hat's where the real conspirators are to be found; those sowing doubt and fear about Government, who will profit from de-regulation and public distrust of the law and the media. They paint themselves as the 'us' in 'us vs them', but they're the real villians. You know, the kinds that gamed the system before The Big Short. I bet nobody even knows their names. — Wayfarer

You're right. Conservatives are real big on that. The goal is to defund Government so that business can take over. Because business interests are superior to government. That profit motive working for the common good.

a.. but the notion that Trump won because of post-truth doesn't square with my experience with the people who voted for him. None of them were interested in superficial info coming from either campaign. They were looking deeper and their distrust of establishment bullshit was just a lot stronger than their distrust of Trump's. IOW, they knew Trump was fishy. They just couldn't stomach the alternative. — Mongrel

But why couldn't the stomach the alternative? What was so very bad about Clinton, or Obama before her? I don't see anything so terrible that Trump becomes the appealing alternative. Not that I'm a big fan of Hillary, and she can be criticized, but let's be clear about what has gone on the last 20 years.

Fox News, right wing radio, and the Republican party in general has sought to demonize Hillary, even more so than her husband and Obama. She was the one person the right could not allow in the White House. Hillary is evil incarnate to conservatives, basically. And having the Democrats get the first woman after having the first minority in office would have been devastating.

Pretending that all the propaganda from Fox News and right wing radio didn't have anything to do with Trump winning is naive. Now this isn't to say that Trump was their ideal conservative. He's not, not at all. But he's much better ally in power than another Clinton, who would be the enemy.

All you have to do is listen for five minutes once a year to those stations. Same shit about liberal conspiracies, Obama wrecking America, etc. Blatant propaganda, and lot of people eat that stuff up. I have relatives and family friends who certainly do. You would think Fox News was the bible.

So you can imagine something that is at once identical and yet completely different? — Wayfarer

If you've ever watched a show or read a story with magic in it, you can. A magical spell would conceivably cause ordinary food not to nourish.

This isn't to argue for magic at all, it's simply to show that it's conceivable. You can say magic doesn't exist, therefore it's an impossibility, unless of course someone can come up with another scenario. In fact, I think you can:

Ordinary food can fail to nourish by ordinary eaters if something else interferes with digestion, such as poison or illness. Doesn't have to be magic to be conceivable. But the point is conceivability. We are able to conceive of such things.

Humans are 'beings'. To fulfil the definition of 'being' is to have an 'inner life'. The whole discussion is simply an abundant illustration of the intellectual bankruptcy of what passes for 'philosophy' in the American academy. — Wayfarer

No, it's not, because materialism has a mind/body problem until the day arrives that all of the mind can be understood in material terms.

The p-zombie and all related arguments exist because of that. You might disagree that a particular argument makes the case against materialism successfully, but it's hardly "bankrupt".

I thought Landru's campaign against realism was supposed to save us from a world or right wing memes? Wasn't realism responsible for slavery, oppression and Hitler?

You think I jest, but man some of those old forum discussions were doozies.

But realize it's not what academia is, — Carbon

What do see as the role of education? To get a job? Does poor Mary really need philosophy class to become a nurse?

I'm expressing my general cynicism of education, not a criticism of your career, btw.

poor Mary Ellen over there just had question about a single class in her overall career. — Carbon

Ironic that it broke out into a philosophical discussion? She did ask on a philosophy forum. That's the risk. Might actually provoke a discussion.

honestly couldn't care less if she wakes up after taking her class and feels philosophically "enlightened". I'd rather she just pass her class and maybe walk away thinking the educational experience was fun. — Carbon

With all due respect, that comment saddens me. Maybe you're being pragmatic and all, and it fits with real academic experience, but couldn't one hope for more? Like poor Mary becomes intrigued by the sorts of questions philosophy raises? Maybe she even chooses to read a philosophical text during her nursing breaks?

But this is precisely what is at issue. In other words, that begs the question. It is precisely the difference between a corpse and a human being: the corpse is indeed 'purely physical', but then, it's a corpse. It's not going to tell you what a nice day it's having. — Wayfarer

The reason it doesn't beg the question is because we have neuroscience, biology, chemistry and what not to understand the behavior living systems without referencing consciousness.

It also makes sense because we're not sure when and if machines cross over into being conscious. If they tell us they're having a nice day, do we take them at their word? Maybe not if it's a phone app, but what if it's an android?

What if the program is an extremely detailed digital version of us, living that simulated life?

