metaphysical statements are not propositions — 180 Proof

Could you talk a bit about why you think that?

I wasn’t fully in control of my thoughts — Skalidris

This is probably borderline off topic but, do you really feel like you're "in control of your thoughts" when you're not drunk?

I think you might be. I don't think they've published a paper just to propose a tautology (though worse ideas have been published)

I might be wrong but the way I understand it is: "the functional information of a system will increase over time when the environment around the system is favorable for that to happen". — Skalidris

That phrasing borders on tautological. "X will tend to happen in a system when the environment around that system is favourable for X". Replace x with literally just about anything and that sentence structure holds. Right?

mainly concern myself with theology and the philosophy of religion being influenced primarily by Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, Russian religious thought (Nikolai Berdyaev, Alexander Men, Vladimir Lossky), and the Greek Fathers (I also enjoy Buber's "philosophy of dialogue" as well and the work of Giovanni Pico who used Jewish mystical work to develop an argument for Christianity). — Dermot Griffin

Fascinating. Could you give a short "blurb", 3 sentences or so, of the most important ideas in this sphere of thought to you? Concepts, normative rules you've derived, etc - whatever you think is most central and most important to you.

Is “Western Civilization”, the very foundation self-criticism regarding ideas like universal rights, due process, and Western philosophy itself unfairly and unthinkingly maligned by educators and leftists for some kind of relativism or one-way version of rights? — schopenhauer1

I loosely agree with the take given in op and have had similar thoughts myself.

the Israelis will have to move out AND pay reparations

They'll have to? Is this a prediction? You think this will be a reality? When?

I'm talking a usual sticking point, the "right of return" from 1948 War.
— schopenhauer1

In a secular state, the land would belong to all citizens, people would be free to move wherever, assuming there is housing available. — Tzeentch

Right of return is the idea that Palestinians who previously lived on specific tracts of land that are now lived in by Israeli Jews have the right to those specific properties back (or their descendents have that right). It's not just about the general ability for them to freely move around the area.

Either Jews have to be moved out or Palestinians have to accept reparations, someone has to give something up either way.

the detail you call "straight forward" is worth saying explicitly. Thank you for doing that now.

I would have secured the border and subsequently resigned. — Tzeentch

Resigning seems like a shortcut, a way to answer the question without answering the question.

Evidence? You mean like Israeli politicians admitting intent, and decades of Israeli policy we can fall back on? — Tzeentch

yes, those things would also constitute evidence, sure.

it makes a huge difference, because it's evidence of the claim. Population increases are evidence against the claim of genocide.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by 'chance occurrence' here, and what you're suggesting is the alternative. Most biologists, I'm pretty sure, think life was pretty likely to occur somewhere in this universe, at some time, and quite probably occurred many times across the universe - it's not exactly "chance" in that sense, it's a likelihood that was bound to happen. That it occurred in the place that it did in the way that it did and developed in the way that it did -- all those involve a sense of "chance", sure. What's the alternative? That there's a being deliberately guiding the whole process?

I don't see how the situation counts. Can you break it down for me?

I can't be the only one that thinks the word "genocide" is dramatic. Jews were genocided - the current count of Jews is STILL less than it was before ww2. The Palestinian population, in contrast, has grown faster than the Israeli Jewish population. Is "genocide" really the right description?

I would like to formally retract anything that might be interpreted as a suggestion for Israel or Palestine towards a "solution".

Israel is, quite frankly, evil. Hamas is obviously evil. All the innocent that have died and will die are a travesty. I have no idea what a way forward would even look like.

respectable change of direction there

This guy thinks most Palestinians would cheer the end of HAMAS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2BSDLFVT74

He's very biased, I think, given his history and circumstances, but I would love it if he were right

was basically saying was that Palestinians need to bolster their moderate voices — schopenhauer1

The best thing Palestinians could do, as a group, is stand up against Hamas - make it clear that the people aren't looking for the destruction of Israel ("from the river to the sea"), and want to negotiate for a 2 state solution, one where Israel can feel confident Palestinians won't allow another Hamas to come to power.

This would never happen, but if it could happen it would fast track Palestinians into having their own sovereign territory.

People are being very dismissive of this here. It's not necessarily obvious that things must become more complex over time, so framing it as "a theory that explains everything" (which clearly isn't true - it wouldn't be able to explain a universe where things get simpler!) or "a recapitulation of the features of the universe that we actually observe" just seem unfairly quick to brush this aside.

I'm not saying this "new law" is a law, or even a good idea. I just don't think the criticisms offered are actually giving it a fair shake.

I don't know. I mean, I'm a layman, not an expert, so to be completely honest, the evidence of "most experts in cognition and consciousness agree that panpsychism is the case" would probably be the most likely kind of evidence to convince me. I'm comfortable with the fact that I can't be an expert in everything, and they I can outsource some of my knowledge to people who are experts.

I do know that many experts in relevant fields take the concept of the fundamentalness of consciousness seriously, but at the current moment it's not apparently the most liked take by relevant experts. Consciousness is hard, and for now, "I don't know" is kinda the best we got, with a little sprinkle of "but it might work like this" on top.

okay

Our priors are too distant, I think, for you to understand my intuitions or for me to understand yours. That's fine.

anything specific beyond that consciousness is a primordial feature of reality. — Pantagruel

Primordial features of reality, as far as we know, all have a kind of locality to them. They aren't aware of the macroscopic "objects" we would perceive them to be a part of. An iron atom doesn't know if it's part of a hammer or part of a human - it just does things iron atoms do, no matter what it's a part of. That's what I mean when I say panpsychic consciousness implies a kind of locality. If consciousness is fundamental, then you still have all the explanatory work of figuring out how this fundamental consciousness becomes macroscopically aware, macroscopically integrated with a macroscopic brain.

