If we are going to start changing the hypo and adding intentions and cheeseburgers, we would have to conduct a new analysis of responsibility and intent and actions in furtherance of these. — Fire Ologist

I think this is a strawman because clearly what is not interesting about the trolley problem is not the trolley problem on its own, but the underlying reasons that people make decisions on it. Changing the scenario is relevant because by exploring counterfactual scenarios we are testing and probing the underlying reasons why people make these choices and how they would react in different scenarios.

Changing the context to cheeseburgers is relevant - not in the sense of wanting to analyse a new scenario with cheeseburgers - but in the sense of analyzing whether your use of the notion of intent is really consistent here. If the answer to the question of culpability for murder changes when we replace the goal of saving innocent people with eating cheeseburgers, then clearly lack of intent in the sense that has been described in this scenario is not sufficient to remove culpability.

I think the question the hypo poses is: should the person who either pulls the lever or sits still be held responsible for anyone’s death? And the answer is no, under the existing facts. — Fire Ologist

I think there are layers. Someone may not be blameworthy in some sense that they can't help being forced into a situation where someone had to die. But does that mean there was not a better or worse decision ethically? Not necessarily.

The key difference is that they aren't experiments, they are theoretical in nature only. You cannot really do these experiments practically and the ethical requirements today are so high that they can't ever be done. — Christoffer

They are experiments. What is being measured is not what someone would do practically but their judgement or opinion. You don't need actual experiments to assess someone's opinion.

An actual moral experiment where people are acting arguably might bring in many more factors than simply someone's belief or opinion on a moral scenario.

So imo your criticisms that these may not be representative of real scenarios is misplaced because the goal I have in mind here isn't to talk about what people actually do, its to yalk about the beliefs they have.

People don't necessarily behave consistently; however, it is usually difficult for people to maintain inconsistent beliefs. People carrying inconsistent beliefs tend to try and explain away the inconsistency with reasoning which is more internally consistent (e.g. you think its bad to hurt living things but okay to kill animals... you need to find an additional reason to explain away this inconsistency).

Asking about people's opinions or judgements as opposed to their actual behaviour is invaluable in understanding what people hold to be a consistent moral framework and why they hold it.

When it goes into the real world then things change... people are perhaps more likely to miscalculate the correct option... people get scared... peoples judgements are clouded... peope turn out to not care or not value morality over other motivations for their own behaviour.

Yes, they work as introduction courses to philosophy, but since there's no validation past the theoretical, and real world examples of similar events show much more complexity in their situational circumstances that they become unquantifiable as statistical data, they end up being just introduction material, nothing more. — Christoffer

So are you suggesting that people change their morality when it comes to complex vs. simple scenarios? Do you personally change your whole moral thinking when it comes to a complex scenario vs. a thought experiment? Or do you believe you are using the same moral framework to tackle different problems? If you agree on the latter then I don't see the obstacle in using simplified scenarios as ways to tap into and clairfy people's reasons on moral scenarios.

I'm not sure what you're disagreeing — Christoffer

Well your comment looks like its saying these experiments only pinpoint flaws in people's thinking but I don't see how that can be the case when there is no consensus on a correct answer. I don't really understand how strength and depth in moral reasoning would bring about an optimal, uncontroversial solution to the trolley problem.

sometimes just a question of their current state of mind and mood. — Christoffer

This regularly happens in real life. People often behave in the wrong way and then only realize they were shouldn't have afterwards.

But still, the problem is that people's justifications rarely correlate to how they actually behave in real moral situations. — Christoffer

Again, it depends what you are interested in - the psychology of moral behaviour or moral beliefs, reasoning and frameworks - and no doubt there is overlap.

Just reading the audience discussion around the moral actions in The Last of Us part 2 and how people had problems with everything that happened in that story is more fascinating and revealing as a case study in morality than how people justify their choices in the trolley problem. — Christoffer

Well I can only take your word on that because I don't know anything about that.

the more trivial I've found these thought experiments to be. — Christoffer

Trivial in what way? To me, the lack of consensus
makes the trolley problem non-trivial.

But if the person on the trolley said “I need to save the most innocent people I can” and pulled the lever he wouldn’t be culpable for murder because that was not his intent. — Fire Ologist

What if it was about their own life and not innocent people? What if it was about tge reward of a tasty cheeseburger: " I didn't intend to kill anyone, I just wanted that cheeseburger so bad".

Yes, thinking about it I see what you mean. When I made this comment I was still stuck on the question of whether this had to be some evil agent concocting the whole scenario. One could then look at it in the sense of someone refusing to participate in their game. At the same time, you could argue that in this context, if there is abetter or worse outcome then one should still make it. One could go even further and argue that if the whole scenario waa concocted by an evil genius then some of the moral responsibility is alleviated from making utilitarian-type choices.

If the scenario was totally accidental then one could say that there is no reason to refuse to participate. But then again maybe this applies most to non-trolley scenarios: e.g. a basic rescue mission where you could choose to save 5 or 1 or 0... then the choice is pretty obvious. I see though that the trolley-problem complicates this in the sense of the fact that 5 people were always going to die. I guess then one could refuse to participate in the sense of refusing to make such a choice if it meant killing someone. Then again though, the trolley scenario is constructed in such a way that refusing to participate is indistinguishable from making a choice... did you really refuse to participate or did you make the choice based on the idea that killing someone and encroaching on that person's freedom is worse than allowing 5 people to die who were going to die anyway.



Very interesting. Even if it was the whole human race (including your self?)?

There then comes the irony and absurdity of committing to your moral standards so strongly that you would allow the human race to die and, arguably in doing so, render your value system meaningless.

One could also plausibly argue almost a kind of immoral dimension in the sense of someone would sacrifice the rest of the world just so they personally didn't have to bear any moral culpability (though maybe from someone elses perspective they may still be morally culpable for ending the human race).

I think a case could be made for a policy of non-interference, but that case falls apart when the numbers get extreme. — RogueAI

It also falls apart when the scenario is accidental / incidental and hasn't been engineered by some evil agent.

But the messiness of reality strips the simplicity out of the scenarios adding so many moving parts that the scenario in itself has changed so much that the parameters of measurement becomes skewed. — Christoffer

I don't see this much different to how scientific experiments are always much simpler than everyday reality. A dice roll is presumably describable via Newtonian / classical forces but no one creates a direct Newtonian / classical model of a dice roll and then conducts an experiment to validate it.

But it's not very good at higher level thinking about morality as it's already clear how complex morality can really be. — Christoffer

For me, the point of it isn't to produce moral thinking and correct moral answers but to uncover the underlying reasons and intuitions of moral thought.

Most of us would assume those reasons are consistent across many different scenarios regardless of complexity or if "the experiment [has] already been conducted".

Yes, but in that case I much rather look at the scientific experiments that have already been conducted. Since experiments that cannot be actually conducted only becomes theoretical and at best very surface level. The fact that people regularly over-estimate their ability to act morally in every single situation makes it hard to actually get a good "scientific" result. — Christoffer

The thought experiment itself is the conduction of it. I just want to see what the opinion or judgement is of it. The fact that people may over-estimate their ability to act morally would apply to any thought experiment regardless of complexity or realistic-ness.

