Where is the information and meaning of these marks? I can use a magnifying glass or a microscope to examine these pixels and probably won't find anything like meaning. It is because of this problem that I speak of meaning as an effect of an effective and active relationship between signs. It follows that nothing is exchanged, but is constantly produced as something new. Right now, when you read this, you are creating meaning as an effect of "my" words. But I am certainly not sending you anything, I am simply provoking something in you in a technologically mediated relationship. This is very counterintuitive. — JuanZu

The "meaning of these marks" lies in the way they activate pattern recognizing neural networks in your brain, and the way those recognized patterns bring up associations in your mind. We don't find meaning looking at the words with a magnifying glass, because the meaning is a function of recognitions occurring in our brains.

What is your view on possible world semantics?

So this already created world is B. How is it that the following is not saying that God creating a different world is not even possible?

I would say that it is not even possible that God create A, if God has already created B. — Metaphysician Undercover

By what Walter stipulated, A and B are incompatible, so not only is it impossible that such is necessary, I would say that it is not even possible that God create A, if God has already created B. — Metaphysician Undercover

So would you agree that means that if God is simple then he did not have a choice to create a world other than this one?

I think we're back to the beginning, and you are just going around in a circle. God only makes one of the two choices, A or B. The choice was A. So we have "God's action to create A". There is no "God's action to create B" because God did not make that choice. That is a false premise. So your conclusion "God's action to create A is the very same as God's action to create B" is an unsound conclusion because it requires the false premise that God created bot A and B. — Metaphysician Undercover

Since it seems likely that Walter is asleep...

Would you agree that there is no possible world in which God creates B and therefore it was necessary that God create A?

I think this is what I was saying above to T Clark, but one of the problems often brought forth by the substance dualist is that there is not empirical proof that brain state X always causes behavior Y because fMRI results do not show that for every instance of behavior Y the exact areas of the brain show activity.

What this would mean is that brain activity supervenes with behavioral activity 100% of the time, but the precise brain activity down to the neuronal level is variable. That means that for person A who is an exact replica of person B (down the neuronal level), the substance dualist would not necessarily commit that the two would exhibit exact behaviors. Sometimes brain state A yields behavior X and sometimes Y. — Hanover

Going through this thread and it seemed worth pointing out that fMRI doesn't come anywhere near individual neuron level resolution. The last I looked it was around 50,000 neurons per voxel (volume-pixel). It is to be expected that fMRI voxels are variable because the spatial resolution (not to mention the temporal resolution) is far too poor to detect the subtleties of what is occurring.

Thanks.

I was just trying to understand the term. I still am. — frank

What aspect(s) are you still trying to understand?

And certainly folk hereabouts missed it. — Banno

Link?

Ah. Ok. No, I am still working my way through others. Slow process for me. I started it. But I don't expect him to have the answer to the question of how consciousness can come from the physical when he begins the book by saying we don't know how:
§0.4 The deepest problems have yet to be solved. We do not understand the neural code. We do not understand how mental events can be causal. We do not understand how consciousness can be realized in physical neuronal activity.
— Peter Tse — Patterner

But then Tse demonstrates, in the body of the book, that he has looked into the sort of things that need to be looked at in order to develop that understanding. Shades of gray. Perhaps, if it is possible, for humanity to develop the scientific understanding to satisfy philosophers, it will be next century or the one after. Although, at the pace of AI development, it becomes very hard to predict.

I agree with you that Kastrup, while interesting in some areas, goes off the wall with attributing "dissociated boundaries" to objects, this is an extreme extrapolation. — Manuel

I wonder if there isn't some merit to the concept, if reframed in terms of us being elements of a social species, whose thoughts are very much a function of of our encounters with conspecifics.

a red straw herring. — Janus

:rofl:

The weirdly prophetic perspective that has resulted from being willing to seriously consider physicalism.
— wonderer1

What is it? What is that perspective like? — frank

It is hard for me to communicate, because a key aspect of my perspective results from being somewhat autistic and somewhat savantish. But to take a stab at it...

37 years ago I was a young electrical engineer who had studied information processing in artificial neural networks and I was desperately in love. So I got intensely focused on issues I have with communicating and considering how my brain might be weird in some ways. (I didn't know anything about autism or Asperger's at this point, and it would be a couple decades before I was diagnosed with Asperger's.)

