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  • Solution to the hard problem of consciousness
    A possible solution: as we all know, matter is made up from two basic fields. The matter fields contain three kinds of charges. On for the long-range interaction with other particles, and two for the small-range. This charge is somewhat a mystery in physics. It is not known what it exactly is. We therefore can use it for an explanation that can't be explained. Consciousness is charge. The charge of matter. Our conscious feelings and perceptions are extremely complicated forms of this charge. At the same time, panpsychism can learn from this, as charges reside in all matter.
  • Solution to the hard problem of consciousness
    We can still chit-chat about the world, though, including self-awareness. Meaningfully, too. Or we'd have no forums. — jorndoe

    I fully agree! What is the self? I'm aware of it and see him in the mirror. :smile:
  • Solution to the hard problem of consciousness
    ↪jorndoe


    Sorry! I meant that you can comprehend color... Just as I can. It's blue.
  • Solution to the hard problem of consciousness
    There is a very simple solution. The physical charges, electric, strong, and hyper-strong, give the explanation. The charge of matter is what gives matter that special ingredient.
  • Solution to the hard problem of consciousness
    Who says it's unsolvable? — frank

    I do. Whatever formal explanation you give to the color blue, it's no explanation of the color blue itself. "Das Ding an Sich" can't be known. Only experienced from within.
  • IQ vs EQ: Does Emotional Intelligence has any place in Epistemology?
    It seems to me, it is more useful to know how to navigate the emotional spectrum than understanding the purpose of thought. — TheQuestion

    You assume a separation of these two. In reality they are connected. Of course you can explore knowledge and emotion separately, and investigate them as such. And use that knowledge as a key to success. But when you apply intelligence and emotion in practice, your measured and explored intelligence and emotion won't really help you. It's their unexamined combination that's the key.
  • Solution to the hard problem of consciousness
    Right, no comprehensive explanations. — jorndoe

    I,m not sure what you mean by a comprehensive explanation, but that's not the one I'm looking for. You can't comprehend color just as I can. You can give it a contextual meaning just as I can. Maybe color is a necessity to see the difference between different materials, as is usefull in a Dawkinsian approach to evolution. Maybe it corresponds to different wavelengths of a small range of the solar electromagnetic field. Maybe it is a huge collective parallell traveling of electric spike potentials on a least resistant path on the forrest of the intricate and madly complex and orderly chaotic neuronal structure in the visual cortex. Operating on its own or stimulated by the retina, formally, dynamically (temporally), non-linearly, and holistically structured in the larger context of that same neuronal structure. I comprehend color, and so do you. We both know what blue is. No question about it. But do you understand what it is? No. It's a hard problem
  • To What Extent Does Philosophy Replace Religion For Explanations and Meaning?
    The origins of Western religion is interesting and I am sure that Greece was central, but it is probably extremely complex. — Jack Cummins

    It is of course more complex than we can ever describe in a scientifically adequate way. One can only offer an abstract, formal approximation of what happened in the development of western religion from what happened in the days of old Greece. But one will always be unfaithful to the actual historical happenings, which are hard to verify these days. Who knows exactly what happened in the ancient world, in intercultural development, or in exchanging ideas in their chaotic world of existence. One hasn't even the knowledge of how one elementary particle that was floating around around the gods of the Olympos. I think the general outline is pretty simple though. The Olympic gods were replaced by the unit-base vector God of Xenophsnes and equally minded. It was assigned objective existence in an extramundane world. The God had superhuman features. It was all-powerfull, all-knowing, omnipresent, and at the same time invisible and never knowable himself. This monster God was singular nevertheless. Omnipresent he might be (personally, I think this omnipipresence was the desire for the ones who invented him), he will remain invisible to all of us. There was something about the Greek gods that Xenophanes didn't like. I don't know what, but it's a fact they disappeared. Maybe it was because of that heavenly domain of Plato, which showed exactly the same features as the divine world of his fellow country man (Xenophanes). The combination of the two forms a powerful combination of the desire to know, which again can never be fully reached, according to both Greek gentlemen.The ways by which this image got a hold on the western scientifically driven world is complex. Via the dark ages it got a hold again in the Enlightenment, freeing people from the tyranny excessive by the church. It was a welcome aid in freeing people from being burned at stakes. The same attitude that made religion kill (this was the attitude of Xenophanes) was taken over by the new orthodoxy (freeing and enlightening as it might have been) of an endlessly explorarable physical world, without gaining ever exact knowledge of it (Popper!), took over though. The world was "discovered", the idea exported, and other cultures exterminated or put in reservetories. The same attitude again. "There is only one true reality and it applies to all!". Now how fundamental can you get? Every culture says it's view has its fundamental in reality. Of course. How else can it be. Proclaiming it to be the standard for everyone is a different matter and reduces humanity.
  • Solution to the hard problem of consciousness
    I don't believe that the world/scenario that I mentioned is more or less imaginary than the one we currently live in. — Flaw

