Unfortunately for many of you, I am 85% sure the stochastic interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct. Unfortunate, because it is very boring and marks a return to the realism of classical particles with the caveat that they move about randomly. But it literally answers every single interpretational issue in quantum mechanics in very commonsensical parsimonious ways.

I guess there's part of the issue with bringing with bringing quantum mechanics into it ... interpretations are so controversial because everyones got very different opinions. Then again, its hard to ignore because if the quantum mysticists are correct then it does have possibly very big metaphysical implications. Big implications no matter who is correct I guess.

I'm still not entirely sure whether you mean some kind of dualism or just that something like math is obviously not a physical concept. The way I see it, all our categorizations are just high level abstractions of sensory input. Something like a dog is such an abstraction. Math is abstraction in the exact same way imo, only that it is so abstract that it doesn't pick out any specific physical object in the world. We can then make abstractions of abstractions, systems of rules for these abstractions in and of themselves in which we learn to manipulate content and then even superimpose onto other concepts (like when creating a mathematical model of empirical phenomena).

But when you say mental content drives the physical, this sounds like dualism.

I feel as though something needs to be said about physical reductionism and it's place in culture. One of the quotations I often fall back on is from Thomas Nagel's 2012 book, Mind and Cosmos. — Wayfarer

This 'poweful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality' comprises the basis of what is generally described as the modern scientific worldview. Although science itself has already overflowed those bounds on many different fronts, it still retains considerable if not always obvious influence in philosophical discourse: that what is real are the objectively-measurable attributes of the kinds of entities that science is able to analyse. 'The subject' was bracketed out of this reckoning at the very outset. (The quotations that Joshs provided in this post both diagnose and remedy this issue from the perspective of phenomenology and embodied cognitive science.)

This view is at the back of many of the arguments in favour of physical reductionism, as to admit an alternative philosophy is to have to defend some form of dualism or philosophical idealism and their attendant metaphysical baggage. — Wayfarer

I was talking about general explanations appropriate to their respective scales of being as opposed to mind-physical reduction.

I don't have the same issue as put forwarx in your quote because I simply don't believe that subjective experiences can be explained and so they don't really have a role in any of our explanations anymore than they already do in psychology. The only explanations we have are the kind of functional ones that cannot apply to experience.



One thing you have to understand is that because of the hard problem, it is impossible for there to be an intuitive connection between how brains work in a mechanistic manner compared to how we experience the world.

I think its less about trying to explain what minds are doing as we directly experience them and toward just finding neuronal architectures and objective functions that will lead to reasonably realistic replications of behavior that humans can do. The most you can do is correlate neural behavior and experiences or behaviors. There is no assumption of some kind of interaction with non-physical things. Obviously, many people will find this unsatisfying but for me, replicating complex behavior, finding information information processing principles is enough. We can't do more than that.

Yes, I think it makes sense that we cannot and maybe sometimes should not go for the most reductive explanations. I don't think of science as having a goal toward explaining things in increasingly reductive or decomposed ways.

But I do think, insofar as we have a spatial conception of the world, there is still this asymmetry of larger scales depending on the small in that kind of supervenience sense, which maybe is quite weak (too weak for decomposition? not sure, need to think about that) as opposed to a full blown reduction (Again, I think probably there are various ways of construing reductionism so its about strength of reduction). But then it has to be weak because then manner in which our models are incomplete and give different conceptual and empirical perspectives / reference frames, the taxonomy of our models and theories do not neatly match up at all to our ideal vision of a world full of objects with rigid boundaries organized at different levels. They may never match up to that ideal, even in principle, because we only can have insight into reality vicariously. We kind of blindly prod at reality and it prods us back, and obviously the prods we feel shouldn't be conflated with the cause of the prod. At the same time, maybe physics shouldn't be conflated with scale since physics works on all scales and some physics applies across multiple scales.

That said, I wouldn't underestimate the degree to which reductive physicalism is the default view of the public, and seen broadly as what "science says the world is like. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, I can see that, though I also think maybe the general public might not really know what reductive physicalism means their views might be still quite vague even if they lean toward reductive physicalism. And I think its possible to lean or are drawn toward reductive physicalism even if they don't actually hold the view. I think I am probably in that category. I don't think I am actually a reductive physicalist at all but there is this kind of gravitational pull tugging at my intuitions. I don't know if it just has something to do with how compelling a person finds science, or something like that.

this is also why compatibilism doesn't seem appealing to them. The problem isn't just that the mind is determined by what comes before any volitional act, it's that mental life has no causal efficacy because real causal power rests with the atoms and molecules. Often I also see a conflation where "if determinism is true then reductionism/smallism is also true," so that evidence for determinism (strong in some contexts IMO) becomes evidence for smallism (weak IMO). — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think I know what smallism is but tbh I don't find compatibilism that compelling for reasons like these.

