OK. I don't think anybody would suggest that a roomba has the complexity needed for human awareness/experience, but neither does a bat. The bat gets closer. — noAxioms

Yes, different things have different mental abilities. Many things have no mental abilities. — Patterner

I cringe at calling those abilities 'mental' since there's such a strong connotation of both life-form and dualism with that word. Let's just say I am considering the cognitive abilities of that roomba.

But at some point, he goes so far as to conclude the necessity (does he? or just he possibility?) of these mental properties that don't supervene on physical properties, — noAxioms

Sorry, I don't know what you're asking.

I wasn't a question. I was noting that Nagel concludes dualism from his musings, and I don't follow the logic by which he gets there. Maybe if I read his work, I'd know better, but maybe not even then since the only argument I ever see is incredulity.

If you think rocks are conscious (just not very) — noAxioms

I don't.

I'm sure I'm getting your stance wrong, but i had gathered that you believe that matter (all matter) has mental properties, and since the rock is made of matter, it must have mental properties. OK, having mental properties is different than being conscious, but then at which point does the latter kick in? You either draw a line somewhere, or deny the line. Denying the line makes for conscious rocks. So where do you draw it?

Regarding the issue of presentism and eternalism, I wasn't necessarily advocating for presentism. Rather, I was arguing against eternalism. — boundless

Didn't know there was more than the two, even if presentism comes in half a dozen different flavors, but all sharing the premise of a preferred moment in time.

Also, when I think about the word 'evidence', I don't think it means a 'conclusive evidence' or an 'convincing evidence beyond reasonable doubt'.

OK. You accept intuition as evidence and I don't. That's fair. I agree, I think more along the 'falsification' line of thinking.
Eternalism does not deny change, so awareness of that is to be expected.

In philosophy, like in jury, some evidence might have less conciving powers but still have some importance.

Good example. I was trapped in a hung jury once. Being hung like that is bad, but the reasons why they voted their way were often the wrong reasons. I was probably the most waffley guy there, most likely to be swayed to the other side. The facts were clear. It was the interpretation of them that split the decisions.

I believe that simply appealing to GR or other seemingly eternalist scientific theory isn't enough to conclude that 'it is an illusion'

Agree. Relativity and absolutist theories make (almost) the same predictions, so the appeal to a model doesn't work.

Not sure how this got worked into a topic about first person being magical or not.

Regarding knowledge, instead, again I believe there are evidences (in the weak sense) that seem to point to the fact that machines can't 'know' in the same way we 'know'. — boundless

I'm fine with that. I didn't claim it was the way we do it. And no, you're not aware of all the things you've learned. But my point was, however the roomba does it, it acquires the information of where it can be, where it has been and where it has yet to be. It couldn't do what it does without that information. If you don't want to label that 'knowing', then you're just saying that the language usage of that word is restricted to a privileged subset, but it doesn't change what the roomba is actually doing. It only alters the words available to something else trying to describe it. The roomba functions just fine regardless of which words you find eligible for describing it.

That is, in human beings, it seems that knowledge is a specific kind of qualitative experience. If it is true, then, is it possible that a machine can 'know' things? Yes, if a machine has qualitative experiences.

You put it in scare quotes, suggesting that the word is reserved for things that do it the human way. I didn't claim the roomba has any need to do that.
You willingness to stamp 'qualitative experience' on what the roomba is doing is similarly irrelevant. Point is, it is gathering information on its own by whatever means and reacting appropriately to that information. The way it gathers that information can be expressed as 'qualitative experience' or not. The roomba operation doesn't depend on anybody's designation of where that term applies or doesn't. You apparently decline to apply the term. That's fine. Nobody claimed it is experiencing the way you do.

it seems that in order to have some kind of self-awareness a degree of autonomy is needed

I don't see how these two are related at all, and while I don't know how you distinguish autonomy from the lack of it (to the point that you can demonstrate that you have it, rather than just feel like you have it), the roomba is admittedly a slave, doing what it's told, but leaving how to do it open.
Or alternatively, demonstrate that you're not algorithmic, since that term is also put out there. I attempted to describe a test for that in the OP.

I would here also add that in the case of algorihm-based machines, consciousness seems to be unnecessary. — boundless

Perhaps we define consciousness differently. The roomba needs to measure its environment and react appropriately to that. Refusal to apply that word to the situation just seems to be a word-definition choice, not a denial that the roomba is doing the same thing, just in it's own way, just like frogs do it their own way.

The usage comes from "The world is all that is the case", the first lines of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. — Banno

Ambiguous. Do they mean 'all that is empirically the case' or 'all that is objectively the case'? The former seems idealistic/relational, and seems to be how you're using the term. The latter wording is realism.

I say that, but most people's idea of 'realism' is 'it's real because I see it;, which is the relational usage again. If I say I'm not a realist, I mean I'm not an objective realist because I cannot identity a meaningful distinction between something real and something not. I only see relations.

The world is the facts, experienced or not, known or not.

That is very different than how you've been using the word, which seems very much based on experience and induction.

There is no mystery. First and Third person views are the way of human perception. — Corvus

There are those that assert that a human being supervening only on physical particles and laws cannot have a first person view. That's part of what the topic is about. The other part is drawing the line between what can have it and what cannot. If it's confined only to humans (or a subset of them, as has been argued), one must justify what makes us the preferred entity, and when that preference was acquired.

You don't understand my point. which is darn likely my fault. — Patterner

OK, re-reading, I think I see your point. Never mind the friend, since with enough friends, counting becomes base ∞, which reduces to simply tally marks.
So your point is that 11 values (0-10) can be represented with 10 fingers, so '10' should instead be the next number beyond that, rather than the redundant <all fingers> is the same value as (1 in the next column). Interesting point, but the next column is a count of handfuls, not a count of 'more than handfuls'. Best I can think of.

Nobody seems to do binary arithmetic. It's a cute exercise, but awkward for people. The c language lets you directly specify constants in base 10, 8, or 16, but not binary. There's just no call for it.

The number had no meaning to me in binary. I could do the math, but there was no meaning.

Well that's mostly because you don't work with binary regularly, so you haven't learned the feel of what the numbers are. The example of the big decimal number was my example of us not really having much of a feeling for big decimal numbers either. After a while, it's just a string of digits.

To illustrate, Tegmark computed the distance to the nearest exact copy of you. It was a huge number.10**(10**28). What units you might ask? With a number like that, units don't matter. Angstroms? Parsecs? It's the same number either way. If you don't believe that, try to convert that number of angstroms to the value in parsecs.

Never mind that. You want a debate? — noAxioms

I do not. I wasn't aware I said anything that would invite debate.

It was a rhetorical question on my part. It's one of those topics that divide people who care, kind of like the Monty Hall problem.

I'm just wondering how much of our thinking that isn't about math is, nevertheless, affected by math

Most thinking has been at least partially about math, long before numbers were discovered. Consider the calculus needed to throw a spear accurately.

and how different it would be if we thought in binary.

Most math isn't done discreetly at all, so the base is irrelevant. But the math we learn in school would admittedly be pretty awful if it was done in binary. We'd need more than just commas to help parse the strings of digits.