    Isn't it the same world the? How can a material brain, body, and universe exist without the creature seeing, for example, colors, or the world around them? Faces would have no meaning as there is nothing to express.
  • Solution to the hard problem of consciousness
    What do you all think about the following thought experiment:
    Imagine a physical universe of space and time exactly like ours in which all of the same laws of physics apply and all of the same events occur but in this universe there is no conscious "experience". Meaning that there are plenty of books and discussions between philosophers and scientists about consciousness and experiences but no real "observer" in any of these scenarios.     — Flaw

    This experiment supposes soul and matter can exist independently from each other. Maybe they can, but in that case your mentioned world cannot exist.
  • Solution to the hard problem of consciousness
    ↪jorndoe


    As respectable and informative your writing is, it still doesn't explain my conscious feeling of pain. How can it. The conscious pain cannot be explained. A scream explains it too. Litterally. It ex plains, shouts out.
  • Solution to the hard problem of consciousness
    Why is that?

    What do you all think about the following thought experiment:
    Imagine a physical universe of space and time exactly like ours in which all of the same laws of physics apply and all of the same events occur but in this universe there is no conscious "experience". Meaning that there are plenty of books and discussions between philosophers and scientists about consciousness and experiences but no real "observer" in any of these scenarios.     — Flaw

    Because all explanations have the consciousness as subject matter. They don't have access to the consciousness itself. There is no knowledge of the consciousness itself. You have to feel it on the inside, experience it. So no explanation can be given. You can construct theorize endlessly about its context though. Say the matter it's in (the neural structures in the case of things like vision, thoughts, memories, sound, itch, spacetime awareness) or its function, or it's origins, but the stuff itself is not explained. That's why it's called the hard problem. Outside of it you can see the difference (matter(, inside you can feel it (consciousness, even when you see things outside of your body).

    Oh, you can imagine a world like you do, but it is just a soul depleted world, you have extracted the matter of the universe only, without its content, and placed it in an Imaginary world.

    How will you ever explain the colors you see, the sounds that you hear, or the feeling of music that makes you cry? Apart from their function and reasons of having them? How do you explain blue? In a sense I litterally explained it here in the sense that you know what blue is. Can a blind man ever experience it? It is said so. A blind man can even be afraid in the dark, or see motion when he sees black only. But I doubt if he can experience blue. Maybe an abstract concept of it. If he has no neural correlate for it, it's questionable, if not impossible. Blue is no concept.
  • God and time.
    What you say is clearly false. Of course God can choose whether to be subject to time or not. That's the point! How, though? Well, time would have to be God's creation. If time is God's creation,then he is choosing to be subject to it. So you seem to have missed the point somewhat. — Bartricks

    Spacetime can be infinite. How the hell could he have created that at a moment in our time? Any moment in time has a predecessor. How could he have created spacetime if it had a definite beginning? In our time, that is. Conclusion:he experiences time too. A heavenly spacetime, of which the worldly spacetime is an expression, to make life possible. He is not subjected to it. How can you be subjected to spacetime?
  • God and time.
    don't know what you are on about. The only 'trick' I use is to combine ingenuity with ruthless reasoning. — Bartricks

