A lot of Christians I've talked to would respond with something like, "Why would you think there are objective moral goods or evils if there is no God?"

Do you see yourself as particularly well qualified to judge what is science?
— wonderer1

You are getting mighty close to arguing from a place of bad faith. But please do continue...poison well commence I guess. — schopenhauer1

I asked a question which you didn't answer. Do you know why are you are jumping to conclusions about whatever arguing you are speculating about?

In any case, I'd say the poisoning of the well began with your OP.

If you don't like the Chinese Room argument because it seems too narrow, then call my version, the "Danish Room Argument". That is to say, my point that I wanted to take away was that processing can miss the "what-it's-like" aspect of consciousness whilst still being valid for processing inputs and outputs, whether that be computationalist models, connectionis models, both, none of them or all of them. I don't think it is model-dependent in the Danish Room argument. — schopenhauer1

Well, by all means, present your Danish Room Argument, but it's sounding like it amounts to an assertion that science has no role to play in explaining "what it is like".

That seems fairly out of touch with what the Philpapers survey suggests is mainstream philosophy of mind:

Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism?
Accept or lean toward: physicalism 248 / 414 (59.9%)
Accept or lean toward: non-physicalism 105 / 414 (25.4%)
Other 61 / 414 (14.7%)

As for me, scientific understanding has proven to be of enormous explanatory value in understanding what is like to be me. (And to some degree, what it is like to be you.) More and more it looks to me, as if you are a modern day analog to a geocentrist, when it comes to the topic of philosophy of mind, but you do you.

BTW, I'm rather accustomed to, and unbothered by, people finding things I say disagreeable. Respond or don't, as you like.

I'd have some quibbles as what is "science" but it would be going on a tangent. — schopenhauer1

In a discussion of theory of mind, consideration of neuroscience would be going on a tangent?

Do you see yourself as particularly well qualified to judge what is science?

Rather, I want to focus on the idea of the difference between what is going on in the Chinese Room experiment and an actual experiencer or interpreter of events that integrates meaning from the computation. — schopenhauer1

Why do you want to talk about what is going on in a Chinese Room rather than what goes on in brains? I thought I had already explained that the Chinese Room argument is an argument against computationalism, and not particularly relevant.

I'm getting the impression that you are wanting to beat on a straw man, rather than have an enlightening discussion of the topic. Say it ain't so.

I was t saying that for rhetoric. You were pretty haughty sounding there. Information processing is not necessarily scientific, though it is technical. — schopenhauer1

An important aspect of neuroscience is developing scientific understanding of the information processing that occurs in brains. Neuroscience involves knowledge of other relevant sciences such as physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology. Yes, technology plays a huge role in humanity's ability to make progress in understanding the information processing which occurs in brains, but that is fairly tangential to the question of what is being learned in neuroscience.

Oh come now, get off the pedestal. I was just pointing out problems with the move to information processing which I know is a popular approach. — schopenhauer1

Come now, crawl out of the pit of scientific ignorance you are in.

But it's more than trivially true in respect of the question posed in the thread, the question being, what does the ground of experience really comprise? Are beings concatenations of atoms behaving in accordance with the laws of physics, or something other than that? And if 'other', then what is that? — Quixodian

Do you expect the sort of simple answer that someone might post here? Or do you expect the answer would take years of study to get a handle on?

Yes I understand the move to describe it as information processing, but does that really solve anything different for the hard problem? Searle's Chinese Room Argument provides the problem with this sort of "pat" answer. — schopenhauer1

Please remember, I was responding to your question:

But we are back at square one. Some processes are not mental. Why? Or if they are, how do you get past the incredulity of saying that rocks and air molecules, or even a tree has "subjectivity" or "consciousness", or "experience"? — schopenhauer1

Do you see your question as a purely rhetorical question? Or do you want to learn about the answers? To develop some understanding of how far beyond square one (some of) humanity is?

Searle's Chinese Room is an argument against computationalism. We could have a nuanced discussion of the argument's merits and limitations, but let's suppose the argument totally succeeds against computationalism. In that case we have reason to narrow our view of the sort of information processing which could result in mental events to non-computational information processing. However, I only presented information processing as a criteria for ruling out the many physical processes which aren't the sort of physical processes suitable for resulting in mental events. Narrowing things down further is not a problem, depending on how specific we want to get in various ways.

As you walk away self-assured, this beckons back out to you that you haven't solved anything. Where is the "there" in the processing in terms of mental outputs? There is a point of view somewhere, but it's not necessarily simply "processing". — schopenhauer1

I solved the problem I wanted to solve - providing a relatively informed answer to your question, as to why some processes don't have mental results. Now I'm going to swagger away from your moved goal posts. :razz:

But we are back at square one. Some processes are not mental. Why? Or if they are, how do you get past the incredulity of saying that rocks and air molecules, or even a tree has "subjectivity" or "consciousness", or "experience"? — schopenhauer1

Some physical processes are information processing apt, while most physical processes aren't information processing apt. If what we refer to as mental processes can only supervene on information processing apt physical processes, then we are some distance from square one.