Long story short, I came up with an extremely speculative hypothesis about how my brain might be wired differently from those of a lot of people, and this hypothesis seemed extraordinarily powerful in explaining a wide variety of idiosyncratic things about me, in addition to explaining aspects of human thinking more generally. Since that time I have had a lot of insight into psychology and neuroscience in the sense of recognizing a lot of psychology and neuroscience as bollocks that would be replaced by a view more consistent with my understanding given time. And psychology and neuroscience has gradually evolved to be more in line with what I recognized as being key aspects of human thinking.

In fact here's a scientific finding that is a great fit with the sort of thing I would have expected to find based on my speculations of 37 years ago. I recognized the two systems view of Kahneman years before Thinking, Fast and Slow came out.

So an aspect of what it has been like is being ahead of my time, but on the basis of an intuitive 'picture' I wouldn't know how to communicate very well to someone without a background in electrical engineering. Fortunately a substantial number of people have caught up, and are surpassing my understanding by leaps and bounds these days.

Another aspect of being willing to seriously consider physicalism is understanding that we are all social primates here, although that was a more gradual process for me.

Please clue me in! — Patterner

I pointed you towards Peter Tse's book awhile back. Tse is definitely one of the less clueless writers on the subject that I have encountered. Did you read the book?

However, the Hard Problem is figuring out how the former lead to the latter. So far, we don’t have any clue. — Patterner

I'd modestly suggest that some of us have more of a clue than others, and given that it is a hard problem, it makes sense to look at it in terms shades of gray or degrees of cluelessness. :wink:

The modern physics tells us that all there is energy, Tesla agree whole heartedly. So, if all there is, is energy then there are no things. — boagie

It looks to me like you are throwing the baby out with the bath water. Some forms that energy can take are highly stable on the scale of human lifetimes. Energy in such stable forms (and particularly macroscopic agglomerations of such energy in stable forms) is what we conceive of as physical things. Might it make more sense to refine one's notion of things, rather than try to do without a notion of things altogether?

I find esoterica quite interesting, but this facet of it can make trying to discuss it extremely tedious. "Oh, you don't agree with/love x, well then you absolutely cannot have understood it. It wasn't written for you." Ironic, in the esotericists themselves have a tendency to lambast competitors in stark terms. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I find your failure to resonate with narcissists disturbing. :razz: :grin:

All these questions make (scientific) sense and can be answered by objective, reproduceable measurement. But I’m wondering if we can meaningfully ascribe measurement to “consciousness.” It seems odd to say, “There are 2.5 milliliters of consciousness here,” or “This consciousness weighs 71 grams,” or “That consciousness is negatively charged.”

Isn’t consciousness different (in kind) from what science investigates? Planets, colors, particles, reagents – these are discrete, objective areas of scientific investigation, whereas consciousness is the underlying, subjective medium through which we access all of these areas. — Thales

Note that what you describe as science doesn't seem to include the study of processes, including processes underlying human consciousness. Study of processes might be worth considering.

Wouldn't you have to argue that physicalism itself is successful? Is that possible? — frank

I'm not well suited for presenting such an argument. For me it seems like it would requiring writing a book that I would never get finished with. Fortunately, I don't have to make the argument.

But, I'll add what has been sitting unposted in the reply box overnight...

If you are a physicalist, what convinced you? Or is it just the grounding of your thinking? — frank

As grandiose as it may sound*... The weirdly prophetic perspective that has resulted from being willing to seriously consider physicalism.

*It's fucking weird to consider saying this out loud here. Not sure if I'll hit Post Comment on this one.

:flower:

How about considering it is as we believe it to be? We can experience a wonderful love or not. — Athena

I found 'the grass is greener' nature of Tom Storm's perspective and mine amusing. I'm not seeing how what you said is related.

1. Hanover is simply correct that figurative interpretations have been accepted since ancient times.

2. You claim is not in evidence, for Augustine spoke of an "ignorant individual." — Leontiskos

1. I'm not arguing against figurative interpretations existing since ancient times, as I already explained to Hanover. I'm simply pointing out that the Augustine quote itself points to literal interpretations existing alongside figurative interpretations in ancient times.

2. You seriously think that Augustine wrote that to discuss the behavior of one individual? Ok, consider the fuller quote with emphasis added:

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking non-sense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.

The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?

