they did not require ramps...? — Banno

A general policy of accommodating all people equally based on their needs covers this. People who have greater needs get greater accommodation. There's an important difference between divisions between people along lines of physical, mental, or financial ability (so recognizing people's disabilities or poverty), that make a practical difference in the kind of treatment someone needs, and things like skin color that don't.

There's nothing a black person needs on direct account of their being black that a white person doesn't, or vice versa, only indirect correlations between skin color and things that do need direct accommodation like income. So long as you directly address those correlates (so be accommodating of people who are poor, for example), there is no need to address the irrelevant features that correlate with them directly; you'll automatically be accommodating of, for example, black people's greater statistical poverty, just by being accommodating poverty in general.

Forrest (@Pfhorrest) if you get a second, could say a little about Leibniz's answer to the PoE, and what he had to say about heaven? — frank

I actually don't remember anything in Leibniz specifically about heaven, and some quick Googling to try to jog my memory mostly finds people asking similar questions (how does heaven fit into his solution to the PoE because it seems like it shouldn't) and commenting on how Leibniz' metaphysics isn't really trying to mesh perfectly with Christian doctrine, plus one paywalled article I can't read on Leibniz' view of purgatory, so it's possible that Leibniz never really said much about heaven per se and that's why I don't remember anything about it. Given his identification of souls with monads and the location of monads in the actual world, it seems like any kind of afterlife besides a rather naturalistic sense of reincarnation wouldn't be very compatible with his metaphysics.

As for his solution to the Problem of Evil, it seems to me like you mostly covered it. Leibniz thought that God could only create a universe that was logically possible (rather, that only certain combinations of things are "compossible" in the same universe, and all God can do is pick which such combination of things to make actual), and that God being all good would necessarily have created only the best of all of those possible worlds, so the actual universe that exists must necessarily be the best of all possible worlds, and whatever evils may still exist in it could only be done away with by instead actualizing a different possible world with different and still greater evils. Personally I don't find it very convincing, just kind of an abstraction of the usual free will type of theodicy ("God did the best he could, any better is logically impossible").

Plus, yeah, it seems to suggest that there can't be any kind of heaven that's better than this world.

As to the actual topic of this thread, I more or less agree with the thesis of the OP, and that's basically the reason why I don't have kids. I can't conscience bringing new life into the world when I can't be reasonably sure it would be a good life. I advise most other people to make the same choice, and I would have advised my parents to do the same. Basically only rich people should be having kids, and not even all of them. Which is not to say that everyone else should be prohibited from it, because while creating new life is risky (for that life) it's not guaranteed harm; nor is that at all to disparage the poor at all (of which I'm a part myself, hence my decision). Rather, it's an abject tragedy that this has to be advisable for so many people. Following that advice en masse would do something to ameliorate that tragedy for future generations though, much like the Black Death in Europe, as tragic as it was, did much to elevate the socioeconomic status of the survivors. To wit: if we poor don't make more poor people (by breeding), the rich who depend on us will eventually have nobody to depend on and will have to fend for themselves, and those future generations will be forced to be more egalitarian.

I do think that humans in general should continue to procreate though, even if we were all on hard times; it's just because of the fact that there's really no danger of us not having enough kids at this point in history that I can advocate for most people to not have kids. The reason I would advocate for humans in general to keep procreating even if life sucked for everyone right now is the same reason I advocate that individuals having hard times don't just kill themselves and end the suffering now: because it can get better. I have hopes that humanity can create a future world that is not so full of suffering as this one always has been, and in order for that to be worth doing, someone needs to be alive in the future in order to enjoy it.

None of this contradicts the Problem of Evil at all because God is supposedly omnipotent and so, if (he existed and) he wanted to create some beings to enjoy life, he could just create a world that was entirely enjoyable and had no suffering in it, and wouldn't have to just create life amidst suffering and hope that things got better eventually, like we do.

Yeah if you can split that out of this thread that’d be great thanks.

Can you please answer the second part then? What specifically does who need to do when to avoid doing the bad thing you’re against?

You still act like I’m trying to essentialize when I’m not at all. The point about particular experiences all being slightly different isn’t at all in contradiction of what I’m saying. You can’t step in the same river twice, in a really pedantic sense, but we nevertheless give rivers names and talk about multiple visits to them and whether or not two people have stepped in the same one. Likewise with things like “red”: that names a range of possible experiences people can have, and no two will be exactly alike, but the point of needing to have some experience in that range to know what experiencing something in that range is like still stands. You’re going way out of the way to import much deeper metaphysical baggage to this really ordinary way of talking than is called for, which makes it look like you’re just looking for something to disagree with just to win the argument, when nothing you’re saying in “rebuttal” disagrees with anything I’m saying so I really see no need for that.