Does Ovulation Change Women’s Sexual Desire, After All?:

So yes, women do increase their sexual desire during ovulation. And yes, this is important because most women do not know when they are ovulating. When these findings are added to the evidence that men show increased interest in ovulating women, and other findings that testosterone influences sexual desire in both sexes, it is clear that the extreme versions of the Blank Slate social constructivist views of human sexuality, such as Gagnon and Simon’s script theory, were wrong.

Someone grows up with culture reinforcing X, Y, Z traits as attractive markers. These are the things that should get your attention, in other words. This then becomes so reinforced that by the time of puberty, indeed the connections are already made that this is the kind of things that are generally attractive. Of course, right off the bat there is so much variability in people's personal preferences (beauty is in the eye of the beholder trope), but EVEN discounting that strong evidence, let's say there is a more-or-less common set of traits that attraction coalesces around. Again, how do we know that the attraction, or even ATTRACTION simplar (just being attracted to "something" not even a specific trait) is not simply playing off cultural markers that have been there in the culture since the person was born and raised? There is the trope in culture, "When I reach X age, I am supposed to be attracted to someone and pursue them or be pursued (or mutually pursue or whatever)". — schopenhauer1

Cross cultural studies have been done

[PDF]Sex differences in human mate preferences: Evolutionary hypotheses tested in 37 cultures

To label something as "tall" is a relative descriptor, to label something else as having a height of 6 feet is an absolute descriptor. — LuckyR

To label something 6 feet is to describe it relative to something, like the length of someone's foot.

In most cases, I think what you're talking about is incredibly exciting, and I can think mostly of examples where it will be used for good. — Judaka

Indeed. It has incredible potential for being beneficial, and it is proving itself very beneficial in science and medicine right now.

I talk about the subject because I see it as a subject that is important for humanity to become more informed about, in order to better be prepared to make wise decisions about it.

I'll try not to disappoint. — Isaac

I'm afraid you aren't succeeding.

I have the impression that you are trying to paint Jabberwock as a bigot, which seems the sort of thing you deplore about woke cancel culture.

Although I'm not actually that familiar with TikTok, there has been controversy over its AI gathering data from its user's phones to recommend videos and such, do you have any familiarity with this controversy? — Judaka

I'm afraid I don't know much about TikTok.

Knowledge can be a means to power, but rarely does it amount to much, and I'm not too sure what the actual concern is. Could you give a context? Does TikTok, or gambling apps using AI, or stuff like that, represent your concern well, or is it something else? — Judaka

I disagree about the power of knowledge rarely amounting to much. The colonization of much of the world by relatively small European nations, is something I see as having been a function of knowledge conferring power. The knowledge of how to make a nuke has conferred power since WWII. Trump's knowledge of how to manipulate the thinking of wide swaths of the US populace...

In the case of knowledge coming from AI, it is not so much that there is anything specific I am concerned about, so much as I am concerned about AIs ability to yield totally surprising results, e.g. recognize factors relevant to predicting the development of schizophrenia.

As an example nightmare scenario, suppose an AI was trained on statements by manipulative bullshit artists like Trump, as well as the statements of those who drank the kool-aid and those who didn't. Perhaps such training of an AI would result in the AI recognizing a ways to be an order of magnitude more effective at manipulating people's thinking than Trump is.

:up:

AI tests into top 1% for original creative thinking:

...The researchers submitted eight responses generated by ChatGPT, the application powered by the GPT-4 artificial intelligence engine. They also submitted answers from a control group of 24 UM students taking Guzik's entrepreneurship and personal finance classes. These scores were compared with 2,700 college students nationally who took the TTCT in 2016. All submissions were scored by Scholastic Testing Service, which didn't know AI was involved.

The results placed ChatGPT in elite company for creativity. The AI application was in the top percentile for fluency -- the ability to generate a large volume of ideas -- and for originality -- the ability to come up with new ideas. The AI slipped a bit -- to the 97th percentile -- for flexibility, the ability to generate different types and categories of ideas...

I've never heard a perspective like this. Can you give an example showing the cause for your concern? — Judaka

I don't know of any cases of modern AI having been used nefariously. So if that is what you are asking for then no.