    I'm on to expose your view. It's a nice view, though I can easily show it to be wrong. From my POV, that is. To God, time can exist or not. I think it does, but it's a different, godly and holy kind of time. In that time, still ticking in the outerworldly, extra-spatiotemporal, eternal godly realm, he can can create a universe like we live in. Even, as I think, it is a spatiotemporally infinite one, with our universe being a finite intersection with it, having a total dimensionality of one less than the full 7-dimensional extent (that means six, in layman's terms).
  • How do we know that our choices make sense?
    I’m not exactly sure I know what you’re referring to when you mention a base system of knowledge. Would you mind explaining the concept to me? I would be grateful.
    /quote]

    It's pretty simple. Different people have different views of reality and a knowledge in accordance with it. I see a physical universe filled with material stuff, and a knowledge of it. Others see a universe filled with God's, ghosts and ethereal entities. You can base your decisions on both. Of course there are more then two realities as humanity is not divided up in two. Nevertheless all people can have choice making in common.     — Average
  • How do we know that our choices make sense?
    Choice isn't a technical phenomenon, it's a random phenomenon. — Varde

    It can be, though that's pretty problematic. Most choices are non-random. It's not universal though. In the sense that it applies to all people.
  • How do we know that our choices make sense?
    Since we both agree that knowing the truth is important whenever we decide to do something perhaps it might be a good idea to discuss how that knowledge is acquired. I’m of the opinion that a simple ratio is enough to find out if our methods work well enough to be worth our time and energy.
    4m     — Average

    Sure! Good idea. Though we must firstly choose a base system of knowledge. Or you prefer a formalization? Applicable to all bases, be it the scientific one or the one of the Hopi? Examples do the trick too. As many examples as possible can do the trick too and can show the different choices people make, on the different bases of knowledge.
  • The Knowledge of Good and Evil
    I believe there is nothing wrong with attempting to interpret the bible as an art rather than trough faith. — SpaceDweller

    Indeed there isn't. It's a piece of literature that expresses a system of knowledge, a worldview. The major part expresses an abstract moral system with rather dramatized scenes and examples from life.
  • God and time.
    So you meant 'time' and elected to use the word 'something'to express that? A word that doesn't mean 'time'and is considerably longer. Clever.

    Good job too in addressing nothing argued in the OP. God is timeless. Ok,if you say so. That's how philosophy works. You say something and it's true. No need for arguments.     — Bartricks

    You merely try to capture other POV by means of your old trick. Making these conform to yours and then calling them a self proclaimed invention of the basic stuff that reigns your own POV.
  • The important question of what understanding is.
    "The important question of what understanding is."

    Why classify this question as important? Is as important or non-important as any other question. I'm not trying to troll or provoke here but what if you have the answer? Then you understand what it is. Makes this people more understanding? Knowing what understanding presupposes a theoretical framework to place the understanding in. Understanding this is more important than knowing what it is inside this framework. Of course it's important to understand people. It connects us. Makes us love and hate. The lack of it can give rise to loneliness. Though it's not a sine-qua-non for a happy life. You can be in love with someone you can't talk to, because of a language barrier. Though harder, understanding will find a way. No people are completely non-understandable. Only truly irrational ones, but these people are mostly imaginary., although I can throw a stone over the water without any reason. You can push the importance of understanding but at the same time non-understanding is important as well. Like I said, knowing the nature of understanding doesn't help in the understanding itself. It merely reformulated it and puts in in an abstract formal scheme, doing injustice to the frame-dependent content. It gives no insight into the nature of understanding itself.
  • Are there sports where nothing is open to subjective interpretation?
    What about hunting sport? The animal shot is dead or not.
  • God and time.
    No, not okay. It's God, after all. God isn't subject to time. — James Riley