Since other people are posting more details than just a poll answer I guess I should post something about myself too.

I’ve got a BA summa cum laude in philosophy, and besides the basic lower division intro, historical surveys, logic and critical thinking stuff, I did upper division studies on Plato, Descartes, Berkeley, and Leibniz, and topical courses on metaphysics, philosophy of space and time, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, ethics, metaethics, moral psychology, free will, theories of justice, and political philosophy.

Since you seem to be the prime opponent of “colorblindness” on this thread, maybe you can answer the question I’ve asked of that side several times: is a policy of treating people the same regardless of their race “colorblind” in the sense you are against? If so, what specifically would you have people do differently in what circumstances to avoid doing the bad thing you’re against?

“Normative” means pertaining to what ought or ought not be; prescriptive, evaluative, loosely speaking moral.

:up:

Treat everyone the same regardless of race. Including helping people in need regardless of race. If one race is more in need, you end up automatically helping them more exactly in proportion to their greater need.

The normatively relevant part is important. So unless you think vulnerability to sunburn makes white people worse as people, then no.

A common academic definition of racism (eg George Fredrickson) is race essentialism which is to say that there are such things as races with inherent biological differences between them that have normative import, ie that some groups of people are inherently better than others in a way that they cannot change.

That’s far from an uncontroversial definition but it was the baseline definition we started from in the polisci class on the topic I had a decade ago.

@fdrake or another mod can you please confirm or deny this supposed rule about links? I’ve been linking a bunch to my own essays in other threads, ignorant of any such rule, and would like to know if I should stop.

:up: :clap:

:up:

It sounds like you still think I am essentializing the experience of something apart from the thing itself, when the thing itself is itself an experience such that even phrasing this sentence is difficult. (I first wanted to type “...the experience of something apart from the experience of something”, because “the thing itself” in this instance just is an experience).

Seeing red is an experience. The experience of seeing red isn’t something separate from the seeing of some red, it’s just the specific experience that is the seeing of some red. Like how Los Angeles is a city, and the city of Los Angeles isn’t something different from Los Angeles, it’s just the specific city that is Los Angeles. Saying “the city of Los Angeles” doesn’t abstract some separate “city” entity apart from Los Angeles; Los Angeles IS the city.

You and fdrake seem to really want to take this really basic way of talking about things to imply a lot more than I mean by it. As for your interpretation of the Wittgenstein quote, that still agrees with what I’m trying to say in every substantive way. There isn’t anything you can say to communicate an experience to someone, they just have to have it. You can’t tell someone what seeing red is like, in a non-analogical sense of that phrase that just means to describe it to them; they just have to see it themselves.

That Wittgenstein quote seems to agree completely with what I’m trying to say, so if you agree with it may we agree more than we thought. In saying that you cannot know what an experience is like without experiencing it, I mean precisely that there is no external, intersubjective “thus” to point at in the sentences Wittgenstein talks about; the things we’d like to point to to say “it’s like this” are internal, subjective states, and the only way to communicate what it’s like to be in that state to someone is to put them into that state, or invite them to enter into it themselves.

Logic is only the form of reason, evidence is its substance. Reason means offering exactly that, reasons, to (dis)favor one opinion vs another.

“Cis” is not an acronym, it’s just the Latin antonym of “trans”.

The not-faith is reason.

Arguing about panpsychism is really beyond the scope of this thread.

The more salient point is that having my philosophical opinions didn’t send me spiraling into desperate search of meaning. I philosophized for decades holding broadly similar opinions all the while before this kind of angst started to afflict me. Philosophy is neither the cause of nor solution to existential angst. It’s just a mental health condition.

My objection is then that you have defined faith as “probable or reasonable belief about religious topics”, which is most problematic for excluding all unreasonable or improbable beliefs (“blind faith”) as not faith at all, but even if we fix that, that just means that faith is any belief about religious topics, which would then make religion defined in reference to faith circularly defined.

The thing that distinguishes faithful belief from other belief is its independence of good reasons. Thomists may claim that you should strive also to have good reasons in addition to your faith, but that is just saying not to go on faith alone, as faith alone (without reason) is blind. Faith per se is thus exactly what they would call “blind faith”, and it is only in fortifying a belief with something besides faith that it becomes not blind.

That definition of faith would include basically all secular belief as well though, so doesn’t seem useful for distinguishing faith from other modes of belief.

Yes absolutely, if we create a “technological god” we will probably (and should) become one with it rather than it being something separate from us.

