No one has suggested the possibility of NY sewers being conscious, so that is just a strawman.

I'm well aware of your ignorant incredulity towards physicalism. No need to tell me where we differ.

I wouldn't say they are fascist. But they may (unconsciously) hold views that conform with fascist tendencies — schopenhauer1

Many Christian literalists hold monarchy as an ideal, as that is what they expect in an afterlife. The extent to which such a view is consciously held varies, but it tends to be there to some degree as a consequence of the culture.

I think what schopenhaur1 implies, rather than that Trump himself is fascist, is that many Trump supporters are fascist, and they see his actions as an opening of the door, inviting them in. In reality he's just using them for his own personal gain, what schop describes as narcissistic. And, it appears like the number of fascists is sufficient to make opening the door to fascism worthwhile for him. — Metaphysician Undercover

:up:

The Plot Against America is a novel by Philip Roth published in 2004. It is an alternative history in which Franklin D. Roosevelt is defeated in the presidential election of 1940 by Charles Lindbergh. It's believable, given its setting in time, but perhaps isn't indicative of how a fascist movement would operate now. — BC

Hmm... Joe Steele by Harry Turtledove, published in 2015, is a horrifyingly plausible alternative history along the same lines. Now I wonder if there was some plagiarism going on.

Still, it was a good book. While reading it, it was somewhat of a relief to know that Trump doesn't read.

By "naturalism" Plantinga seems to mean non-belief in God in this context. It appears that someone who does believe in God can, according to Plantinga's proposals, maintain that our cognitive abilities are reliable. Although it's possible I have misunderstood Plantinga. — NotAristotle

Plantinga does believe that we can believe that our cognitive faculties are reliable, because God created them to be so. However it would be a recipe for self-delusion to accept the circular argument that one is justified in believing in God, because otherwise one would have to accept that one's cognitive faculties are unreliable to some degree. The EAAN is a poor rationalization for believing in God, rather than a good argument against naturalism.

No, anti-theism is moral opposition to God on the basis that belief in God is harmful to people. It's not an ontological claim, but a moral one. — Hallucinogen

No. Anti-theism is opposition to theism.

Wouldn't there be the possibility to know one's emotions and thereby know why one is acting? And, is it not the case that if we know how we are going to act, we have the ability to act in a manner contrary to what we are conscious of?

And, if consciousness really is an illusion, why the illusion? Wouldn't we be better equipped evolutionarily speaking to see the truth; reality as it really is. — NotAristotle

Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, while failing to provide a persuasive argument against naturalism, can provide some insight into the fact that given evolution and naturalism we have good reason to question the reliability of our cognitive faculties.

Lucky for us, questioning the reliability of our cognitive faculties has the potential to greatly increase their reliability. Or as a Nobel Prize winning physicist put it, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."

There are generally two big responses to save reduction. One is that we just lack the computational abilities to get to the reduction. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The Three Body Problem (which BTW, is the title of a great SciFi book) at least suggests that the problem goes much deeper than availability of computational resources:

In physics and classical mechanics, the three-body problem is the problem of taking the initial positions and velocities (or momenta) of three point masses and solving for their subsequent motion according to Newton's laws of motion and Newton's law of universal gravitation.[1] The three-body problem is a special case of the n-body problem. Unlike two-body problems, no general closed-form solution exists, as the resulting dynamical system is chaotic for most initial conditions, and numerical methods are generally required.

Why do I sit here and write this? What drives me to do it? Not what I think is driving me, but what is actually pulling my strings doing this? My emotions surrounding the act of writing all of this. Is my emotions driving me to find survival in a group here? Predicting that if I write something good it will generate connection to the tribe, to the group and put me in a better place for survival? Is it an act against death? Is it about survival? — Christoffer

:cool:

I think philosophy consists in questioning choice and the choices one makes in order to understand how and why one chooses. One tends to learn more from making unwise choices, IME, than from "making choices wisely" – in other words, failure, like loss, is the teacher, and those who do not seek to learn such lessons are foolish (i.e. unwise, or do not 'love wisdom'). — 180 Proof

:up:

To put that in my own words, I would say "reductionism" is ill-defined. Perhaps a properly defined reductionism may not be at odds with emergentism at all. — NotAristotle

I would think we would have to reach more definitive conclusion as to the quantum foundation of nature to have much hope of being free from fuzzy boundary issues between quantum views and classical views. In any case reductionism and weak emergentism work very well at scales where quantum effects can be treated as just noise.