    Indeed! God doesn't need time to create the universe, even if it is a temporal infinite one, as I think. This is the problem of modern physical attempts to explain the origin of the singularity. What happened before the emergence of our universe from a singularity? How could it have occurred if no time was available yet? Analogies are put forward to circumvent this paradox, like comparing the problem with the North Pole. That it doesn't make sense. Well, it doesn't, but in the case of the big-bang it does. Hawking used complex time to address this question, thereby effectively introducing a second time to place the creation of our time in. But how comes this second time into being? The situation can be solved more easily by taking into account an existence of time before the big bang. But then still the problem remains from where that eternal time comes. God's did the job, though cannot understand that process in spatiotemporal processes.
    I like your style of writing and responding!
  • Are there a limited amounts of progressive content available to creative sci-fi writers?
    Are there limited amounts availabe of a progressive content? This question presupposes a progressive content. A progressive content grows. So the amounts in it grow too. It follows that there is no limit. The question is self-contradictionary.
  • To What Extent Does Philosophy Replace Religion For Explanations and Meaning?
    I think you make an unwarranted leap. The Greek conception of deity was quite mundane — Michael Zwingli

    That's true. But, as you can read, Xenophanes didn't like them and turned into an abstract 1. Existing independently from as and being the only true one. Which is no problem, but this attitude shows contempt f for other realities and conceptions of truth. Existing in the same kind of extramundane world as Plato suggested for his math. Being able to know approximations only. But not the God by itself (who in the western conception is reduced to a merely formal moral system). An attitude present in modern science.
  • Are there a limited amounts of progressive content available to creative sci-fi writers?
    thought evolution was a logical process. — Varde

    Of course indeed! It's very logical. It has to be. If not, structures wouldn't have the possibility to evolve into life.

    for ex. A snake that grows back a tail it's lost, or any type of growth, such as aging or scaling, is because of pulsation of muscles.

    On cyclic progression, my former example(backgrounds, stories) anoints a greater cycle; happening in the mental realm.
    ReplyOptions     — Varde

    I'm not familiar with muscle pulsation and cyclic progressions in relation to evolution. Of course muscle pulsation can be very helpful for performing circular motion or hammering, or other periodic motions, and you can progress cyclic, like a snake does when walking a terrain, I don't think evolution operates in this way, though thanks to the cycle of night and day it can take place.
  • To What Extent Does Philosophy Replace Religion For Explanations and Meaning?
    Philosophy and religion have combined origins, as expressed in the history of Western philosophy. — Jack Cummins

    The origin of western religion was connected once to the notion of abstract formal systems, which constituted the major part of ancient philosophy. Logic, math, moral systems, etc. Religion was still connected to them. Nowadays, the connection has gone, but the ontological content lingers on. A single God existing in a realm outside of spacetime, not-knowable to mankind. Though glimpses can be perceived sometimes, and they can interact with the world occasionally, mainly to punish. The only things we can know about them is their moral system. And the fact that they created the universe and life in it (how else could it be). But the nature of themselves is unknowable, so it's thought. The same attitude as held in science, which has its origins ancient Greece too, but is as disconnected from it as religion is nowadays.
  • Are there a limited amounts of progressive content available to creative sci-fi writers?
    I can infinitely evolve creatively by making one or multiple image references to earlier creativity. — Varde

    Creativity doesn't evolve. The very process of evolving is a creative process. Creativity is going on all of the time. Also in the SF-field. There are always new technologies imaginable, in accordance with accepted or non-accepted ideas in science *that's what good SF is all about). Imagining a warp-drive device (as recently proposed by a French guy), a gravity gun, or whatever (say a rotating container with a super liquid in it, to store kinetic energy), will get easier when scientific knowledge progresses, and can even form a stimulation or improvement of science. So contrary to the assumption made by the OP, there is no evolution, convergence, or approximation to some final abstract entity. Which is the view hold by most scientists. Unluckily we are trained in adopting this doctrine from the young age on, and this reflects itself in the question asked by the OP.
  • To What Extent Does Philosophy Replace Religion For Explanations and Meaning?
    Philosophy and religion have combined origins, as expressed in the history of Western philosophy. — Jack Cummins