Reckless and incompetent expounders of holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although “they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.” [citing I Tim. 1:7]

Now, there's something that's been indirectly tackled, does your view on us not having free will, include, say, that you are forced to reply (or not) to this sentence here and does that include the ability to merely lift a finger as well? — Manuel

Well, there is an issue of whether I would have remembered to reply, which I'd guess I likely wouldn't have if @Vera Mont hadn't subsequently replied in this thread, making Vera part of the causal web that resulted in this reply. :smile:

I don't have strong objections to compatibilist notions of free will, as a matter of pragmatic necessity for beings as complex as we are. I just see a lot of value in awareness of what a compatibilist free will needs to be compatible with.

I'm unsure if Sapolsky would agree that there is felt (perhaps illusory) difference between lifting one's finger right now, and then have someone tap your finger such that it raises out of reflex. This is important. — Manuel

I'm sure Sapolsky would recognize the difference, and perhaps would go into detail about how the reflex finger raise was a result of a chain of events that didn't go beyond nerve paths between brain and spine. Whereas in the case where the finger raise resulted from someone having written a post on TPF, the causal path was vastly more complicated. It seems clear to me that Sapolsky understands that most of us model the world with our thinking playing a starring role in what we do.

This would make a fascinating thread -- invite people to describe, as best they can, what their personal "stream" is actually like. — J

Yeah, forget bats. It's challenge enough to understand what it is like to be other people.

The movie Temple Grandin makes an attempt to convey Temple Grandin's "thinking in pictures", which I guess Grandin herself found to be a worthwhile attempt at a depiction.

And I didn't know there were people without a stream of consciousness running on in their heads! — J

Not having a linguistic monolog going on in consciousness is not the same as not having a stream of consciousness. In fact, from my perspective it would seem rather impoverished, to be dependent on language for a stream of consciousness. I don't much experience a monolog these days. I used to in the past, and once (over a period of days) I experienced a knock down drag out dialog going on in my head. (Which is a long weird story.)

I'd guess "visual" might be the best succinct way of trying to convey the nature of my typical stream of consciousness, but it seems far from sufficient as a description.

That's fine - yet I think we already have instances in which people do not automatically go with kneejerk reactions. Compare the Nordic justice system with the US'. They are just night and day, one of them is much more humane, the other is just punishment or mostly based on more primitive notions.

But, as I understand it - especially the Nordic one - which is extremely little, is that both of them are based on the notion of freedom of the will, what changes is the way society reacts. — Manuel

Sure. There are many ways that humanity has culturally come up with, to deal with our innate tendedncies in a more prosocial way. Religions provide some such tools, for example Christianity and Buddhism. I wish I was more knowledgeable about the roots of the more enlightened Nordic perspectives, but I haven't looked into it and am open to reading recommendations.

Let's suppose it is an illusion. What changes? Not much. People will be prone to knee-jerk judgments and others will not. — Manuel

The extent to which people are educated, to have a more accurate perspective on human nature and how to deal skillfully with having a human nature, might change. I think this is a reasonable hope that Sapolsky and I share.

You could say that those who are more rational don't think free will is real, but then one would need evidence for this. I strongly suspect that even those who are less judgmental would not all fit into the camp of determinists, not that you are claiming this, I know.

Either way, we need data for this — Manuel

Right, and the data would require a book length treatment to lay out well.

But that quote you provided by Sapolsky looks like what others who deny free will say, especially the phrase:

"it’s very hard, and at times impossible, to uncouple from our zeal to judge others and to judge ourselves."

In other words, he lives and judges people as if we had free will (because if we really don't then how could we judge? It would be an illusion.), but then says we really don't have it. — Manuel

I haven't read Sapolsky's book, so I can only speculate on the case he makes. However, I'd say that we judge because evolution endowed us with instincts which are adaptive for members of a social species in maintaining the benefits of social living.

We do have natural impulses to see others and ourselves as blameworthy, and as the quote says, because of the instinctive nature of those impulses we can't be totally free of them. However, with a more accurate understanding of our own nature we can become more cognizant of that nature and develop skill at seeing beyond our kneejerk monkey-mindedness.

So suppose blameworthiness is an illusion/projection and we have rationalized our view of each other as free willed agents, because although simplistic, it fits with the monkey-minded ways we tend to interact with each other. Wouldn't there still be value in recognizing our proneness to such illusions, and in developing skills at seeing through such illusions. I personally find it valuable to have at least some skill at that.

Anyway, I recommend checking out what Sapolsky has to say, because I'm sure his case is a zillion times better than what I am able to say about it.