Oh contraire mon frère, this is more something we thought we knew at the high point of reductionism. The case for this is now more difficult. IMO, it would be foolish to assume reductionism as a given until it is decisively disproved, since reductionism itself was never been decisively proved in the first place. Reductionism trades off millennia old intuitions and philosophical arguments, and this might be grounds for dismissing it as much as supporting it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You bring up a good point, but rather than swing between supporting or dismissing, why not simply recognize the need for a more complex and nuanced view?

@RogueAI

Somewhat creepily, the video below was suggested to me by Youtube last night.

Cool video though, if you are into such nerd stuff.

God works in mysterious ways" and all that... — AmadeusD

That may be, but it is harder to convince people to worship the god of baffling with bullshit.

In principle, they do. They acknowledge God has all-encompassing power. Why would deluding us or merely providing odd empirical data to our minds be outside that? Although, in this case it wouldn't be Odd. It would be the case, and nothing more. — AmadeusD

Christians typically think that God, being good, wouldn't mislead us.

:up:

What's the catch there? I don't really understand the correlation, so I can't pick out the problem. — AmadeusD

Ohms law is v=i*r where
v represents Voltage
i represents electrical current
and r represents electrical resistance

So for any given resistance, the relationship between voltage and current would be graphed as a straight line at some angle.

Fluid flow is much different with something more like p=r*q^2 where
p represents pressure
q represents flow rate
and r represents something crudely analogous to electrical resistance we can call "pipe-resistance".

Graphing p vs q for a given pipe-resistance (according to this simplistic equation) would result in a parabolic curve.

Fluid flow is actually even more complicated than that, so keep in mind this is merely a crude approximation. However, an aspect of the situation with fluids, is that the energy required to move fluid through pipes tends to go up as the square of the flow rate.

Where do you stand on the possibility of consciousness emerging from collections of pipes, vales, water, etc.? Even I would grant that it's logically possible. But suppose we have an infallible consciousness meter, and (bear with me) someone has created a planet-sized system of valves, pipes, pumps, water, etc. that is functionally equivalent to a working brain. I would give astronomical odds that when we point the consciousness meter at the plumbing, it's not going to register anything. What kind of odds would you give? — RogueAI

I don't see any reason to think such a system couldn't in principle be conscious, but it would be an extremely low temporal resolution sort of consciousness, and would require an enormous input of energy to power the pumps. This is related to what I pointed out Kastrup showing ignorance about, with his claim that the relationship between fluid flowrate and pressure, is the same as the relationship between voltage and current expressed by Ohms law.

So your conciousness detector would need to be able to detect a consciousness, for which one of our years was but a moment.

You mean M. Scott Peck? I did read Road Less Travelled in the 90's, one of my favourites. — Wayfarer

Yeah, we've discussed it before. The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace, as the name might suggest, has a lot of relevance to the workings of a community such as TPF.

It's such a shame this thread still exists, I honestly thought after the jan 6th atrocity and his election wipeouts it would be all consigned to the past. — Wayfarer

BTW, it's a shame you never read The Different Drum. It provides a lot of perspective good for a forum moderator to have.

I don't think it was too long. — Wayfarer

You haven't seen his response yet. :chin:

If, by 'laws of reality' you mean 'natural law' or 'scientific law', are these themselves physical? — Wayfarer

If Christoffer responds to this and tries to correct your misconceptions, do you consider it likely that you will be inclined to tell him that his response was too long?

If so, it would be considerate to say so now.

It fits well with General Relativity as well.

It exists in the past. Physicalism states that only physical things exist. My the past exists in minds. Therefore, it must actually exist, as an actual physical thing (that it has passed, i suppose is no matter to the principle - either could be argued by whomeveer held the view) — AmadeusD

On a perdurance view you would be a four dimensional being, with one of those dimensions being the time dimensions of spacetime. So from such a perspective, yes you have temporal extension.

Of course it is your brain is processing the data from your eyes. But it's still a cat, and it's still just a line. Thinking that the cat is no more than a bit of data processing misses its place in the artist's creation, the web page's design, the post I just presented and the argument about emergence.

Indeed, thinking of it as nothing more than your brain processing the data from your eyes is exactly the error that this thread is about. — Banno

What you say there is just you jumping to the conclusion that my view is much more simplistic than it actually is. I responded to you with a focus on the cat, because you yourself brought up the cat specifically.

Of course, I understand that we can associate a wide variety of things that we might wish to talk about, with the image. (And that is just another thing that is quite understandable, given a connectionist perspective.)

You seem to have a rather, "Don't look at the man behind the curtain." thing going on here. And your comment seems more gotcha rhetoric, than something I'd expect from a person willing to consider that he might have something to learn.

