Do you honestly believe that we ought to accept Q as true, now that the probability of Q being true has been doubled? — Metaphysician Undercover

I literally said you don't have to accept it as true. It has evidence, whether you accept it as true or not.

Because this is how God has traditionally been understood in classical theism. — Tom Storm

Do you have evidence for that?

So that means, if someone says "I believe in God", that would by synonymous with saying "I believe existence exists"?

I would be real curious to understand the desire there, the desire to take the word "god", which for many means "a being like odin or zeus or ra or krishna or yahweh", and then turn it into "being itself". Where does that come from? Why do people do that?

To me, it seems like if you want to talk about being itself, you could always use the phrase "being itself", and you could leave god meaning "a being like odin or ..."

I have known atheists who have become theists after reading more sophisticated writing on the notion of God. — Tom Storm

But they're still atheists in the normal sense. In the sense that pertains to zeus and odin. They're only not atheists when you define god in such a loosey-goosey way that it could mean just about anything.

And if you redefine zombie to mean "a fruit that grows from the branch of a tree", well, hell, I believe in zombies too in that case! But why would I do that? Why would I redefine zombie in that way?

I don't see the point in redefining god to "being itself", when there's already a perfectly cromulent phrase for that, and that phrase is simply "being itself". I just don't see the point.

ignoring what MU is saying, I googled "meaning of unsubstantiated", and google tells me "not supported or proven by evidence".

"proven" there is in the loose sense of the word, because I think we both agree that it's not within the jurisdiction of evidence to "prove" things in the strong sense of the word proof - the strong sense like is employed in classic logic.

Evidence supports things, or it doesn't. And sometimes, you can have evidence on both sides of a question, right? Did Bob kill this person, or someone else? Well here's some evidence Bob killed her, here's some evidence Bob didn't.

So yeah, when it comes to evidence, "proof" is... kind of beside the point, which is why I like to think about it in bayesian terms.

Do you believe in Zombies? Maybe you do, but let's assume not for the time being. Tom Storm doesn't believe in Zombies.

Does your disbelief in Zombies need to evolve? Does it need to evolve into disbelief in Being Itself?

How about ghosts, or ghouls?

If someone says "i'm an atheist", and by that they mean "I don't believe in odin or zeus or ra or krishna or yahweh, or anything like those guys", then why does that disbelief need to "evolve", but disbelief in zombies doesn't?

If you're going to say you don't believe in God, you'd better be sure what you mean by 'God,' right? — Tom Storm

Yeah, and so changing the definition to "being itself" is... not what's meant. That's my point. Atheists are sure what they mean, and they're sure they don't mean that.

That's why it's a red herring, a useless equivocation.

Yeah well I agree with you that it's OBVIOUS that "proof" in the strong sense of the word is out of the picture here. So if he means that... well, he shouldn't.

What do you mean by "substantiated" if not proven? — Janus

I was taken it to mean "evidenced". An unsubstantiated claim is a claim without any evidence.

can atheism evolve its thinking about the notion of God beyond the cartoon version? — Tom Storm

What would be the reason? What would that evolution look like?

When someone says they don't believe in God, the reasonable next question is: "What do you mean by God?" — Tom Storm

and the answer is never "being itself"

In contrast, more nuanced conceptions of God, such as Paul Tillich’s idea of God as the "Ground of Being" or David Bentley Hart’s articulation of God as Being itself - represent attempts to have this conversation in metaphysical terms rather than anthropomorphic ones. — Tom Storm

Abstracting god away from being a conscious being, and into something like "being itself" are... fine, I guess, but they have nothing to do with what Atheists think. When an atheist says "I don't believe in god", they're not saying "I don't believe in Being itself." It's so far removed from what everyone's talking about that bringing it up in a context where atheism is relevant is a complete red herring, an unwelcome equivocation.

indicates nothing except that you are lacking in skills of critical thinking. — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't see why you're bringing insults into it, I'm not calling you stupid.

From a Bayesian perspective, evidence for a belief Q is information that increases the probability assigned to Q. Keep in mind that evidence isn't proof, evidence is just a shift in probabilities.

So take Q to be the statement "mental processes are physical processes". Now, the two pieces of information I listed before - the chemical effect on mental processes, and the early foray into AI that we're witnessing - I think pretty reasonably raise the probability of Q, compared to what Q would be given the opposite observations. Opposite observations being, a hypothetical world in which chemically altering the neuronal environment DOESN'T affect thinking, and in which simulating neurons in a computer DOESN'T produce a machine that can solve problems, pass the turing test, and generate internal models of the data it interacts with.