Life is a functional difference. A living thing stops being alive when it stops doing the things that constitute living. Also, life isn’t the difference between me and a tree, but our experiences are still significantly different, as are our behaviors, because both of those are products of our functions.

There are still causes you can care about and support without having to decide the big controversial issues, and some of them can be the most important kind. Causes that just help individual people one by one in an uncontroversial way. Like Food Not Bombs, which just feed hungry people in parks.

Faith is taking “because X said/thinks so”, i.e. the absence of any reason, to be a reason, for any X, including “everyone” or yourself.

Religion is any system of beliefs about reality or morality grounded ultimately in faith thus defined.

“God” can mean different things to different religions.

And theology is the attempt to study “God” (whatever that means) with reason.

Back more on topic...

I like that line of thought so much I’m planning on majorly expanding the last chapter of my philosophy book to address it, this relationship between ennui or the feeling of meaninglessness or the Absurd, and its polar opposite, the feeling of profound meaningfulness, cosmic love, like a noncognitively religious or mystical experience. I’m thinking of calling them ontophobia (existential fear) and ontophilia (existential love).

No, and that’s kind of the point. If you have no experiential knowledge of anything like color, the only way to get it is to experience color. Whether that’s by having actual photons hit your actual eyes or the AI that runs the simulation you’re a part of virtually stimulating your visual cortex, it’s an experience either way.

I’m emphasizing the triviality to distance myself from what Jackson and his followers think. I concede that his argument makes A point, but I want to be clear that I don’t think it makes THE point that he wants it to be, but something much less significant.

As far as terms like “redness”, I don’t know why that has to evoke any kind of essentialism. Does “color” evoke that same essentialism to you, or “appearance”? To my ear, the redness of an apple is a narrower description of the color of an apple which is in turn a narrower description of the appearance of the apple, and I don’t mean “the appearance of the apple” to be some separate entity from the apple itself of course, just a name for a particular feature of it I’m talking about, the way it looks. Likewise it’s color, and its redness. I don’t know what other words I could possibly use to refer to the feature of the apple that consists of it being red other than its redness.

It doesn’t sound like we disagree.

Descriptions of what it's like are analogies. Could Mary understand any analogy with seeing red if she can't even see red? — Janus

That is the entire point. What something is like to experience cannot be described, other than comparatively with other experiences. You fundamentally have to undergo the experience yourself to have experiential knowledge.

Colour-blind synaesthetes have experiences of colour in response to other senses, — Isaac

And those are still experiences of color, and if they had not had them, they would not know what it’s like to experience color.

As I said before you keep bringing up examples of unusual ways to experience things as though they were counterpoints to the complete trivialism that you need to experience something to know what it’s like to experience it. A simulated brain in a simulated vat being virtually stimulated can have an experience of color without any actual photons striking any actual eyes or even any biological brains being involved, and that is still an experience of color, without the likes of which that virtual brain would not know what it’s like to experience color.

I know Jackson set out to disprove physicalism. I think he failed at that but proved something else much more trivial instead. Just like Searle’s Chinese Room, which I think soundly shows that syntax is not semantics, but does not thereby show that artificial semantics is impossible or that there is anything magical about consciousness, just that much more trivial point.

Also, none is this is meant to essentialize anything. Not every red is the same, but we have that name for a similar range of experiences. Not every act of sex is the same either. Not every moment of being you is the same. “What it’s like to be you” isn’t anything above or beyond whatever you’re experiencing right now, it’s not an experience of some essential self in addition to your ongoing experience of the world, it’s just the having of any experience at all, in the way that you are capable of experiencing (in contrast to ways that otherly-constituted beings might experience the same phenomena impinging upon you now). It’s completely trivial and not worth the words we’ve all spent talking about it.

Isaac, what was it you thought we agreed on earlier?

When you imagine yourself running, you have memories of running or at least similar motor functions with which to generate that mental image. When you see someone in pain, you can sympathize because you have memories of your own pains. If Mary had gone blind later in life, or somehow had memories transplanted from a sighted person, or false memories of color generated from artificial brain stimulation, or whatever, I have no doubt that she could imagine redness from those memories. But absent her own brain having that configuration to draw from, she can’t, and just looking at other people’s brains doesn’t actually give her that same brain configuration, even if it tells her what configuration she needs to have. You keep giving examples of someone experiencing something in an unusual way, which don’t refute the point that knowing about other people experiencing is different from experiencing yourself.