Most moral analogies usually only pinpoints the banalities in people's confidence in their own morality, but those people were usually not very involved in critical thinking about morality to begin with. — Christoffer

I disagree. As far as I'm aware there is no consensus on the correct solution to the trolley problem. The fact that people disagree brings up the question of why they disagree and what this says about their moral thinking and what kind of variables make them change their moral choices, which imo is an interesting thing in its own right. The question of how people act and actually behave morally in real life (and whether they actually do what is in agreement with the beliefs, judgements, moral frameworks they have) is also another interesting question in its own right.

I think my disagreement with people in regard to these things maybe stems from me finding these questions interesting in their own right as opposed to just a vehicle for prescribing practical morality.

I think there are layers to agency in the sense that one could be forced to make a harmful choice by someone, in which we might reduce responsibility for the action; but then, within that choice context, if there is room to choose a better or worse option, then I think that is still up to you unless that specific choice was forced on you by someone else. So there is a nuance in the sense that you were partly forced but also had some choice.

Some might even layer it up even further in the sense that some people might argue that in a deterministic world no one has actual responsibillity. But then again I don't think many people strongly commit to that idea, at least in practical ethics.

Nonetheless, that last point brings up the fact that sometimes we just have to make choices. No one may have forced us to make the choice but it seems that a choice had to be made just as a matter of how events unfolded. You keep talking about the trolley problem as if a choice had been forced (commanded participation by another agent); but I don't think there is anything explicit in the trolley experiment saying this. The trolley problen could have a natural cause - a freak train incident due to no ones fault. Maybe this could be forcing in some sense of diminish responsibility... but it is unremarkable and does not especially stand out. Almost all other difficult moral choices are like this and not participating in a scenario like that would be immoral I think most would agree. The way that the trolley problem is set up, 5 people are going to die anyway so refusing to participate is practically the same as making a choice. But even so, refusing to participate in a rescue mission where either one or 5 people must die would not be deemed to the moral thing to do in that context by most people.

Again, if there is still wiggle room to make a better or worse choice then I think that one still has moral responsibility for that I think, though obviously people may attribute less responsibility if the choice was unusually extreme or difficult people didn't have the correct information (but trolley problem gives us the correct information). But then that doesn't mean there are not better or worse choices. You may be forced to kill 1 or kill 5 but if you knew you were doing fully in the moment then surely you have to justify the choice. Contrary to what you say, I think morality emerges precisely because "consent" is broken. There is no need for morality if it is just about getting what we want and agreeing to play the game. Morality comes from the fact that we are forced to play games we might disagree with. We wouldn't have all these moral rules if people didn't have conflicting wants.

Edit: some tidying up.

Yes, I think most moral analogies automatically fail in that they are too simple for being actually valuable in moral philosophy — Christoffer

I'm not sure I agree that scenarios like the trolley problem never happen - I think they probably do a lot in a messier way and in some ways the fact that the trolley problem has no perfect outcome reminds of the messiness of reality sometimes.

Nonetheless, I think the value in these analogies is not necessarily in trying to find out what the right thing to do is, but why we have the moral preferences we do and how they differ. Its like an experiment. Scientific experiments need controlled and independent variables to figure out whats going on. If you have a simplified scenario and you change certain aspects of it and see what people think then it may give more clarity as to why we make certain choices or what our preferences are. If you just present a scenario with lots of different factors then its not always clear what is actually guiding peoples decisions.

I don't think I can agree on your view that the other things are distractions. These "distractions" are part of what make it interesting, and the fact you can vary these different factors and change how the situation seems I think is very informative about morality.

I also don't think the statement: "if you were forced to kill either 1 person or 5 people with no other options, which would you do?” is an absolute description of the trolley problem. I think stating it like this changes the scenario a bit - from what I can gather, the most common views of it have it that 5 people were going to die anyway. As I said in another post, I'm inclined to think that framing it this way makes the situation different to a simple choice of 1 vs. 5. Viewed this way you could also argue that there is not so much a forcing element here. 5 people are going to die; you can choose to save them if you so wish at the cost of 1 person's life.

Edit: Thinking about it, maybe someone could view the last description / sentence as forcing if they wish; but at the very least, I think its not absolutely clear there is a single way to interpretate. Depends what you mean by forcing I guess. If you were to view that last description as forcing then perhaps it is not so different from many other scenarios in life someone could choose to engage in or abstain from (in similar way to what has been saying I suppose). On the other hand, does forcing really exempt you from moral responsibility?

But you can have a kind of incidental, naturalistic reason for why the event occurred. It could be just to do with trains carrying people like they normally would day-to-day and some unforseeable circumstance happens which requires this choice.

Aha, I respect that you have doubled down on this. Yes, I think my view on this can change a lot depending on how I picture the scenario or the details like you say. Many times I am inclined to think maybe there are scenarios which just do not have a best answer. I am not entirely sure on this 999 scenario though my first instinct was to not kill them. The less I think of the deed as like an intentional, culpable act as opposed to like a preference, the more I feel inclined to kill the 999. But as a culpable act, the more comes into it the thoughts of it being immoral to impose yourself on someone else's freedom of agency and being alive which seems competitively important, morally. But then again, even just changing how I conceptualize the act itself can make this part seem less salient. You can imagine some kind of rescue scenario where a decision must be made and no one would blame you for having made the decision; but the fact that there is like an initial default set of people who are going to die, then the choice seems less like a necessary thing either-or and more of a culpable act being imposed on people.

How can you talk about that without talking about how it works in the real world? — T Clark

When I say regardless, I am not implying exclusion of practical application, not to say that a trolley-type problem can never arise or that people's reactions to a trolley problem won't tell you about how people think about ethics more generally.

It’s an unreal scenario and doesn’t factor in intent, which is essential to defining an ethical act between people. — Fire Ologist

Surely you can incorporate intent into your consideration of it though?

then its a different question — Philosophim

Well, what's your answer to the different question?

What if you had to execute the 999 people yourself?

Most philosophical thought experiments are silly. To have any value, a thought experiment should take into account the issues we see in the real world. It can still be simple, but it has to be real. — T Clark

Some people are just interested in morality just because they are interested in morality, regardless of practical application. For them there is no reason to cast away such thought experiments. They are just as informative about morality as anything else. Why people have differing opinions on these experiments tells you about how people think and their view of morality or what motivates moral action.

There's an interesting question. Is there lack of evidence of other intelligent life because it is so rare for it to get started?

Or because once it starts, it never lasts long.

Or why not both.

Aha, that actually made me laugh out loud for several minutes.

I like reading about these ideas, something both very poetic and powerful about them.

What is the Buddhist view about creating life? If they see life as just suffering and the ultimate goal is ending the cycle of suffering, death, birth - "extinction" - (as far as I understand), then wouldn't they be anti-natalist?

Wow, very interesting, thanks! Will definitely have a look.

Pregnancy is actually an interesting example in these kinds of debates that touch on the notion of disease as a construct that is intertwined with social activities and consensus. Not sure why I have never thought of that before, so thanks! At the same time, I wonder what has motivated this post since I have never heard of anyone calling pregnancy a disease.

methodological dualism — Mww

I might steal this phrase to describe how even though I am not a dualist, I often refer to both brains and experiences.