I can give you an illustrative excerpt, to convey the sort of 'superhuman' pattern recognition that I am concerned about:

In 2015, a research group at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York was inspired to apply deep learning to the hospital’s vast database of patient records. This data set features hundreds of variables on patients, drawn from their test results, doctor visits, and so on. The resulting program, which the researchers named Deep Patient, was trained using data from about 700,000 individuals, and when tested on new records, it proved incredibly good at predicting disease. Without any expert instruction, Deep Patient had discovered patterns hidden in the hospital data that seemed to indicate when people were on the way to a wide range of ailments, including cancer of the liver. There are a lot of methods that are “pretty good” at predicting disease from a patient’s records, says Joel Dudley, who leads the Mount Sinai team. But, he adds, “this was just way better.”

At the same time, Deep Patient is a bit puzzling. It appears to anticipate the onset of psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia surprisingly well. But since schizophrenia is notoriously difficult for physicians to predict, Dudley wondered how this was possible. He still doesn’t know. The new tool offers no clue as to how it does this. If something like Deep Patient is actually going to help doctors, it will ideally give them the rationale for its prediction, to reassure them that it is accurate and to justify, say, a change in the drugs someone is being prescribed. “We can build these models,” Dudley says ruefully, “but we don’t know how they work.”

https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/04/11/5113/the-dark-secret-at-the-heart-of-ai/

Currently there is no true AI, there is simulated AI. However, even simulated AI can replace numerous workers in middle management and low level creative fields. This can/will have a devastating impact on employment and thus the economy as well as social stability. — LuckyR

What do you see as the distinction between "true AI" and "simulated AI"?

My biggest concern about AI, is its ability to acquire knowledge that humans aren't up to acquiring due to the enormous amount of data AI can process without getting bored and deciding there must be a more meaningful way of being.

Knowledge is power, and individuals or small groups with sole possession of AI determined knowledge can use such power unscrupulously.

What government are you assuming to be Jabberwock's?

I agree. Do you see a contradiction between what I said and what you said?

I think there is a lot that is interesting about human acts that is independent of whatever moral judgementalness might pass through people's minds.

Let's suppose that when Einstein presented his theories of relativity it was intentional. Why is the defining characteristic of those acts by Einstein his intentions rather than the increase in human understanding?

Blinking and breathing are not acts in the philosophical sense. — Leontiskos

In that case I assume the following sentence says the same as what you wrote:

Every intentional human act involves an intention, and the intention is the primary defining characteristic of an act.

So the first proposition is a tautology, and I'm not seeing any good reason to believe the second proposition. Why think the intention is the primary defining characteristic of all acts?

Very well said.

Every properly human act involves an intention, and the intention is the primary defining characteristic of an act. — Leontiskos

Medical doctors expect properly functioning humans to have the patellar spinal reflex.

I blink and snore without intention. There are all sorts of things humans do without intention.

I'm fine with waiting until I've read more of what you have to say, before deciding that I have something that I want to try to communicate to you.

To date, it is unclear that cellular automata, neural networks, or the like can do anything that Universal Turing Machines cannot. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I didn't mean to suggest that I think neural nets can do things that a Turing machine couldn't do in principle. Remember I was talking about "the way human thought really works".

We don't have thinking based on Turing machines. We have thinking based on neural networks, and understanding the nature of the more analogish sort of information processing that occurs in neural networks is conducive to improving one's understanding of oneself.

For example Peter Tse's book The Neural Basis of Free Will: Criterial Causation discusses aspects of understanding free will, in light of scientific understanding of the way we think. It's not the sort of free will that many people want to believe in, but there is a lot of pragmatic value in understanding it.

I don't claim any expertise on the thread topic, but is there a reason to think that the 'wisdom of crowds' doesn't merit serious consideration here?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd

The wisdom of the crowd is the collective opinion of a diverse independent group of individuals rather than that of a single expert. This process, while not new to the Information Age, has been pushed into the mainstream spotlight by social information sites such as Quora, Reddit, Stack Exchange, Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers, and other web resources which rely on collective human knowledge.[1] An explanation for this phenomenon is that there is idiosyncratic noise associated with each individual judgment, and taking the average over a large number of responses will go some way toward canceling the effect of this noise.[2]

:fire:

Why no popcorn emoji?

Beware the jabberwock my son...

According to wikiquote that statement that you are propagating, as being from Heisenberg, is misattributed.

Yes. And ever changing. If psychology is affected by culture (and I'm certain it is) then what was true yesterday in psychology might not be true today. We're playing catch up. — Isaac

Good point about the moving target. Furthermore, I'd think propagation of psychological understanding itself contributes to the target moving.

Corrective rather than constructive, and the consistency being enforced is that of the narrative your current model is organized around, rather than "the way the world really is" or something. — Srap Tasmaner

For me at work, it is often a matter of a 'picture' rather than a narrative, and I am trying to bring my mental image of how an electronic gizmo works into better compliance with how thing work in the world. If my mental image is out of compliance with the way things actually work in the world, the world may well inform me of this with flames, puffs of smoke, or minor explosions. (Although more typical is that the circuit just doesn't work as expected.)

