Mammoths on Mars?

In principle I am totally on board with this. We have used technology to create the biggest and most devastating mass extinction in the history of the planet, so I'm all for using it to undo it too. — StreetlightX

Yeah but what if Mammoths went extinct because of climate change from the end of the last ice age, and not because of humans? Then we'd be bringing back an extinct species into a world they didn't evolve for. I think it's interesting as hell, and if someone wants to cultivate a small herd in Siberia for the science, then fine. But I'm not so sure about bringing them back for ecological reasons.

In keeping with the theme of recent threads we've both been in, the fourth book has proto-Miller chapters in which it states that the protomolecule is not conscious, but some of its constructs like Miller are. And so they realize the futility of continuing to reach out.

Which is maybe borrowing from Arthur C. Clarke's 3001 where Hal and David are conscious simulations inside the Monolith, which is itself not conscious.

Alien tech apparently doesn't know what it's like. :death: :sparkle:

The Expanse is new (in the last 6 years), and the series of books it's based on is just finishing up. It's quite different from Star Trek and Star Wars, mostly favoring more realistic portrayals of space with less magic technology. It's more like what we might expect several centuries from now if our current civilization expands out into the solar system. That and a big mystery plot that drives the events in the books and show, given the political and economic setup of the Asteroid Belt/Outer Planets, Mars and Earth.

This thread is still going?

Schopenhauer said the Law of Explanation (our perception that everything has to have a cause) is part of a process of pulling a united world apart. Is that what you mean? — frank

I mean that we come up with mental models of the world, and then tend to treat those models as the world itself, forgetting that they're our explanations, not the world. But yes, causality can be considered part of that, as Hume noted.

You know, "bewitchment by means of language" and all that? — Janus

I don't think Wittgenstein is of much help when it comes to consciousness. There is something it is to have experiences, and this is not easily accounted for in the sciences.

But sometimes I wonder if we can ever step outside consciousness so as to explain it. — frank

Sometimes I also wonder if we can ever step outside of explanation so as to explain the world. Meaning, there is an inherent idealism to our making sense of the world, whatever the world is.

if I understood it right, is that the 'what is it like' phrasing is based on the intuition that a comparison should be, or could be. possible. — Janus

The comparison would be one of color for someone born blind from birth. "What it's like" is meant in the literature to denote there is a subjective sensation. There is nothing it's like for a blind person regarding vision, just like there is nothing it's like for humans to echolochate.

Nagel was arguing there is a subjective aspect to perceiving creatures which is not captured by objective descriptions.

Isn't it rather obvious Nagel was saying bats may have a sonar sensation which is different from any of the sensations we experience, since sonar isn't one of our perceptions? Or it may be a kind of sound or color. We don't know and that's the point.

In these very contentious philosophical subjects, people get worked up over the exact phrasing of words. Semantics, I guess. "What it's like", is just a way of phrasing subjective feels as opposed to behavioral or functional aspects of perception. Someone acting like they are in pain is different from being in pain, which is again different from a description of the neural correlates of pain.

If zombie-consciousness is devoid of phenomenality, what possible set of conditions could give rise to the zombie asserting phenomenality? Isn't this a petitio principii? — Pantagruel

We could in the future have f-zombies with mind-uploading. The science fiction book Permutation City explores the concept. Brain scanning and computing has progressed to the point in the 2050s for accurate digital copies to exist in simulated worlds. The question the physical main character wishes to explore is whether a digital copy is conscious, and how manipulating the simulation might distort that consciousness. Most of the copies commit suicide upon finding out their uploads. But the last one is prevented from doing so, and goes on to invent the dust theory of consciousness.

If digital uploads are not conscious, they could still be functionally equivalent and make the same claims about being conscious as we do. They would physically be different, which would mean that consciousness is not functional, and behavior is not a reliable indicator for being conscious.