…..and yet, there is currently no plausible explanation for experiential space in terms of sufficiently reduced brain dynamics. — Mww

The experiences aren't explanatorily reducible to brains, but in principle, the dynamics of how these experiences change will map to the dynamics of how brain states change. Maybe to be more intuitive, a "perfect" model of the brain will produce all of the behaviours and reports you would find in normal people. Maybe that model is used to control a synthetic but perfect replica of a human body - no one would be able to tell the difference. Put that replica in a psychology experiment, it would then demonstrate all the findings of psychology and our various cognitions.

But then, models of brains are just predictive tools that replicate functions and behaviours. They don't tell you anything about the underlying metaphysics or devalue experience imo. A model of a brain we construct isn't necessarily a statement about that, it is a bundle of formal tools and math that we can use.

I don't think such things are a threat to people's humanity.

Everything in this response further entrenches the clear fact you are confusing cognition and experience — AmadeusD

No, not at all. I am just pointing out than in the scientific process we construct concepts and models of cognition abstracting from things people observe in their immediate experience. They are just constructs describing experiences and behaviour. "Unconscious" cognition is a category defined by directly observable experiences in the exact same way "conscious" cognition is. When awake, we are always in the flow of experiences, sometimes with the phenomenology of deliberative thought, sometimes with automaticity where we are not really aware of why or how we have behaved in a certain way. We cannot directly observe the root cause for either but in principle, any underlying hidden cause or explanation for exactly why we go through chains of either "deliberate" acts or "automatic" ones will be explainable completely by a sufficiently complete model of the brain. "Cognitive modules" are in principle completely explainable just by dynamics in the brain. With regards to phenomenal experience, both these kinds of cognition are in the same boat in terms of unfolding on the same experiential space with the same category of underlying explanation very broadly in terms of brain dynamics.

I am unsure why you're bothering with length replies at this stage. — AmadeusD

I am just trying make sure I am articulating my thoughts as thoroughly as I can, even if just for the case of someone else reading.

The charge that I'm invoking some mysterious unobservable is risible, in that context. — AmadeusD

"We can understand it as an underlying organisational structure that informs experience in some way, but given we already know 90% of our cognition has absolutely no noticeable effect on our phenomenal experience, this is just not plausible. Experience is irrelevant to the explanations and organisations of cognition. There is nothing in cognitive science that would lead us to predict conscious experience from the underlying structure of, lets call it awareness, which is in turn strictly tied to (theoretically) the underlying physical relational structure of information processing in the brain. This is so much more fine-grained than you're allowing for, while simultaneous so much simpler than you seem to think it really is. Cognition has no per se relationship to experience. This is, in fact, in what that mystery largely consists in. Even if we are to grant a 100% reductive concept of 'consciousness' there is no current, plausible way to connect cognition with experience beyond some vague, uninteresting correlates that amount to 'vibes'."

I didn't write this ...

One of them started Apple Computer.. — Wayfarer

And according to some, that has only exacerbated the culturo-emotional malaise talked about in your other post.

Emotions come already world-directed — Joshs

Maybe Barrett is explaining how emotions are world-directed in terms of how interoceptive states are integrated with external environmental context and allostatic responses to stressors / in service of some kind of evolutionarily basic goals.

We dont have some general body-maintenance feedback first and then have to decide how to explain its meaning by relating it to a current situation. — Joshs

Well think about all the different kinds of scenarios that may coincide with release of (nor)adrenaline in body and raised heartbeat. This is a dimension of the bodies response to scenarios which is present across many different contexts, anger, anxiety, excitement even. It may seem obvious how this can be distinguished in all these different scenarios but I think to some extent your conscious cortical regions actually have to learn to hone your bodies basic allostatic responses to the environment and then recognize different contexts because knowledge about the self doesn't come for free - under these accounts, what we know about ourselves is inferred in the exact same way as learning about the external world. Different social contexts (e.g. in different cultures) may then result in slightly different emotions which, while perhaps sharing a similar underlying basis in visceral(bodily) motor responses and ethological response programmes similar in various animals, is coupled to environmental contexts in different ways (and probably more complex ways than other animals). And we have to recognize these in our selves as well as in others - and we all have various levels of skill at it from very good to very poor.

the emphasis is not on WHAT is taking place when one has the sort of experience Barrett describes, but on HOW one has it — Joshs

she could have talked about how one’s heart races where one looks up at the crowd , and calms down when one quickly turns back toward the lecture notes — Joshs

I am not really sure I see an inherent conflict here. What she talks about just may reflect her priorities on what she wants to describe or explain compared to someone else.

but representationalism seems perhaps to result in an emphasis on arbitrary difference at the expense of what makes the components of emotion belong together as a meaningful whole. — Joshs

But isn't talking about emotion in terms of components together what she is doing?

How is the way the world appears to change related to the aims of the system, and what lends coherence to these aims? Is there in fact a system at all for Barrett in the sense of an integrated normative directionality? I get the sense that for Barrett all these sources of input into the system are a jumbled accumulation of semi-independent and semi-arbitrary bits of information , and that human goal-directedness is not much more than a more sophisticated, action-oriented pattern-matching version of S-R( judges in a cited study rule more negatively before lunch than after, thanks to the brain's interpreting of the arbitrary negative interoceptive reinforcement from the ‘body budget'). — Joshs

If you look at this from a free energy / active inference perspective (not sure if Barrett goes this far but I am trying to show that the contested views you are talking about are not actually inconsistent with each other), emotions would be linked to an organism which modulates its behaviour in response to how well it is minimizing free energy. What is minimizing free energy? It is fulfilling the predictions of an organism about the states it wants to exist in - it is about a goal-directed organism that is actively manifesting the sensory states which confirm its own existence, and when met with different obstacles or successes in this, you may have various emotional reactions and moods which reflect the organisms continual adaptation to its external circumstances in order to realize its own existence.

Today, there is an increase of people feeling very disconnected from themselves, from each other, from the world, and from a viable and foreseeable future. Let’s discuss this, let’s work on it together, let’s rationally reflect on it. Getting out of this problem is going to be tremendously difficult. It’s going to require significant transformations in our cognition, our culture, our communities. And in order to move forward in such a difficult manner, we have to reach more deeply into our past to salvage the resources we can for such an amazing challenge.

Not a fan of this. Just comes across as suggesting this stuff produces some kind of secret sauce to salvation which is independent to other structural factors going on in society. How many times in the past have things like this been offered as solutions. What happened to the hippies of '67? Transcendental meditation.

defines autonomy on the basis of a markov blanket distinguishing between internal and external states — Joshs

I wouldn't say it is just this, but also organisms acting on the external environment in order to realize the sensory experiences which confirm their own existence - to describe it in a Friston-esque manner.

I would say the bit at the end of your quote, which Thompson accuses standard cognition of leaving out:

how certain processes actively generate and sustain an identity

Is exactly what Friston's theory is about.

At the same time, I think it's maybe worth noting that on Friston's account, there are Markov blankets within markov blankets on every level. Organisms are comprised of things with Markov blankets; they might also plausibly be construed as part of wider systems which have Markov blankets.

