This is nonsense. Of course you know what it's like to be you. If physicalists have to make this sort of move to salvage their position, they've lost. It's not convincing to anyone. — RogueAI

I didn't say this as a physicalist but as someone trying to make sense of 'what it's like to be.' Maybe you can explain what it means as I am unable to access an experience that coherently matches the statement.

But that's not his hypothesis (or he's being disingenous). Kastrup's hypothesis is idealism. Idealism claims that this is all the dream of a cosmic mind/god. Mutations, entanglement, physics, the universe, the Big Bang, etc., none of it is real. It's all just elements of the dream. — RogueAI

Does he use this dream metaphor, I must have missed this?

To be fair he doesn't say 'it is not real' he says it is not what we think it is. All reality is mind and those mutations, the universe, entanglement, etc - are aspects of how mind presents itself when viewed through the dissociative divide - through our perspective as 'alters' of Mind-at-Large. It's an elaborate narrative and you'd need to read his detailed account to make better sense of it. At this point I don't have enough interest to do this.

When I claim that reductive physicalism has a ‘hard problem of consciousness’, I am claiming that it is impossible for that metaphysical theory to explain consciousness: — Bob Ross

Right, you have said that several times. But that is not something you know.

I am not claiming that we merely haven’t yet. — Bob Ross

Right. You are claiming that we can never provide a physical explanation. But again, that is just an assertion, and it is not evidently true. [

quote="Bob Ross;811138"] ... my definition of a ‘hard problem’ is that it is irreconcilable under the view in question[/quote]

There you go. Based on your definition. But creating a definition and then rejection something because it contradicts your definition does not hold water.

The Hard Problem is a term of art. It has a specific meaning as defined by Chalmers and is used as defined. Calling something "a hard problem", stipulating it is irreconcilable with physicalism, is your problem, not the accepted meaning of the hard problem.

so in order to explain consciousness on this view one has to reduce mental states to brain states. — Bob Ross

The brain is part of an organism. Physicalism need not be reductive physicalism. The recognition that a living organism can be conscious, is not reductive. To look at an organism as a whole is not reductive physicalism. To claim that consciousness must come from elsewhere because a physical explanation must be reductive is misguided.

[set of biological functions] impact consciousness in [this way]” — Bob Ross

It is not that biological functions impact consciousness but that it creates consciousness.

why do those biological functions give rise to consciousness? — Bob Ross

We don't know. But we do know that some living organisms are conscious and we do not know of consciousness elsewhere, so it makes perfect sense to look at conscious organisms. To ignore these physical organisms because you reject reductive physicalism is willful blindness.

The brain is part of an organism. Physicalism need not be reductive physicalism. The recognition that a living organism can be conscious, is not reductive. To look at an organism as a whole is not reductive physicalism. To claim that consciousness must come from elsewhere because a physical explanation must be reductive is misguided. — Fooloso4

:100: :fire:

But that line of reasoning is untenable. There is no way to compare noumena and phenomena in order to determine that the one is not the other. — creativesoul

But I know that my perception of the tree is not the tree, right? My perceptions are constituted by phenomena: sights, sounds, tactile sensations and so on, but the tree is not merely a sight, or a sound (say wind in the leaves) or a tactile sensation (say the feel of its bark) or the sum of those. Can I not be said to know that without knowing what the tree is as it is in its unperceived status?

It very well may be separate metaphysics attribute to things-in-themselves and noumena a knowledgeable reality of their own, but in Kant, having given only 26 pages to objective reality, the implication is that nothing about them has any significance. — Mww

So at this point noumena is a conception understanding thinks but can’t do anything with. — Mww

I agree that, by definition, the ideas of the noumena and the things-in-themselves are useless, but I think the fact that we can, indeed must, think them as the limits of knowledge, has great significance for understanding the situation we find ourselves in.

