A single celled organism has no thoughts, but it does have a "self", in that it is distinct from its environment. — Daemon

We might say that the self is that which is controlled toward homeostasis. The environment would be where this 'self' finds food and releases waste. We say it has no thought (because it doesn't speak), but if it inherited reactions to its environment, that might deserve to count as intelligence. What do humans really know of their thoughtstuff except as language that organizes other activities?

Getting a computer to process context is one of the hardest parts of NLP. — universeness

Dreyfus used Heidegger's work to argue against the hopes for AI back in his day. I think the approach was more symbolic at the time. I'm more hopeful with a continuous (floating-point ) approach. The internal thought of such 'machine' is just 'boxes' of numbers, not unlike the brain perhaps, if interpreted appropriately. (Of course we're actually talking about currents, etc., which represent floating point numbers.)

Machine translation doesn't "think" at all however, neither does it do what I do when I translate. — Daemon

I know pretty well what goes on at the level of bits, and I agree, and yet...I don't know if we think either. Zoom in on our neurons and AFAIK there's no localized special sauce.

My own preference is to measure intelligence or thinking in terms of ability (from the outside of that intelligence, ignoring the presence of absence of qualia/intuition/etc.).

Machine translation doesn't "think" at all however, neither does it do what I do when I translate. Here's a concrete example, intended to illustrate what you do when you understand language, which a computer can't do:

1. The council members refused to allow the protestors to hold their rally as they feared violence.

2. The council members refused to allow the protestors to hold their rally as they advocated violence.

You can tell who "they" refers to in each case because of your immersion of a world of experience. The computer can't tell. — Daemon

Excellent example. So currently humans are better. My question would be whether there's any reason why improved algorithms, more compute, and more/better data won't eventually result in machines being as good as humans at translation? Our own brains, immensely complex, are nevertheless finite. Consider a machine the size of the moon, built in 4056, trained on all data generated in the meantime. (I wonder if GANs have been used to detect machine versus human translation. )

I think it will happen eventually, yes but do you think the potential technological movements toward a transhuman distant future is evidence of emerging panpsychism? — universeness

I wouldn't use that exact word for it myself. I understand that (perhaps incorrectly) in terms of even a copper atom having its little allowance of 'consciousness.' I'm not a consciousness denier, but I think it's almost impossible to talk about apart of public criteria that themselves have no need of that hypothesis. A statement that I can't be wrong about...contains no information? 'I am conscious.' What do/can I mean? A deep question. Messing with it in another thread I started.

Humans merging with technology! Cyborgs/human brains contained in cybernetic bodies/human consciousness transferred to cloned bodies etc. All these sci-fi projections of transhumanism. Will this eventually mean more 'networking' of individual consciousnesses and the ultimate result would be a Universal consciousness which is a merging of the individual consciousness of every lifeform in the Universe? Could such a manifestation of panpsychism satisfy the god criteria, ie the Omni's?

So the reason the god posit has always been with us, is because it is our ultimate fate/goal.
I don't particularly subscribe to this, I am an atheist through and through but I find the 'ultimate result of technological advancement,' interesting. — universeness

Excellent stuff! I'm also an atheist, but the dream/concept/ideal of God remains central for humans (under different names perhaps.) As other thinkers have noted, humanity is already a little god itself, when considered in aggregate. Look at our cities of concrete and steel, our satellites that allow us to facetime one another from the other side of the worldball. Not exactly just beavers, are we? Language is the primary network, but technology could perhaps accelerate communication. On Youtube, I saw a video of a device that allows 'locked in' victims of ALS to talk again. They can't even blink, let alone speak, but can change their brainwaves so that the machine gives them words. Early days, but circumventing the mouth and hands is suggestive.

If we could extend the life of a personality, so that someone could master 30 languages, master physics and chemistry and electronics....and basically build the newer and better cyborg (or a newer body for itself, motivated by a flight from a mortality that is revealed as a stupid and obsolete Darwinian glitch.)
Anyway, Sartre thought the individual consciousness was a futile quest to be god. As a species goal..and conceived less metaphysically..it's at least plausible. More knowledge, more power, and (hopefully!) more wisdom and decency. That's where David Pearce might come in. Dare we tinker with our own DNA to make us kinder and happier? Or is this Act I of an unspeakable tragedy? Deep Blue Sea features sharks that become super-intelligent and super-unfriendly in pursuit of a cure for Alzheimer's. As you already mention, our hubris, however glorious, might also be self-extinguishing.