So, put another way, how could a device simulate an inner life, in the absence of an actual inner life? What would it take to produce the appearance of a conscious being, in a being that is not actually conscious? What system would do that? — Wayfarer

A meat suit, since it's a philosophical zombie. I tend to think the argument is incoherent, because it poses problems for meaning. But in it's defense:

If physicalism is the case, then all behavior is the result of physical processes. There's no need for an inner life.

But do realize that for students, like Mary Ellen, who take classes (that people like me have to teach) - it makes it really difficult to get into the class if this is their take away. She was looking for info on classes - give her info on classes. — Carbon

Jesus man, so taking a philosophy class has nothing to do with the reason humans engage in philosophical query.

No wonder I'm so cynical about schooling. But hey, a lot of courses are like that. Physics is just about learning some equations. Math is just about solving some. History is about recalling some dates. Literature is about reading some books.

Sounds utterly boring to and devoid of meaning to me. But I'm not criticizing you. I'm criticizing the approach to taking classes.

It also existed because of the long-time reliance on slavery which enabled production at virtually no material cost. — Agustino

Isn't that what the migrant workers are for? Get paid slave wages way below minimum requirements and no benefits? You have to ask yourself why no Republican administration has done anything other than saber rattling about illegal immigration.

The North in the US was doing quite well industrially without slave labor leading up to the Civil War. The South was more agrarian, and being the virtuous souls that they were, decided to have other human beings do the work for them.

China is already a larger economy than the US. In 20 years, if the current rates continue, China will be TWICE as big as the US. — Agustino

What do you expect? They have 5 times as many people, and we found it in our economic interest to trade with them. Expect India to follow suit, and Africa after that (granted, it's a continent not a nation). That's globalism for you, and that's countries realizing they need to catch up and modernize.

America's global hegemony. — Agustino

That existed due to the outcome of WW2, and it led to a cold war with thousands of nukes hanging over our heads. But the rest of the world was going to catch up.

I mean they thought they could go on and on in their stupidity, hedonism, total ignorance of virtue and pragmatism, — Agustino

What makes you think Trump is any better? What makes you think that by being President he will make America more virtuous and pragmatic?

Pencil and paper is not computationally universal. — tom

When coupled with a hand to calculate the symbols, why isn't it?

Rampant liberalism/progressivism, hedonism, stupid decisions and leadership have utterly destroyed America's greatness. — Agustino

What greatness was destroyed?

Trump is America's last hope - really and truthfully now. — Agustino

Last hope for what?

And all this is because he's the only one who has the pragmatism that it takes to save America. — Agustino

Save America from what? Cheap Chinese goods? Evil climate scientists? Below minimum wage migrant labor?

As I said, America's interest diverge at this juncture from the interests of its people. — Agustino

How so? Is a New York billionaire going to save the interests of the people?

The America we lost when Trump won was a liberal fantasy which would have been wiped off the face of the Earth in a few decades by the infantilism of the Clintons and their cronies. Trump saved America, as much as America can be saved at this juncture. Trump is right - after Bush and Obama America isn't great anymore. — Agustino

Do you really believe this? That's straight up propaganda. It's not remotely accurate. It's just right wing talking points.

It's not the brain, it's the software running on the brain that has the experience. — tom

So pencil and paper implementing that software would also have the same experience.

That I'm afraid is impossible. The same evidence AND the same rational ability should take everyone to the same conlusion. That however, is beside the point I'm making. — TheMadFool

But it doesn't. What you really mean is that if everyone with the same evidence and rational ability started off with the same premises, then they would reach the same conclusion. But even that isn't the case, because there's often debate over whether a step in an argument is committing a fallacy or not.

S/he is in a nursing program bro. No one beyond the newbie undergrads in philosophy gives a shit about the mystical connection with wisdom you think is required for REAL philosophy or whatever the hell you're supposedly doing. — Carbon

Quite a few people on this forum care about philosophy beyond it being useful for learning how to construct arguments. Take a logic class if that's the case. Or an ethics class, if that's the overriding concern for a Nurse.

As for philosophy in general, everyone at one point or another asks deep questions about existence, how to live, what's the right thing to do, how we know what we say we know, etc. It's a human endeavor to think about such things.

It's like asking what value art or music is, and being told that a sculpting class can help your dexterity when handling patients, or something. Even if it does, that's not the reason for art or music, nor should it be the motivation for taking an art appreciation class, or learning how to play violin.

I am afraid I still don't understand the reason behind the puzzlement. — SophistiCat

Why would any physical system or process be accompanied with experience? Why is my active brain/body having experiences?

You can replace physical above with functional, computational, mathematical, or objective, depending on one's ontological commitments or preferred explanations.