You do not understand what you're talking about given the above. You're conflating the activitiy in the brain with the (abstract) experience which is not of that action. We are blatantly speaking past each other and you are, unfortunately, flat-the-heck-out-wrong. — AmadeusD

Here is the issue. You are talking about the idea of some mysterious unobservable process.

I am coming from a different angle which is what is actually being studied in psychology. We are studying observable data, right? Thats where all psychological study comes from. We then give names to these events we observe. Some of them we describe as involving conscious, deliberate awareness. Others as unconscious or automatic. But both these categories are things that are observable, just like a reflex is something like an act performed automatically but we are still observing empirical data. Or playing music on the piano in a habitual automatic fashion. Both of these things can be experienced by the one performing these acts even though they are categorized as automatic or unconscious - because they lack deliberation. This is what I am talking about when I am saying that both unconscious and conscious cognition arr manifest in experience and so not fundamentally different in that way. Yes the behaviors are different, but after starting from the empirical observations, it is then that models of cognition are constructed to explain those events after the fact.

So when I am talking about unconscious cognition I am talking about these observable events and this is a totally valid way to do it because after all, thats how we know these things are happening and thats the entire basis of the categorization. We don't have access to what is going on in someones head when they automatically and fluidly do some kind of intricate automatic event so we therefore we cannot be distinguishing automatic and controlled cognition through direct observation of the unobservable faculty inside someones head. If you look at lists detailing the differences between automatic and controlled cognition, you will find that all of the things on the lists are what you can observe for yourself through your own experience... because unconscious and conscious processes are defined from whats observable, we do it by categorizing the behaviour that is experienced and observed by people. Models might then built to explain that after the fact and obviously people might construct different latent models to explain the same observable facts.

So by my reasoning we have both of these categories are, on the most superficial level, about behaviours and experiences which are just different in ways which can be directly discerned from experiences or behaviors. They both have in common that we can view them and discerning them through our own personal experience. We can then construct different underling cognitive models to explain them. But at the end of the day brain activity is more fundamental than these models. So at the end, what do we have? Two sets of distinct events observable in experience and, in principle, brains which explain them because the cognitive models can in principle be eliminated as underlying causes. They both can be entirely discerned and explainable in the same two mediums of experience and then the brain in similar ways. The brain is doing all the hardwork for both processes and again the main difference can be thought of in terms of something like temporal and contextual depth of processing. Conscious processes are very sensitive to temporal contexts - to goals, to history, to future - deliberately controlling attention in open ended scenarios. Whereas automatic processing the temporal or contextual depth is thin. Reactions to cues which are indifferent to recent histories or goals and no longer entertain an open endedness in future context presumably due to practise and repetition or expertise. I think it is widely considered though that these are just extremes and most things meet in the middle somewhere; for instance, playing a musical instrument is definitely attentionally demanding but if you are familiar with a piece enough you will be going through passages in a very habitual and automatic pattern. The less familiar you are, the more deliberate is the playing of those passages.

Which makes it all the more clear that you're confusing not only the concepts you're discussing, but yourself in the process. — AmadeusD

No, because that incoherence being referred to ia just referring to the paradox of phenomenal judgement as stated in Chalmers' book.

I'm not. This follows from what i take to be your (rather extremely) misguided conception of cognition in relation to phenomenal experience. It seems quite clear to me your monist conception is arbitrary and counter to what's presented to you. The line of yours I quoted should make it sufficient clear that your objection here is not apt, at all, in any way, to my objection/s. — AmadeusD

Nonsense. You didn't understand what I was saying. I don't even think what I was saying actually depends on any metaphysical stance. It just depends on you understanding what I mean by unconscious and conscious cognition:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscious_cognition

And the triviality that we learn about our own cognition through experience and behavioural responses or reports are used in psychological experiments as a way to access these events that take place in the manifold of our experiences.

Your point about other complex behaviors either does not clearly fit the kind of distinction between conscious and unconscious cognition I was thinking about or it simply begs the question in a way that is sympathetic to dualism by assuming that those certain things don't have experience or that there is a kind of flick of the switch between experience and non-experience. I don't like making claims about what or how things other things would experience because I think ultimately talking about it is ill-posed; but by rejecting the dualism between physical things and experience, my view rejects this notion you have that one thing clearly has experience and another does not. Again, where I was coming from in the first place was a notion of human cognition where.we all agree on the role of experience operationally.

an underlying organisational structure — AmadeusD

Structure of what.

but given we already know 90% of our cognition has absolutely no noticeable effect on our phenomenal experience, this is just not plausible. — AmadeusD

You will have to be clear what you mean by this and give examples and then it will probably be easier for me to show you what I mean by interpreting these examples through my lense.

Experience is irrelevant to the explanations and organisations of cognition. There is nothing in cognitive science that would lead us to predict conscious experience from the underlying structure of, lets call it awareness, which is in turn strictly tied to (theoretically) the underlying physical relational structure of information processing in the brain. — AmadeusD

Cognitive science is not trying to explain phenomenal experience in any sense in the first place. Experience is relevant because cognition is studied by people reporting or behaving in reaction to their experiences, so cognition is tied to experience in that sense. If you went and participated in a study on memory or attention, you are reporting about your experiences to the experimenter, correct? In that sense, cognition is about your experiences. Cognitive models are constructed by scientists to explain the flow of people's experiences after the fact. We trivially wouldn't know about cognition without our own experiences ans ultimately notions of cognition are less fundamental than the brain which in principle explains all cognition purely through the apparatus of neurons.

This is the entire f-ing point my dude. We dont. And this is a known fact. We have no idea about most of our cognition. Because "as above.." — AmadeusD

I will give you a list of cognitions from wikipedia:

"functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, imagination, intelligence, the formation of knowledge, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and computation, problem-solving and decision-making, comprehension and production of language."

Not one of these is not something you are not directly aquainted with by experience. Perception? Obviously experience. Attention? Obviously attending to experiences. Imagination? Bring up mental images, talk about narratives. Intelligence? Do an intelligence test, you have the experience of doing it and coming up with the answers. Memory? You experience your recollection of a fact or event. Judgement? You experience yourself looking at something and experiencing it and then making the judgement or reporting it and how you feel. Problem Solving? you experience yourself thinking and engaging with a problem. Language? You experience yourself reading or bringing up words.

All of these functions are describing things happening in experience.

Where we ascribe the term unconscious is when we don't really know how we do some of these things. We are unaware of where they came from. They seem automatic. They are not deliberative. But at the same time all of these tasks are being performed experientially and arguably deliberative processes are just products of automatic processes which perhaps show traits of temporal depth as I suggested before. Therefore, "unconscious" and "conscious" cognition has the same foundations in terms of flows of experience which are in some sense automatic. What explains the transition from one experience or behaviour to the next? The brain. The brain in principle is all that is required to explain the changes in the sense of isomorphia., though not the phenomena itself in the sense of the hard problem. This is how I view "conscious" and "unconscious" cognition as inherently separate. Afterall, they are both being performwd by the same brain, perhaps just with different patterns of brain behaviour which nonetheless don't have a strict divide.

