it's clear now, thank you. I did misread. See my last comment.

Oh, you know what, I get it now.

He wasn't always formulating his argument like that, he did that mid conversation. That is of course a VALID argument, but the question is, where does that premise come from?

We know where Corvus gets it from - he gets it from a missapplication of modus ponens, where he denies the Antecedent.

I did say it wasn't easy - I was acknowledging the strong possibility that I misread. Can you please explain more what you mean by

(t→e)→(¬t→¬e) is a premise. it's P->Q. — Banno

(t→e)→(¬t→¬e) is a premise. it's P->Q. — Banno

It's not easy to see what you're saying here. It looks like you're saying

(t→e)→(¬t→¬e)

Is equivalent to saying

(t→e)

Or in other words, whenever you have

(t→e)

You must also have

(¬t→¬e)

Is that what you're saying?

this is (completely understandably) misunderstanding what he meant by negation there. Negation isn't the word he should use, I'm not even sure if there is a word he should use.

He's talking about modus Tollens though.

your proof is treating (t→e)→(¬t→¬e) as a premise.

He thinks it's ALWAYS true. He thinks for all statements t implies e, it's always true that not t implies not e.

He even called that idea "modus ponens", that's how I know he thinks you can always do that for all implication statements.

(t→e)→(¬t→¬e) CAN be a premise in a valid proof, and it's synonymous with (t <-> e). But it hasn't been used that way

no, he would get caught up on the word "then" as a time signifier.

we know his first language isn't English, and we know he thinks "a therefore b" can only mean "a happened and then later b happened". He has more confusions than that, yes, but this language hiccup is a big thing stopping him from understanding.

The last problem comes from the question: "why even posit epiphenomenalism?" It seems prima facie unreasonable that our thoughts never cause our actions, so how do we end up here? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think epiphenomenalism is a thing many people actually believe. It's mostly posited as a thought experiment, and like Solipsism, it's something you're supposed to figure out how to overcome, not something you're supposed to fully accept and believe.

Epiphenomenalism has to be false. The most likely two reasons for it to be false are (a) we have souls, and that's where a lot of the work of a mind happens, which means if you create a "zombie" without a soul, it WILL be distinguishable from a human, because it won't act like one, or (b) the mind is entirely the result of physical processes in the brain, which means you can't have a physically working brain with all the bells and whistles of a human brain, without also having consciousness - the proverbial zombie is impossible.

Generally non physicalists go with a, physicalists go with b. Exceptionally few people go with option c, which is to accept epiphenomenalism and the genuine possibility of zombies. They have a hard time explaining some things, I think.

I think he is acting in good faith, good-ish anyway, but that his grasp of English in certain areas isn't as good as he'd like it to be and he's too proud to consider that he might be wrong, and his intuition for logic is clearly entirely compromised which inherently makes it very hard to reach him with logic. How can you explain to an illogical person that their reasoning is illogical? If they don't accept logic, then it's really really hard!

Counting the seconds until corvus once again says "Read my posts over and over again until you accept that denying the Antecedent isn't a Fallacy", because apparently that's the extent of his skills at explaining his reasoning.

Did you notice his bizarre understanding of the word "therefore" already as well? It's going to make it hard to reason with him, if he doesn't have a solid grasp of the basic English words we use to talk about reason and logic.

That is a very unserious comment to make given what's been said

I told you what I am convinced by, and I didn't say it was an incomplete thought.

you asked questions, got answers to your questions, and kept asking the same questions again. It's not a serious thing, you're clearly not being serious.

I feel like you're asking me a bunch of questions you already know the answers to. This whole "incomplete thought" "poem" line of questions. It doesn't seem very serious to me.

Beats me. Just considering possibilities. I don't think it's the best idea to rule out entire fields of thought when we can't find any evidence that it's purely physical. — Patterner

Yeah, you're right, we shouldn't, and I'm sure when someone finally develops the very first ever model of how a soul might work, cognitive scientists will pay attention. But for now, there's nothing to pay attention to. The world is absolutely full of people saying matter can't explain consciousness, but who aren't producing any better explanations.

It'll have a seat at the table when it has a model.

I don't follow that. — Banno

You don't follow what? That this poem is stated as concisely at possible for aesthetic purposes, but implies a more complete argument within?

So what grants certainty? — Banno

My thoughts. My thoughts grant certainty to me. Descartes thoughts grant certainty to him.

The stuff that's already been talked about. I must exist in order to think. I think. Therefore I am.