But equally, it's obvious that organisms can learn to differentiate signals by the "sensori-motor loop". — Ludwig V

Yes, just that representations and symbols are not fundamental nor necessary to this picture.

But what's that like? — Ludwig V

Yup, thats the big mystery. I just fall on the position that that kind of thing is just outside the realm of explanation, description, anything. I can only assume that my experiences are what it's like to be certain kinds of structure in the world around the vicinity of the brain. Our models don't capture phenomenal experience but they are just that - models, not reality - I don't think they capture intrinsic ontology at all, nor do they carve out objective boundaries for ontologies. As you say, we prod and nature prods back, and all the proding can be done in various different purviews or perspectives.

What do you mean by "syllopsistic"? — Ludwig V

Often the way that it is looked at is that Brains are doing inference so that their models optimally match what it's like in the outside world. But obviously a non-representational view isn't about that nor does the brain ever have access to that to know if it is right or not and it cannot know in principle. I guess I just mean talking about things like efficient coding without needing to explicitly refer to objects outside the head (in the sense that the brain is trying to match some kind of representations to something it doesn't have access to).

I think one issue with this whole thing is there are various ways you could conceptualize physicalism. On one hand, you can just define it as explanations for everything being directly reducible to fundamental physics explanations. And people have pointed out this almost eliminativist view is very difficult to hold up just by virtue of how we explain and conceptualize a lot of things outside of fundamental physics. But then, is this the kind of physicalism most people hold? Probably not. I think most people are intuitive physicalists and haven't thought too precisely about it but it just seems intuitive to them. I wouldn't be surprised if those big phil surveys, where most people end up being physicalist, are full of respondents of that kind. Maybe they aren't really physicalists but more like naturalists of a general kind in the kind of manner I proposed on the first page of this thread - essentially they are anti-woo.

I think there are probably various different ways and extents of conceptualizing reduction too. I would actually speculate that not much actually outright reduces to something else without needing to invoke some kind of prior assumptions about how different theories connect. Maybe not everything can be satisfactorily explained in physical terms because different fields can have very different conceptual and empirical reference frames and then we have things like emergence and multiple-realizability. But if you accept the models that have held up in science then I find it very difficult not to accept that the objects and structures you find everywhere in your theories about the world in principle depend on, are constrained by, supervene on the structures we find in fundamental physics. You see that their behavior is enacted in or realized within the dynamics of those fundamental physical entities when looking at it from the lense of physics and the scales it operates in. Nothing additional in principle is involved in determining those dynamics even if we may want a more amenable higher-order description / explanation of those dynamics. Even if our fundamental theories are incomplete or cannot pragmatically do all the work on their own, it seems reasonable to suggest that we can describe things in the world at various different scales but the resolution at smallest scales will always produce distinctions that are more fundamental to which others can be decomposed, given the assumption of placing our models within spatiotemporal contexts where there is inevitable nesting.

But a symbol is always a symbol of something and a representation is always a representation of something. But in the case of mental states, we have no access to the "something" in either case — Ludwig V

Yes, I think the causes of sensation are inherently underdetermined, indeterminate. There is no inherent fact of the matter of what they mean or represent in reference to some external context.


""

The problem with taking this as conveying information about the specific physical structures of stimuli beyond the organism's sensory boundary is that the only thing sufficient for this process is the receptor perturbation, regardless of what caused that perturbation. All that is required is the presence of something sufficiently stimulating and eventually this results in action potentials that communicate information to the brain through action potentials: membrane depolarizations with stereotyped amplitudes and time-courses. Effectively, the only information the brain can receive are one-dimensional signals denoting the presence of some stimuli as distinct from the presence of others. By having different neurons whose firings are statistically independent, in the sense that they have been specialized to receive signals from some stimuli independently of others, signals do not get confused. However, given that all of the different types of receptor cells use the same form of membrane potential signaling, neither we nor the brain can in principle identify the cause of membrane activation by just looking at the nature of the membrane activation.