The mind-independent world is not naturally divided into individual parts — Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p92)

Does that mean it is nothing but an amorphous mass of nothing? :lol:

I can see absolutely no reason to think that individuation relies on conscious observers.

Exactly!

So that passage quoted from Magee, which I have no argument with, puts paid to Kastrup's notion of mind at large, and even to Schopenhauer's notion of "noumena as will", since "will' is a human category.

Glad someone noticed it! As you may recall, I myself have disputed the necessity of positing mind-at-large. The way I put it is simply that, if you argue that the nature of being is constituted by mind, then the answer to the question as to whose mind, is that it is THE mind. It is what the mind does, whether yours, mine, or the next person.

I can see absolutely no reason to think that individuation relies on conscious observers. — Janus

Charles Pinter makes his case very well. Try and imagine the Universe from the perspective of a rock. That might provide a hint.

The recognition that a living organism can be conscious, is not reductive. To look at an organism as a whole is not reductive physicalism. To claim that consciousness must come from elsewhere because a physical explanation must be reductive is misguided. — Fooloso4

Daniel Dennett is Chalmer’s foil. He puts it like this:

In Consciousness Explained, I described a method, heterophenomenology, which was explicitly designed to be 'the neutral path leading from objective physical science and its insistence on the third-person point of view, to a method of phenomenological description that can (in principle) do justice to the most private and ineffable subjective experiences, while never abandoning the methodological principles of science.’ — Daniel Dennett, The Fantasy of First-Person Science

’

The objection to Dennett remains that no third-person account of even something as simple as pain can ‘do justice’ to the actual feeling of pain, because no amount of analysis of the firing of nerve fibres, no matter how scientifically accurate, actually constitutes ‘the feeling of pain’ (‘what it is like to be in pain’). This is why, for example, John Searle parodied Dennett’s book as ‘Consciousness Explained Away’.

Hello Fooloso4,

Right, you have said that several times. But that is not something you know.
…
Right. You are claiming that we can never provide a physical explanation. But again, that is just an assertion, and it is not evidently true.

I outlined an argument for why I do know this. I am unsure as to why you said this: it is unproductive.

There you go. Based on your definition. But creating a definition and then rejection something because it contradicts your definition does not hold water.

I already addressed this in the previous post:

Bob Ross:

You say that I am question begging because my definition merely precludes scientific investigation. I want to clarify that I am not doing that: my definition of a ‘hard problem’ is that it is irreconcilable under the view in question—there is nothing question begging about that. I am then, on top of using that definition, claiming that the ‘problem’ of consciousness for reductive physicalism is a hard problem in the sense that I defined it. There is nothing question begging about that because I am not saying that the definition is the proof of it being a hard problem. Now let me explain why I think there is a hard problem of consciousness for reductive physicalism (and it is not merely a soft problem of consciousness).

So, why did you make the same claim again despite me clarifying that I am not making that claim?

The Hard Problem is a term of art. It has a specific meaning as defined by Chalmers and is used as defined. Calling something "a hard problem", stipulating it is irreconcilable with physicalism, is your problem, not the accepted meaning of the hard problem.

I clarified exactly what I meant by the terms. If you semantically disagree, then forget those terms. I am claiming that reductive physicalism cannot account for consciousness. It isn’t productive for us to bicker about the terms. I express that claim as the “hard problem of consciousness”, you clearly don’t but, most importantly, this doesn’t matter for all intents and purposes of the substance of the debate.

Physicalism need not be reductive physicalism.

This is true and that is why I specifically used the term ‘reductive physicalism’. I do not think that irreductive physicalism is a valid position (as it either dissolves into reductive physicalism or becomes a closeted substance dualism). I can elaborate on that if you would like.

The recognition that a living organism can be conscious, is not reductive

Correct, but the claim that the living organism is fundamentally a mind-independent organism is to reduce consciousness thereto.

To claim that consciousness must come from elsewhere because a physical explanation must be reductive is misguided.

