I like this response. I don't really jive with the logic that "science doesn't have a complete account of consciousness, therefore science will never have a complete account of consciousness". Or "I can't think of a way to explain this with matter, therefore it can't be explained by matter".

Sure, we can't yet explain it with matter. It's not like we can explain it with something else either. It's not like there's some other more complete alternative that sufficiently gives an account of consciousness.

I'm just directly responding to the question of evidence.

I think the hard problem of consciousness IS a hard problem. I don't disagree with you that it's a hard problem.

A pretty simple piece of evidence is how frequently we observe that changes in matter produce changes in consciousness. Drugs are an example. The changed conscious experience of people who have experienced brain damage is another.

These examples of course don't prove definitively that all of consciousness must arise from matter, but they're undoubtedly painting a picture of a strong causal relationship between matter and consciousness. It's sufficient to convince me that at the very least, conscious experience has significant physical components.

A book, Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape The Universe, offers the idea that our universe swims in a sea of universes that come and go, and that depending on the values of certain - six - variables, the universes are short-lived or enduring, support life or don't, and so forth — tim wood

Sounds remarkably similar to max Tegmarks mathematical universe.

It seems to me to also imply a sort of mathematical causality - if these numerical values change, that causes a different kind of universe, it causes different behaviours in the different universes.

No, I'm telling you it's inadequate. I specifically requested those points in time to demonstrate to you, the inadequacy of your technique. — Metaphysician Undercover

So now you intentionally avoid that specified time period saying, 'that's not my problem, it's your problem, because I have no interest in that time period. — Metaphysician Undercover

Ok so you realise it was your idea to do that, so let me just reiterate how inappropriate is for you to complain to me about how bad your idea was.

If you ask me to figure out a way to get an answer, I can tell you, and THEN we can go into if the technique is adequate or not. Until then, your own problem with your own technique is something for you to work on with yourself, and it's not a criticism of me or any idea I've had.

I'm completely happy to look at that time period too, you just never asked me a question about it. Instead of asking, you started telling me what I would do. You're doing things in the wrong order and being too hasty, making careless assumptions again. Slow down.

I think you should just let go of the "force" wording. When someone disagrees with you, on a philosophy forum of all places, they are not "forcing" you to agree with them. Do you understand that?

this is very funny

If you feel like you're being forced to believe something because someone says something you disagree with, yes I think you need to toughen up a little bit

I suppose that's an accurate description, but it was focused trolling with a purpose. I'm demonstrating the absurdity of the claim you made that you're being "forced" to agree with something. Your only example of being "forced" was that you came across people online who disagreed with you.

Don't be such a snowflake. People are going to disagree with you here, that's acceptable and it's not force.

I just wanted to discuss who is forcing you to think a certain way. You said it was me. If I didn't make you feel threatened, did I physically harm you? Or did I bring harm to you in some sort of social or financial way?

sounds like a fascinating read. Too many articles behind paywalls these days.

Fighting bad guys can feel terribly biased when the guy I want to win happens to be the bad guy.

I'm sorry for using force on you. Did I harm you or did I just make you feel threatened that harm would happen?

Nonetheless, this is not correlated to the fact that I have to believe in such a system blindly. That's what I am complaining about. — javi2541997

If someone forcing you to believe that? By what means are they forcing you to believe that?

That podcast I linked before - if you don't want to listen to the whole thing, the most relevant bit is between 20min - 35min. They're talking about the idea that the universe is mathematical, how that idea has been strengthened over time in their view, and then wildly speculating on Max's opinion on a potential consequence of that being true (Sean Carroll agrees that the universe is mathematical but I don't think he necessarily agrees with Max's further speculation)

https://spotify.link/zMHaM1TQiDb

Anyone who does not hold our understanding of truth is an idiot, right? And the way to deal with those idiots is to tell them their faults as flannel jesus did in his reply to my post. — Athena

I interpreted our exchange in exactly the opposite way. I never told you there's all these obvious problems with whatever your world view is. You said that about materialism. I don't think someone is an idiot for not being a materialist. I don't think you're an idiot at all.

I respect your opinion.

If you're interested in hearing a couple scientists talk about it casually, and wildly speculate far beyond that, this is pretty good:

https://spotify.link/zMHaM1TQiDb

I've made as much sense of it as I'm going to. If you don't understand the intuitive notion that the rules by which reality evolves from past states to future states might be mathematical or computational, or loosely analogous to those ideas, at the root of reality, then that's it. There's nothing else for me to show you.

There probably isn't a point, I said upfront that I'm not capable of convincing you nor would I even want to. Most people don't see the would this way, I don't expect them to.

no, I don't see a problem.

I don't think there is any explicit problem with the idea. I think you may not like the idea for your own philosophical reasons, and I have no illusion that I'm capable of convincing you otherwise. I'm comfortable with that.

They somehow think that republican leaders harping on ad nauseum about how mail in voting is untrustworthy and every voter should come vote in person is completely unrelated to the fact that most mail in ballots are for lefty candidates. There's no casual connection for some reason in their minds.

You must be insensitive to your own rudeness. That's understandable, most people have an easier time perceiving other people's rudeness than their own.

Can you speak plainly please? I don't want to guess at what the fuck you're talking about.

You produce the average, the speed for that time period, but this is obviously not a good representation. — Metaphysician Undercover

A good representation of what? You keep saying things like "inadequate" or "not a good representation". Some measurements are adequate for some purposes and inadequate for other purposes. You can't just raw say it's inadequate, it can only be inadequate in relation to some goal.