We have real life examples of this underdetermination. In nature, spurious signaling has been known to occur such that thermal fluctuations in the retina can cause perceptions that are indistinguishable from flashes of light in the dark. Rhodopsin which is used for detecting light in human retinal rod cells is in fact used as a means for light-independent thermosensation in fruit flies. Therefore, not only could an unidentified receptor cell's membrane activation be conceivably caused by any type of receptor interaction, the change at a given type of receptor could be caused by alternative possibilities. It's well documented how neuroscientists can even stimulate sensory receptors or downstream neurons to artificially produce sensations. In one radical case:


Paper - Embedding a Panoramic Representation of Infrared Light in the Adult Rat Somatosensory Cortex through a Sensory Neuroprosthesis; 2016.


Rats were fitted with prosthetic infrared sensors that sent signals directly into the whisker parts of the somatosensory cortex, allowing them to distinguish sources of infrared light in their environment. While the rats eventually learned to be able to discriminate between sources of infrared light and touch, they initially seemed to perceive infrared light sources as somatic whisker sensations. It is clear that given the initial confusion, the downstream neuronal architectures are incapable of discriminating the stimuli purely in virtue of the nature of the external causes of stimulation, whether from somatic vibrations or infrared light. Whether communicated through organic somatosensory afferents rooted in vibrations, electrodes from prosthetic infrared sensors or even re-routing of other modalities into the somatosensory cortex, all information is communicated via the same manner of membrane stimulation. What distinguishes the different sources of information is not anything inherent about their physical causes, but the statistical properties of the patterns of the homogeneous one-dimensional signals which are generated by those causes. These are in some sense incidental to those causes; neurons can perform blind-source separation on these signals but in theory those signals can be artificially mimicked like in a brain-in-vat type scenario. Given that the physical causes of signaling are underdetermined and the way that these signals can only convey a one-dimensional signal about the presence of something, we might see the information communicated as having no explicit notion of representational content beyond their binary states ("bits") of activation or silence. In a sense, the possible repertoire of states that can be generated by these "bits" is what actually gives the possible contents of experiences, independent of and irreducible to the extrinsic causes of those states. Insofar as different patterns or combinations of these states can directly cause distinct downstream responses, these contents then become actionable or usable and might be considered to have meaning in the context of other states.

No measurements are inherently capable of identifying what is being measured without the external observer having prior knowledge about what is being measured or how to interpret the outcomes; without something like an external observer role who assigns meaning to the membrane potential signals and then uses them appropriately, reducibility to the physical causes of sensory activation as we know them is not a given. Such semantic ambivalence is even implied in information theory, as stated by its most preeminent founder, Claude Shannon:

"The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. The significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages. The system must be designed to operate for each possible selection, not just the one which will actually be chosen since this is unknown at the time of design."

""

(Taken very out of context from https://hl99hl99.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-impossibility-of-reduction.html?m=1 which looking back on it I regard as unfinished and in need of lots of editing.)


'Meaning' is a superficial but maybe useful/intuitive idealization that does not fully reflect how cognition and brains work - purely mechanistic enaction or transformation between brain states (not representations). It is about predictive mechanisms in neurons from which sensori-motor loops emerge, about cause and effect. I would say experiences are like a coarse-graining of the structure of brain dynamics.

Nice article:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30714889/

Nice quote:

"Knowing is the process of dynamic assembly across multileveled systems in the service of a task. We do not need to invoke represented constructs such as “object” or “extended in space and time” outside the moment of knowing. Knowing, just like action, is the momentary product of a dynamic system, not a dissociable cause of action.... We think to act. Thus, knowing may begin as and always be an inherently sensorimotor act."

(quote from Dynamic Systems Theories - Esther Thelen, Linda Smith - Handbook of Child Psychology, Sixth Edition, Volume One: Theoretical Models of Human Development; 2006)

Important to recognize is that any input-output configuration relating one (set of) neuron(s) can be seen as a sensori-motor configuration in itself. There is a nesting of sensori-motor loops on different scales. We might consider even eco-systems as behaving as if it were a big sensori-motor loop in some ways. Then we have individual humans, brains, neuronal systems inside a brain at different scales. It even gets smaller than a neuron, on the scale of the dendrite where signals propagate and interact along the membrane in terms of excitation/inhibition/modulation.