I don't think I'm lacking in anything intellectually when I say, the observations we have are evidence. I welcome you to disagree with me and tell me why, but I request that you leave the insults out next time.

it's clear on the home page on desktop. Not so easy to find on mobile

well I for one am plenty convinced. Affect the chemistry of the brain and you affect mental processes too. Plus, the closest thing we've built to a thinking machine is a machine that simulates a simplified version of a neuron.

Perhaps you're not entirely compelled to agree, that's fine, but we're far far away at this point from it being an entirely unsubstantiated assumption. We have plenty of fantastic reasons to think mental processes might be neural processes.

In chapter 11 of the Annaka Harris audiobook Lights On, she has a conversation with Carlo Rovelli. Most of the conversation is about Rovelli's view that time is not fundamental, but is an emergent experience from the structure of the universe. Part of the conversation, though, touched on Rovelli's view of objects-as-processes.

Unfortunately I don't have a transcript of their conversation YET, but I'm working on it.

But in a nutshell, what he says is something I've found myself thinking, in perhaps slightly different terms from him, over the past months. He says an object is a process, a process whose identity is defined by how it affects and is affected by other processes.

But the properties of particles are, in conjunction with other factors, the reason groups off particles have the states they do under various conditions.

Where am I leaping? — Patterner

The way you had worded it prior didn't seem to acknowledge the "other factors". It sounded like you just thought, you have particles with these lower level properties, you get them all in a group, you get this higher level property.

But perhaps I misunderstood, or perhaps you changed your phrasing on that point, in either case, we agree that it's not just a straightforward properties-to-properties.

is it meant as a challenge to physicalism? Something along the lines of, "well if physicalism is true, then at what point does matter go from just matter to matter with experience?"

I'm reading your question like a challenge - and if it is, it's a good challenge, worthwhile to ask, I just want to understand.

well then I can't rephrase your question for you. I'm not sure what you're getting at, if not my attempt at rephrasing. I do recommend avoiding the spontaneous generation wording, whatever it is you're getting at.

Right - so what is it a matter of? — Wayfarer

Well you skip the question about spontaneous generation of sentience, and just ask, why is it that this hunk of smushy pink wet matter has an experience? Why is it that there's something it's like to be a human with a brain, and is it maybe the case that there's also something it's like to be a worm, an amoeba, an atom?

That's the question, right? Why is there something it's like to be anything, and what things is that even true for? Maybe there's not something it's like to be a paper clip, or maybe there is.

I think it's certainly worth talking about the hard problem! I bought an audio book that's all about the question "what is it like to be something?" What's it like to be a bat? I love it, fascinating, brilliant question.

I just don't think your wording of the way you asked the question was pointing in the right direction. It's not really any spontaneous anything, and contrary to patterners pattern of writing, it's not just a straightforward matter of low level properties -> high level properties

I’m asking, what causes that ‘rare arrangement’ — Wayfarer

Maybe I got distracted by the word "spontaneous", which is a word magical thinkers tend to use to dismiss out of hand the idea that, say, evolution can happen. They say "well if evolution is true, how did monkeys spontaneously turn into humans, and why aren't monkeys in zoos sometimes spontaneously turning into humans?" Spontaneously is a word used to straw man scientific ideas about the progression of life, because really, the science doesn't say it's spontaneous at all. Right?

So now that we have that word out of the way, what causes the ears arrangement of matter into a brain? If we take life as a given, it's a question of evolution and DNA. The question is, how and why did DNA ever build the first building block of a brain? Which is a neuron. And why was that mutation that built the first neuron beneficial enough to survive into future generations? (And it's feasible it wasn't, fun fact, not all evolved traits are beneficial, and they don't need to be beneficial to survive)

But then once you have the basic building block, eventually getting a network of these neurons together that are big enough to do something useful seems like almost an inevitability.

And it probably doesn't need much explaining why intelligence can become favoured by natural selection processes.

Why not? What’s the matter with the question? Surely it’s germane to the subject. — Wayfarer

I'm not sure it's established that there's anything "spontaneous" about it. And once you realize that, the rest of your question is just... chemistry. Literal chemistry. Like, if you want to understand how life forms came about from non life, that's a question for science, and you can take classes on chemistry, bio chemistry, maybe even early life chemistry.