I multiplied it correctly in binary. But I had no idea what the numbers were. — Patterner

You did know what the numbers were since you had the answer. You just didn't know the base-10 representation of that answer any more than you knew the base-13 representation of it, but none of those representations is 'what the number is'.

And that's only 8,238,805,960.

Most people have little idea what that number is either. Sure, it's a string of digits, but enough to be little more than an abstraction corresponding to no relatable quantity. It's probably big in most contexts, but how big? Words fail to convey. You can talk about human population, but having little real concept how many people there are, what does that tell me?

My second thought is a question. Do people who work with binary often enough think in binary the way the rest of us think in Base 10?

Not often, but I did work in hex enough to memorize the base-16 multiplication table. I hate octal, but hex is your friend. Somehow I find it far more friendly.

But yea, computers mostly do math in binary. My old TI-59 calculator did it internally in decimal. It was wicked slow compared to the HP which stored its numbers more efficiently in binary. But the TI needed a far simpler circuit to put the answer up on the display.
The HP taught me the power of RPN, and was a precursor to how programming should be done.

You wouldn't call 101001 "forty one" if you thought in binary. Do we have non-Base 10 words for numbers in binary?

Sure. Put commas in there to group them 3-4 at a time, just like we do with decimal. The word 'hundred' and such are applicable, but it's probably more terse to just say "OneOhOne, One". I do that with decimal all the time, skipping the optional words.

My third thought is another question. Why do we use Base 10?

Duh... Count the fingers. In binary, a dexterous person can count to a thousand with those fingers. I regularly hold counts up to 100 with just that (One digit per hand, thumbs count as a 5), but I cannot do the binary thing with any efficiency.

My fourth thought is wondering if people using different mathematical bases would have different thinking in general. Maybe not. Maybe it wouldn't go much beyond the math.

Never mind that. You want a debate? How about the whack job (some Arabic nut case) that invented big-indian numbers, a travesty that Motorola/unix decided to continue, and Microsoft/Intel descarded in favor of little-indian (actually little Endian for those unfamiliar). The former is the source of so many computer bugs, but of course the Arabic guys (and the Romans as well) didn't think of that at the time. With the Romans, you at least know when the number was going to end. Not so with the Arabic system, where you knew nothing until you were told that the number was done. A big-vs-little endian debate is a worthy one, and one which I absolutely have an opinion.

'Knowing' something seems to imply having an awareness of such a knowledge. — boundless

OK, but the roomba acts on the knowledge, and it couldn't do that if it lacked awareness of the knowledge. Contrast that with a book, which contains information, but lacks that awareness of what it holds, and does not act on it at all.
The calculator indeed does not know it's doing math, just like the roomba. At best it knows what is stored in its limited registers in such a way that it can act upon those contents when requested, and even then, it just knows digital bits, not that those registers represent numbers.

But at a certain point, one should wonder if one isn't equivocating language.

But language should be used in situations where it is appropriate and not just places where it used to be used.
I'm claiming the roomba knows where it's been. I'm not claiming it has qualitative experience (but I also not claiming it doesn't).

On presentism:

Yes, the experience is identical. But the interpretation is different. In one interpretation, the experience is taken as veridical. In the other it is taken as illusory. — boundless

Yes, the intuition is false in the latter case, but if the experience is identical, one has to wonder why the intuition for something undetactable is there at all, regardless of which is the case. The answer of course is that the intuition makes one (any being that predicts) more fit. Being fit scores points. Knowing the truth about something that cannot matter does not.

In both cases, however, one should be able to explain how the experience occurs.

Why? This has come up countless times in the topic. Why do the dualists hold physical monism responsible for an explanation of something complicated when 1) it is clear that no explanation will ever be accepted, and 2) their view is even less explained?
So I reject this requirement. Sufficiently complicated things (like the sun rising each day) have been physically processes despite lack of physical explanations for them over the centuries. To falsify one, one must show that it cannot be the case, not to show that there isn't currently a full physical explanation.

Regarding 'free will', the evidence comes from my own immediate experience and, of course, the view that moral responsibility seems to require it.

There are many definitions of 'free will', so not sure which one you are using, or how you would distinguish the experience of not having it. I mean, my definition is pretty loose: Physics does not prevent one from doing what one wants, and I don't have that kind of free will since I desire to levitate, and gravity prevents that.
The suggestion that moral responsibility requires free will seems to stem from a lack of distinction between choice and free choice. You have the former (and thus bear responsibility), else you'd not have evolved this nice brain to make better (more fit) choices. The latter requires a definition that yields a distinction from mere choice, and most distinctions actually seem to hinder making a better choice, but it's quite definition dependent.
Also note that eternalism is quite compatible with non-deterministic quantum interpretations like Copenhagen. Not sure if you're aware of that.

A good starting point is also pinning down 'moral responsibility'. Responsible to what? Responsibility is a relation. One can be help responsible to physics, or to the law, or to society, or to a god. Only responsibility to something outside our universe seems to require some sort of external volition. The rest doesn't. I've given several examples earlier in this topic of responsibility to the former things, and how classical deterministic process are best at implementing choices in those contexts.

Of course, both free will and the experience of 'flow of time' might be illusory. But I do not deem the grounds of taking them as such to be compelling. YMMV.

Opinions are fine, but you cite 'evidence' a lot, and there cannot be any if there's no empirical difference. I hold intuitions very low on the likely-to-be-true list. so my opinion tends to go with the simpler model, not with the suggestion of a known liar (intuitions, not you).


On the 'physical laws of our universe':

One however might ask the ontological status of these 'rules' — boundless

To me it's a relation. These laws describe the outcome of the particular nature of the mathematics that describes (or is) our universe. It's a relation between emergent effects (matter say) and the mathematical structure in question.
Whether any of that 'exists' or not seems to be irrelevant to it being a relation. The realists need something to have 'exists' stamped on it, but those same realists often define existence (or 'actual') in idealistic terms.

If they are 'real' (and not just an useful 'construct' that *somehow* help us), what is their status?

The universe supervening on mathematics is different than the mathematics being objectively real or not. Of course you might not be talking about objectively real here, but more the relaties-to-me kind of 'real' that most self-described realists use.

Can they be explained in purely physicalist terms?

No. The physical comes from the laws, not the other way around. Physicalism does not explain the laws of physics. That's backwards.

Not sure of your point. MUH asserts that all mathematical structures are 'real'. — boundless

Yea, I have a real problem with that. How would the structures differ in any way if they were not real? That's why I think declaring them 'real' is pointless. By my main issue is with giving all structures the same status, which means all the uninteresting structures exist as much as the interesting ones, and there's so many more of the former, to the point where you are probably part of one of those instead of the improbable interesting structure you think you're part of.

If the mathematical structure of 'natural numbers' is real, how is it possible that the numbers aren't real?

Does anybody suggest that? One of the rules seems to be "real stuff comes from other real stuff", so if I'm real, so is my child or anything else I cause. If I'm not real, I cannot create or interact with something real. Likewise, it seems that natural numbers share the same ontology (whatever that may be) as the set of natural numbers.