The future is a world of ∞∞ possibilities. God maybe one of 'em. You never know what tomorrow will bring. Isn't that what's so exciting about times yet to come? — Agent Smith

If the future wasn't constrained at all, then that'd be terrifying ! I've seen the idea that God may yet arrive, but then this God is not a creator but a kind of wonderful alien, an even bigger and nicer BFG (as in Roald Dahl's creation.)

https://roalddahl.fandom.com/wiki/Frobscottle#:~:text=Frobscottle%20is%20a%20green%2Dcolored,the%20drinker%20fly%20and%20fart.

Consciousness is a complex awareness in which an integrated life event creates a variation in its structural arrangement (of interacting molecular change) in relation to an ‘other’ event with which it interacts - ie. the world. Each variation relates to the next to gradually build and rebuild a conceptual structure of the world as a predictive reference for the brain, in much the same way as DNA builds an updated blueprint for the organism. This integrated structure of predictions about the world is then able to create an ‘image’ of the world or the self as it develops self-consciousness - creating potential or simulated variations to test how such an arrangement might affect the organism’s ongoing structural arrangements of molecular change. — Possibility

Nice !

Although I think you are setting a very ambitious time frame. I think some seriously transhuman creations are in our future but I think it will take thousands of years not hundreds and only of course if we can prevent our own extinction. — universeness

Perhaps you are right. We were supposed to have floating cars by now, right? If, however, a particular kind of 'AI' is especially profitable or powerful, we might see 'Manhattan Project' research intensity. Cyber warfare could become decisive, so that flexible and quick-reacting attackers/defenders are developed. A genetic algorithm might be used to develop neural networks that fight one another. We already have GANs making convincing faces of folks who never lived. I confess that I really don't know.

I have never seen or read about any AI system that can pass the Turing test in any interesting way, have you? — universeness

No. I just don't see why it won't happen eventually. We're near the beginning of the revolution. An economic/military arms race will only accelerate the process. 'Skynet' might destroy us one day (mostly joking, but who knows? We are reckless enough...)

I read a little about Stochastic Gradient Descent. — universeness

Yeah, that's it! It's a very general technique. Let's say I have a differentiable function of ten thousand floating-point variables, then I can probably find a very nice local max or local min using SGD. The gradient points in the best direction for the next baby step. Doesn't always work, but one can try lots of random starting points.

When I rest in simple, clear, ever-present awareness, I am the Witness of the World. I am the eye of Spirit. I see the world as God sees it. I see the world as the Goddess sees it. I see the world as Spirit sees it: every object an object of Beauty, every thing and event a gesture of the Great Perfection, every process a ripple in the pond of my own eternal Being, so much so that I do not stand apart as a separate witness, but find the witness is one taste with all that arises within it. The entire Kosmos arises in the eye of Spirit, in the I of Spirit, in my own intrinsic awareness, this simple ever-present state, and I am simply that.

https://integrallife.com/always-already-the-brilliant-clarity-of-ever-present-awareness/

This sounds great, and I believe it describes a possible if probably unsustainable state of the heart. Conceptual rigor is not the point. That might be the best way to defend this variety of metaphysics. Calling it 'poetry' is too dismissive and might dampen its effect. But calling it 'science' flatters something that doesn't prioritize its own correction, confident already in its own completeness.

I made the point about the subjective nature of time itself. I drew on some quotes from various scientists on that point. The very fabric of space and time is in some fundamental sense generated by the mind. — Wayfarer

Assuming that thesis, how does an evolved brain still fit in? If time is just part of our mediation, I don't see how it can be applied to the presumed source of that mediation.

But saying that reality is 'generated' by the mind is not saying that it's just a dream. That's the only reality we know, and it has a fundamentally mental character. — Wayfarer

Don't take the metaphor too seriously. Call it mediated content if you like. The 'dream' is of the 'world' which models/represents/presents (presumably, if we talk in terms of mediation) some 'world-in-itself.'

But as soon as you say 'ah, in the mind', then already you're trying to see from a perspective outside that — Wayfarer

Yes, but this isn't some barbaric metaphysical preference. I see my wife and friends 'from the outside.' I see all other subjects 'from the outside' and embedded in the same one world with me. Spoiler: a Möbius strip seems like a better metaphor to me than a reduction to all-mental or all-physical.