I'm wondering how P-zombies could have a history that involves the development of words that refer to conscious experiences they don't have. — RogueAI

If we're not conscious in the way that philosophers like Chalmers claim we are, then qualia would count as such a word in our universe. Idealism would be another. Platonism would be yet another. Not to conflate those three terms, but it demonstrates that if the world is physical, it doesn't prevent us from coming up with non-physical words.

If I visit the doctor and inform him that I'm a chain smoker, he'll say "you should stop smoking (or else you'll regret it)" but how is "you should stop smoking" true? — TheMadFool

Indeed, if a sociopath asks why they should be moral other than consequences, there is no true answer. And if we're trying to decide which moral theory is true, there is no answer.

Well you're demanding a physical description right? How does it go when you avail yourself of the non-physical? Should be easy as pie now, shouldn't it? — Srap Tasmaner

We already have words for sensations, dreams, imaginations, hallucinations, etc.

Is a purely physical description of a photon complete? — InPitzotl

Are photons conscious?

Does anyone think they can describe "what it's like to see a red patch" or "what it's like to be in pain" in non-physical terms? — Srap Tasmaner

That's just a way of saying that seeing red and feeling pain are subjective, to distinguish from the behavioral meanings of detecting reflectance or acting as if a body part is potentially being harmed.

My guess is that language isn't just tied to external behavior, but also things like mirror neurons in that we project our own experiences onto others, as long as they're similar enough to us. We infer similar subjectivity in others. This does break down in various situations. If there was no radical privacy, one would think it would never break down.

And how would you classify that information?

To me the issue is not about the denial of sensation but rather about its status. We seem to understand sensation (the 'what it's like to see red') as radically private. At the same time we thoughtlessly assume that of course we all have access to the 'same' redness. — hanaH

I'm not sure that we do. Seems that sensation varies a bit. Some people report seeing different shades of color than I do. But I'm not an artist. I do notice that some people are better at discriminating tastes or sounds than others. Still, it does seem similar enough under normal circumstances. You can go read an Oliver Sacks book for odd neural experiences.

he unspoken logic seems to be that the same-enough hardware should provide the same-enough radically-private-experience-stuff. But whence this 'should'? Anything that's radically private by definition is seemingly outside the purview of logic and science, by definition. — hanaH

It's an assumption since other humans are biologically similar and speak a shared language. May it's not quite so radically private since humans share common biology, behaviors and languages. But for other creaturs like bats, it does seem to be radically private. The best we can do is suggest that bat sonar sensation is either like sound or color for us. But we really don't know. It could be something else entirely for bats. After-all, they do already have ears and eyes. Same with dolphins and whales.

I would argue that sensation is somewhat radically private, in that we never fully know what it's like to be someone else. Only what their behavior and words tell us, and to the extent that our projection or simulation of their minds is accurate. Which often enough, it's not.

Yeah, but is the same substance "physical"? It could be neutral monism or mental, or panpsychism could be the case. Chalmers has argued that consciousness is an additional property tied to informationally rich processes.

The issue is whether a physical account of the world is complete. The world is whatever it is, which includes conscious sensations. How do we best understand the world?

How so? — T Clark

There are sensations unknowable to science. We only know the human ones because we have them. Otherwise, humans would be like bats, to an alien or AI science lacking those sensations.

The mental part has always been a problem for reconciling the the material.

Strongly emergent properties are a problem for physicalism. It means something entirely new comes into existence. Something not logically entailed by it's description.

I'm sure there are. How could we have any idea about what an organism is experiencing if we don't even know the experience exists? — T Clark

Isn't that a problem for physicalism?

A description of a rock doesn't include a rock either. What has that to do with what the rock's made of? — Isaac

Rocks don't have strongly emergent properties like color sensation.

We know what their eyes can detect, and something about what their brains can process visually. If they are conscious, we don't know what those sensations are.

Why not? — Isaac

Because the description does not include them. I'm talking about physical descriptions. The reality is whatever it is such that brain activity can be conscious.

She just doesn't know she's wearing red, or that the Matrix code is green.