If one cannot account for consciousness with a reductive physicalist approach, then the only other option is that it is not emergent. The proof that it is emergent rides on the idea that it can be reduced to brain states.

It is not that biological functions impact consciousness but that it creates consciousness.

As I said before (in the proof), the only way to argue that it creates consciousness (without just making it up) is to argue in the form of “consciousness is [set of biological functions] because [set of biological functions] impact consciousness in [this way]”. You are assuming it creates consciousness even though this form of argument cannot prove it.

To ignore these physical organisms because you reject reductive physicalism is willful blindness.

The only way you can prove that consciousness is produced by the brain is by the reductive physicalist method. So if you can’t prove it with reductive physicalism, then you have no reason to believe it.

Bob

Whatever distance is discovered, not invented, and not existentially dependent on whatever human discoverers' heads. :shrug: — jorndoe

You seem to be wrong here jorndoe. Miles, km, etc., all those terms you used to express the distance refer to something invented, not discovered. It seems you have this backward, distance is invented not discovered.

Charles Pinter makes his case very well. Try and imagine the Universe from the perspective of a rock. That might provide a hint. — Wayfarer

I can't even begin to imagine a rock having a perspective, but I can imagine a rock existing without there being any conscious observer of it. Of course, it would not look like a rock, feel like a rock and so on without some sentient creature to see it and feel it. Kant acknowledged that things exist in themselves, but of course that existence is not in terms of perceptual categories. Individuation is not a perceptual category, or at least not primarily a perceptual category. It's also worth noting that individuation does not entail separation.

You seem to be wrong here jorndoe. Miles, km, etc., all those terms you used to express the distance refer to something invented, not discovered. It seems you have this backward, distance is invented not discovered. — Metaphysician Undercover

↑ backwards

Distance to the Moon doesn't begin to exist because someone makes an estimate, rather it can be estimated because it exists.

:up:

Distance to the Moon doesn't begin to exist because someone makes an estimate, rather it can be estimated because it exists. — jorndoe

So you say, but where are the premises which prove this?

The distance between here and the moon is indeterminate until it's measured. This means that there is no fixed value. The variance in the numbers you gave are evidence of this. And that there is such a thing as "the distance", is just an assumption prior to the measurement. This assumption motivates the measurement, and the measurement produces the value. But this does not imply that the value existed before the measurement. Prior to measurement there was just an assumption.

This is really no different from the issue of uncertainty in quantum physics. That the particle has a position prior to being located is just an assumption. This inspires the act of measurement which fixes the position. But the fact that the measurement fixes the particle's position, does not imply that the particle had a position prior to being measured. Likewise, if the measurement of the distance between here and the moon fixes the distance, this does not imply that the distance existed before the act of measurement.

I can imagine a rock existing without there being any conscious observer of it — Janus

Really? You can imagine a rock without imagining yourself observing it?

The distance between here and the moon is indeterminate until it's measured. — Metaphysician Undercover

Is this another way of saying that it's not measured until it's measured? Or does "indeterminate" carry some meaning here unrelated to measurement?

But this does not imply that the value existed before the measurement. Prior to measurement there was just an assumption. — Metaphysician Undercover

With respect to the distance "itself", as it were, it is indeterminate before measurement; with respect to those who will measure, but haven't yet, there is an assumption that the distance is measurable, that it can be determined. Is this a way of saying that scientists, unless they are foolish indeed, ought to agree that values they have not determined are values they have not yet determined? Or is there more to this assumption?

if the measurement of the distance between here and the moon fixes the distance, this does not imply that the distance existed before the act of measurement. — Metaphysician Undercover

If by "distance" you mean a value, the result of a measurement, indeed it won't exist until it exists. Or do you mean that the spatial separation of the earth from the moon doesn't exist until someone thinks it does? Something must underwrite the assumption that "it" can be measured; its existence of that "it" to be measured would do nicely.