No. — AmadeusD

So how do you know when you have been distracted? There ia obviously a pattern of experiences which characterizes someone who has been distracted and deviates from a task.

I have no idea what you thought this was addressing? — AmadeusD

I am talking about the fact that if you lack access to the fundamental nature of reality you don't have to take intuitions about dualism to be ontological. It is therefore not waving away anything but embracing the reality of the limits to our knowledge.

But no. — AmadeusD

All you had to say.

You think a reductionist account is incoherent? — AmadeusD

I was talking about dualism being incoherent, i.e. conscious experiemce arising out of and separate to something elae.

I guess its just agree to disagree then since I don't find your justifications compelling. — Apustimelogist

It's difficult to when you misunderstand about 85% of what I say.

If property dualism were true, we could formulate and test psychophysical laws the same way we test physical laws, and come to the same levels of causal, relational and phenomenal certainty about them — AmadeusD

This wouldn't explain why physical things were connected to the particular phenomena though it is beside the point because I was talking about phenomenal experience being irreducible to functional explanations of "mental stuff".

here is though. I think i'll just leave you to discover the discussions on your own, at this stage. Chalmers himself deals with these issues in the work we're referring to. — AmadeusD

I have already explicitly coveredthis with you and told you his responses are irrelevant to my position.

It seems you simply have no idea about hte arguments in this area. — AmadeusD

Chinese Room*. Chalmers deals with it head-on aimed at Searle. — AmadeusD

I don't know. Someone who earlier admitted to misconstruing the hard problem, was seemingly unaware of some very general definitions of idealism and now has shown they are unaware of the knowledge argument, I think it is you who seem to have much less familiarity with this whole topic.

This, again, has literally nothing to do with the discussion we're having. — AmadeusD

Again, more evidence that you just don't understand anything I say. The point is that we can functionally explain why people have an intuition for dualism without requiring the distinction to be about fundamental ontology.

There are extant examples of complex behavioural outputs from complex reaction and adaptive cognition without any hint of anything like conscious experience. — AmadeusD

I have made it clear in this discussion that I am not a dualist so why are you interpreting my words in a dualist fashion?

I have used the notion of p-zombie in my posts in a way that specifically alludes to the idea that all cognitive functions can be functionally explained in terms of the brain in the sense that all our reports and behaviours can be seen as following a causally closed chain of interactions as described by entities from physical science.

Given that your interpretation of what I have said is in fact inconsistent with the views I have already set out in this thread, there is no way that what I have said in the last post could "explain [my] entire rationale".

The following that you have pointed out:

Ants, cilliates and even slime molds are examples which make the vast majority of what you're saying, which basically relies on the assumption above more-or-less moot arguments. There are extant examples of complex behavioural outputs from complex reaction and adaptive cognition without any hint of anything like conscious experience. — AmadeusD

Is therefore in no way contradictory to anything that I have said. The issue is you are interpreting what I have said as some kind of dualist would even though I am not one.

Either way, what I had in mind was specifically human cognition as studied in psychology. The medium through which we study cognition is 1) what we experience and how those experiences flow; and 2) behavioural responses which is inevitably required to catalogue the former. We can think of cognition as latent models created to explain this empirical data in the flow of experiences and behavioural responses. What we call unconscious and conscious cognition in terms of things like memory, attention, automatic behavior, dual processes, perception, etc., are all embedded and instantiated in the same flow of experience and responses albeit in different ways, perhaps with different latent models or explanations. But ultimately the functional behaviour of the brain is more fundamental than any of the typical kinds of latent cognitive model and it is responsible for both "conscious" and "unconscious" cognition. So I don't see any fundamental difference between "conscious" and "unconscious" cognition. They are both embedded in experience and have the same fundamental explanation. What is different about them I think is something that can be talked about in terms of something like context-sensitivity in terms of things like temporal context, goals, trajectories and similar: e.g.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28416414/

This is a functional difference, not about experience. We can talk about attentional awareness in terms of functional explanations.

Probably worth noting. cognition is not 'things', it is not 'experience' - cognition is the processing element of perception. thinking. — AmadeusD

At this point, I don't know what you mean by things. But "cognition is the processing element of perception." seems more or less a reasonable definition probably. Purely operationally (don't interpret it metaphysically but simply what is required to make the concepts empirically articulable), perception involves our experiences and behavioural responses. What do we mean by processes? I am not sure but maybe another question is how do we know we are "processing" or engaging in cognition? Well, we are experiencing it or experiencing its consequences. Before psychcology was a field I am sure people were aware (or meta-aware) of their own cognition... attention, memory, thought... purely through experiences. Otherwise how else you would know about these things? You are aware of memory through experiencing your recollections or failure to recollect. You experience your losses of attention.

Any cognitive model of that is either a latent explanation constructed to explain those experiences and responses or just an abstract, non-latent description of the flow of experiences (e.g. when talking about memory, you may just be referring to the ability to behave (and experience) with a sensitivity to historical information). But again, if you believe functional brain interactions are ultimately what is both necessary and sufficient to produce cognition as observed in experience or behaviour, then what exactly is the status of the latent cognitive models? Do you really believe they float around in some other realm which is neither experiential or physical? Or possibly are they just models we construct to organize what we empirically observe and have called cognition (or synonyms) before psychology was even a field? Again, there is the non-latent way of thinking about it but as someone who rejects dualism this is ultimately not distinct in a fundamental ontological way from the latent view from my perspective. Only in a superficial sense (e.g. someone might posit different ontologies or paradigms for different scientific fields e.g chemistry vs biology without thinking these represent fundamental ontological distinctions in the same way a dualist would think of experience vs. the physical. We can explain away the ontological difference in different scientific fields simply through the fact that they approach the same world from different perspectives).

Even on the reductionist account, the missing piece of the puzzle is still how consciousness arises from any level of cognition. It clearly does, though. — AmadeusD

Well, I can only say that I have already outlined why I believe such a view is incoherent.

I think my previous comments are adequate to outline my thoughts. If they are not convincing, so be it — AmadeusD

I guess its just agree to disagree then since I don't find your justifications compelling.

Waving it away wont do. — AmadeusD

I don't think my view is waving it away in any sense because as I have already said, I believe there is very good reason to think that we cannot have access to the fundamental nature of reality in any objective sense while what we perceive and the beliefs about them we come to are obviously constrained by the informational processing of a brain.

On the other hand, you seem to think the problem of irreducibility can be solved when arguably irreducibility by virtue of its meaning means it will never be solved. Even if somehow, science empirically discovered "mental stuff" separate to the physical, such functional explanations of "mental stuff" would still not be able to explain phenomenal experiences and so the problem will still persist. Stands to reason that if dualism is true and we have a complete explanation of both "mental" and "physical" stuff, there would still be a problem of consciousness and it would still suffer from Chalmers' paradox of phenomenal judgement but this time in terms of "mental stuff". There is no possible explanation of experience in virtue of its irreducibility and positing "mental stuff" doesn't help. The basic stipulation of two substances / properties is really as far as you can get; the irreducibility hurdle cannot be overcome because thats what irreducibility means.