But brains are not consciousness, brains are conscious [of stuff] - see the difference? It's not what the brains are made out of, it's what they do. — SophistiCat

Sure, so it's not what a car is made of, it's what it does.

Physical processes are part of the ontological commitment to everything being physical. Brains not in action aren't experiencing anything.

So does this help explain experience, saying that brains in action are conscious of something, but hurricanes, meteor showers or smart cars in action are not?

I mean, consciousness is a wondrous thing and it certainly has plenty to be puzzled about, but let me remind you again that physicalism isn't supposed to be an oracle that will answer all of your questions. — SophistiCat

No, but it's an ontological commitment to physical systems. So if anything can't be explained in terms of some physical system, process, or parts, then the ontology is in question.

It's possible for physicalism to be false. Maybe it's ontological commitments are incomplete. Experience isn't the only challenge.

Why is experience problematic to physicalism? — SophistiCat

Because nobody so far has come up with a way to show how experience is constituted by physical parts or processes. Neuroscience falls into that category, since it's positing neurons, neurotransmitters, etc, all of which are made up of physical parts.

To put it another way, the concepts of experience don't fit into the concepts employed by biology, neuroscience, chemistry, physics. It's really an issue of whether an objective account of the world can explain subjectivity. So it applies to computationalism as well.

Max Tegmark's mathematical world has the exact same problem. If the only real properties are mathematical ones, then how can some mathematical systems have experience, since experience isn't a mathematical property or concept?

If experience is actually mathematical, then someone needs to demonstrate how that's so.

Anyway, what question are you actually asking above? — SophistiCat

How experience is made up of physical stuff. Saying that meat experiences color, while cars don't because meat, isn't an answer.

What sort of answer would you accept? — SophistiCat

An answer that would make the puzzlement go away, where we could see that experience is physical stuff, probably because we were tricked by a cognitive illusion about what experience is, or something.

Physicalism posits answers to certain specific questions, and that's it. — SophistiCat

Physicalism is an updated version of materialism, not the science of physics. It just says that everything is made up of whatever physics posits. Cars being made up of physical parts isn't an issue for materialists. But experience is problematic.

I didn't make this stuff up.

Which metaphysical view explains subjectivity? Actually, which other metaphysical view offers an explanation for anything? — tom

There's always idealism, where it's mind that matters, and not the other way around. Then there's dualism, panpsychism, and neutral monism.

They have their strengths and weaknesses. Idealism doesn't have a mind/body problem, but it sure seems like we experience a material world.

Where is the problem? Some systems are cars and others are not. Is that a problem too? — SophistiCat

Physicalism can't explain why some physical systems have experience and others don't. You might ask so what, but physicalism is supposed to present a comprehensive ontology. It can't leave anything out and be true.

It's just a poorly constructed capitalist assembly line of bad to mediocre to good resume competitions between people that usually don't even know what they want to do in life. — Heister Eggcart

The robots are coming, so maybe the role of education will change.

It isn't always the teachers' faults, though. Lots of factors go into why most kids arrive at the high school level dumb as rocks. — Heister Eggcart

I'm not blaming the teachers, I'm questioning whether the way the system is set up makes sense, if the goal really is education.

n no case do testing or grades prove very much. Except that high test scores and good grades give you the pass codes that allow you to advance ahead several steps. — Bitter Crank

I'll confess to being caught up in working hard for grades at some point. It worked, but when all was said and done, I realized that really learning the material in way that would have stayed with me would have been far more value, even if I got Cs instead of As doing so.

In high school, the class that garnered the most enthusiasm was driver's education. That one had obvious real life benefit. I can't tell you how many times someone has asked what benefit geometry or algebra was. It's interesting that the answer given is that it teaches you to think, yet there was no critical thinking or statistics class, not at my high school. A stats class seems to have a lot more obvious real world benefits that could be explained to students.

In college among the liberal arts electives, it was the world literature class, because we discussed and debated the meaning of famous writings. I've noticed that with foreign language, students tended to be more enthusiastic if they were planning on visiting a country that spoke that language.

This is why I mentioned that schools are increasingly forced into being a parental apparatus because modern children are little shits, by and large. — Heister Eggcart

But maybe the approach to education is just wrong. Why do you need to pass tests and get grades? Why do we all need to be taught the same things? Is that more important than learning something interesting that will possibly be of value to you the rest of your adult life? It could be a trade skill, could be critical thinking, maybe history or philosophy if a student has interest in that, perhaps actual fluency in another language, maybe organization and planning skills.

Just feels like a lot of it was a waste of time after elementary school and before I settled on a major in college.