Efficient coding should be syllopsistic and action-oriented -

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4010728/

https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.09063

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006899321004352#b0340

https://direct.mit.edu/isal/proceedings/isal2020/32/121/98428

Indeed, they do not, this is why I said they aren't specific to the hard problem of consciousness. — Skalidris

I think my point on is that these aren't really part of the nature of the hard problem, fullstop. And my quote was never intended to directly refer to those things.

In any knowledge that we create, we can always generate new "why" questions that we aren't able to answer, this isn't specific to consciousness — Skalidris

First part of the problem: we can never produce knowledge that perfectly matches reality. This problem isn't specific to consciousness — Skalidris

I think neither of these really reflect the problem of explaining phenomenal experiences. There is something very different about the way experience cannot be described or explained.

Well arguably these are not analogous scenarios in the respective worlds.

Yes, this is a good point which always gets me thinking.

I guess this is an open question depending on how someone conceives phenomenal experiences.

I am not familiar with this Thales thing but I would argue maybe things like this add extra things (extra scientific hypotheses) to the world beyond what is in current science. I suspect many idealists and panpsychists would also add extra things or at least extra explanations which are beyond what is in current science.

Maybe some idealists or panpsychists wouldn't be so ornate. But then again, isn't the idea that the world itself is just consciousness also an extra scientific hypothesis? If this notion of physicalism I brought forward is just about the rejection of certain hypotheses then having physicalist beliefs doesn't add any scientific hypotheses in the same way. I guess this view of physicalism would be kind of minimalist metaphysically.

I think maybe I would also say that without some additional distinctive structure beyond current scientific hypotheses then the metaphysical idea that everything is mental is just as vague and empty as the idea everything is physical.

Just a random thought. But seems to me that things like materialism, physicalism, naturalism are all kind of difficult to define in a way that doesn't come with some triviality, e.g. Hempel's dilemma, also the thought that if something like the "supernatural" ever became confirmed, it would just trivially become natural. Methodology also to me seems to just appeal to whatever scientists happen to do which is complicated, not easily summarized, perhaps doesn't even have any hard rules (which might seem trivial if anything that gets results is included). Metaphysical views like structuralism that seem to have been created as improvements on physicalism seem to be just as difficult to define - notion of structure seems extremely vague and general, to me at least.

Seems to me these kinds of views seem most useful when you have something to contrast them against like dualism.

I wonder if these views, rather than a metaphysical view, maybe could be seen as closer to like a loose grouping of scientific hypotheses about the absence of certain type of things like extra mental substance and against things like parapsychology, cryptozoology, pseudoscience (pseudoscience maybe just being more like a label applied to certain ideas that are considered false but are still discussed as true in some fringe communities). Arguably the same denouncements could be said applied to methods too.

My remark about recognising the limitations of the model is based on two issues. First, all this simply assumes that we can count a causal process as a cognitive or symbolic activity. But there's an issue about whether this is legitimate. Second, the example is fascinating because it simply ignores the so-called "hard problem". — Ludwig V

Oh I see, quite right; however, I was not trying to invoke that kind of model of the brain or mind. I wouldn't say efficient coding necessatily entails that kind of idea and my views of the brain and mind don't hinge strongly on symbol or representation.

I think we both more or less agree about what is happening in the picture physically and causally in the scenario you are talking about so maybe there is not much more to be said. I just have a kind of "No-Self" kind of view (" " from wikipedia personal identity page) which makes me view those events differently - the causo-historical significance is for the components of the system but nothing about those components or their causal relationships carves out an objective self-boundary. But again, I think we agree on what is happening here physically.

Yes but my point is that if there is no objective identity then this seems trivial in the sense that it is trivial that we are always constantly changing. Its trivial different events have different consequences. Its not trivial how to objectively construe those consequences as a self-contained identities with continuity over time amidst changes.

A popular matephor, but wrong. Nature does not sit out there (wherever that is), like a joint of meat, waiting to be carved up and served up. Nor are we separate from nature, hovering over it looking for the joins. Nature prods us and we prod it back. Interaction, all the time. Nothing is possible without it. — Ludwig V

Yes, I agree this is a much better way of looking at it.

It goes back to the question whether we can say that computer calculates or speaks. Unlike Searle (if I understand him right) I think we not only do say that but that it is not a mistake to do so.
Nonetheless, I’m sure that in the end, we will have to recognize the limitations of this model/metaphor, if only so that we can get round them. — Ludwig V

What do you mean on this bit?