I can't imagine a particular rock without imagining it in terms of perceptible attributes, but I can imagine that a rock could exist without anyone perceiving it.

Sure. I'm not really disagreeing with you. --- I'm just noting that our minds only work the way they work. But you're a better Kantian than I, so I'm not telling you anything.

I would give some thought, though, to exactly how this rock-imagining stuff works. Go slow. Is it like a regular picture of a rock but with a caption that says, "No on is looking at this"? There's something interesting here, don't rush past it.

There's something interesting here, don't rush past it. — Srap Tasmaner

You make a good point, and perhaps "imagining" is not the right word; certainly not if the term is equated with "visualizing". So, there's a difference between 'I can imagine (in the sense of 'visualize') a rock existing that I am not perceiving' and " I can imagine that a rock exists when no one is looking at it', because in the former case I could be thought to be relying on the visually perceptible attributes of a rock in order to imagine it existing unperceived, which one might say would constitute a performative contradiction.

So, perhaps a better way of saying it would be 'I can, without contradiction or inconsistency, think that rocks exist when no one is looking at them'.

So, perhaps a better way of saying it would be 'I can, without contradiction or inconsistency, think that rocks exist when no one is looking at them'. — Janus

Yeah, but I'm not sure we can just switch from visualizing to something vague like "conceiving" and declare the problem solved. I think it was Hume who noted that to conceive of something is to conceive of it existing -- which cuts both ways: on the one hand, there's no "and existing" step, which either means existence is not a real predicate (which Hume says in almost so many words), or it means it's already baked in, i.e., it's at the very least part of how we think things. Maybe it even means that words like "existing" are names for our habits of thought more than anything else. (Hume, again, will end up saying almost exactly this, and he finds the idea horrifying.)

All that's about the rock's existence, I guess. I don't know if Hume's exactly right but I think he's on the trail of something, as he usually is. There's some connection between thinking and the object of thought's existence, and the various isms offer an account of what that connection is.

So you're thinking rocks, and thinking them existing, whether that's another step or not, and you're also thinking no one observing these rocks. Various ways to do this, I guess: you could conceive persons (or technological proxies for them, cameras and stuff, whatever), and they just happen not to observe some particular rocks, and the rocks continue peacefully existing undisturbed by not being noticed. Or you could strengthen this scenario: rather than just happening not to observe these rocks, though they could, you could make it impossible, make some particular rocks unobservable, even with technology. Simplest way to do that is conceive rocks in the distant past before what we take to be people had evolved. The only strengthening left would be to imagine there just aren't any persons, anywhere in the universe, and never will be. --- That's something more or less like the whole range.

Pointless though, right? I mean, to conceive the absence of persons to observe, you have to conceive them so you know what to keep out of your desired conception. You may claim to be able to conceive a universe without people, but you'll only get to what you call that conception by conceiving people and conceiving them absent. I don't see any way around that.

Does it matter? The idea is that the content of this conception is still person-free, even if your own mind isn't. But it's not blindingly obvious anymore what "conception" means; it's clear that even to define the pure person-free conception, you not only need the person conception as well, you need them to be constellated in a particular way.

I'll stop now noting that how these conceptions are related is particularly interesting because it runs through absence. Not perfectly obvious how dealing with that is going to work, but it makes a fitting third to go along with thought and existence.

Yeah, but I'm not sure we can just switch from visualizing to something vague like "conceiving" and declare the problem solved. I think it was Hume who noted that to conceive of something is to conceive of it existing -- which cuts both ways: on the one hand, there's no "and existing" step, which either means existence is not a real predicate (which Hume says in almost so many words), or it means it's already baked in, i.e., it's at the very least part of how we think things. — Srap Tasmaner

I agree that to imagine something is to imagine it existing. Of course, it doesn't follow that the imagined thing necessarily actually exists. So, when Tolkien imagined the story Lord of the Rings he imagined every scene and event as existing, because it would make no sense whatever to say he imagined them and also simultaneously imagined them not existing.