    I disagree. Western religion has its origins in old Greece, a country more philosophical than others. Xenophanes replaced the concrete poly by an abstract mono. Unimaginable, independent of us, objective, eternal, and the same for all. Reflecting itself both in modern science (which posits, as does Xenophanes, an eternal single objective that cannot be known "an Sich", but only, in combination with the most abstract formal system of all, math, approximated, which is basically a Platonic notion, the difference being that Plato talks about mathematical objects, existing in an extramundane, metaphysical, heavenly world) and Western religion, delegating God to the same extramundane world. How many pictures exist of their image? Quasi non. And it's always a man with a beard. It's even blasphemous to picture them (in basically the same religion, Islam, the Sharia forbids explicitly to paint pictures of him, and I think the Bible says about the same). The views of Xenophanes and others in old Greece, still make their bells heard loudly nowadays. In the whole of the world. Be is science or religion. The scientific minarets are high as they have never been before.
  • Does God have free will?
    The view of @Bartricks is mind centered. It's all about the mind. I guess his mind is a great one. But what's so special about it? It can be free, it can be oppressed and the will can be hold by other minds tied to bodies with a will. To say it's unfree and ruled by a physical laws, that it is determined by them is non-sense. Just as it's non-sense to say its thoughts or other experiences are determined by our genes or memes in order for them to propagate themselves. Or by whatever abstract principle.
  • Does God have free will?
    God cannot overcome logic though. can he? He cannot be both omnipotent and be unable to lift a stone. — Janus

    Of course they can. They are omnipotent. They are bound though by the possibilities. If they could do everything, they can do nothing. If you can't lift a stone, then you can't. If you can't travel faster than light then you can't. If they could there lives would be chaotic. A whimsical fleeting existence. God's are not like that. Like the universe isn't, which they created in their image. Is their will free? Of course. If they don't force the wills of each other.
  • COP26 in Glasgow
    I'm very pessimistic. The only way out would be a president who orders the placing of solar panels on every rooftop within a week, closes all carbon-exhausting devices, orders the construction of hydrogen production units, the construction of a distribution system thereof,
    the replacement of all fossil-fuel-based engines by hydrogen ones (although an exception can be made for classical cars and boats), and the order to income-tax the 10 richest people of the Earth with 90%, mister Tesla with 99, for the financing. They will be left with enough material wealth. 90% of 100 000 000 000 is still 10 billion, for which I would settle) Huge fresh water from the sea extractors should be built in the dessert. To prevent the so feared water wars. t's as simple as that.
  • Solution to the hard problem of consciousness
    Consciousness attempting to self-comprehend has troublesome self-reference...
    Analogous to a map being part of its own territory.
    Does that mean there's an information horizon somewhere?     — jorndoe

    Consciousness simply can't be explained. Only experienced.

    There is an information horizon in the sense you can't envision you whole brain, as the image is part of the brain.
  • How can one remember things?
    Yep. And unlike the conventional notion of a computer – the representational understanding - meaning arises semiotically. What is significant is the brain's ability to eliminate that all that "information".

    To recognise is to whittle a near infinity of possibilities down to some useful act of identification. In a split second, any number of less well fitting states of interpretation are discarded.

    So computers place high value on storing information. Brains place high value on how much can instead be ignored.

    Recognition is something forced on our attention by our inability to otherwise look past some aspect of our environment.     — apokrisis

    I tend to consider this as poetry! In a positive way, I mean! Great.
  • Is personal Gnosis legitimate wisdom?
    Google it. Look at some data. As mentioned, I recently read Enlightenment Now. You'd probably hate it, which doesn't make it wrong. — hanaH

    I Googled but couldn't find data about it. I think the virus approach is best in the short run. I think modern science has a pretty distorted picture of the human body. Cut up, disconnected, and reductive. The non-scientific approach addresses the body like it is. I'm glad my mother gets surgery though. She has been in pain for a few months now. Reparing her damaged place is science pretty good at. So thank the doctors! I had my eyes radially keratotomized. A technique applied in the former USSR on the wagon line. But my insurance wouldn't pay! Damn that greedy company, who steal money from me every month! And I even have to pay my daily methadone dose myself (upto 380).

    Let me be even more specific. Thanks to the rotating of the Earth, facing the heat and the cold periodically, the slow changing of the heat flow daily, gave rise to dissipate, non-reversable structures, continually interacting to give rise, in a reproductive way, to the beautifully diversity and interconnectedness of life we see nowadays. We are the only naked species but have gained a creative freedom. But fundamentally we are the same as any other creature. The universe was created by gods when they had nothing to do. So it's a fancy of the gods. I damn them for it! How could they have made a universe with a form of life that's so violent and tyrannical? I thank them at the same time. For having made it.(yes, they have made you too, via evolution) It's beautiful!
  • Is personal Gnosis legitimate wisdom?
    I agree with Popper that creativity is crucial, so that science even grows in the soil of poetry. But we have to test those hunches. — hanaH

    I don't agree. Why should it? I like creativity, but I don't consider it crucial. In the sciences it welcome, But if one want to stick to the status quo, why not?