What's the point is trying to let people know about this? — Manuel

One point is suggested by this excerpt from the Amazon blurb on Sapolsky's Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will:

Yet, as he acknowledges, it’s very hard, and at times impossible, to uncouple from our zeal to judge others and to judge ourselves. Sapolsky applies the new understanding of life beyond free will to some of our most essential questions around punishment, morality, and living well together. By the end, Sapolsky argues that while living our daily lives recognizing that we have no free will is going to be monumentally difficult, doing so is not going to result in anarchy, pointlessness, and existential malaise. Instead, it will make for a much more humane world.

You can't change what they think and if they do change based on what you say, then there is freedom to choose based on reasons. — Manuel

It's not simple to change the way people think, but we certainly do effect each other's thinking, and we have fields such as education that would make no sense apart from an understanding that people's thinking can be changed. Perhaps your paradigm, for understanding changes in human thinking, is a bit unrealistic?

And I wonder, "why are these brain atoms producing consciousness? What is special about them?" "Well maybe when you arrange atoms in that way they are conscious?" "But Not Aristotle," I say to myself, "that is entirely an ad hoc explanation and besides, why would the arrangement of the atoms matter?" And I am unable to answer. — NotAristotle

Suppose it occurred to you, that you could look into answers to your questions rather than just remain ignorant of the answers?

Suppose you were equally ignorant of why the arrangement of atoms in your computer results in different behavior on the part of your computer than the behavior of a boulder. Would you say it is totally an ad hoc explanation to say that it is the difference in arrangement of atoms in your computer that makes the difference? Or would you realize that you could study computer engineering and understand the details of why differences in arrangements of atoms makes a difference?

Now admittedly, one can't very well remain in her armchair and become well educated about such things. Trips to libraries and labs might be needed. However, why take such a fatalistic position as, "And I am unable to answer." Why not have more faith, in the ability of that gray stuff between your ears, to learn the answers to questions that you are unable to answer at present?

The burden of proof is on anyone who claims to have the answer. Nobody has the answer at the moment. It’s all guesswork on everybody’s part. Somebody thinks it’s physical? Prove it. Somebody thinks it’s proto-consciousness? Prove it. Someone thinks it’s fields? Prove it. — Patterner

Holds a cloth soaked in chloroform over your mouth and nose...

:lol:

Not even "a point" – nothingness. — 180 Proof

Can nothingness have a property?

I'm not being dismissive of it, I'm challenging it on the basis of arguments and citations. — Wayfarer

I've seen more than enough evidence of your cherry-picking scientific views for their consistency with the beliefs you prefer to have. It's a common characteristic in humans. I've done it myself, and had my life gone differently, I might be as inclined to do so as you are.

However, aspects of the way my life has gone have resulted in my gaining expertise in a number of areas where reality will smack you upside the head if you aren't willing to put aside what you want to believe, in order to develop a better understanding of the way things are in reality. I don't think I deserve any more credit or blame for having my view, than you do for yours. It's just a matter of the way things have gone.

I do however, have a lot more confidence that my view will stand up to testing, than that your view will. For example, I expect that as you read this your are dealing with aspects of your social primate nature. Do you think I am wrong?

But, of course, philosophy itself is useless, right? — Wayfarer

Of course philosophy isn't useless, but when someone's philosophy is dismissive of natural philosophy the results don't tend to be very good.

And that is where Nagel's critique of evolutionary reductionism is salient. To seek to provide an account of reason, on some grounds other than the rational, is to call into question the sovereignty of reason. — Wayfarer

Nagel has failed to recognize the poor thinking in things like Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism and Intelligent Design. So your appeal to authority is particularly unpersuasive in this case.

FWIW, that article on cultural evolution of our ability to apply logic is just the kind of thing that Plantinga's EAAN grossly fails to address. To the best of my knowledge Plantinga never recognizes the significance of our evolutionary ancestors being members of a social species to the EAAN.

Ha, have any of your suspicions been verified? — Apustimelogist

Oh yeah. I'd estimate my record at something like 15 and 3. (With one of my failures being dismissing my intuition that I was observing sock puppetry.)

However, a large percentage of my successful recognitions of sock puppetry involved individuals with some degree of personality disorder, which makes for relatively stereotypical behavior patterns. My ratio when there aren't personality disorders involved is definitely lower.