I think my point in the context of this post here is that if "personal identity" is not objective then the gamete point is trivial because there is no objective fact of the matter that the possibilities belong to a single individual. At the same time there is the strange counterexample of two possible world where everything in someone's life was the same except for the fact that in one world that individual had been conceived with different gamete that had identical genetic information. The difference the gamete brings here then seems about as significant as if one day that person had decided to put on a different pair of socks. You could say that the person is not the same but given that everything else in the world is identical, surely there is claim to say that this is a version of that person in another world. Looking at your Ryle considerations, in general I think often there is no fact of the matter about what makes these counterfactuals the case. We infer that things could have been otherwise purely through our ability to imagine things and there seems no bounds on what could have been the case without having to place an artificial restriction on what seems plausible or not. There's nothing to substantiate these.

Well @Moliere can correct me if I am wrong but I think they are using intension to motivate an argument which is about extension.

Perhaps it would be better to think of what is going on as simplification. We have to decide (and agree) what features of the world are important in a particular context and need to be attended to and which are not. — Ludwig V

Yes, I think this is a core part of science. We carve up nature into systems that are easier to handle, ignoring its interactions with the outside world, averaging over the details to produce simple rules or descriptions. This is exactly what we do in experiments too by controlling the environment so inferences are simpler. Arguably, brains even do this when you consider some common ways of conceptualizing how neurons work like efficient coding.

I am denying objective identity and so I am denying that the developmental trajectory of an organism is deeply intwined with some objective identity. The organism is a collection of components, always changing, always in flux, taking things in from the environment, spitting things back out. There is no essential self there.

My view:

1. There is no dualism; this is demonstrated by the incoherence of the p-zombie concept.

2. The question then becomes about epistemological reasons why we cannot reduce the experiential to the physical.

There is a logical argument, A: If experiences are information about the outside world then it is inconsistent that information about the brain should be derivable. However, this does not mean there is no information about how brains divide up the information in the world - e.g. see that opponent processing and trichromacy in our retinal neuronal architectures were all but predicted by observations about the phenomenal structure of colour - at the same time, what was inferred was not the actual physiology of brain processing but just the way that the brain divides up sensory input that enters the retina by frequencies. It didn't tell us that a brain as we know it was doing the dividing, just that a division or organizing was being made.

There is a skeptical/indeterminacy argument, B: The way brains are structured simply does not give them access to information about the micro-physical causes of input (whether externally or internally) - such causes are inherently indeterminate (and much of the information lost anyway at larger scales).

Conceptual primitives argument, C: A description or explanation is just outlining/modeling relations in a conceptual space. Descriptions or explanations cannot go outside of the space / framework they sit in. If our conceptual space is founded on primitives that are experiential qualities then there is no way of explaining or describing those experiences in a satisfactory way since they are the primitive foundations of the entire explanatory space. They cannot be decomposed or reduced further so they seem ineffable, but this ineffability is unavoidable in any inferential system like our brain that can make explanations.

3. It also must be acknowledged that our scientific theories don't say anything about ontology, they are part of the same explanatory framework as C above. Scientific theories are like predictive tools and there can be a plurality of descriptions. There is therefore no inherent contradiction between physics and experiences if we say that physics doesn't tell us about inherent ontology. Equally we might say that the notion of experience doesn't tell us much about ontology other than the fact it is informative about the external world. If anything, coherently non-trivial fundamental ontologies are inherently unattainable.

Next part is more speculative:

4. If my experiences are what its like to be a brain then we might want to try vaguely conceptualize the world in a way that accomodates their existence. We might look to a kind of structuralist but minimalist metaphysics where all structure is on ontologically equal ground. What we may deem most fundamental in the world may be things like symmetries, invariances, regardless of the scale they occur. Experiences are what its like to be some structure, invariances, information (difference that makes a difference). Specifically my experiences reflect particular macroscopic invariances in the vicinity of the brain among many others that exist and are described in physics, chemistry, biology at various scales.

Simply because if one is skeptical about a coherent ontology for identity then there is nothing for it to be potent about. All it would then be about is labelling things and keeping track of those labels.

Yes, yes. I think we must have got some wires crossed in this topic. I don't think people necessarily really mean h2O when they say water.

Other notes:

It seems to be idealizations everywhere though. Even if you want to go past the idealization of water=H2O, then the less idealized descriptions will include idealizations as per the nature of chemistry where various models still involve idealization.