Again, I believe that in this discussion we agreed that mathematical truths do not seem to be 'physical'

Yes, we agree on that. I cannot find a physical natural number anywhere in the universe. Collect them all!

I also don't think the mathematics that is the universe is a set of 'truths'. It's a structure, not a truth. A typical example is the Mandelbrot set, which is simply a set of numbers in the complex plain with a certain property. There's nothing true or false about it. It's just what it is. It doesn't need to exist to have certain properties (like being fully connected). It's ontology seems utterly irrelevant to what it is. That's how I see our universe. It being objectively real or not seems totally irrelevant, which is why most people's notion of being 'real' isn't an objective one.

as they seem to be independent from the existence of the universe (or the 'multiverse'). MUH asserts that reality is made of 'all mathematical structures'. So, I wouldn't call it a form of physicalism.

No, but the universe thus described by some mathematical structure typically is suggested to obey physical law. It isn't necessary. Perhaps the mathematics can be more complicated and include mental properties as well. It's just that nobody has ever observed such properties, let alone modeled them.

As I think consciousness is fundamental, a property of matter just as things like mass and charge are, and I think information processing is what makes a system conscious as a unit, I think a Roomba is conscious as a unit. However, it does not have the complexity of multiple integrated information processing systems for it to experience the kinds of thinking and awareness we do. — Patterner

OK. I don't think anybody would suggest that a roomba has the complexity needed for human awareness/experience, but neither does a bat. The bat gets closer.

Anyway, the implications of physics don't include anything about consciousness.

I beg to differ. So much of the old works rest on classicality (one world, one identity, presentism, and yes, all effects have a cause), and all that has been tossed out the window by 20th century physics (starting pretty much at 1900). It's why I got into these forums in the first place, since so much of the philosophical literature (even 20th century stuff) was written by people who don't know their physics.
So here I am, an armchair physics guy (moderator of a science forum), working out my own philosophy with little help from the pros.

As an illustration, try finding somethings that explores which quantum interpretations are compatible with the Bible or one's theology of choice.
For some reason, the free-will discussion seems to care about this, reasoning (incorrectly) that apparently randomness is required for moral responsibility, thus favoring only interpretations with, as Einstein put it, 'God rolling dice'.

[Nagel] isn't saying that. He's just trying to find something close enough to us that those who believe things other than us are conscious will agree is conscious, but different enough that we can't really imagine what it's experience is like.

It seems pointless to belabor the point when you don't worry about a cutoff like I described. If you think rocks are conscious (just not very), then it isn't something that just 'turned on' with one thing. There are those that believe otherwise (the jellyfish, lacking a brain, isn't conscious), and the comment was only applicable to that suggestion.

For all the similarities you mention, we can't know what it is like to exist with as creatures who have echolocation as our primary sense every waking moment, and to fly and capture our food and eat it while doing so. As he says, our imagination can only get us so far:

No argument there. But at some point, he goes so far as to conclude the necessity (does he? or just he possibility?) of these mental properties that don't supervene on physical properties, and being admittedly ignorant of his work, I cannot assert if he finds a valid reasoning for this, or just the usual incredulity that so many lean on.

I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. — Nagel

Sorry Thomas, but not going to happen. It not happening is not proof of anything. As was said, imagination only gets you so far. It certainly fails to get to the roomba.

I think consciousness is fundamental because the "experience (if a binary thing) suddenly turned on, something its immediate ancestor lacked" idea seems too fantastic.

I also find that too fantastic, but I never considered it a binary thing that you have or don't. Like I said, it a point only relevant to those with such a view: probably substance dualism, where something has an immaterial 'mind' object when it's parent did not.
I had the Adam/Eve thing explained that way. Two people cannot breed all of humanity, and the story as taken literally contradicts evidence. So the idea is that the area was full of these near-human apes, and Adam was somehow a mutation that utilized this immaterial object to call his shots rather than using his own brain. It worked better, and the mutation propagated as he (and his offspring) bred with the almost-humans, and most of the descendants of Adam were conscious after that, when the ones without this mutation (ancestors, early spouses) were not. Of course bats wouldn't be either. It's this mind/soul thing that God judges, not the physical body. All this requires that classicality.

All kinds of holes in that. The mind taking over like that is akin to possession. Why do we have these huge expensive organs (a whopping 20 watts, a power drain that has killed plenty of people), when the other animals do it for far less. If this immaterial object is doing all the hard work, a walnut size brain should suffice for the rest just like it did for dinosaurs.
And then there's the whole bit about how the not-conscious ones (zombies, just like the bats) managed to do what they do without any 'experience', which I find preposterous.

And then the Bible kills off everyone a 2nd time (so much for the last of the zombies) and has Noah & co (4 couples) repopulate the planet so fast it would require something like 50 kids per breeder. I digress...

Mixed domains. "Universe" is a metaphysical notion, while "world" is a logical notion. They do not have the same use. "Universe" is a term used by physicists for a particular physical structure. "World" is used by logicians, more or less for a group of consistent, true sentences - a use that probably comes from the Tractatus. — Banno

Perhaps this is our disconnect, given my physics background. "World' means that which relates to us, or that which has been measured by a given entity. Think the W in MWI. Hence our world is essentially confined to the visible universe, the rest being totally unmeasured by humans.

OK, so you're using a modal logic meaning of the word when you say "The actual world is the one we are in", I think you saying that this particular world is the only one that corresponds to the facts of reality as we experience them, which is not a strong statement since I don't see how it could be otherwise. It's just a stipulation: actual to me. The designation seems to correspond to idealistic or relational thinking: actual to me, not objectively actual (as I had mistakenly interpreted your comment). Empirical truth vs objective truth.

Tell me where I'm getting this wrong, since I'm sure I mucked up the meaning from a modal logic domain.

The roomba empirically demonstrates the knowing of where it has been — noAxioms
Well, I hope you and it can form a meaningful relationship. — Wayfarer

An evasion. Have I pointed out an inconsistency then? Knowing your methods, you'd likely deny that a non-living thing cannot know something since the dictionary doesn't have any examples of that usage, a denial despite the roomba clearly not being able to do what it does without such knowledge, and knowledge that it obtain on its own, not something fed to it. You can teach it stuff, like define a no-go zone to protect a place it cannot handle.

since the roomba knows — noAxioms
begs the question i.e. assumes what needs to be proven. — Wayfarer

What is being demonstrated ('proven' as you put it) is an implication of the assertion that "being consciously aware is prior to the knowledge of any facts". I don't buy that assertion, but I am not begging what follows from it.
The roomba empirically demonstrates the knowing of where it has been and where it yet needs to go. This constitutes empirically obtained facts. Therefore, by your assertion, the roomba is conscious. I would suggest that the example falsifies the assertion rather than the example demonstrating that the roomba is conscious.

"The universe is not composed of true statements" contains no indexical expressions. It contains no indexical terms (no “I”, “here”, “now”, “actual”, “this world”, etc.). — Banno

Given your "By definition, the actual world is the one we are in", how is "The universe" in any way distinct from the form: "this world'? You label the latter indexical, but apparently deny that of the former.