I think part of the setup of Mary’s Room that is needlessly confusing if the stipulation that she knowns “everything”, just to then point out something she doesn’t know. The point is to highlight something that you can’t know just from observing other people. If Mary really knew “everything”, then if you showed her a collection of different colored balls and asked her which was the red one, she shouldn’t say “I don’t know”, but in stipulating that she’s colorblind we’re saying exactly that she would do that; we’re saying there’s something she doesn’t know. That thing that’s different between her and an otherwise identical person who isn’t colorblind is what it’s like to see color.

Hallucination etc are still experiencing it. Like I said, you could use third-person knowledge to recreate a first-person experience, so Mary could surgically stimulate the part of her brain that would be stimulated by red light in a normally-sighted person and so undergo the same experience and then know what it’s like. But just knowing HOW to do that doesn’t suffice; she has to actually DO it.

This is why I like using sex as a better example. There was a time long ago when I had never had sex, but nevertheless propositionally knew a lot about it. After the first time I had sex, I hadn’t gained any propositional knowledge; there were no new facts I could report that I couldn’t report before. But I nevertheless felt like I had gained experiential knowledge: I now knew what it was like to have sex, and none of that propositional knowledge I had already had before had been enough to substitute for that experiential knowledge.

That is roughly the same point I am making, so thanks.

Well I agree that Mary could not know what it’s like to see color no matter how much other information she had. You have to undergo an experience to know what it’s like to have that experience. If that’s not the part you’re agreeing with then I don’t know what you’re agreeing with. I just don’t think that noting the difference between first and third person experiences means anything ontological, it’s the same kind of physical brain undergoing the same physical process whether or not that brain is yours or someone else’s; but it definitely makes a difference in how you experience that process for it to be your brain undergoing it instead of someone else’s.

My sex example is meant to make more clear what the Colorblind Scientist example is trying to get across. And it’s not so much question-begging as it is defining the thing we’re talking about: “what it’s like to see colors” just means whatever it is that a normally-sighted scientist understands that a colorblind one who can speak all the same third-person facts doesn’t. That doesn’t have to have any ontological implications, I’m a hardcore physicalist myself; it just means that observing someone else undergoing something is different from undergoing it yourself. That should be a trivial truism, neither denied nor held to be of some deep philosophical importance.

Do you have some reason for wanting to add some additional constituent (other than brains), that wouldn't also apply to every physical system too complex to describe reductively? — Isaac

Or every physical system at all, as in my physicalist panpsychism described earlier. There is a first person what-its-like experience for everything, and because of that it’s trivial; the “hard problem” is only hard because there is no real problem, so there’s no real answer. The differences between the first-person phenomenal consciousness of different things is the real problem, and that’s philosophically “easy”, it’s just functionalism as an explanation of access consciousness, but the details are a much harder scientific problem.

Oh and for fdrake and all wondering what this “what it’s like” thing is all about: no amount of studying human sexuality in the third person can tell you what it’s like to have sex. You have to experience it in the first person to know that. Maybe that book learning can help you recreate an accurate first person experience of it, but you still have to then undergo that experience to know what it’s like. That’s all there is to “what it’s like”; nothing deeply ontological about it, but it’s something.

the obverse of ennui. — ZzzoneiroCosm

That is a very good way of describing the “mystical experiences” that I have had, and just as I earlier in this thread described how I’ve observed such ennui to negatively impact my ability to think clearly and rationally, so too these “mystical experiences” seem to have a strong positive impact on the same.

Having experience with bipolar disorder, there are also strong similarities between those two states and depressive and manic states, respectively.

During “mystical” or manic states I’ve had some of my most profound philosophical insights, some of which of course did not later stand up to more sober scrutiny but some of which did.

Friends who have done LSD tell me that I sometimes sound like someone who just came back from a really good trip, the “mind-opening” kind.

I don’t attach any epistemic or ontological significance to any of this, these are all just emotional states of mind to me that are ultimately explainable in neurological terms, but I can’t deny that such states of mind can make a significant difference, in either direction, on my ability to reason clearly and insightfully.

ADDENDUM: It strikes me now that just as I earlier described ennui/angst as arationally generating a false need for “meaning” where there is no rational question, so too “mystical experiences” as I have had are most notably characterized by a profound but not necessarily rationally grounded feeling of meaningfulness.

That is a good point. I was imagining those who would answer “not at all” as being those who feel no confidence in their own philosophical studies while those who answer “self-taught” would be those who had done enough independent reading to feel confidently educated, but Dunning-Kruger would suggest that both states of (un)confidence are probably dubious, and perhaps some of those who would answer “none at all” deserve the title of “self-taught” better than many who would answer “self-taught”.