There doesn't seem any way to get away from Chalmers' paradoxes without getting rid of dualism, and I don't see any additional reasons to keep it. The fact that dualism is intuitive need not be explained by direct observations about inherent ontology but by discrepancies due to epistemics. If you recall the Mary's room knowledge argument against physicalism, it seems reasonable to think that a p-zombie Mary would give the exact same response to regular Mary in some scenario where she was previously colorblind and then come then became color-able (e.g. due to gene therapy). Her inability to reduce phenomenal experience to physical stuff then is inherently tied to the information processing in her brain in a functional sense. I feel like dualists sometimes underplay that what we are capable of perceiving and believing is not totally unconstrained by brains; in principle there are reasons we think or perceive things in the way we do which are constrained by physics in the same way a car runs in ways constrained by physics. Obviously some dualists may underplay this because they believe in some kind of interactionist substance dualism where the mental actively causally affects the physical but I don't think there is any good scientific reason to believe in this kind of model - I would need good evidence to entertain that.

Imo there is no reason to think these functional capabilities of a brain give an insight into the intrinsicness of reality... in fact when I am talking about a brain, I am invoking a family of constructed models and explanations, not inherent ontologies.

Well for one, an explanation of the words "dog" or "swimming," seems like it should require reference to dogs and water respectively, rather than just neurons. Explanations that draw a line around the brain seem to forget that brains do not work in isolation and do not produce consciousness in isolation. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Hmm, I don't think anyone could create any kind of explanations for language or the use of words without including what words are referring to or connected to - that wouldn't make sense! I don't think many people are that reductive. Similar I think can be said for other questions you talk about like the why and how word use is created. I think word use is more or less about the contexts that surround the utterance and reception of words (maybe counterfactually), whether you want to talk about context in terms of experiences or the role of the brain and physical interactions with external stuff (at least in principle). I think the questions of why and how is just a matter of expanding these contexts, the chains of causes.

I get the impression you won't disagree with what I say and maybe you have been just attacking this truncated version of use you briefly mentioned which is not intuitive to me.

Now, the "examination of the queen," might actually have a role in the explanation of language. Here we might substitute the queen for "the human sensory system, psychology, neuronal structures/signaling, etc." That is, the properties of our "pieces," will tend to explain part of how language emerges and has the structure it does. But you can't focus just on this. This is what I was talking about before when I said it would be strange if information theory didn't shed some light on language, or human communication in general, but it also doesn't seem like it could possibly adequately explain everything. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What else do you have in mind in terms of explanation?

Edit: To clarify - in terms of other explanations that cannot be explained by "the human sensory system, psychology, neuronal structures/signaling, etc."

IE, it is a problem of circularity, in that there are two objects provided we have already determined that there are two objects. — RussellA

Very good point. I think what this point really alludes to from my perspective is that numbers is not strictly a passive consequence of objects in the world but are consequences of our ability to create cognitive maps or models we use to navigate the world. Spaces with dimensions, distances, transformations. We develop the ability to deal with metric information (even rats can deal with distance, duration, numerosity) just in virtue of a brain which can sequentially sample environmental inputs, has memory, can act to manipulate those sequences, and can abstract regularities or overarching structure from that kind of sequential sampling of the world, one viewpoint or location at a time. Counting on a number line is like tracking a location in a 1D space.

what is entailed by 'mental only' — AmadeusD

Well what is entailed by it then? I haven't understood from what you have said so far. I don't recall talking to or reading about anyone else who has this issue with the notion of idealism.

I have. "What are the experiences of" is a good enough question to at the very least, put the position you're driving at on the rocks, if not infer a position that requires externalities (in a 'proper' use of the word - not the economic one) to inform any type of experience. Otherwise, we have infinite regress - at what point would content be involved, if it's experience all the way down? Seems a massive gap here. — AmadeusD

Why do experiences have to be of anything? All I know is that I have experiences. Why can't experiences be externalities? I don't see any justification here for an infinite regress.

As noted a couple of times, and apparently ignored: Experiences must be OF something(if you do not accept this, we may be at an end of the road we travel together). — AmadeusD

You should then be able to give a logically entailed justification why an experience must be of something or come from somewhere.

Mental objects do not exist outside of mind, by definition. What's not getting through? — AmadeusD

This issue can bypassed by just postulating that the universe is a mind or made out of minds. At the same time, I see nothing here suggesting that minds need to be supported by something else like the physical.

This is the exclusion you seem to just straight-up ignore. — AmadeusD

If it looks like I am ignoring what you have said, it is because you haven't given sufficient justification. You just keep reiterating your position that experiences must be a certain way and must be related to some other external stuff in a certain way. But from what I gather, this is just based on definitions you have started with that you perhaps find very intuitive. You haven't logically ruled out alternatives in any case. You just keep going on that it must be this way without giving me a further reason.

"why isn't anything conscious"? The latter is not irrelevant, in the discussion we're having. — AmadeusD

Yes, but questions like these and "why is there experience?" are no more or less difficult than asking why the world isn't some other metaphysical kind of way. The point was that the issue of why there is experience is no longer the hard problem of consciousness, which is specifically about the inability to explain consciousness through physical and functional explanation. In an idealist universe, this is no longer a problem.

This is not a problem, and it does not suggest this. I would recommend reading all of Chalmers, if this is where you're going. — AmadeusD

I recommend you reading it because he says this paradox is probably the greatest tension created by dualism. It is definitely a big problem. A p-zombie believes they have consciousness, they report on it in ways identical to any non-p-zombie. Whats worse is they do it for the exact same reasons we do. We report our experiences and profess them because our brain fires in a certain way which leads to our behaviours and reports. Your beliefs about consciousness then seem to have nothing to do with consciousness itself and all to do with the causal action of whats going on in your brain. Chalmers' only response to this is pretty much that we are directly aquainted with out consciousness which is not something I am denying. But I am denying dualism because that story makes no sense, and the only way it can make sense is if there wasn't really any dualism at all.

From this point of view, "Discovering that the consciousness does not logically supervene on the physical" is not saying something about the profound ontology of the world but about how information processing and explanations work, which is exactly why a zombie would come up with the same conclusions. There is no reason why a zombie could know anything about the profound ontologies of the world just from the functional interactions that go on in a brain. There is no reason to think we do either.

Can you explain why this would have any weight in displacing the (potential) property dualist account? — AmadeusD

I think the story of a world that logically makes sense but we don't have direct access to - for pretty reasonable justifications regarding how minds and brains work - is a much better explanation than a world which doesn't logically make any sense at all and then postulates two different ontological categories which we can't even explain anyway under this view.

He would posit that nothing you've said changes the fact that Consciousness is irreducible. — AmadeusD

Well then you have not understood a thing I have said. *I am not motivated to change the irreducibility of conscious experiences, only the idea that this represents some fundamental ontological category that sits beside some other fundamental ontological category called the physical*. As I just happened to say earlier in this thread, my view is probably closest to a kind of neutral monism which Chalmers goes through briefly on page 153 - 156 of the excerpt of his book you linked me.

I'm beginning to think you're confusing yourself. — AmadeusD

No, I think you are confused if you think indirect perceptual realism is about directly accessing the world.

Do you know any idealist scientific realists? — AmadeusD

There is nothing necessarily inherent that contradicts it if you are open to the kinds of definition in the article on idealism that I linked which the majority of other people seem to think is a reasonable definition.