It doesn't seem to me that when I imagine something where there are no persons, that I have to simultaneously imagine persons as being not present. When I imagine, for example, a planet in a far distant galaxy I just have an image of a planet. However, in this case I am visualizing a planet, which means I am relying on perceptible attributes in order to do that. And this is different to thinking that there could be a planet in a distant galaxy that has never been or ever will be seen by humans or any other percipient entities.

I think it's interesting that you introduce absence, because we can also imagine the non-existence of things, or to put it perhaps more coherently, we can imagine (or think) that something we know to exist might not exist. I'm not sure we can visualize absence, although I can visualize an empty room, for example, but that then would be imagining a phenomenal room, not a noumenal one.

When I imagine, for example, a planet in a far distant galaxy I just have an image of a planet. However, in this case I am visualizing a planet, which means I am relying on perceptible attributes in order to do that. — Janus

I think it's stronger than that: I think you're imagining it as you or at least a creature a lot like you would see it, the attributes perceptible by us and those like us, and so on. When you visualize this, you visualize it from a certain vantage-point, yes? You can't visualize at all without picking the spot where the eye of the observer is situated.

Now if you do that but then add, "Only there's no observer at that spot," I think that just misrepresents the conception, which clearly has <person> as an element, only just off-screen.

And this is different to thinking that there could be a planet in a distant galaxy that has never been or ever will be seen by humans or any other percipient entities. — Janus

This is a thing we can say, but it remains to be seen what we mean by this. I think the conception here is still of the sort of thing we or critters like us might experience, it just happens that none of us do. And that means it's still all tangled up with us, and what is a possible experience for us. Which is fine, right? What else is there to talk about? We can pass by what isn't a possible experience for us, but we should at least be clear that we're still always in the picture in one sense or another. --- That's much vaguer than I'd like, but I'm just about done for the night. Saying what those senses are and aren't is exactly what we're about here.

I can visualize an empty room, for example — Janus

Good! If you hadn't said this, I was going to ask what your model for conceiving absence is, so you beat me to it. This bag used to have apples in it, now it doesn't, that sort of thing.

Think it'll work for conceiving unobserved rocks?

Think it'll work for conceiving unobserved rocks? — Srap Tasmaner

I think everything you have said there is consistent with what I have said, in that I have acknowledged from the start that visualizing something is going to rely on perceptible attributes, and as you noted, which I hadn't, also viewpoint.

The further point was that although I obviously cannot visualize a rock as it is without any perceptible attributes or from no viewpoint, I can imagine that such things could exist under those conditions, in fact it is more difficult to imagine that they cease to exist when not being perceived.

But the caveat here is that the kind of existence they have is unimaginable to us, we can only imagine that they do not have the kind of existence they have as perceived phenomena, so it is an apophatic kind of imagining, or again, perhaps 'conceiving' might be the better term.

This kind of stiff is very hard to talk about coherently.

, then how come we sometimes get it wrong? We can get estimates wrong. (Some more than others.) Doesn't make sense for inventions. That's the direction of existential dependency.

I found that substance dualism, likewise, fails to explain reality as well as analytical idealism because of the hard problem of interaction. — Bob Ross

It does - it feels intuitive, but it leaves many questions open, which need not even arise.

Firstly, objects in general, under analytical idealism, are not disassociated complexes: only other conscious beings are. The cup I am holding exists only nominally distinctly from the chair I am sitting on: they both do not have distinct boundaries like disassociated minds. — Bob Ross

If objects are not disassociated complexes, then that's much more sensible. And yes, these objects don't have a natural separation point in which we can say this is a cup and this other thing is a table, on which the cup rests on, there's no reason why we can't take both things to be a single object.