I think even if a model is considered true, there are ways that we can envision it being underspecified in some way. Maybe the example of quantum mechanics interpretations. Two different interpretations may afford the same empirical description of water in terms of quantum theory, physics, theoretical chemistry. Yet they may have radical metaphysical different implications for what water is. So then, is water picking out the same thing everywhere if it cannot distinguish between interpretations of H2O with extra interpretational or underlying structure like this?

Well I think this is a different topic to what I was saying in my post you replied to but I would say this causo-historico thing presumes a coherent ontology of the individual to which the causo-historical connection has a non-trivial consequence for. When I think about it deeply, I am skeptical about such coherent ontology of the individual where the causo-historico thing has any signicance beyond a kind of bookkeeping role of keeping track of things.

I best be careful then. If my account means that people cannot refer then it's in trouble since we do successfully refer! — Moliere

I think there's been some wires crossed as I don't understand whats being implied here.

Quite so. Not wanting to be picky, but what makes these abstractions arbitrary? Isn't it rather that the idea of natural kinds proposes a certain kind of model, but the facts (nature) undermine it. — Ludwig V

Yes, I think you are right about proposing a certain kind of model and it being undermined in the sense that either the model is outright wrong or the idealization ignores meaningful distinctions.

I was meaning that once you lift the lid on the issue of the model and probe past what was once seen as some essential nature; then, in probing the specifics about how something like H2O may behave in different contexts then there is not really a limit on how specific you want to go or where you want to place the boundaries for classification or on what basis you want to make separations between different things. H2O with different ion concentrations, isotopes. Ice, vapour, etc. We can always cut arbitrary lines or boundaries.

though very little in comparison. — Moliere

Yes but they are still necessary for the properties of water like electrical conductivity, even if little in comparison - if they were not present, it would imply there was no water there or at least that the water didn't possess its characteristic properties. Hence why different concentrations lead to different properties. The isotope example is also interesting because its not trivial at all the changes it makes. D2O can kill things because of how different it is to water.

I think the concept of idealization always strengthens this kind of direction you are going in since at the very least it questions or complicates the idea that people are actually referring to what they say they are referring to when they use particular terms or phrases.

It just means that H2O represents more than just "H2O" perhaps. — schopenhauer1

Yes, I was reading an article suggesting that it isnt really problematic for saying H2O is water since you can say that all that is required (under certain conditions) is that you have many H2O molecules and in their interactions, these ionization phenomena happen... so you still don't need anything more than H2O really. I don't have a problem with saying H2O is water since there is a pragmatism of ignoring these kind of details.

But at same time to me that means acknowledging an aspect of pragmatism or choice into it about where I draw the lines/boundaries. It complicates the notion that we are talking about some essentialistic natural kind here imo.

But the point is that it becomes a posteriori necessary, which is Kripke's controversial theory. The evidence provides the necessity of identity's content, which can be changed with more evidence. So the content can change, but the link of necessity does not, with whatever it is that that content provides. — schopenhauer1

Yes, I see this but it seems that was is posteriori necessary trivially depends on what I happen to decide I should call something so to me it doesn't seem that interesting or have deep consequences. Can you even call that necessary?

Then it comes to the issue of deciding what is water in all possible worlds. Does that trivially mean that water in all possible worlds is identical to water in this world? Or might there be other possible worlds with water that is different in some way but still similar? It seems this is down to my decision in some ways about what I want to deem as water or not depending on what I want to ignore in possible worlds.

But even here I'd note that a chemist differentiates between aqueous solutions and water, and the normal usage calls the sea "water" even though it's actually a mixture of water, ammonia, salt, etc. So that the common usage does not always pick out the very same thing even in our world, and so the claim to necessity is hampered by that possibility. — Moliere

I'm afraid common usage is too messy for us. Common usage can distinguish between water, sea water, sewage water, rain water, &c. Pure or distilled water is part of that range, but is really a technical idea, now adopted by common usage. Perhaps we need a natural kind for each of them? — Ludwig V

Its interesting because really, we can get arbitrarily specific about different kinds of water. When H2O molecules react it results in various different ions which are essential for its properties so if you want to be more specific, you could say that water isn't really just H2O - that water is H2O may be a straightforward statement since it emerges from H2O molecules interacting, but then it has to be qualified that this is idealizing the details.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-ionization_of_water

We might then see that different concentrations of these ions result in different properties of water and then we might have water with different isotopes of hydrogen which impart different properties too.