"The actual world is the one we are in" is indexical. It contains "we".

So does 'the universe', since it means "the actual universe" which has, by your definition, a 'we' in it.

...this particular universe is the actual one due to your presence in it — noAxioms

On this account, any possible world in which you exist would be an actual world.

You never said 'an actual world'. You said 'the actual world'. That's your wording, one that implies that your being in it makes it the one and only world that is actual.

This all seems a rather odd thing on which to focus.

You brought up indexicals. I brought up the fact that almost everybody's definition of 'exists' is essentially an idealistic one, which your definition illustrates quite nicely.


As for the 'smell of coffee', my usage of that language is a reference to the mutual private experience of the scent, carrying no implication that the experience is entirely similar between two people. It is neither a reference to the coffee nor a reference to my public reaction to the scent, which may well be no reaction at all, despite very much noticing it.

Nagel discussed this in What is it like to be a bat? — Patterner

He should also discuss 'what it is like to be a roomba' (my choice of X). Answer:We cannot know. That not knowing includes us not asserting that there's nothing it is like to be a roomba.

I know Nagel is famous for the bats, but I've actually never read any of the famous works by anybody. Most of them were published before modern physics and its implications were known, and so they all lean on classical assumptions, assumptions we know today to be false. Not saying Nagel is wrong. Just that I'm uninformed. I appreciate the quotes.

I assume we all believe that bats have experience. — Nagel

Some don't even believe that of their mothers, so Nagel is perhaps assuming a less solipsistic audience here.

I have chosen bats instead of wasps or flounders because if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience there at all.

But that shedding of faith is important, since it implies that somewhere on our walk up that tree, experience (if a binary thing) suddenly turned on, something its immediate ancestor lacked. If this 'experience' is more of an analog thing (X is more conscious than Y), then we entertain that notion that we may very well still be incredibly low on that scale.
I find bats (being a fellow mammal) to be unreasonably close to humans, a safe call that suggests an unwillingness to explore something far more alien like the roomba.
And bats are awfully similar to humans. We can get around by echolocation except we lack the hardware to emit the sharp sound pulses required. They've fitted babies with these and they learn to run through a forest at full speed in complete darkness.
Dolphins are closer to us in intelligence, and they also use echolocation.

Anyway, your quote kind of dies there. Nagel indicates why 'bat' was chosen, but says little more.

anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life. — Thomas Nagel

I did pull out of the woods in a canoe, at twilight. A cloud of mosquitoes came out with us and tracked the canoe (laden with firewood) across the lake. Two bats emerged, flew around us for about 5 seconds, and then the cloud was gone. I was impressed.

I agree. I think experience is feeling. I think "What is it like?" Means "What does it feel like?". Not necessarily physical feeling. I think the experience of redness is a feeling. Although anyone would object if they were told all of that was about to be stripped from them, once it was stripped, once they had no feelings, there's nothing to complain about.

But Chalmers apparently thinks otherwise, that the thing stripped of feeling would behave undetectably the same. A lot of his argument hinges that unreasonable assumption.

Been traveling, and the topic has once again run away from me.

"The universe is not composed of true statements" is also an indexical — noAxioms
I don't think so. — Banno

You do think so.

By definition, the actual world is the one we are in. — Banno

By this very idealistic definition, this particular universe is the actual one due to your presence in it, and possibly due to your perception of it. It depending on the context of your perceptions, this universe's actuality is an indexical.

Notice that we manage to name the smell of coffee and the shade of red in the paint shop, despite supposedly not being confident that your smell of coffee and your sensation of red has anything in common with mine?

How's that work, then. — Banno

It works in that the referent (especially with the coffee, not so much the paint) is the private sensation that evokes the public concept of coffee. It is not a referent to coffee. It being a reference to a private thing, it bears no implication that your personal experience of the scent is similar, but it can still be a reference to the personal experience of another.

I do agree that qualia has no place in a paint shop since orders for a very specific color ("match this swatch") can be (and very much is) done entirely by machine.

If you and I both smell coffee, it cannot be a reference to an indexical private thing, since we both smell it. — Banno

That usage has both of us detecting the same public actual coffee. That usage is not a reference to the experience of the scent, only to the action of detection of the public substance.

We can give someone who can see all colors but red all the information that can ever be given, and they will not know what red looks like. No description or data will help. — Patterner

I said as much in the OP. It's why we cannot know what it's like to be a bat, but given that, we also cannot go around asserting that there is or is not something it is like to be X. If you're not X, then this cannot be known.

I think if someone was going to strip away your qualia, you would object. Probably strenuously. — Patterner

Hence 1) my falsification test mentioned in the OP, 2) the inconceivability of a p-zombie acting undetectably the same, and 3) I suspect that the ability to object at all would be stripped away with the qualia gone. Such actions rely on continuous feedback, feedback which is now gone.

But are qualia real without consciousness? Qualia are first person as a matter of definition. — Wayfarer

Definitions don't tell you how things work. They're not metaphysics at all. They just indicate how language is to be used. I can't prove my solipsism by defining existence to be confined only to that which I directly perceive.

It's also not a 'brute fact' - being consciously aware is prior to the knowledge of any facts. — Wayfarer

Great, so since the roomba knows where it has been and where it still needs to go (knowledge of a fact), then it is only via its consciousness that it can come by this knowledge.

But [roombas] don't heal, grow, reproduce, or mutate. — Wayfarer

Nobody claimed they were life forms. But I know. You're leaning on your proof-by-definition again, which as I just said above, just shows how language is typically used, and doesn't prove anything about the roomba not doing as much and more than many 'sentient' life forms.
The same tactic is employed by racists to 'prove' that moral obligations don't apply to the race of choice.

IMO I don't even think that we can say that one can 'know' something without a qualitative experience. — boundless

Well, 'qualitative' apparently is a word reserved for life forms, and since non-living things can know stuff (see roomba example just above), I must either disagree with the statement or disagree with all the definitions that are confined to life forms.

"The cold mountain is to the left" you labeled an indexical despite it not being dependent on who says it. — noAxioms

Well, yes it is. If we face each other, then if it is to my left, it is not to your left. It matter who says it. That's why it is called indexical. — Banno

It's actually a matter of coordinate system choice, and not on who says it. Any person can choose whatever coordinates he likes. For a given person, the coordinate system would be loosely suggested more by which way he faces than who he's with.

The problem with eternalism is: are those experiences (i.e. that 'time flows', the appearance of 'free will' etc) compatible with eternalism? — boundless

Again, the experience of both interpretations is identical, so if it isn't compatible with eternalism, then it isn't compatible with presentism either. Both have you experiencing flow of time. I have a hard time with free will since there's no way to detect it one way or another. It also seems to make no predictions.

In fact, as I said before, if we deny those 'raw' experiences, can we trust empirical knowledge?

Since the two interpretations are empirically identical, you cannot have knowledge of which is correct. So there's no empirical knowledge to trust when it comes to anything interpretational.

IIRC, Goedel's theorems showed that even in relatively simple mathematical structures you get true yet unprovable (within the structure) propositions.