I can be certain I'm thinking, and existing.

The poem doesn't grant certainty, the poem is just a poem. The poem is there to trigger you to think.

They are not duplicating consciousness — Patterner

Yes, I agree, they aren't yet. You said

"Regarding models, we don't have any for physical processes"

You didn't specify if you meant specifically the full model about how physical stuff produces consciousness, it sounded like you were talking about models of physical processes *at all*.

I read the poem and figure out what it means. It's not the poem that gives certainty.

We can duplicate, in a different medium, a lot of the physical processes — Patterner

That's what a model is. Or rather, you need a model to be able to do that

Calling what I'm talking about as "magic," and referring of the "soul realm," otoh, smacks of ridicule. What is the goal? — Patterner

I didn't say magic. "Soul realm" isn't ridicule, it's just my word for the category of ideas that say the mind isn't the result of physical processes. If the processes of the mind aren't happening here in this physical realm, then they must be happening in some other realm - I give that broad class of ideas the name of "soul realm", and I would call it that *even if it were discovered tomorrow that it really exists*. It's not meant to be ridicule, or a value judgement, or even imply it's not true.

If our minds aren't physical, I call the alternative "souls".

No worries bert1. What do you think about pansychism?

No, that was addressed to people saying that the mind exists somewhere else or somehow else other than in this physical world, as a result of our physical bodies and brains. I don't think pansychists necessarily think that. In fact I know they don't all think that.

Personally, I feel like it's better to think of the cogito as a poem, rather than a complete thought. I think the ego-less interpretation fits within Descartes thought process well enough already, as long as you're willing to let the word 'I' have some wiggle room. That's why I'm not personally using that as a basis to disagree with the cogito.

I've expressed earlier in the thread that I have a lot of sympathy for the view that "I think therefore I am" maybe should be reworded in such a way to remove the ego, to remove the I. If you feel like it makes more sense to say "There is thought, therefore something exists" or whatever, I think there's wisdom in that.

Another way of putting it:

it's possible minds are not the result of physical things. I don't think it's probable, but I can't deny it's possible. BUT when it comes to the goal of understanding consciousness, understanding minds, if it is the case that minds are not the result of physical things, then... the project of understanding minds is fucked. We can't do it.

We can either understand minds as resulting from physical things, -or- we can't understand minds.

Maybe that's a bit too strong, maybe there's some way to understand souls somehow, but we don't have a single model for it yet, no way to poke and prod a soul, so if that's really reality, it's looking pretty hopeless for the project of understanding.

In short, the physical processes being described as doing x, y, and z are already doing something. That is, x, y, and z. Yet we are told they are also doing this other thing - producing consciousness. — Patterner

We are told the physical processes in a computer are doing x, y, z. Yet we are told they are also doing this other thing - beating us at chess.

Things can do multiple things.

So how about consider that something exists which we cannot detect with our senses or science? — Patterner

That's totally possible. Once there's an *actual model*, there'll be something to consider. Right now, there's not enough substance to the idea to begin to consider it.

We have a problem - a hard problem! - and that problem is, we want to understand consciousness. We currently *literally only have one avenue of investigation available*, and that is to try to understand the physical brain more. We don't have any way of investigating souls. We don't have a single model about how souls are supposed to work. Souls so far offer no promise in terms of explantaory power, they offer nothing progressive towards our goal of understanding consciousness. That doesn't mean souls don't exist, but it does mean that there's not a whole lot to chew on when we try to take seriously the idea that they do. All you've got is that sentence: "Maybe the mind isn't produced by physical stuff, maybe souls exist", and then there's nowhere to go from there.

So do we continue to follow the one single avenue of investigation for consciousness, as being the result of physical brains following physical processes, or... do something else? What would the 'something else' be? And, knowing about the massive achievement of AI from neural nets, why even consider giving up on the physical idea? We can literally *talk to a simulation of physical neurons*, for free right now.

But it is obvious that it has many rational incongruity to be classed as a logical statement. — Corvus

But you agree with the fundamental premise of it, which is that one must exist in order to think.

So physical brains, to you, are "just interactions of physical things" (and thus presumably not the seat of consciousness and minds), but you don't have anything to say about any other possible model (no matter how undeveloped) of how minds might be non-physical (this is what I call, as an umbrella term, the soul-realm - if the mind doesn't exist here, because of physics, it must exist in some other way, because of something that isn't physics - aka the soul realm).