But bats may experience sonar in a way that's entirely different from any of our sensations. It's just an example. I'm sure one can find others in the animal kingdom. The thought that humans experience the entire range of conscious experience is silly. Surely there are sensations we have no idea about. Thus alien Mary not having eyes and therefore no color sensations.

Obviously because those changes are not color sensations.

Why? It doesn't seem to follow at all. Why would it be the case that if everything is physical we can describe it? What is it about being physical which makes something describable? — Isaac

Physical is a description of the world. It's saying the world is fundamentally made up of X and nothing else. So if the physical can't describe something, then that something is being left out of the picture, which means the justification for saying the world is physical is flawed.

It's important to distinguish our map of the world from the world itself.

If you mean if a bat could talk sonar that we could pick up on our equipment in an actual language expressing concepts, perceptions, and feelings, I don't see why not. — T Clark

So you think learning bat language would give us sonar sensations? Doesn't that just move the problem from the brain to language?

Some philosophers would say that if she studied and observed enough to be able to use terms of color and seeing appropriately then she would know what it means to see and to see color. Is that pragmatism? It makes sense to me. — T Clark

So you're saying if a bat could talk sonar, we would understand it?

So is this one of those threads where someone starts a philosophical tall-tale and everyone else adds on to it? I can't wait to see what monstrous aberration that produces. Maybe we should publish it.

Alien scientists certainly know about electromagnetic radiation. I doubt there would be any controversy about animals being able to sense different frequencies. Some animals can echolocate or sense magnetic or electric fields and we don't think that's hard to believe. — T Clark

The controversy would be over color sensation, not the physics of EM radiation. Same problem we have when discussing bat sonar sensation, except bats have no language to name it for us.

Mary's species wouldn't know anything about color the same way we don't know anything about whatever sensation bats have when experiencing sonar.

It's not that physicalism cannot account for experience, it's that you define experience in a way that physicalism cannot possibly account for. In other words, if someone tells you "the experience of anger is the physical process of anger" (as I am doing) you wouldn't be convinced because by definition, to you, the experience of anger is non-physical. But that identity does allow physicalism to account for experience. — khaled

Since color and feeling angry are not properties in the explanation, I feel justified in saying that physical descriptions are incomplete. It's basically Locke's primary and secondary quality distinction.

One interpretation is that the experience is fundamentally different. Another is that the experience is the physical process. And many more. The neuroscience doesn't take a side here. It just tells you what's happening in your brain at the same time as the experience. — khaled

Right, but the problem for physicalism is that experience is not part of the explanation. If we say that we live in a physical world, but some aspect of it is not part of the physical description, then physicalism is incomplete. The world might be something more.

There are plenty of physical things that don't weigh anything. Like an electric field. — khaled

Just curious, an electric field has no mass?

Are we agreed? — Varde

Yeah, but I'd be more interested in things like the ontology of computation, whether computers can be conscious, superiintelligence, the ethics of turning the Earth into computronium, whether the universe is a computer, and those kinds of big questions.

Most of the examples you give seem to be more straight forward computer science or online programming discussion, and less philosophical. But questions around the use of social media and the ethics of giant tech corporations would work as philosophical topics.

Just my 2¢ but I think Nick Bostrom's philosophy would count. So would a few things Jaron Lanier has argued.

Saying that there is an "experience" that is created by the neuronal activity, separate from said activity, is something you added, not something I said. — khaled

Because the neuroscience does not include the identity you are asserting. The red experience is not part of the explanation. It's only a correlation.

When you propose the existence of a non physical experience created by physical processes, you're not challenging physicalism, you're assuming it is false from the get-go. — khaled

The physical processes, in terms of physical explanation, do not include the experience as part of the explanation. Ergo, the physical processes qua physical explanation, are not identical to the experience.

You might wish to nevertheless assert such an identity. Which is fine, but understand it's not part of physicalism. Rather it's something additional. The key being that physicalism is a metaphysics. The world is whatever it is, whether that's fully described by physics. Which I think in the case of experience, it's clearly not.