Now it's not like you gave me a specific goal and I said "all we need to do is measure the location at these points in time". In fact measuring them at those points in time was YOUR suggestion, not mine. Don't tell me it's inadequate - tell yourself. If you want me to help you get adequate measurements to accomplish some goal, then all you have to do is tell me the goal and ask.

not any bells relevant to the conversation, care to fill in the blanks?

He voted by mail before he was president.

you have two examples to the contrary and that doesn't give you pause.

If making it easier to vote were good for conservatives, why in the world did Donald trump talk so much smack on mail in voting? Shouldn't he be a big fan?

Did you know Donald trump himself does mail in voting?

Bingo. These guys see that when voting is made easier, a lot of people vote left. They see this as evidence of corruption on the left, they completely discount the possibility that it's evidence of corruption on the right.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/10/31/conservative-republicans-are-least-supportive-of-making-it-easy-for-everyone-to-vote/

Conservatives don't want it to be easy for people to vote.

Future states seem to have a mathematical relationship with past states. It might be because future states derive from applying mathematical laws or computations to those past states - that might be how the universe itself works. Or it might even be, as many physicists think, that time itself is an illusion, and future states and past states are all encoded together in one big mathematical object - and what we experience as the passing of time and the perception of casual chains might just be what it feels like to be inside that mathematical object.

But in the end it actually is a matter of likes and dislikes. It's not like there's a known objective answer to the true fundamental nature of our universe right now, so if you feel strongly that it can't be mathematical, which you seem to do, it's not because you have scientific proof that it can't be. It's because you don't like it, it's because there's some aspect of it that doesn't sit well with you, that goes against the grain of your intuitions about how the world works. It goes exactly with the grain of my intuitions, so I think it's a compelling idea.

The concept of Turing completeness provides the bedrock, for me, for the idea that we might be in a computational universe - that computation and/or mathematics are strongly analogous to the root nature of every thing and every event in this place. That makes sense to me.

and if I'm right, that the universe really is math at the fundamental level, then electricity is itself governed by math.

You don't have to accept it as truth my man, I'm not trying to convince you it's the case. You asked some questions, I tried to answer them. Plenty of physicists think like this. It doesn't matter if you like it or not, I'm perfectly fine with you not thinking the universe is mathematical. It makes perfect sense to me.

You tell me.

but in the case of physics simulations, we literally have the source code. We know why things in those stimulations behave the way they do, and it's precisely because of the computations of formulas. It seems like you're just begging the question.

Sure, but those rules not efficacious, not efficient causes — tim wood

Why?

So let's bring this zero point into your numerical expressions, and produce a "slice in time" which is the period between -.1s and +.1s. Do you agree that the averaging technique will not give a good representation of this time period? If you agree, then how do you propose that we deal with this period of time? — Metaphysician Undercover

Why would it fail to give a good representation? The only problem with our high speed camera data for this moment in time is that it has limited resolution, so we wouldn't necessarily be able to see how it starts moving at that moment in time (I've been rounding previous measurements of distance to 2 decimal places to sort of mimick the problem of camera resolution).

We'd have to film it up close and make sure everything is much more precise at the moment the thing is dropped. But there's no problem with it conceptually. First we get the average velocity between -.1s and .1s, and then we can look at how that velocity changed over that time frame by dividing that into even smaller segments, and then even smaller ones if we still have more questions.

ought to offer a simple explanation of how that can be — tim wood

Well we have universes where the fundamental rules are defined by computation and mathematics, and those universes are called video games. Similarly, cellular automata universes like Conway's game of life.

The things you call "matter" are in theory representable by numerical data (that's exactly how they're represented in video games and in physics simulations), and able to be manipulated by computations of mathematical rules - that's how every "universe" we've manufactured works, which at least gives us a potential analogy for how any universe might work - I'm not saying our universe definitely obviously works like that and you're wrong if you think otherwise (even though you're apparently that confident of your own position for some reason), I'm saying it's a potentially strong analogy to how our universe operates.

There appear to be rules that describe how these interactions will go — tim wood

And you don't think those rules are defined in some way that's analogous to mathematics and/or computation?

more of a diver United supporter really

I think you misunderstood what I was asking, but that's okay brother. Don't worry.

I don't think so. I mean if you go to meetings with other people who believe that, and your organisation treats it as important for you to convert other people, and you think people are immoral for disagreeing with you, then yeah you're just another religious nut.

But if it's just an idea you think is compelling, and you're not just refusing to look at any scientific evidence that might conflict with your point of view (like astrologists for example), then... I mean, I don't speak for all atheists, but I'm an atheist and I don't consider the concept you've brought up to be inherently woo, stupid, or religious. I see why others might but I am at least sympathetic to weird ideas of consciousness. Consciousness is the hard problem, right?

honestly, I don't think most atheists would, or should, care to even attempt to convince you to change your mind in that. The most important aspect of atheism for most atheists isn't a rejection of all god concepts, in my opinion, it's the rejection of religion, religious epistemology and religion's idea of morality.

Universal consciousness conceptually doesn't have those trappings. If you reject religion for similar reasons, a lot of atheists are going to consider you a like mind

Do you think nos is right, that this article is them confessing to rigging the election? I'm looking for an explanation of how it's a confession of that.