Yes. It's really easy to show this. But our universe isn't composed of statements or determinations of halting or whatnot. It's simply run by rules, none of which seem to contradict its operation. A counterexample would help a lot.

So, you can't derive all mathematical truths by a set of arbitrary axioms.

Agree. How is this relevant since I'm not suggesting that all truths must be derived?

This clearly suggests that mathematics isn't 'invented' IMO

If it was invented, it wouldn't be fundamental, but rather supervening on this inventor. So no argument here either.

MUH can also be a non-realist view. — noAxioms
Interesting, however I'm not sure how to conceive it. — boundless

2+3 sums up to 5. That works whether those values are real or not. Some disagree.

I do believe that MUH is defective, however. Other than the problem of change, I also believe that things like consciousness, ethics, aesthetics and so on require more than just 'math'.

You mean you think those things require more than just 'particles'. You are incredulous about physicalism. I suppose MUH is typically spun as a foundation for physicalism.

You reaffirming the idea that meaning and successful communication do not require private referential identity. — Banno

That I am.

The term "the aroma of coffee" perhaps picks out a pattern of behaviour and report, coordinates shared expectations, and is indexical but public.

"The aroma of coffee" does not reference a particular public reaction to it. It is bending the meaning considerably to suggest so. It is not a reference to the detected particles in the air. It is a reference to an indexical private thing, and no particular private thing since the subject is missing, but the language usage works due to a presumption that the private thing referenced is similar from one human context to the next.
Note that I say human. Humans cannot see yellow, but squirrels can, meaning that if a squirrel sees a printed picture of a banana, it doesn't look yellow at all because it isn't. And it's not the same from one human to the next. Again, my father, when asked to pass the yellow token, doesn't know which I am requesting.

But it does not pick out a thing.

It does not pick out a particular, but not all referents designated as 'things' are particulars. I speak of a banana, and that's a thing, but not a particular. "This banana" is, or it would be if I was indicating a specific one.
An example from lyrics of non-object that are nevertheless designated 'thing' in language use:
"Silver-white winters that melt into springs
These are a few of my favorite things"

Thus selected because every other 'thing' in that song was an object. No, the example is not one of a qual like 'the aroma of coffee'. Not even an abstraction. More of a process being treated linguistically as an object.

We may avoid the hypostatisation.

Why, when language is so full of it?

Why is the language usage relevant in any way to the topic of first person being mysterious or not?

It's not just being context-dependent that makes an indexical. The truth value of an indexical changes with who is doing the uttering. — Banno

The definition of 'indexical' mentions only context dependency, with no requirement at all that the statement is something necessarily uttered, although many of the examples are of typical utterances. "The cold mountain is to the left" you labeled an indexical despite it not being dependent on who says it. It was listed as an objective statement lacking context, but even if we give it context (e.g. I am the one uttering it), it doesn't give information needed.

"I am Australian" is true in my mouth, perhaps not in yours.

Sure, but that's a self reference to the speaker. The statement is arguably meaningless if printed. My statement is not.

But the truth value of "The universe is not composed of true statements" does not depend directly on who says it in this way.

It doesn't depend on it being said at all. But it does depend on context, meeting the definition of 'indexical'. Perhaps you're using a more anthropocentric definition of the word than the one I see if I just google it.

I assume that by 'absolutist' you mean theories like the modern versions of Lorentz Ether Theory (LET). — boundless

Yes. Pretty much anything that denies both premises of SR. Hard to deny just one since one postulate is a particular instance of the more general one.

The wording on wiki is very empirical, whereas the wording in Einstein's paper is more metaphysical. Light is measured to locally move at c, vs. light moves locally at c. The difference between LET and SR is metaphysical only. They make the same empirical predictions, so absolutist interpretations are actually the same theory as relativity, with a few exceptions, opening a door for an almost-falsification test.

I meant that 'eternalism' seems to be in contrast to our experience of change, 'free will' etc.

But both interpretations of time involve that same experience, else there would be a falsification test.

But, anyway, didn't Godel prove that even simple mathematical structures are based on unprovable axioms?

Probably, yes. Any axiom is by definition unprovable. If it could be proved, it would be a theorem (based on deeper axioms), not an axiom.

In fact, the very impossibility to prove 'everything' (as 'formalists' like Hilbert believed) was seen by Godel himself IIRC as a proof of 'platonism'. After all, if everything was provable by humans, it would make more sense to think that mathematics is purely an invention (not a decisive point, but nevertheless an evidence against 'realist' views).

I don't see how mathematics being an abstraction follows from axiom-free mathematics. I don't think raw MUH is a form of Platonism, but the kind of MUH that Tegmark suggests is such a form. He's a realist. MUH can also be a non-realist view.

Ok, perhaps I see more the point now. However, it is isn't a 'fatal' point against MUH.[/quote

It renders MUH empty (completely lacking in evidence) unless the problem is fixed, making it a modified MUH. I do believe that there have been attempts to do so, so maybe my protest has been addressed. But in a satisfactory way?

Yes, I understood in this way your point. I would answer as I answered in my previous post.

Your answer in the previous post was that you share similar incredulity, just about a different topic. This in no way lends evidence one way or another about the true nature of a pie.

We might see as 'through a glass, darkly' to borrow an expression from St. Paul the Apostle but we are not 'blind'.

Exactly

in so far as they are public, we already have 'red" and "sour" to cover that use — Banno

These don't generally refer to qualia. Rather, to public features. We just happen to identify these features by a internal coding system, qualia. How each of our coding systems presents to us is not communicable by language or any other means, as there is no stable referent language can latch onto. — hypericin

I've kind of stayed out of this exchange, but I have to agree here with you. I do not follow any argument that leads to how Banno sees things, and thus I decline to leverage such thinking to support my opinion.

I am currently inclined to agree with Chalmers in that under 'meaning is use', reference to 'my feeling' is relatable to feeling by a similar context, anchoring the meaning.

Dennett repeats Wittgenstein's point, that if two people cannot compare referents, and cannot check criteria, and cannot correct or be corrected, then they are cannot genuinely be said to be “talking about the same thing.” — Banno

But word usage is not about assertions of the referent being the same thing. Most language is pragmatic, and if a Doctor asks me if I'm in pain, nobody suggests he's asking if I'm experiencing his pain, or pain the way he would. I don't buy Dennett's reasoning.

Chalmers thinks he’s appealing to private, introspected items. But every scrap of evidence he uses for “shared structure” comes from public behaviour — Banno

Introspection is valid evidence. Discussion of introspection is presented evidence, which is indeed public.

What most of us do agree is that there is something that it is like to see an apple and smell ammonia. — hypericin

We probably agree that there is something it is like for another human to experience these things, and that the experience is vaguely similar from one human to the next. This might be totally wrong. I know my father's experience of the apple image is somewhat different than my own, that he could not experience red the way I do. As for non-human experience of X, you can assert that there is something it is like for A to experience it, and assert that there isn't something it is like for B to experience it, all at one's own whim. B cannot experience it because B experiencing it in its own way does not lend support to my unbacked belief system.