But we know, for sure, that cognition happens sans any experience. — AmadeusD

I disagree. I think all of what we call cognition is things we observe ourselves through experience. The difference between conscious and non-conscious experience is to do with things like whether we perceive cognition to be automatic or deliberative, or whether our attention is strong or weak. But they all still occur through the flow of experience and the kinds of non-experiential aspects that explain the flow are the same for both conscious and non-conscious cognition, involving dynamics of brain activity. There is a non-trivial difference in the experiences of conscious and non-conscious cognition, but they are both experiential and are underlaid by the same kind of non-experiential explanations.


Edit: * *

Just commenting on this to remember/"bookmark" it because I thought it was interesting.

"why are social practices what they are? why do they evolve the way they do? etc." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Because we have a brain with trillions of parameters capable of extremely complicated abstraction and inference tasks!

Everything I am saying about idealism is just the basic contemporary opinion on it. I linked an article by David Chalmers as the source for my definition and conceptualization of idealism. Notable contemporary idealists like Bernardo Kastrup and his followers thinking about idealism in precisely this way, as you may have seen.

I feel like you have this strong preconception that any kind of phenomena is necessarily internal to some kind of external physical things, because you are dualist. But I don't see how this view is strictly necessary and how other kinds of views of phenomena as ontology are not at least conceivable.

You seem to agree that:

"We have no idea about the intrinsic nature of what we scientifically observe beyond our experiences ..... there is absolutely no reason why we should be able to have any tangible access to some fundamental metaphysical nature of how the universe is, whether from science or perception"

Elaborating (in a similar way to the Chalmers chapter you linked): all we have direct access to is our personal experiences; our engagement with and articulation of physical theories is through experience; and the content of physical theories is relational or functional.

So if physical theories are defined purely functionally or relationally and say absolutely nothing about the intrinsic nature of what is beyond our personal experiences, I think you have to give an argument to rule out the idea that what is beyond our personal experiences can conceivably be more experiences and nothing else.

Again, we have established that you have no idea about the intrinsic nature of what is going on beyond your immediate experiences so I don't see what standard you are using to judge that what is going on beyond cannot be experiential. There are various options such as one universal mind filled with mental things interacting or many different individual minds interacting. What we think of as physical objects can still exist, just they have to be made of phenomena. What is the basis for saying that "Mental "objects" giving rise to conscious experience sans anything else is just dumb"? I haven't seen justification. What standard are you using if you don't even know what physical things intrinsically are? Does a standard even exist if physical concepts are purely relational?

It then seems pretty clear that if everything were phenomenal, an idealist would avoid the hard problem in its most basic sense (perhaps not the combination problems). The question of "why do experiences exist?" would be no different from the question of why any other different kind of intrinsic stuff were to exist (e.g. why does material exist? (perhaps in a hypothetical universe that only has material and no consciousness)).

With regard to dualism?

There have been absolutely no discoveries in science that suggest some kind of inherent metaphysical separation between mental and physical stuff in any sense. Such a dualism is incoherent.

My main argument against dualism is probably the "paradox of phenomenal judgment" that Chalmers talks about in chapter 5 of the Chalmers link you gave, and it is a consequence of epiphenomenalism (it follows soon after the pages you recommended). The problem is that consciousness is rendered causally irrelevant not only to our behavior but to our own knowledge of consciousness. The absurdity suggests that dualism is an illusion and that there is no dual-aspect.

There is no need for a dual-aspect. Physical theories are just models that are used within the human experience to predict and carve out abstract functional relations to other intrinsic experiences. They cannot tell me anything about the intrinsic nature behind "physical" objects. In fact, I think that not only are all physical theories relational and functional… all beliefs, hypotheses, knowledge, etc, etc, etc, are relational and functional. No knowledge, as a cognitive process, can ever tell you anything about any kind of intrinsicness, simply by the nature of what descriptions and explanations do and that is also why phenomenal experiences are fundamentally ineffable. I think this is less mysterianism than the fact that if you endorse kinds of scientific and metaphysical deflationism / antirealism, then the need for inherent dual-aspects is not pressing. The fact that there is no accepted peer review published scientific evidence for non-physical properties and the incoherence from the "paradox of phenomenal judgment" then presses even more against the idea of dualism. Because this view doesn't rely on falsifying phenomenal experiences, it evades Chalmers' responses. I don't think Chalmers would see this view as adversarial to his though, even if he may not necessarily agree with it.

I think the closest we can get to characterizing reality is that there are objective structures in reality which we cannot directly access; my experiences are what it is like to be some of that structure at some particular scale (or I guess even what it is like to be information to move closer to Chalmers' thoughts). And as more or less an instrumentalist about cognition and knowledge, that characterization doesn't even necessarily mean much other than a story that helps conceptualize the world. At the same time, the brain, information processing and cognition should still in principle be the ultimate basis for explaining why people have difficulties articulating things about consciousness and why explanations about it fail (given the p-zombie who is confused by the hard problem because of his brain independently of consciousness).

Scientific realism posits there is an external world we can accurately measure. Perceptual realism posits that we, without measurement, can directly access an external world — AmadeusD

Your latter definition only accounts for direct realism, not indirect realism. Also, scientific realism is not about positing an external world per se, it posits that our theories about the world are true. Doesn't seem very different from the idea of perceptions being true representations or giving true access to the world.

What's your take here, then? Pure curiosity. To come to table, 'cognition' doesn't seem to me something that is the same as experience. So, all cognition is 'conscious' but barely any cognition arises in experience — AmadeusD

Cognition is just a higher-order description of what is happening in the flow of experience imo. The difference between "conscious" and "non-conscious" cognition essentially comes down to differences in this flow of experience.

Atomization (also mistakenly termed 'individualism'/'individualization') is a result of these types policies — Tzeentch

Sounds a bit reductive, no? The world is much more complicated than that. At the same time, were the issues being discussed much better for societies that are less atomized, perhaps in the past? Not sure about that. Seems a distraction from the issue at hand imo. I am not entirely sure ideals like this are reliable just as the notion of the American Dream never was.

Getting rid of neoliberalism, heh.

Very interesting.

with senses other than sight I'm not sure what is representative. — Moliere

I certainly get the intuition. We know that the sensation of sweetness is associated with certain molecules but its not clear that perceptions of taste are representing anything like this to us. From my viewpoint, vision is not inherently different.

To be honest, for some further reading around the issue, which seems more nuanced than I thought and my own preconception of what indirectness meant, I have become much more sympathetic to the direct view and the ambiguity of what constitutes directness/indirectness. For instance, I find the following passage reasonable:

"In this light, consider the following two
claims:

(i) perception is indirect in the sense that it
involves a series of causal intermediaries
between the external object (or event) and
the percipient;

and

(ii) perception is indirect in the sense of involving a prior awareness of something other
than the external object (or event).

Claims (i) and (ii) thus distinguished,
Direct Realists can argue that it does not
follow from the fact that perception is indirect in the sense of (i) that it is indirect in the sense of (ii). What the Causal Argument establishes is only the causal indirectness of perception in the sense of (i), not the cognitive indirectness in the sense
of (ii)."