Look at my icon carefully. I could not have planned it and then created the necessary math, in my wildest dreams. — jgill

What are the axes of your drawing?

I'm used to thinking of (1,0j) as on the right hand side. I assume that is rotated 90° from my accustomed orientation. Is that correct?

There's a third type of emergence, more psychological than physical. The cat emerges from the single line: — Banno

This assumes psychological is other than physical.

In any case, neural network pattern recognition is highly fault tolerant, and that is why we are able to 'recognize a cat' when looking at that line.

Emergence, if it is to help us here, has to be akin to "seeing as", as Wittgenstein set out. So once again I find myself thinking of the duck-rabbit. Here it is enjoying the sun.

The duck emerges from the rabbit? — Banno

At any give time, either the duck emerges as a perception, or the rabbit emerges as a perception.

It is a function of how your brain is processing the data from your eyes from moment to moment.

Wouldn't that be a big step forward? — Ludwig V

I'm not clear on what you are asking.

I see weak emergentism as most reasonable, and in the context of weak emergence the emergence is only epistemic. So on this way of looking at things there is nothing for emergence to do, except provide cognitively limited being like ourselves with conceptual frameworks that are manageable.

Perhaps this should have been spelled out more clearly earlier in the thread. In any case, I don't know if Christoffer shares this view.

I think so too. I think the plausibility of my house's plumbing being conscious is about the same as the possibility that I'm a zombie: nonexistent. Yet, when you make Kastrup's point to materialists, they shrug and say, "Well, the brain is conscious, so I guess a bunch of pipes, valves and pumps could be conscious too". They don't want to entertain the possibility that there is no physical brain, that idealism might be the case. They're so opposed to idealism, they will seriously consider they might be zombies or "there is something it's like to be a sewer system". — RogueAI

This is just an argument from incredulity and a wheat field's worth of straw manning.

It's unfortunate that so many who consider themselves to be critics of physicalism have nothing much more than cheerleading for their tribe.

He hopes you will do that to further fuck with you. He has accepted that it is just a game for him: — Paine

:up:

Depending on how essential emergence is in nature, if it is an integral part of everything, then finding a holistically governing equation would be like finding the equation to end all equations. — Christoffer

It's not the holisitically governing equation some may dream of, but we can certainly make a psychologically called shot based on scientific understanding, on occasion.

↪wonderer1 Thinking about what? You haven’t said anything. — Banno

No, not if you can look at things from a more holistic perspective, and recognize the interactions that occur within the world. I could provide a link if you can't think of recent examples you have seen on TPF or in real life. — wonderer1

I said I could provide a link if you can't think of recent examples. Do you need me to point out an example of the sort of interaction I was referring to?

Doesn't sound like you are interested in thinking about it.

Never really been that into math.

Do you have an understanding of the sort of interactions I was referring to?

Isn't emergence no more than Emperor Reduction in his new clothes? — Banno

No, not if you can look at things from a more holistic perspective, and recognize the interactions that occur within the world. I could provide a link if you can't think of recent examples you have seen on TPF or in real life.

You see, everything a computer does can, in principle, be done with pipes, pressure valves and water. The pipes play the role of electrical conduits, or traces; the pressure valves play the role of switches, or transistors; and the water plays the role of electricity. Ohm’s Law—the fundamental rule for determining the behavior of electric circuits—maps one-on-one to water pressure and flow relations. — RogueAI

He demonstrates scientific ignorance with the last sentence there, showing his scientific understanding to be highly questionable. At least that is what he shows me.

I'm a ways back on your dominoes video and am wondering if it could be misleading on how computation is done — Mark Nyquist

Well, if I posted the right video, it discusses how logic gates are implemented in domino structures. So the domino structure is crudely isomorphic to a subsection of a small part of a microprocessor. But what do you expect from dominos? :smile:

No, it is not much like what goes on in the neural nets in our brains, other than that the domino system and neural networks both exhibit the three key elements I mentioned earlier. (nodes, channels, amplification)

The computational capability of our brains is qualitatively different, in that it is massively parallel distributed processing with dazzlingly complex processes going on.

The problem is not in finding examples of phenomena that might exhibit emergence. There are plenty of those. It's in framing what emergence is in a way that meshes with the overall ontology (which would generally be physicalism since the overwhelming amount of work on emergence is in that context).

The blocks example is about our intuition — a metaphor. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It seemed to me to be reinforcing a simplistic intuitive view, since blocks aren't something we typically think of as interacting with each other in any very interesting way.

However, substitute dominos for blocks, and see the video I posted earlier, and you can observe the property emerging from the dominos being structurally arranged in a certain way.