But that is also all a cognitive act. So I'm saying, reality has an irreducibly subjective pole - but there's no use asking 'what is that' or 'where is that'. — Wayfarer

I get that. The question is whether or not you grant the existence of some kind of substrate where all of us more or less conscious/subjective animals live (and can have evolved in the first place.) Given your taking evolution as a fact, it seems that of course you'll acknowledge some kind of 'physical' world. One can still insist that it's only experienced mediately (as sensations, thoughts, etc) and that all such experience is a marriage of whatever a nervous system is understood to host and whatever kind of stuff it's embedded in and made of.

The very fabric of space and time is in some fundamental sense generated by the mind. Kant saw this. — Wayfarer

Currently I think Kant went too far, that he needs an ordinary notion of time and space to build his spaceship. Brilliant for 1781, but we've had a lot of time to worry over it. We are the ancients (vessels of an old flame, encrusted with the dialogue of centuries.)

I don't think I will be able to visit a non-English speaking country in my lifetime and be wearing an earpiece that speaks to me in English that which is spoken to me in Spanish. — universeness

Do you know if they've got any big computers that can do it almost instantaneously ? I haven't checked in for awhile. I never focused on NLP, but I know the theory of SGD pretty well.

Even if we do get such technologies working perfectly, I don't see how this helps answer the questions I asked about. — universeness

An 'operationalized' definition of consciousness might involve something like a Turing test. If you are talking on the phone with some voice and don't know if that voice is conscious or not, then it's 'operationally conscious' (in the context of that particular test.)

Am I conscious ? Is it plausible that I (manifested as this stream of text) am the output of a program? Because you know the field, you'll probably say no. But how about a century from now? Once we've trained some newfangled model among ten-million of its siblings and 20 billion humans? To be sure, translation alone is not sufficiently impressive, but 'thought' is most directly manifest (perhaps) in language use.

Another relevant quote.
/////////////////////////////////////
The voice is heard ( understood ) ­... closest to the self as the absolute effacement of the signifier: pure auto-affection that necessarily has the form of time and which does not borrow from outside of itself, in the world or in "reality," any accessory signifier, any substance of expression foreign to its own spontaneity. It is the unique experience of the signified producing itself spontaneously, from within the self, and nevertheless, as signified concept, in the element of ideality or universality. The unworldly character of this substance of expression is constitutive of this ideality. This experience of the effacement of the signifier in the voice is not merely one illusion among many ---since it is the condition of the very idea of truth... Within the closure of this experience, the word [mot] is lived as the elementary and undecomposable unity of the signified and the voice, of the concept and a transparent substance of expression. This experience is considered in its greatest purity --- and at the same time in the condition of its possibility --- as the experience of "being." The word "being," or at any rate the words designating the sense of being in different languages, is, with some others, an "originary word," the transcendental word assuring the possibility of being-word to all other words. As such, it is precomprehended in all language and...only this precomprehension would permit the opening of the question of the sense of being in general...Heidegger reminds us constantly that the sense of being is neither the word "being" nor the concept of being. But as that sense is nothing outside of language and the language of words, it is tied, if not to a particular word or to a particular system of language..., at least to the possibility of the word in general. And to the possibility of its irreducible simplicity...
///////////////////////////////////////////
What is the relation of the self-present subject and language ? Or between being and language? Since the 'pure witness' seems to gesture at the 'thereness' of that which is there. 'It's not how but that the world is that's mystical.' Does each subject have ineffable private access to Being ? Should one be silent on such matters? Witt didn't mind saying at least his little piece. Or should one dissipate the glad tidings that thou art that ? Or found science on pure intuitions? Or challenge the intelligibility of such claims? Or live half-in half-out of the game? (I think Derrida sets Saussure ajar.)

Thanks, I wish we had some answers! Come on ye scientists! — universeness

We might see faster progress on the digital front. Natural language processing is getting pretty good. Translation on the fly was a sci-fi idea, and now we have it. Point your camera and watch it replace a German coffee label with one in English. I haven't messed with live voice translation, but I'm guessing it's pretty great (might not fit on a cellphone yet.)

I think the facts of evolution are indisputable. But unlike evolutionary materialism, I don't see evolution as a kind of spontaneous chemical reaction elaborated by the Darwinian algorithm, a la Dennett. I had a wise professor of Indian philosophy, who related the Vedic idea of evolution, which is that evolution is the result of involution - that the cosmic mind enfolds itself into the material world, which then unfolds as its expressions. 'What is latent', he would say, 'becomes patent'. — Wayfarer

:up:

Thanks for clarifying! That helps.