That said, I agree with most of what you said, inasmuch as I am interpreting it correctly.

Pattern recognition. Thats a huge part of what the brain does and it’s so dedicated to finding patterns that it will even see patterns that aren’t there, optical illusions etc. — DingoJones

:up:

In case anyone is interested the following link will take you to a forum thread where I make use of evolutionary psychology based thinking:

Does being in a blaming state of mind amount to Monkey Mindedness?

I'm afraid it starts off quite inchoate, and there is a lot of context behind some comments that I'm not going to try to fill in. Still, perhaps some will recognize some usefulness to it.

But beyond the general idea of it, it seems very speculative, and it seems inherently so - I don't see a path out of the speculation for most hypotheses in the evo-psych realm.

I think that pretty much sums up what I think of evo psych - the basic tenet of it is pretty much obviously true, but any specific hypothesis is probably untestable, unverifiable, unsatisfiable. — flannel jesus

Perhaps it is important to mention that what can be learned about human nature from evolutionary psychology is only a portion of a large complex picture.

I don't know of any evolutionary psychologists, who if asked, "Nature or nurture?", are going to respond with 100% nature. or even 50% nature. EP is most appropriately understood as simply a part of a very complex picture.

I tend to frame the effect of reason in terms effects on our priors, so reasoning is still post hoc, but has an effect. Basically, if the process of reasoning (which is effectively predictive modeling of our own thinking process), flags up a part of the process that doesn't fit the narrative, it'll send suppressive constraints down to that part to filter out the 'crazy' answers that don't fit. — Isaac

:up:

I'd likely have said "intuitions" rather than "priors" but there is a lot of overlap at the very least.

What I'm convinced doesn't happen (contrary to Kahneman, I think - long time since I've read him) is any cognitive hacking in real time. I can see how it might cash out like that on a human scale (one decision at a time), but at a deeper neurological scale, my commitments to an active inference model of cognition don't allow for such an intervention. We only get to improve for next time. — Isaac

I don't recall getting such an impression from Kahneman, but because Kahneman seems to have come to his conclusions from a more psychological than neurpsychological direction I wouldn't be too surprised if he made such a mistake.

In any case, I very much agree that shifting our fast thinking (or deep learning) generally takes a substantial amount of time. Though there can be sudden epiphanies, where a new paradigm 'snaps into focus', the subconscious development of the intuitions underlying the new paradigm may have been taking place over the course of many years.

It appears like the cellular responses (so-called learning) took five times longer to occur in living tissue than it took in prior studies inanimate mass, "in vitro". That is very clear evidence that the relationship between stimulus and effect, is not direct. The cause of this five-fold delay (clear evidence that there is not a direct cause/effect relation) is simply dismissed as "noise" in the living brain.

Furthermore, it is noted that the the subjects upon which the manipulation is carried out are unconscious, and so it is implied that "attention" could add so much extra "noise" that the entire process modeled by the laboratory manipulation might be completely irrelevant to actual learning carried out by an attentive, conscious subject. Read the following:

"It is important to note that these findings were obtained in anaesthetized animals, and remain to be confirmed in the awake state. Indeed, factors such as attention are likely to influence cellular learning processes (Markram et al., 2012). — Metaphysician Undercover

How is is it that you learned about these confounding factors?

From the "devious" scientists.

Noam Chomsky argued:

"You find that people cooperate, you say, 'Yeah, that contributes to their genes' perpetuating.' You find that they fight, you say, ‘Sure, that's obvious, because it means that their genes perpetuate and not somebody else's. In fact, just about anything you find, you can make up some story for it."[43][44]
— Chomsky — schopenhauer1

So you look deeper and learn about how our closest living relatives live in relatively small cooperative bands in territories bordering on the territories of other small bands of chimps, and while there is cooperation within a band there is 'murderous' hostility towards chimps from neighboring bands. Then you look at the way humans behave.

Us and Them

Most of them were published subsequent to 2005, from what I can see. David Chalmer's article was published in 1996. I think much of the literature reflects that, as it was an influential article and put the idea on the agenda, so to speak. — Wayfarer

Again you are demonstrating that you don't know much about neuroscience. Off the top of my head, the Libet experiment made use of first person report more than a decade before Chalmer's paper was published. Split brain studies making use of first person report go back to the 1960s.

Did Chalmers write any papers as an infant?

That's very deceptive use of equivocation. — Metaphysician Undercover

Unless you are able to present some evidence, that animal learning does not supervene on cellular learning it's a bit ludicrous to call it very deceptive use of equivocation.

It looks to me like you simply have a bias against science.