You're right, there isn't a whole lot to say about the soul realm. There's no model, so there's not a lot to talk about. It's a god-of-the-gaps type situation - humans are ignorant of how consciousness works, so while we're ignorant of it, we can just naysay physical ideas of the mind and we get to posit a soul-realm without really saying a whole lot about it. It doesn't seem like it's doing any work as an idea, to me, and that's probably why physicalism is the normal position among experts.

I also think it can't be taken lightly that the closest we've gotten to artificial intelligence is by making a (very simplified) simulation of how our neurons interact and relate to each other. The fact that we looked in our brains, learned some things about neurons, deconstructed them down to their most fundamental concepts and then simulated neural nets based on the concepts we learned from our neurons - and that those neural nets *can literally now talk to us* - this can't be taken lightly. This is a big deal for the conversation. We haven't simulated minds yet, of course, but the accomplishment shouldn't be downplayed at all, and its relevance to this conversation shouldn't either.

We suspect human brains are conscious. Physicalism is the most popular position among philosophers, scientists, and specifically cognitive scientists.

Maybe physicalism isn't the case, but the reason nonphysicalism doesn't have traction is *we don't have a single model of anything that might compose a non-physical mind*. There's no model. There's no way of poking and prodding this soul-realm in the way we have ways of poking and prodding physical things, and there isn't a single model. Physicalism is the general take because *there isn't another serious competitor*. There isn't a model.

We have models of chemistry, we have relativity, we have quantum physics - we have various actual useful models of physical stuff, models complete enough that we can make a simulation of them. That's the sign of a well-defined model - a simulation. If you can simulate something, you know your model is getting somewhere. There's no simulations of the non physical soul realm, because there's no model.

And if you wanted to imagine a model of how soul-stuff operates, consider this - our physical reality is turing-complete, which means whatever your model is of how the mind might work in the soul-realm - you can just imagine that model is implemented here, in physics, in brains. Anything that is implementable is in principle implemetable here. If it's possible to implement consciousness, it's possible to implement it in our physical world, because our physical world is turing complete.

What that's not physical do you suspect? — Patterner

I suspect that the internal workings of a computer are physical events, but they're not JUST physical events, they're physical events that do abstract things. They take inputs, run them through algorithms, and figure things out. They do work.

Someone 100 years ago looking at a lightbulb would think that a bit of electricity and a metal filament was making light, sure, but it's JUST a physical thing, it can't, like, make calculations or, you know, beat us at chess. 100 years later, we've got a bunch of stuff that's JUST physical things, that can make calculations, beat us at chess, and pass the turing test better than some people can.

I think it makes more sense to be open minded about what things that are "just physical things" are capable of. A lot can emerge out of something that is "just a physical thing".

Nor do I. — Patterner

Sure, it's just very common for people to go from "science hasn't figured it out" to "science can't figure it out", and then from there to souls.

The way you've phrased it sounds like you're going to "science can't figure it out", which is possibly a misreading.

What is taking place - photons hitting retina; signals traveling asking optic nerve; storage of information; etc. - doesn't suggest the presence of consciousness. It's just interactions of different levels of physical entities. — Patterner

It sounds like you're extremely confident that it's JUST interactions of physical things, and thus CAN'T contain the explanation for consciousness. If that's not what you mean, I apologize.

I, for one, am not of the opinion that these physical interactions can't be the seat of consciousness.

We don't know yet — 180 Proof

I also don't understand why people jump from "science doesn't have a complete picture of how the brain produces consciousness" to "science can't ever find answers, it must be that we have souls that aren't physical".

"We don't know" feels like a comfortable thing to say, I don't see why I would want to propose souls.

I can't tell if anybody actually believes subjective experience has no effect on human behavior at all, or if that's just a big straw man that nobody believes.

Panpsychism need not talk about consciousness or mind as a "force" at all - conscious experience can be rephrased as "what it's like to be something", and some pansychists just conceptualize it as "there's something it's like to be EVERYTHING".

There's "something it's like" to be a chair. A molecule. An atom. An electron. A quantum field.

Are you proposing the idea that consciousness doesn't *do* anything, but is nevertheless the consequence of physical brains?

I think it's hard to argue consciousness doesn't do anything, personally - you'd have a hard time explaining why humans write so many words about 'consciousness'. The very existence of arguments about consciousness seem very hard to explain without consciousness. Why would a non-conscious zombie write about being conscious?

Have some angel cake tonight, you'll be alright.

As for me, I don't mind. My favourite picnic food is deviled eggs.

I hope so too brother.

Ok. Well I hope you can find out if you are.