What property of matter is such that it spontaneously assembles itself into sentient life-forms. — Wayfarer

I don't think that's the right question.

The reason I go this route is, of course, that the particles we are made of are indistinguishable from any other particles in the universe. So what is in us that makes us conscious must be in all the other particles.
— Patterner
Hasty generalization & compositional fallacies. :eyes: — 180 Proof

This is exactly why earlier in the thread, I disagreed with the idea that it's simply the properties of particles that explain the properties of higher level things.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/980415

Patterner seems to want to leap from low level properties to high level properties, that there's some direct correspondence there. The problem with that is, there's intermediate steps that are super important that get missed by that approach.

A high level object doesn't just automatically follow from the properties of the things that make it up.

Take carbon for example. Graphene is made of carbon. So are diamonds. Carbon as an element has various chemical properties that allow for certain arrangements to happen, and those possible arrangements, because of the physical processes that happen in those arrangements, result in very different high level properties.

So it's not just "the properties of carbon produce the properties of the high level thing made of carbon", you can't skip that in between step, it's "the properties of carbon allow for various arrangements, and some of those arrangements result in the high level properties we observe in this object or in that object".

So when he says "So what is in us that makes us conscious must be in all the other particles.", he's making the same mistake. He's skipping the middle step, he's going low level properties to high level properties and completely ignoring the extremely relevant fact that it's not just the properties of the low level thing that determines the properties of the high level thing, it matters how those low level things are arranged.

You're not intelligent because of the properties alone of the chemicals in your body. You can't skip the middle step. You're intelligent because of the processes that that specific arrangement of chemicals allows to happen. And those processes AREN'T in all the particles. Those processes aren't in any individual particle at all.

However, understanding ("intellectual consideration") would also seem to be of a higher intellectual order than justified propositional belief, — Count Timothy von Icarus

Doesn't justification require some degree of understanding

"explained by properties" isn't it I don't think. The properties, on their own, explain next to nothing.

Instead, I think a lot of high level things are explained by the processes that are happening at a lower level, processes that are enabled perhaps in part by properties.

But it's not just a raw properties -> properties relation. "Properties" doesn't really properly communicate what's actually going on there.

Seems like a (grandiose) composition fallacy to me: — 180 Proof

I think this is really at the center of a lot of disagreement in these types of conversations. Things often are very much unlike the things that make them up.

Can monism be the answer if we already have those? — Patterner

Funnily enough I had the same question myself the other day. "If physics has many quantum fields, does that mean it's not technically monism?"

I guess the reason it is is, even though they're different, they're still the same type of thing.

interesting, thanks for elucidating

the way he phrased it made it sound like he doesn't call himself a physicalist for other reasons, but that he does still believe in a physical type of monism, but I could easily be misreading it.

@bert if monism is about everything being composed fundamentally of "one type of thing", what type of thing is at the center of your monism? Or is it not that kind of monism at all?

interesting distinction, to call yourself a monist but not a physicalist. I guess that means you believe in strong emergence?

she'll make it pretty explicit before you get far in. I hope you enjoy it

Thoughts are not the same. — Patterner

Yes, describing things from the outside seems so far removed from what it feels like to be inside. Experience does seem drastically different, hence the hard problem.

I've been listening to a new audio book, a so called "audio documentary" that touches on this. It's called Lights On by Annaka Harris. Perhaps not up your street because she's an unabashed physicalist, but she explores concepts of fundamental consciousness because she's become increasingly convinced that that's more the right approach to talking about experience.

I don't take that kind of feedback from someone who doesn't understand the difference between a normal implication and a bidirectional one. Maybe suggest that again to me in a year when you've grown beyond basic logical fallacies

That's not what "coherent" means at all. That's just a bidirectional implication.

the thing I said wasn't an explanation didn't have any because.

Yes, we can explain it. The explanation is this: The banana turns blue when someone reads that sentence. That explains it. So it's not magic. — Quk

That's not an explanation, that's just a sentence describing the phenomenon you want to explain.

ease of access to referenced information is actually pretty important I think. There's a reason academic journals require cited sources.

too right. I've seen this pattern too, people just posting videos (sometimes hours long videos) without explaining anything about why they're posting it, how it's relevant to the topic, anything.

Like they think they're so important that other people should dedicate hours of their life just to find out if this video this random person posted online might be worth watching. The conceitedness of it... exhausting.