I accept that panpsychism might be the case - I'm agnostic about it, only slightly betting against it. I want to see real evidence that it's the case before I change course, because it doesn't have as much explanatory power at the moment as many of its proponents might like.

my reason for not liking panpsychism as an explanation for human consciousness is that panpsychism almost implies a certain kind of extremely local consciousness, which means you have a lot of extra work to do to explain the emergence of our apparent flavour of "nonlocal" consciousness - nonlocal in the sense that our consciousness integrates information from many space-separated information sources, and those information sources are processed in many space-separated parts of the brain.

By the time you've explained how "fundamental local consciousness" can integrate all of those non local sources of information and information processing, you probably can explain consciousness itself without even needing to rely on "fundamental local consciousness".

And even panpsychism doesn't have an obvious answer, any more than physically emergent consciousness, to how we experience the qualia of colour, for example. Panpsychism seems like a lazy shortcut to consciousness to me, for those reasons, rather than a full answer. It's the other side of the coin to "we're conscious because of a god-given soul" - another lazy shortcut.

That, of course, doesn't mean it's not TRUE. It just seems a little too convenient. Take this extremely complex thing that nobody quite understands and just declare it fundamental. But still, it could be the case.

if pansychism is true, human consciousness (probably) isn't the result of evolution. But I don't think that's likely - I don't turn my nose up at it either, but I don't think it's likely.

Even if there's no survival benefit to consciousness and natural selection doesn't apply?

But if our information processing capabilities increased because of evolution, it's probably because there were survival benefits.

Is it possible consciousness appeared when a certain amount of information processing in brains was present? In that case, if consciousness just happens when a certain amount of information is processed, would you really say it's a "product of evolution"? — RogueAI

Yes, that's exactly what I would say. If our information processing capabilities increased because of evolution, and consciousness is a consequence of that, that's exactly what I would say.

no, I don't see your point. If science doesn't have ALL the answers about something, it can't have ANY answers about something? Is that the point?

The plurality of the scientific establishment is justifiably pretty certain that humans evolved. Either life was conscious from the beginning, or consciousness came into the picture later in the evolutionary process. Most people, I think, believe the latter (some believe the former, and I'm sure there are some very intriguing arguments for that). If it came later, then either its a consequence of evolved features, or it just appeared by magic. I don't think it's magic.

the question seems largely irrelevant to me. I also know when I bought most of my computer accessories, but if there's some computer accessory i have in my office that I don't know the time of purchase, I'm not going to stop believing I purchased it.

who is "we"? I have no idea when sight evolved, but I have very little doubt that sight did evolve.

that's how I take bells theorem as well. Epistemic interpretations remain popular in spite of it - I think it's because the epistemic take allows people to keep their intuitive understanding of the world. They're more comfortable with that.

This take is tentatively the one I'm choosing to take:

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2016/09/08/consciousness-and-downward-causation/

This take is the hidden option from the poll: physicalism is true, we are conscious, epiphenomenalism is NOT true, consciousness evolved.

In the case of consciousness, if all we were confronted with were large-scale behavior, and not with any subjective inner life, I think it could be argued that the two cases are analogous, even though the degree of complexity of human behavior is vastly higher than that of a tornado. But when we find ourselves conscious, not just with complex behavior, having also a first-person perspective and qualitative experiences, and we are told that this simply "emerges" from a special way of arranging bits of matter that in themselves have nothing even remotely like subjectivity, this seems vastly more surprising and harder to see how it could work. I don't think it is analogous at all. — petrichor

Why does that make it not analogous? Tornadoes are composed of things that don't have the properties of tornadoes. Consciousness is composed of things that don't have the properties of consciousness. It seems... still analogous.

Consciousness has to *happen* somehow - whether it's physical or something else - and it seems almost obvious to me that, however it happens, the things that facilitate it happening aren't conscious.

Establishing Israel was as legitimate as establishing any other regime in the world. — BC

This doesn't square with the rest of your comment. If occupation counts for the most, and most of the occupants are Arab Muslims, then... establishing Israel was categorically less legitimate than establishing other regimes that had the consent of a majority of the occupants.

sure, which is why I think the claim that Jews had a right to it all in the 20s is patently absurd (not that you're making that claim), but the idea that the Jews have the right to remain there now seems, to me, obviously true.

But that second thing is true regardless of the Torah. The Torah doesn't play into it at all. Religious fantasies don't give them the right

what I'm saying is, if someone came and said they had a right to your house, them pointing to a fictional book they wrote wouldn't make you feel any more inclined to let them take it, right?

Like it matters historically, it matters in the sense that it sheds light on their motivation, but it does absolutely 0 work, from my view, in justifying what happened in the region in the first half of the 1900s in the region. Contextualises? Yes. Justifies? No.

That doesn't seem especially cynical to me. What do you think Hamas wanted out of the attack? I mean, what he described isn't any MORE cynical than what we already know Hamas actually factually did, it seems to me.

I somewhat agree.

However, I wouldn't say that gave them any more of a right to the land on Palestine back in the first half of the 20th century more than anybody else. Perhaps I was jumping the gun thinking that's what you were saying - do you think that gave them a valid claim there?

okay, allow me to take a step back - why did you bring it up? Do you think it weighs into the ethics of anything going on in Israel?

is there a reason anybody not interested in the superstition should be persuaded to weigh this information into the ethics of the situation at all?

Creating an artificial god would just be a downright lie. — Dermot Griffin

That's not what Christianity already did?