Seems to me anyone can get as precise as one wants in distinguishing things and all "natural kinds" require ignoring some kinds of details, differentiation, contextual relevance. Nothing we categorize in the world avoids arbitrary abstractions.

Ha, have any of your suspicions been verified? I had a suspicion of that kind of nature once about another poster who hasnt posted in this thread, there was just another poster with a very similar writing style who started posting in the same thread as them.

Totally agree about this water thing. I more or less have the same idea but I extend it to individuals too.

Well said on these various posts.

I wouldn't say research like this would be helping with the Hard Problem of consciousness though. Ofcourse, the more we learn, the more we might precisely we will be able to relate experiences to neural activity but that isnt necessarily the same as explaining why specific phenomenal experiences are related to certain mechanisms.
And I don't think there an explanation to that is even possible as I think such a duality is illusory.

Oh, this is an actual question about another poster?

No I am not him. Why did you think that? Never heard of that name until I looked it up just now.

I am 100% sure, there is absolutely no way that neuroscience can solve the hard problem of consciousness in a way where our descriptions in neuroscience fully explain our experience in the sense that there is some kind of necessary entailment between some neuroscientific description and some experience. This is impossible I think. Your wave example doesn't help. It wouldn't explain why the wave is associated with some particular experie ces in the same way that current descriptions of vidual cortex activity cannot tell us what experiences we are having. I think consciousness is a place where the natural limits of self-explanation really becoming prominent... the thing is, there is no reason we should be able to explain everything, especially the self (i.e. experience). I think its almost analogous to how self-reference always results in paradoxes in logic. We can never know just as a dog will never know somethings because its brain is designed in a way that is limiting to it.

P-zombies are definitely incoherent by any normal standard of a good, coherent description of how the world probably works.

It makes absolutely no sense that there could be things out there with no conscious yet they routinely claim they are conscious and enter into debates about the hard problem of consciousness.

Moreover, because our brains are the things which are functionally responsible for our conscious claims, it follows that the reason I, as a conscious being, believe that I am conscious is for the exact same reasons that a p-zombie believes it is consciousness, even though the p-zombie is wrong and I just happen to be correct.
To me, science doesn't seem to give or necessitate any room for anything additional to routine physics and biology as explanations for why our brains behave the way they do so it is strange that a p-zombie would make these claims from the physical interactions of the brain. And the fact that my brain is only interacting with physical things brings up the question of how I can even know I am phenomenally conscious if the brain mediates all my knowledge. My knowledge about my own consciousness would be entirely incidental.

So it follows that phenomenal consciousness is entirely redudnant.

The simplest explanation is that there is no duality between the mind and brain. P-zombies are incoherent and don't make sense in the actual world at all.

For me here I think it gets hazy because since in my example everything is completely identical except for this gamete part, it seems to me I could plausibly say they are the same person.

At the same time, I do see the causal intuition. But then again, in this context, I am inclined to ask what makes the causal-historico thing impart this you-ness in a way which is not just kind of arbitrary labelling. And I don't think that I can give myself a good response of what it is that is being imparted by the historico-causal connection.

As I mentioned in another poster, the closest I can find is some kind of intuitive notion that in this world, the lights of my consciousness are switched on, while in that world they are switched off. But I don't think that is well founded at all or gives some good criteria in terms of identity either.

What about a possible world where the only thing that was different was that George 1 came from gamete 2 instead of gamete 1, which just happen to be "twin" gametes. Everything else in that world is identical.

Well given that a p-zombie:

1) Behaves identically to a regular person;

2) The reason it behaves are for the same reasons as a regular person (i.e. it has a human brain that performs functions just like ours); and

3) The circumstances about the world under which I myself am "accepting" or "considering" things is the same as which apply to the p-zombie (in regard to the p-zombie performing acts of p-"considering" and p-"accepting", etc);

Then maybe it makes sense to attribute to it these things you mentioned after all. For all intents and purposes they cannot be distinguished in either case.

Edit: attempt at clarification same points, partly by formatting.

But that's my point about the gametes. That is the point where that very individual cannot be that very individual anymore. Then it is back to being open to simply "a possibility of some individual". — schopenhauer1

Well in the the gamete example, it is about a world where that person was not born as opposed to a world where some property of the person has been changed.