"The universe is not composed of true statements" is also an indexical — noAxioms

I don't think so. — Banno

In a universe that IS composed of true statements, the statement above would be false (and perhaps nonexistent). That makes it context dependent, and thus an indexical.
It also makes the mistake of implying the existence only one universe, a very idealistic definition being used for ontology. I did say above that almost anybody's definition of 'exists' is an idealistic one. Not being an idealist, I needed to find a definition that was an exception, resulting in my more or less relational view of such things.

- - - - -

I agree with you that relativity - both special and general - taken literally implies 'eternalism'. And, indeed, the existence of time dilation, the limit of the speed of light, black holes, gravitational waves etc corroborate the validity of general relativity. — boundless

Just for reference, light speed is locally c under both relativity and not. Time dilation is a coordinate effect (not real) under relativity (R), but is real under absolutist (A) interpretations.
Light speed has no limit non-locally. I don't know how (A) frames gravitational waves. They nave to exist since they're empirically detectable. Black Holes? Yea, those can only exist under R, so they make a funny sort of private falsification test, sort of like how a test for an afterlife is private.

All this is a nit. Just me spouting my science-forum background.

However, there is other empirical evidence (mostly experiential evidence) that I can't deny that seem to suggest that 'eternalism' is wrong.

Really. They're empirically the same, except for the BH test I mention above.

can you give an example of a 'mathematical truth' that is not based on axioms?

Maybe not. Not enough of a mathematician to think of one without help.

Ok, fine. In which case, however, you're saying that something that isn't physical exists

Not being a realist, that depends heavily on one's definition of 'exists', but I often go with 'relates to', which is a relation with something else, and sure, I think there are relations between entities that are not necessarily physical.

you can't be a physicalist (unless you are using the term 'physicalist' to describe a 'broader' position in which the mental supervenes/reduces/emerges/is dependent on the physical but doesn't exclude the existence of non-physical entities).

If you say so, then no word describes a stance that doesn't assert that final qualification. Maybe there is one, but I'm unaware of it.
A physicalist cannot suggest that the physical supervenes on something more fundamental? I've always used 'materialist' to express that stance.

I do not get the point you and Carroll make. I'll read Carroll's paper. At best it seems to me that it is an objection to the 'plausibility' of MUH rather than a critique of its consistency and/or it being a correct description of reality.

It kills so many more theories that just MUH. There are many standard cosmological interpretations that fail this test. This doesn't mean they're wrong, it just means that they cannot be simultaneously justified and true.

To [those suggesting cherry pie cannot have a physical explanation], I would reply that in the case of 'consciousness' I see properties like qualia, the experience of 'free will' etc that seem obviously harder to be understood in terms of what we know of the 'physical' than in the case of 'cherryness'. — boundless

But we're not talking about consciousness or the experience of this pie. The person is asserting that the pie itself, never experienced, is more than a physical state of matter. How would you respond to this person? What evidence would you supply to counter this person's incredulity of the alternative?

I would also add that this implies that the 'ding an sich' has some kind of intelligibility. Otherwise, we would able to distinguish which model is 'better'.

Better can be assessed in multiple ways: Simpler, or making better predictions. The predictions are pretty similar between the sun rising each day, and the alternative of the Earth spinning. So in this case, 'better' probably comes from simplicity, from the lack of additional inventions to get it to work. Maybe it's not simpler. If Earth spins, then why don't we fall off? Gravity is arguably more complicated than just blaming everything on God, who happens to have an awful lot of stuff to move around each day, all seemingly constrained to predictable paths, without any will being exercised to break the monotony now and then. That's an awful brutally boring job to have your deity have to do forever, like the lowest factory worker.

However, the skeptic wouldn't agree that we can say that NM or GR (or QM for that matter) can give us true knowledge.

Does anybody? I mean, what, true, complete knowledge? There's always more to learn, and always parts what are interpretation dependent. So truth is forever unreachable. Your bit from Bernard seems to convey your agreement with this.


Concerning p-zombie plausibility:

I think what you have in mind is an incomplete absence of qualia. For instance, the idea of someone losing all five senses at once. — hypericin

As the story is typically told, the sensory hardware is still there, as is all the brain hardware. But the experience of those senses is gone, leaving only the automoton physical response to the data, not a response to the experience. Except I find this utterly implausible since my reactions (talking about it say) are directly due to the experience, not to the data. The data does have effect. I jump due to sudden noises, and shiver/sweat in response to temperature. I have no conscious control over that, so it's evidence that there is at least some processing of the incoming data that is more direct, before it gets to the experience part.

So yea, I assert that since so much of it is in response to experience (perhaps all of language), a zombie could not function identically without it. I labeled it a fantasy to suggest otherwise.

1. Memory is also qualitative. When we remember, we remember images, sounds, feelings.

Some of it is. Memorizing the digits of Pi seems pretty thin on those qualities, but the memory of qualia once had? Yea, that's very qualitative. But where is that memory stored?

It is just that the brain is able to bookkeep these, marking them as internal

This seems to suggest that the brain stores them, meaning our simulated guy remembers the qualia, but isn't getting it anymore. And the implausible suggestion is that he'll not behave any differently with that turned off.

Someone who lost all qualitative awareness would lose the qualitative aspect of memory as well.

This comment on the other hand suggests that qualitative memory is stored offsite (not in the brain, or at least not via the physical properties of it. So the loss is not noticed, but any reactions to qualitative experience is still lost. How does one interpret speech (recognize a voice say) with the qualitative experience of that voice gone?

Feelings are also qualitative. It is not just distress that would be lost, all feelingds would be lost.

Agree. Don't agree that the lack of feelings will result in identical behavior compared to somebody with them. The key difference is the implausibility of somebody totally lacking qualia somehow describing feelings never felt, and insisting that the experience it doesn't have cannot be explained physically.

I have on occasion claimed to be a p-zombie (in all seriousness) simply because it's so obvious to somebody who's conscious, and I only used the words (conscious, qualia, feelings) due to imitation of others, not due to actually having the inexplicable thing that I cannot know. The obvious solution to this disconnect is that some of us are zombies and some not. We don't behave the same. What is so clear to you is baffling to me, and we only use the words because everybody else does.

happy holidays!

Thanks, and same to you if it's holidays. One can never tell.

I am currently away visiting family for holidays, which is why replies are not always prompt.

You say you will notice, but this already presumes that you have the capacity to notice. — hypericin

You're right. For instance, I presumed memory is physical. If that's taken away, I will have no memory of that which was taken away, but I also will be completely unable to function since I could not utter a sentence, lacking memory required to remember what I wanted to say and where I was in the utterance, and lacking language knowledge at all.
So perhaps I (the simulated copy of me) would just be a vegetable, in no distress at all.

If the simulation is just state and processing, there will be no distress.

If there was memory of the qualia, then its abrupt absence would be noticed. Whether that causes distress or not depends on if that distress is part of what was taken away. It probably was. Either way, if the simulated entity notices the lights going out and he retains the ability to report things, he'd report it.

A faithful simulation of the human brain will, somewhere in its workings, faithfully process all the state associated with a full qualitative experience.