Only when you look at it as an object. In practice, the brain is never an object, unless you're a neurologist or some such. — Wayfarer

I still think your not seeing/addressing the issue I'm raising. You and I both believe that the brain evolved, so this seems to require a stage (space and time and molecules) for the composition and interaction of lifeforms (call it 'physical' or whatever.) That only makes sense as 'outside' the dream of such brains (or better yet the mediated environment of such brains.)

If 'the subject' or 'consciousness' lives in healthy human brains, then what are they made of and where do they exist? An indirect realist might say (1) some kind of non-mental stuff and (2) in some kind of substrate.

Well, your brain can be preserved in formaldehyde for much longer than a human lifespan.
Are 'you' still in there? What about those who get their head preserved in cryogenic storage?
They hope to be revived at some point in the future. — universeness

Does the brain of a dead human have to be allowed to 'disassemble,' before YOU can become truly dead. Are YOU gone from the brain the second you die? — universeness

Excellent questions! Altered Carbon runs with this idea and allows personality/memory/self to be stored on a kind of flash drive. Is there anything special about our brain meat? Don't know !

I do know you can have neural networks computing the same function and yet with very different guts/parameters, so perhaps there are many ways to store the 'same' personality.

Derrida (quoted below) might sometimes be said to exaggerate, but I think the pure witness (which is presented most boldly and directed by that metaphysics which is explicitly mystical) is an excellent crystallization of the priority of presence. That which is ever-present and enduring is 'The Subject,' which in the mystical context is not merely an intellectual but a spiritual goal, an ecstatic realization.
///////////////////////////////////////////////
The feelings of the mind, expressing things naturally, constitute a sort of universal language which can then efface itself. It is the stage of transparence. Aristotle can sometimes omit it without risk.In every case, the voice is closest to the signified, whether it is determined strictly as sense ( thought or lived ) or more loosely as thing. All signifiers, and first and foremost the written signifier, are derivative with regard to what would wed the voice indissolubly to the mind or to the thought of the signified sense, indeed to the thing itself ( whether it is done in the Aristotelian manner that we have just indicated or in the manner of medieval theology, determining the res as a thing created from its eidos, from its sense thought in the logos or in the infinite understanding of God) . The written signifier is always technical and representative. It has no constitutive meaning. This derivation is the very origin of the notion of the "signifier." The notion of the sign always implies within itself the distinction between signifier and signified, even if, as Saussure argues, they are distinguished simply as the two faces of one and the same leaf. This notion remains therefore within the heritage of that logocentrism which is also a phonocentrism...

...absolute proximity of voice and being, of voice and the meaning of being, of voice and the ideality of meaning.We already have a foreboding that phonocentrism merges with...the meaning of being in general as presence, with all the subdeterminations which depend on this general form and which organize within it their system and their historical sequence (presence of the thing to the sight as eidos, presence as substance/ essence/ existence / ousia, temporal presence as point [stigme] of the now or of the moment [nun], the self-presence of the cogito...

The semiological or, more specifically, linguistic "science" cannot therefore hold on to the difference between signifier and signified...without the difference between sensible and intelligible, certainly, but also not without retaining, more profoundly and more implicitly, and by the same token the reference to a signified able to "take place" in its intelligibility, before its "fall," before any expulsion into the exteriority of the sensible here below. As the face of pure intelligibility, it refers to an absolute logos to which it is immediately united. This absolute logos was an infinite creative subjectivity in medieval theology : the intelligible face of the sign remains turned toward the word and the face of God.

Of course, it is not a question of "rejecting" these notions; they are necessary and, at least at present, nothing is conceivable for us without them. It is a question at first of demonstrating the systematic and historical solidarity of the concepts and gestures of thought that one often believes can be innocently separated. The sign and divinity have the same place and time of birth.

You’re operating from inside ‘the naturalist assumption’. — Wayfarer

I think my position is more general than that. I'm willing to put all current physics on the side of the model. Let's say that 'electron talk' is the mediated content of consciousness, a product perhaps of an unknown-stuff-mediating brain. Where is the 'real' brain? That one that dreams an image of itself? If there's no stuff 'out there,' then it's hard to explain the apparent synchronization of our 'dreaming.'