Secondly, I agree with you that DID is still a very newly researched psychological disorder, and that is why Kastrup notes it as a working hypothesis to solve to soft problem of decomposition. — Bob Ross

It's the eternal problem of the one and the many. Are we ourselves in reality separate beings or are we one being, that perceives itself as many? The latter option is not so trivial to get rid of...

Still basing a large part of one's philosophy on DID is risky and one should be cautious in relying on it too much. Maybe when more is learned, it could be sensible to use, or it could end up being a false avenue.

And yes, these objects don't have a natural separation point in which we can say this is a cup and this other thing is a table, on which the cup rests on, there's no reason why we can't take both things to be a single object. — Manuel

You can pick the cup up and take it away from the table, though. That said, nothing is ever completely separate from its environment.

So that passage quoted from Magee, which I have no argument with, puts paid to Kastrup's notion of mind at large, and even to Schopenhauer's notion of "noumena as will", since "will' is a human category. — Janus

I would say that Kastrup would argue that Magee does not go far enough. For Kastrup all that is is mentation and for him mind at large is necessary because it allows - as Kastrup says 'for my car to remain extant in my garage when I go inside.' Mind at large allows for object permanence. I think in this way Kastrup is closer to Bishop Berkeley. Abstract from Kastrup's The Universe in Consciousness, 2018

I propose an idealist ontology that makes sense of reality in a more parsimonious and empirically rigorous manner than mainstream physicalism, bottom-up panpsychism, and cosmopsychism. The proposed ontology also offers more explanatory power than these three alternatives, in that it does not fall prey to the hard problem of consciousness, the combination problem, or the decombination problem, respectively. It can be summarized as follows: there is only cosmic consciousness. We, as well as all other living organisms, are but dissociated alters of cosmic consciousness, surrounded by its thoughts. The inanimate world we see around us is the extrinsic appearance of these thoughts. The living organisms we share the world with are the extrinsic appearances of other dissociated alters.

I had a hard time understanding what you were conveying, as I think we just use terminology differently, so let me ask some questions pertaining thereto.

Subjective Idealism and solipsism aren't ideas

By “idea”, I was meaning it in the colloquial sense of the term. Technically, those are metaphysical theories. One is a sub-type of idealism that does not hold there is an objective reality but, rather, that all that exists is to perceive or to be perceived (e.g., the tree doesn’t exist other than an image within your perception). The other is the theory that all that exists is one’s own mind, or, epistemically speaking, one can only know the existence of their own mind. — Bob Ross

The question here concerns whether realism and idealism are truth-apt synthetic propositions, with each representing competing theories that describe different and incompatible possible worlds, or whether they are analytic tautologies that are referring to different aspects of the logic of language and are merely talking past one another. Notably, realists and idealists each consider their stances to be irrefutable parts of commonsense, and are concerned with understanding the semantics of language in opposite directions from opposite starting points.

"Being is perception" is an unavoidable tautology of non-representational idealism that is necessarily appealed to whenever an observer interprets a physical proposition in terms of his personal experiences

I don’t see how this is true. For example, both physicalists and analytic idealists hold that being is more than perception. No one inevitably speaking in terms of their experiences forcing “being” to be perception. Why would that be the case? — Bob Ross

If your "analytic" idealism abandons "esse is percipi" how does it differ from representational realism?

Berkeley's subjective idealism was already "analytic" in the sense that he postulated that observation and conception is tautologically equivalent to existence. Many philosophers misunderstand this principle.

For example, they take the principle to imply that unobserved items disappear from existence. But this doesn't follow from the principle, for according to the principle it isn't false that unobserved objects exist, but nonsensical.

What Berkeley's principle is actually saying, is rather trivial ; that only what is observed or conceived can be thought or talked about. If a realist asserts that "unperceived objects such as quarks exist", Berkeley wouldn't contradict the content of the assertion but remind the realist that his use of "unperceived" requires elaboration until it refers to something thought or perceived, for the assertion to become sensical.