Ofcourse, my own inclinations away from realism generally don't take a strong preference of one set of views or the other or even either, perhaps. The topic as a whole seems too complex for me to give a well-thought view without a lot of research.

I feel like your misunderstandings here must come from a different notion of idealism.

Idealism as I described and as entertained in the article I linked is completely consistent with external objects beyond your immediate experience so the idea of external objects is completely consistent, they just happen to be mental or experiential. In the first paragraph it even says that it is analogous to physicalism, the only difference is replacing physical with mental. I think your notion of idealism is far narrower than most people seriously entertaining idealism today.

It then follows that when you say something like:

If consciousness does not reduce to the physical — AmadeusD

The idealist would agree and then they would say the physical simply does not exist so there is no problem. There is no need to reduce the mental to the physical because the physical just doesn't exist. All there is are experiences. Consciousness doesn't supervene on the physical because consciousness is all there is.

Once you formulate an idealist universe as identical to a physicalist one except that everything is made out of mental stuff, then there is literally no hard problem of consciousness. We can ask in the physicalist universe why energy exists or forces exist or fields exist or anything else. There will always be some point where it just doesn't have an answer - we don't know why things exist or don't exist. The problem of why experience exists would reduce to exactly that problem for an idealist. There is no other thing that gives rise to experience for the idealist because all there is is experience. Existence and being is simply experience at all levels. So the hard problem doesn't exist for the idealist and this is probably one of the major advantages amy idealist will give you to their theory.

I'm not quite sure I'm understand thsi reply. — AmadeusD

The reply is saying that a dualist reality where there is a metaphysical divide between the mental and physical is unfounded. It has no basis in science. Now I can also say that I have experiences but the fact that I say I have experiences doesn't entail that there must be some other physical substance which is profoundly metaphysically different and from which experiences arise. We have no idea about the intrinsic nature of what we scientifically observe beyond our experiences because we can only do science within our experiences. It follows that any metaphysical distinction is inaccessible and science gives no reason to suggest that there is one. At the same time given how the information processing that undergirds perception and knowledge is due to brain structure and functional capabilities, there is absolutely no reason why we should be able to have any tangible access to some fundamental metaphysical nature of how the universe is, whether from science or perception. None of this comes from a particular realist viewpoint which I think is probably key. Essentially all that we work with when it comes to knowledge is empirical structures that we happen to find in what we observe, and models we create concerning those observational structures. From that standpoint the most I can say is perhaps that the universe has some kind of structure which I cannot directly access. Loosely, I am what it is like to be some kind of structure in the universe. But then again, neither the notion of "structure" or "what it is like"(experience) have any substantive definitions that let me pick out anything metaphysically or scientifically meaningful, let alone any dichotomy between experience and the physical which would only lead to an incoherent type of epiphenomenalism.

One question here is going to be (or more accurately "How do we produce conscious experiences of the external world?") but another, separate and probably more profound question is "How could we know that anything in the external world is actually as-it-seems? Even if we have 'direct' perception we still have the issue of Descartes Demon and all that fun stuff - whereas the question around scientific realism addresses the problem of whether our perception is of actual things. In world A' we may have direct perceptions of things which are not actually things, for instance. It is a false perception, but its a direct relation with the mental substance that it arises from. Even in world A, we might have indirect perception yet trust that our scientific instruments are relaying the actual behind our perceptions. — AmadeusD

So in the Scientific sense, are we even metaphysically able to ascertain the world as-it-is? And for Perception its do we, humans, naturally, perceive the world in direct causal relation (regardless of whether the world actually allows for accurate measurement. — AmadeusD

I don't think you have said anything here that distinguishes realism about scientific theories from that about objects of perceptual. Descartes Demon exemplifies a general skeptical problem that can be applied to anything whereas the question of whether our perception is about actual things seems to me just as much a concern for realism about perception as it is for scientific theories. We may have scientific theories that turn out to not be of actual things also. The last two lines also seem to be basically the same except you have added direct for perception which seems to be besides the issue since you can have indirect-realism.

You can keep question one, and simply swap question two for the more specific version: Why is anything in the Universe conscious? To essentially outline the two distinct questions that idealism would still post. Consciousness not supervening on the physical simply doesn't explain it as the majority of cognition is not accompanied by any experience. — AmadeusD

The question of "why the universe is the way it is?" is the same for any kind of metaphysical position because you can imagine the universe in a vast number of different ways even for the physicalist, which are just as arbitrary as the universe being conscious or not or some other distinction. So too you can have an idealist universe where even what you are thinking of as non-experiential cognition is still experience or consciousness. Personally I don't believe in some strong distinction between "conscious" and "non-conscious" cognition in the way that I believe you are thinking about it.

Again, the meat of the hard problem is the reducibility of experience to physical and functional explanation:

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=2544424150595524876&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1

Quotes from above:

"It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of
how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when
our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have
visual or auditory experience:"

"It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical
processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it
should, and yet it does."

"What makes the hard problem hard and almost unique is that it goes beyond problems about the performance of functions."

"Why doesn't all this information-processing go on in the darkí free of any inner feel? Why is it that
when electromagnetic waveforms impinge on a retina and are discriminated and categorized by a visual system, this discrimination and categorization is experienced as a
sensation of vivid red? We know that conscious experience does arise when these
functions are performed, but the very fact that it arises is the central mystery. There is an
explanatory gap (a term due to Levine 1983) between the functions and experience"

The problem of consciousness is only in contrast to the metaphysics of the physical and functional.

This is interesting. It reads lile you view your bodily sensations as fundamentally different from your visual experiences in some separable way?

That literally is the hard problem. Perhaps you have an erroneous idea of what it is? The hard problem consists in this exact question. — AmadeusD

AS above, clearly this is not right. — AmadeusD

If the only thing that exists is experiences, then how are the questions different? "Why is there experience?" would be precisely the same as "Why is there anything at all?"

Its just ignoring one problem for another. — AmadeusD

Well from this perspective, it isn't a true metaphysical problem which is why illusionists may be more interested in the meta-problem of consciousness instead, aiming to explain what it is about human cognition and computation that leads to these limits of explanation.

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_vis=1&q=metaproblem+chalmers&btnG=

It's very hard to see how this could matter. If one is having an experience, that's all that's needed. The framework in whcih is sits isn't relevant the Hard Problem. It is the experience per se that needs explaining. — AmadeusD

This is not my understanding of the hard problem. The issue is the reducibility of consciousness to physical explanations. If you remove the physical from the equation then there is no hard problem. The issue I was talking about in the quote you replied to effectively also amounts to a problem of irreducibility but between different experiences.

An idealist rejects that there are external objects. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you're getting at here. — AmadeusD

The kind of idealism I have in mind is just that everything in the universe is mental (definition exists in the paper below), which I guess could be quite broad in terms of possible types of idealism.

https://scholar.googleusercontent.com/scholar?q=cache:-7cyUpbkVq4J:scholar.google.com/+modern+idealism+chalmers&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_ylo=2020&as_vis=1

Because you're misattributing what 'realism' stands for within each framework. — AmadeusD

Can you elaborate the differences in realism for science vs. perceptual representations?