How could you make a comparison? How could you assume a perspective that can see from all those completely different perspectives at once, so as to compare whether they’re seeing ‘the same thing’? — Wayfarer

I think it's basically an extension of the grammar we already use between humans. Other humans are different enough already to see the world differently. Note that I don't expect the experience of the aliens or cockroaches to be similar, and I agree that consciousness is grammatically uncheckable, so I'd operationalize it in terms of indicators of intelligence, but that's a tangent.

All I'm saying is that if we picture the universe to contain intelligent non-human life, then of course their nervous systems are reacting to or interpreting the same universe. A cockroach on the sidewalk, if it has consciousness, is even more obviously experiencing the same little piece of spacetime as me.

Your mind is not actually ‘your mind’ - it is the mind, the human mind, which has evolved over millions or even billions of years as a sophisticated Virtual Reality generator. — Wayfarer

I'm amenable to this view, but note that it assumes the existence of a non-mental world, a substrate of some kind (the germs needed time to evolve into monkeys with a complicated symbolic interface.) I'm a bit surprised to hear it from you, since it casts the subject as the product of evolution. Throw in some evolving cultural software, confess the substrate, and you have what I'd call a plausible indirect realism.

But if you really consider the nature of consciousness, and the nature of being, you will see that ‘the world’ is always being constituted moment-by-moment in your extraordinarily powerful and large hominid forebrain. — Wayfarer

Ah, but that brain is (positioned as) a mere part of the dream. I really can grok the solipsistic idea. I suppose that I more or less believe (in some register) that I live in a dream 'thrown up by' by my brain. But that only makes sense if my brain exists in a world outside that dream. The brain as known by us is (one might say) a mediated image of the brain-in-itself. But if we go the whole Kantian hog and say that time and space are part of the dream, the whole narrative of me being a ghost thrown up by a brain is endangered. Kant seems to quietly rely on the very common sense that he otherwise subverts. Our ordinary logic of sense organs and incomplete/uncertain knowledge seems to be the source material for something implausibly radical in its forgetting of this material.

The universe and the observer exist as a pair. You can say that the universe is there only when there is an observer who can say, Yes, I see the universe there. These small words — it looks like it was here— for practical purposes it may not matter much, but for me as a human being, I do not know any sense in which I could claim that the universe is here in the absence of observers. We are together, the universe and us. The moment you say that the universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness. A recording device cannot play the role of an observer, because who will read what is written on this recording device?

The 'correlation' approach that I associate with this is ‘the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.' I find it plausible enough to consider. Maybe the universe-in-itself (if you could peel back all our models and see it naked) is doomed to be a point-at-infinity. Perhaps the 'pure witness' is a similar construction.

In the quote above, there's (1) a neglect of intelligent non-human life and (2) a neglect of gradations of consciousness. Presumably 'aliens' and cockroaches, with their differing nervous systems and cultures, would experience the universe differently than we do. But it's the same universe? Right? So it's hard to get around some kind of 'substrate' or 'raw stuff' which is mediated by 'consciousness.' Let's imagine that humans accidentally destroy themselves in a nuclear war, so that all intelligence life in the universe is gone for a few million years, till a species elsewhere attains enough 'consciousness' to do physics. Let's say they discover records of our own physics and translate them successfully. In what manner did the record of our physics exist between our extinction and their achievement of culture (in the absence of consciousness? ) We could easily sharpen this thought-experiment so that all life is temporality absent from the universe.

A bit of tangent in this thread (started one exactly on the theme), but I'll leave a quote from the guy and a comment. It is relevant to the OP, more or less.

I’m not the mind. I’m not the feelings. I’m not the body. That I see. But I surely am. I surely am an individual apart from others. Now, what you’ve gotten ahold of is a very difficult fellow. It’s your ego. He can sneak around and confuse you like the dickens. You can spend years trying to get behind him. And what you can do, you can get into an infinite regression. You look at your ego, all right here am I? It all of a sudden dawns upon you that that which is looking at the ego is really the “I.” So you stick that one out in front and you look at it again, but then you realize it couldn’t be because here’s the something that is observing it. At last it finally dawns that I am that which is never an object before consciousness. And mayhap at that moment in your analysis the heavens will open.

https://freddieyam.com/gen2/p/quotes.merrell-wolff.html

This is quite close to what I quoted from another thinker/site. The transcendental ego becomes (seems to me) a synonym for being itself, except it remains dependent on a pair of eyes and ears and is still localized in terms of sensation. For less philosophical types, this journey of abstraction could indeed be difficult and painful (well I guess it's likely to be painful but philosophical types might suffer it early and then take it lightly.) It's echoed in Fight Club too, in a different tone. You are not your job, you're not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are the all singing, all dancing crap of the world.