    I don't personify nature. I am a Western personality, a child of the Enlightenment, — hanaH

    Allright. You don't personify nature. Good for you. I don't either, though sometime call it mother Nature and talk about her as if she is female. There are many creatures living in it though. They are our fellow beings and have a face just like you and me. Like a consciousness. I don't have a problem killing them, but the way science and its application, in that relentless pursuit of knowledge, has wiped them out, tortured them (for which some scientists are paid well or even get a medal), changed or destroyed their habitat, etc. is simply too much. You don't sound pretty enlightened. As a child of it.



    It's just that focusing on the microorganisms was more effective — hanaH

    And how do you know that? You did the investigation?

    "Dogma of science" strikes me as a crude phrase. — hanaH

    It is a crude phrase? Why? Because you are an atheist, and don't like the dogmas of church? Like the church has dogmas, so does science. There is even the central dogma of biology. We are just vessels of genes and memes in urge to propagate them. So it goes. Now what a view! Damned, do they really think this?

    However. Good luck as a child of enlightenment.
  • Solution to the hard problem of consciousness
    A lot of philosophical analysis comprises questioning what seems obvious to you — Wayfarer

    Here I totally agree. Philosophy should be a means to set us free from the tyranny of Truth as practiced by science. I don't need philosophy though to set me free from my own truth. It seems pretty obvious to me in a non-scientific way.

    I don't assume the brain to be the explanation of consciousness. If you read well, I said that scientific materials I'm does. And science is materialialistic.

    I proposed there is some extra, non-materialistic ingredient of matter, though I can't explain what (and in that sense consciousness just can't be explained, however your urge to explain it, and for the better so; it would take away it's beauty and mysteriousness).

    I wrote there is a correspondence between the two. If you look at my brain you look at it materialistically. Which you can question, but I assume this. I pull you in my truth, so to speak. Outside of the brain, you can see the difference, although a working brain, by it's very nature can't ever be grasped materialisically, scientifically, in its whole, although science makes different, until now very disassociate, cut-up, reduced (or holistic), abstract, invasive, attempts to explain it. It will never ever succeed.

    Consider the nature of meaning. — Wayfarer

    Why the hell should I consider the nature of meaning in relation to consciousness. If you can explain well, then I know what you mean, whatever it's "nature' (your suggestion is a typical bow to science, which is looking for "nature" too).

    Human consciousness, which is linguistic, abstract and ration — Wayfarer
    . That's what you think. It can be pretty the contrary to all of these three! Let me tell you.
  • Solution to the hard problem of consciousness
    The point of David Chalmer's essay, Facing Up to the Hard Problem of Consciousness, is that first-person experience is not within the scope of objective, third-person descriptive analysis. — Wayfarer

    But a connection between the two is obviously there. If I experience whatever conscious quality, then there is a material counterpart in the brain. The person looking at my brain, however he thinks that to do, can describe it materialistically. But there must be a non-materialisic ingredient of matter by means of which I have the conscious experience. I can hear music inside my head, or outside my head, in which case the materialistic outside has to be considered too. The materialistic view is a subjective image though, existing in the mind of who looks at me materialistically. So there must be more to matter than matter only.
  • How can one remember things?
    ↪Joshs


    I'm not sure I understand the bodily memory. Do you think the very recognizing is a kind of relapsing into an earlier state?
  • How can one remember things?
    ↪apokrisis


    Interesting articles! Seems they fit my bill. Thanks! :smile:
  • How can one remember things?
    The memory as we experience it is always a reconstruction , a reinterpretation of what was. It is a cobbling together of what is new in our situational comportment with channels of interaction with the world already carved in our bodies out by habits of behaving. — Joshs

    I think this is the answer!
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