At the high school level, at least, requiring most topics isn't bad, otherwise most students would not take anything. — Heister Eggcart

If they won't take anything, because they rather be playing video games, doing drugs, or possibly earning money, then shouldn't that tell you something?

Speaking of you United States, I don't think you realize the degree to which the state has its hands in teacher performance and how they have to teach. — Heister Eggcart

Yeah, I'm not sure that's really helping.

owever, lecturing and assigning homework is rarely bad teaching. — Heister Eggcart

Not in itself. I have enjoyed my share of lectures, and learned from quite a few homework assignments. It's not that. It's the whole being forced into a pseudo-liberal arts education where it's good that everyone be required to take a year of foreign language, geometry, civics, etc. But then you master none of it, forget most of it, and mainly do enough to get whatever grade you feel you need to have.

No real desire there to actually learn, in general.

As if one might test, assign homework and lecture to a group who did not first know how to behave. — Banno

Sure, but at what age do you suppose that's learned?

Providing guidance as to how one ought behave socially is pivotal to teaching; One might pretend that teachers are not moral instructors, but it would be no more than pretence. — Banno

If that's the case, seems like teachers wasted a lot of time lecturing, assigning homework, and testing on stuff most of us largely forgot that wasn't social. I guess we learned to mostly get along being forced to learn in a place with a lot of people we didn't particularly care bout for seven hours a day. Preparation for the office, I suppose.

The brain doesn't generate color, it experiences color (or rather, your entire organism experiences color, since the brain does not function in isolation from the rest of the organism). It would be senseless to examine the brain looking for the experience of color - what would you expect to find? When you want to drive somewhere, do you just sit and stare at your car, expecting the driving to happen by and by? — SophistiCat

And so some physical systems have experiences, like my brain/body, and others don't, like my car (which could be smart and drive itself these days) or the rock I kicked.

That's why it remains problematic for physicalism.

Is a meteor shower computationally universal? — tom

Lanier's argument was that any physical system is, if you squint at it just right. Meaning, we interpret (and build) our computing devices to be manipulating symbols because that's useful to us. But a computer doesn't really operate on 1s and 0s (or high/low or on/off). That's just an interpretation. The real functionality is driven by physics, not computer science or boolean algebra. As such, aliens might think our computers were heaters (they produce heat).

If we wanted to, we could interpret other physical systems to be doing computations. But you have to read the paper to see how he goes about setting up the meteor shower computer thought experiment, and see whether you agree with him.

His fundamental point is that computation is cultural (physical systems don't actually manipulate symbols), not ontological, but that consciousness is ontological, and the role it plays is to select how we experience reality, out of the many ways it could be experienced (given what we know about physics). As such, conscious beings determine what computation is, not the other way around.

What's worked in the past is likely to work in the future. — Mongrel

Or maybe over time humans figure out better ways of making things work. Conservatives seem to want to start with Ancient Greece or the 1950s, but human existence stretches back thousands of years before then.

The truth is that most of human history is that of being in small groups of hunter/gatherers. Farming and civilization is relatively recent. And over the time period of civilization, populations grew, technology advanced, and civilizations became more complex. Our understanding of the world, including the nature of social interaction and civilizations has changed over time as well.

You really wouldn't want Plato to come back to life and tell a modern country how to organize it's government. Nor would you want Jefferson prescribing an economic model. A lot has changed since then, and lot has been learned that they didn't know about.

As such, the conservative approach seems at odds with reality. Things change. A war to end all wars in 1918 didn't seem like that bad of an idea at the time, but such a war now is apocalyptic.

We could, of course, record any of these facts in a computer. The impossibility arises when we consider how to record and make accessible the entire, unsurveyable, and ill-defined body of common sense. We know all these things, not because our “random access memory” contains separate, atomic propositions bearing witness to every commonsensical fact (their number would be infinite), and not because we have ever stopped to deduce the truth from a few more general propositions (an adequate collection of such propositions isn’t possible even in principle). Our knowledge does not present itself in discrete, logically well-behaved chunks, nor is it contained within a neat deductive system. — Wayfarer

Exactly! But there has been an attempt to do that. The project is called Cyc. It's an attempt to codify human common sense, providing a program with the knowledge needed to reason like a human being. The philosophy behind the project is summarized as, "Intelligence is 3 million rules". So, a bunch of propositions linked together in appropriate ways, permitting the right sort of inferences.

I first read about this in the 90s, and it was immediately apparent to me that this is not what human intelligence is. But, Marvin Minsky, a founder of Artificial Intelligence, has stated recently that it has been the only real attempt in AI research to create common sense in a machine, which Minsky sees as fundamental to creating human level, or general purpose AI.