Stirner treated the 'the sacred' as a sort of X that played the role of such an authority. I call it the triangle inequality. The 'geometry' goes like this: I am better than U due to my greater proximity to X.

When this theme was more in my thoughts, I got in the habit of looking for that absent/virtual yet decisive vertex in rhetorical conflicts. Does so-and-so quote their scripture (Bible or Wittgenstein or Lacan or Trump or Osho or Oprah or ... )? Appeal to norms of rationality, decency? Appeal to the Inner Light or Direct Mystical Experience? Basically we enact our self-flattering, self-shielding heroic roles...and maybe there's no face behind all the masks?

I don't pretend to reject the norms of rationality or decency, by the way, though one can get a certain distance from them by means of them.

Infinity is used to get as close as possible to a target (curves/females). — Agent Smith

Indeed. Try to compound interest more and more often, and you'll naturally bump into probably the most famous number (for insiders) which is $e$.

Aye! — Agent Smith

As you probably know, the old timers of math tended to feel that way...that only 'potential' infinity was respectable. But beyond what is accepted formally (say you embrace the symbol game of an infinite tower of differing infinities), an ancient problem remains. What does it all mean? To what does it all refer? How does it hook up with the rest of life?

Hage you heard of The Teakettle principle — Agent Smith

Looked it up, and it's a big part of math. 'We'll transform this into a quadratic equation, which we covered last week...'

That's the only infinity that makes sense to me; kinda feel like a time traveler (physically in the 21st century but mentally a mathematical troglodyte) — Agent Smith

Do you mean $\aleph_0$, the cardinality of the natural numbers?

I don't see why robotic entities can't be created through non-biological processes. — RogueAI

Well, my idea is that there is something special about biological entities, in that they are separated from their environment. That's what I mean when I say they have an inside and an outside. And a robot isn't separated from its environment in the necessary way. — Daemon

One problem here is maybe a lack of separation of (1) a postulated direct experience of conscious, and (2) criteria for determining with others whether a not-me-or-you deserves the honor.

Maybe a century from now there'll be a robot insisting that it can see redness and feel pain and fall in love. Moreover it acts 'accordingly' (in alignment with criteria we'd apply to humans, with various adjustments for the robot's differing body.) Would the presence of consciousness in this robot be decidable? But then how we 'know' that a random stranger is 'really' conscious and not just faking it? IMO, there are some issues with this concept of consciousness. To 'operationalize' such a concept, we'd probably need to articulate public criteria for its application, and it seems that only 'meat chauvinism' could rule out a sufficiently sophisticated robot. (We ourselves are 'moist robots' in some sense, unless we insist that an undetermined special sauce has been poured on our skullmeat.)

But for those that either believe strictly in science or a more cosmic force like karma or some type of balance don't they also add human virtue when thinking of that scenario? — TiredThinker

I don't think so, if we exclude versions of the karma idea. One can envision nature as amoral and nevertheless trust in the actual relative social harmony in which this envisioning takes place.

Whichever narrative you adhere to, isn't there bound to be some human-centric bias? — Yohan

That sounds right, given that it's a human making the claim. I suppose we can talk about layers. Perhaps there's the bias we can peel off (culture-deep) and then the kind we can't (biology-deep.)

Infinity simply inreases the accuracy of our calculations and I guess that's why it's such a big deal. — Agent Smith

The circle is the limit of a polygon with n-sides. Each polygon is therefore an approximation of the circle. No polygon is itself the circle, of course. Or let $f(n) = 1/n$, then we can use a compact notation for taking limits and say $f(\infty) = 0$, while $\forall n \in \Bbb N \; \; f(n) \gt 0$. Note that the function need not achieve the limit but only 'eventually' (for large enough n) get and stay arbitrarily close.

The lemniscate, if you'll recall, was the reason Cantor lost his marbles. — Agent Smith

Well it makes for a lovely myth (sort of like Nietzsche going mad from his denial of God). He moved on from the lemniscate to the Hebrew alphabet before going mad, btw.