Did the law of the excluded middle come into being as a consequence of evolution? Surely not - what came into being was our capacity to recognise it. And a great deal of the basic 'furniture of reason' can be understood in those terms - they're not the products of biology, but can only be understood by a sufficiently sophisticated intelligence, which h. sapiens possesses. — Wayfarer

Even if we accept the impossibility of recognition of the value of the law of the excluded middle as a result of biological evolution, despite you simply asserting it, here is a paper suggesting it was a matter of cultural evolution. Lucky thing that we are social primates.

To conclude, cooperative anticipatory planning selects for reasoning abilities, which can apply to all domains of thinking, and reasoners urged to follow public norms for thought. With this result, let me return to the issue of deductive logic.

5 Outlook
Given the evolutionary explanation of hominin reasoning just outlined, what about positions like Schechter’s, which claim that there has been selection for deductive reasoning? As mentioned earlier, such positions mainly suffer from a lack of empirical evidence. Imagining “it would be most useful” is not an evolutionary argument. (Perhaps the situation is different with our tancestors—but, again, this is no help in explaining the phenomenon at issue.) So, what real arrangement of things would foster behavior sequences, which could only be planned by deductive reasoning rules? Which kind of entanglement could make necessary truth preservation a prerequisite? As argued in Section 2, there is no theoretical reason to think such a prerequisite was necessarily required during hominin evolution. So far, there also seems to be no empirical evidence for such an artifact in the niches of the Middle Pleistocene hunters. Hence, there is neither evidence for deductive rules as a universal “model” how the human mind works when engaged in reasoning activities nor much reason to believe in deductive logic as a yardstick for reasoning in general.

Nevertheless, we have deductive logic. Why is that? I would propose the following as a probable explanation. If my account is on the right track, the cognitive prerequisites for deductive logic indeed evolved during hominization. To wit, it is being able to reason domain-generally and being inclined to follow public norms in reasoning. However, as also argued above, such norms for reasoning get always established by local circumstances—based on needs but established as cultural artifacts.Footnote15 If true, the norms for deductive reasoning had to be established in a particular niche due to particular demands.

Following one historical exposition, the deductive method appeared late in human history,Footnote16 first invented, probably, by members of the Athenian elite 2500 years before present. It arose as a specific argumentative practice within debates: as dialogues with the element of persuading one another (Dutilh Novaes 2015: pp. 595–597, 2012; Netz 1999). Here, this method is advantageous. Granted both participants of a dialogue agree on a shared set of premises, any conclusion drawn by deductive steps from this set should be regarded as entirely compelling. Given a logically valid form, no counterexample can be given which would show that premises could be accepted, but the conclusion would remain open to being denied. Because no countermove is possible, the opponent must accept the conclusion or should revise one of his premises otherwise.

From this perspective, deductive reasoning is like reading, writing, or calculating a socially learned practice. Deductive reasoning is neither an evolved biological “constant” nor a “universal” of Homo sapiens’ mind. It is a cognitive ability to be inoculated by a certain practice and only open to those members of a population who has been brought to a specific learning environment. Hence, deductive logic must be inherited by a tradition, and only those who have learned it will be able to reason by deductive rules.Footnote17 In this sense, it is like any other piece of mathematical notation. We are not “hard-wired” to use analytical algebra, but once this cultural artifact is there and part of our niche, we can put it to use for all kinds of things. The same goes for deductive logic, as I propose here.

...but we're being awfully sloppy here... — J

Agreed, I was thinking as I wrote that previous post, that if the discussion were to get serious, I'd have to do a fair bit of clarification. For example, I don't consider consciousness to be a thing but rather a process.

Still, in light of the scientific evidence on the side of physicalists it seemed worth bringing up the question of why it is physicalists that are supposed to have the burden of proof.

To assume that I am both conscious and just a physical thing and then to conclude that consciousness is just a physical thing would surely be begging the question. — NotAristotle

Not to speak for @Philosophim, but I treat it as a working hypothesis, and wonder whether you can present any falsifying evidence (while not expecting you to be able to do so).

Spend enough time with such a perspective and it becomes like waiting for people to present evidence that the Earth is flat.

What of your own question begging?

Because, again, consciousness is not a physical thing. — NotAristotle

This may be true, I'd say the difference between a motto and a commandment is the scale of it and the heavier weight of the commandment. — mentos987

"Commandment" can be an awfully semantically loaded word, if what you mean is something more along the lines of "something likely to be beneficial for all of us to subscribe to in a social contract."