Not if dualism is true. It would be like perfectly simulating a physical radio and expecting it to play music. It just wouldn't because you're missing something that is more than the physical radio, and the simulated radio would have zero access to real radio waves.

Point is, the simulation makes for a wonderful falsification test for both sides of the issue, leaving me to wonder how each side would reject the results if their own opinion was falsified.

The agent will "experience" it's qualia, and report nothing unusual. There just may not be any actual qualia.

How can qualia be experienced if there isn't any? This all seems contradictory. I've essentially created a p-zombie here, which is identical under physicalism and not identical under dualism (both substance and property). The dualist will thus reject the test on grounds of p-zombies behaving identically, but I've argued how that cannot be. They cannot make up a story about something they cannot know. They're not conceivable without some serious denial of logic.

In the same way, your chip sim faithfully processes all the state associated with electrical flow. There just isn't any actual electricity.

OK. I never said there was. That's what it means to be a simulation. The simulated chip cannot detect if it's real or if it's a simulation. If the simulation is incomplete, then it could detect the difference. For instance, the simulation does not simulate mass, but the chip has no way of testing its own mass. If it did, then it needs to be part of the simulation.

If you show a human an apple and ask them what color they are experiencing, they will say 'red'.

OK, but under dualism, the zombie simulated would be a human body, not a human.

If they do not, something is wrong with the simulation.

Exactly The simulation is missing a critical component, and would thus not be simulating a human. That's why it makes such a nice falsification test, since it works only if a human body and a human are the same thing.

Computers can't process infinite precision reals

Never worked with an analog computer then? I have. Interesting stuff, but hard to simulate anything complicated since they're so limited. No memory, no instructions.

especially since the universe is seemingly not composed of true statements. — noAxioms

But hopefully, what one says about the university is.

How about a statement of the form "The cold mountain is to the left". — noAxioms

Nice. Your sentence is indexical without being in the first-person. — Banno

"The universe is not composed of true statements" is also an indexical and thus lacks an objective truth value. The language usage there is so common that most forget that it's an indexical.

There is some tension between the Lewis account and the Anscombe/Wittgenstein account, but also some agreement in that both admit to a context, the one saying it is additional information, the other that it is a role int a language game.

Not being well versed in any of the known philosophers, I don't know how (Wittgenstein presumably) argues for the language game thing, and I see arguments made by language games all the time.

YRocks have physical boundaries―namely where the surface meets the air or water and the ground. — Janus

Where it meets the ground is pretty ambiguous. I've a small protrusion of rock in my yard. Does the rock end near the vaguely defined mean ground level? Does it mass a kg or is it a continental plate, even if most of the plate is not the slate that protrudes from my yard? Read the topic if you're interested. One test is: "How big is this?" where 'this' is something pointed to or touched. No actual language is allowed, since the contention is that 'this' is an ideal, defined only by language. Just saying 'rock' gives a huge clue about an ideal instead of the thing in itself.

Even with biological beings it's quite ambiguous. How much do I weigh? Well, 9 stones, but that includes the roll of coins in my pocket. Is that part of me? Fiction says it is. Logic has no clear answer. Convention says it's not part of me, but convention is an ideal.

The boundaries may not be precise on the atomic level, but a boundary does not have to be absolutely precise for us to be able to identify an object.

Of course. Such is the nature of a pragmatic ideal.

It all depends on how you frame it―there is no context-independent fact of the matter.

Just so. Hence identity also being merely an ideal, lacking in objective truth.

The objects are not conventions either.

Your statement immediately above seems to suggest otherwise.

The context is an addition, not found in any third person sentence.

It would seem that first person accounts are indeed not reducible to third person accounts. — Banno

Relevance noted. Trying to see if it solves anything, especially since the universe is seemingly not composed of true statements.

The context is typically there for most indexicals, including any first person account. Our gods seem to have no point of view, or they'd know their context.

How about a statement of the form "The cold mountain is to the left". Is that a third person sentence? It arguably references an unspecified context, but not necessarily a subjective one.

Beyond that, I was just explaining what I meant. — Relativist

OK. The whole thing came up because you suggested that I consider a process to be a 'thing', and apparently because I consider processes to be eligible for having properties. We have differing opinions on this, and 'thing' isn't precisely defined, so that kind of explains the disconnect.

This fundamental nature of consciousness cannot be undetectable. — noAxioms

I don't know how I am being inconsistent when I agree with everything you just said. — Patterner

That's kind of funny because I read what I said myself and I decided it doesn't follow. The noun there is 'nature', and the nature of this consciousness may be undetectable even if the consciousness itself is. That just means you cannot know how it works, which is true of plenty of physical things, anything with multiple interpretations.
It still stands that whatever it's nature, this posited immaterial <whatever> must have physical properties in order to work, and that means it should be (and is) physically measurable. You just need to figure out where and how, and only once you know that can you lay judgement on what can and cannot utilize it.

It isn't merely the lack of a physicalist explanation. It's the lack of any hint of what a physicalist explanation might look like.

I disagree since it's pretty trival to put environmental awareness, appropriate reaction, and intent into some fairly simple devices. That's at least a hint, better than not only a lack of dualist explanation, but an actual assertion that there isn't ever going to be one. The whole point of the black box is its blackness, the inner working being deliberately hidden, the opposite of investigation of how anything works.

if I told you I saw somebody pour a bunch of water on the ground, and suddenly there was a house, you would be skeptical.

Not much. Works for sea monkeys.

But building something non-physical out of physical components is unquestionably the answer, despite the fact that many brilliant people have been failing to even get a vague idea of how it might work?

Are you dissing dualism here? The brilliant people seem to have a vested interest in not investigating how it works. There very much is data to investigate like how this supposed non-physical stuff is so susceptible to physical damage.

We don't know what dark matter is, and cannot detect it in any way.

Nonsense. If it's undetectable, then it should have no reason to be posited (*1). It very much is detected because it's effects are physical and measurable. Thing is, it's slippery stuff and defies being captured in a container.

But we assume it exists because we can see what it does.

But that's how you detect anything. We don't detect the moon directly, but we see what it does. Dark matter is like that, just way less obvious. What they didn't do is suggest the galactic rotation curves are caused by magic. They could have. Perhaps MOND is an attempt at doing so, except it has never worked.


*1 There often very much IS a reason, but the reason is not to explain nonexistent evidence. Not all explanations have knowledge as their goal.

There is a piece of information each god lacks, of a different kind from ordinary propositional/worldly information. It is contextual or self-locating information. — Banno

OK, It seems pretty obvious that indexical truth does not follow from non-indexical truth. Not sure how to apply that here. For one, most indexical statements come with an implied context, allowing a reasonable assessment of truth. Secondly, I'm not sure if the first/third person dichotomy is an index/non-index kind of division, mostly because yes, context is almost always implied, and almost any statement is indexical, such as 'noAxioms lives to his 55th birthday'. The context there is subtle and often missed, but it's there.

Thanks for joining in. Don't think it was due to my jibe about your avatar-du-jour.