Obsession with lemniscates will lead to no good. Please see your psychoanalyst. — jgill

Or, if you are feeling mischievous, hand him some $2^{\aleph_0}$ and tell him the computable numbers are countable.

Bigger picture: do you think in terms of lots of organisms each making a model of their world? Are you (roughly) an indirect realist? I understand the limits of the mind/matter distinction, hence 'roughly.' In this thread, I think the problem have other 'subjects'/persons hasn't been touched on enough. Folks either want to stuff the world into consciousness or flatten consciousness into the brain. I understand the motives for both moves, but each seems to simply ignore this or that issue. Are we different humans with different minds in the same world? And does this same world need some kind of an elusive substrate that we can carve into in order to communicate?

Steo 1: bin James and Rorty. — apokrisis

Well, I could definitely scrounge up some gripes about them. But they are readable. A bit squishy tho for my current taste.

The idea that one exception could break the rule itself assumes a particular metaphysics. It says a theory can describe "how the world works" in some kind of totally constrained and exceptionless fashion - reality as a mechanism. — apokrisis

My current view is mechanism with randomness. So a model will include random noise, for instance. Or the model will just be an empirically established distribution.

And this is the world that science in fact describes. One that is probabilistic at base and thus always capable of exceptions that break the rule. And yet the rule is only in fact a constraint that limits exceptions to some long-run statistical profile. — apokrisis

This makes sense to me. Zoom in and find a casino. The house tends to win, and chairs tend not to jump from one side of the room to the other. Broken plates tend not to reassemble spontaneously. But I only climbed a rung or two beyond Newton in school. Learning more physics is on the list with so many other worthy pursuits.

There is the popular belief that the scientific method ought to be tuned to producing exceptionless law. — apokrisis

My understanding is that, back in Newton's day, folks were tempted/terrified to think of the world as a deterministic video game. As a child, I thought of laws that way and didn't think about the complexities of measurement and curvefitting and wasn't told about the randomness of modern physics.

So as far as framing laws goes, being so constraining as to be exceptionless would be to accept the idea that the Cosmos is an actual machine.

Peirce's pragmatism already understood this point. Which is why he stressed that universal laws were only really highly developed Cosmic habits. A propensity based view of probability itself follows. — apokrisis

Definitely a fascinating idea, which seems to replace the machine metaphor with one from biology. I've looked into biosemiotics a little bit (thanks to your intriguing posts) and it's good stuff.

Thanks ! I found it.

When I rest as the pure and simple Witness, I notice that I am not caught in the world of time. The Witness exists only in the timeless present. Yet again, this is not a state that is difficult to achieve but impossible to avoid. The Witness sees only the timeless present because only the timeless present is actually real. When I think of the past, those past thoughts exist right now, in this present. When I think of the future, those future thoughts exist right now, in this present. Past and future thoughts both arise right now, in simple ever-present awareness.

The eternal Now, eternally self-present, is the eye of the storm of life, the frame of every picture, or perhaps the canvas on which it is painted. The past is memory. The future is fantasy. Or perhaps the past too is fantasy. Perhaps I have never actually slept (been unconscious) but only witnessed a sudden change in the lighting of the room, the conversion of silence to the sound of an alarm clock (or so I remember or fantasize.) If only The Subject endures, all else is unreal, for only the eternal is real.

Precisely because the ultimate reality is not anything seen but rather the Seer, it doesn’t matter in the least what is seen in any moment. Whether you see peace or turmoil, whether you see equanimity or agitation, whether you see bliss or terror, whether you see happiness or sadness, matters not at all: it is not those states but the Seer of those states that is already Free.

Changing states is thus beside the point; acknowledging the ever-present Seer is the point.

This is a bit of a tangent, but...what a remarkable claim !

I accidentally hit 'flag' instead of 'reply,' which I mention both to apologize and to indicate to moderators that it was a mistake. (I hoped one could unflag, but it seems not.)

Anyway, what are you agreeing with ? @Joshs made quite a few points.

For example, a German who refuses to gas the Jews. Or a Russian conscript, who does not go to war, because he sees it as immoral ( not because he is afraid to come back in a body bag ), despite being called a coward and a traitor by his society. — stoicHoneyBadger

I think you are pointing toward an updated version of 'We ought to obey God rather than men.' Of course 'God' is replaced by this or that principle, more or less articulate.