I mean 'computational' in the broad scene, where one state of a weather system physically "computes" the next. — hypericin

OK. Don't think I've ever see the word used that way. States correspond to data, and data does not compute, the engine does. It is unclear if in reality there is an engine involved in the evolution from one state to the next. This would be the 'breathing of fire into the equations' that Hawlking spoke of. A simulation is typically a presentist model, whereas reality probably isn't. It's the presence/absence of that fire that is the difference.
I.E. If the universe is a mathematical structure, it is not necessary that there is a more fundamental engine doing computations somewhere. That would make mathematics not fundamental at all.
And yes, this is only my 11th topic here, but I've done one on that subject as well, 3 years ago.

And if you think about it, there must be a homology between this physical "computation" and the sort of computation a computer does, otherwise the computer couldn't simulate it.

A simulation is typically classical, and the universe is not, so a computer cannot simulate reality. I see no evidence for instance that 1) there is state at all (counterfactuals), and 2) that any of the values (the velocity of the moon relative to Earth say) is discreet, meaning it is impossible to express a typical real number. The set of numbers available to a (infinite capacity) computer is countably infinite, but the reals are not, and I suspect the universe uses reals.
I don't think something as crude as a human crosses the barrier into requiring more than such a classical simulation, but the expression of the initial state of such a system possibly does cross some sort of measurable-in-principle barrier.

But remember, this is a simulated human. Part of a human's behavior is to respond to questions about their qualia as if they had them.

I reject this fantasy. If my qualia valished abruptly, I would 1) notice, 2) not feel obligated to pretend otherwise as you imply, and 3) probably not even be able to express my distress since qualia is required for a human to do almost any voluntary thing like communicate coherently.

Answers to the negative would break the simulation.

Why? The simulation just makes the chemicals and momentums do their things. It has no high level information that it's a human being simulated. It's just a bounded box with state, suitable for simulating a heap of decaying leaves as much as anything else without any change of code.

Can you quote or restate your argument?

I did, just then..

To try to clarify, let me try it this way:
If what we can detect (the physical) cannot explain something (consciousness), then we should consider the possibility that there is something we can't detect (the fundamental nature of consciousness). — Patterner

First of all, that wording half implies that we can only detect the physical. I do admit that you don't explicitly deny the ability to detect anything non-physical.
Your argument instead hinges on the lack of explanation. Physicalism might indeed not have an full explanation, but neither does your alternative, which lacks even the beginnings of one. So positing something undetectable isn't an improvement.

Secondly, the point I keep making: This fundamental nature of consciousness cannot be undetectable. It may itself be non-physical, but it has to cause physical effects, because you are physically responding to it. That's the part that's self-inconsistent with your suggestion.

No. It's a property of the material. I'm referring to the intrinsic properties of existents. Everything that exists has intrinsic properties. — Relativist

I consider processes to exist as much as the material involved in the process. This all seems a quibble about choice of language application and not about how anything actually works.
Why does this point matter?

Do you equate mental and consciousness? — Patterner

Alright, since you've been using 'consciousness', are you saying that you cannot detect your own consciousness? That it has no physical effect?
Funny that you're straight up refused to answer a question asked so many times now.

In terms of ontology, things have properties, processes do not have properties. — Relativist

Oh really. Vapor pressure is not a property of boiling? Light absorption spectrum is not a property of photosynthesis? Sorting efficiency is not a property of a sort process? Bias not a property of decision making?
I suppose one can argue that these are all properties of whatever is running the process (can't think of what in the case of boiling, since vapor pressure is neither property of water nor of heat.

Unclear what you might hope to accomplish by taking this stance.

You are missing the point. It simulates the current. But there is no current, just numerical values representing current. — hypericin

That's right. It simulates current for the purpose of learning what real current will do to the real circuit. I never said the simulation was the same thing as the actual chip. Just that it has all the same relevant properties, so one can learn all you need to know about the real chip behavior without actually making one.

Simulation: reproduces computational features

Disagree with this one. Computation is used, sure, but most often the purpose is not to reproduce computational features. They simulate the weather a lot, but not the computational features of the weather at all.

Imitation: reproduces behavioral features

OK

Model: reproduces (some) physical features

You're thinking like a model ship or something, not a model of physics, the latter of which does not reproduce physical features. The λCDM model is an example of the latter.

And so, Does the simulated guy have qualia? It would seem this can only be true if qualia were computational.

Yea, which makes it a nice test, no?

And if so, you can't build a qualia detector

Well, you ask the guy if his qualia is still there. If you go with the zombie argument, then qualia is epiphenomenal and the zombie is lying when he makes up stories about it. I don't seem to understand how that argument helped Chalmers' case since the zombie behaving identically without the qualia is either inconceivable or an assertion of epiphenomenal, which is identical to fiction.

Because consciousness is not physical, meaning has no physical properties... — Relativist

I'm saying we can detect the physical. — Patterner

Not what you said. I was responding to you suggesting "we should consider the possibility that there is something we can't detect." and Relativist's blatant assertion of same. You still haven't answered my query of if you believe the mental is undetectable.

Because consciousness is not physical, meaning has no physical properties... — Patterner

This cannot be, since you posting on a forum about it is a physical effect. You (probably) don't post via telepathy, so the effect is not direct, but something needs to cause your fingers to type those specific words. Follow the chain back to where your mental processes necessarily cause a physical effect somewhere. Maybe it isn't in the brain. There's plenty of brainless things out there that those on this forum consider to be conscious, you included if I'm remembering correctly.
I know for a fact that some important decisions in my life have been 'ruled by one's d*ck' so to speak, decisions I would never have made had said non-brain organ not thrown its influence into the process.

Can you tell me what the physical properties of consciousness are? — Patterner

A physicalist would say that all mental properties are physical properties. A dualist needs to answer that question himself. If he asserts none, then one is left with a self-contradiction since any writing about it (a physical effect) can only have physical causes. The mental, being totally undetectable, becomes an orbiting teapot: Posited, but totally lacking evidence.

Are they like the physical properties of particles; things like mass, charge, or spin?

Probably not, but they can influence things with those properties,. Being able to influence a physical entity is a physical property. It's something that can be scientifically measured.

Are they like the physical properties of objects; things like length, weight, or hardness? Are they like the physical properties of processes; things like speed, duration, or distance? Can we measure how much energy is required to taste sweetness or see red?

You seem to be assuming consciousness is a thing. — Relativist

Personally I suspect consciousness is a physical process. If a process (like a movie) is a thing, then yes, else no. It isn't an object. Not sure how you're making this conclusion of 'thing' based on what I post.

We can refer to the movie as if it is an object, but it actually is not.

Yes. It's treated as a thing in terms of syntax, but it's not an object like a rock, but it can be a grammatical object.

My hypothesis is that consciousness entails the rapid change from one static brain state to the next.

That does not sound much like a dualist hypothesis, with the mental not supervening on physical states of an object like a brain.

The sim simulates a physical chip, simulating it's physical properties. But, it exhibits none of the physical properties of the chip: not the mass, not the current at any point, nothing. — hypericin

It very much does simulate the current, at all points. Mass, no. Mass is pretty irrelevant to the operation of chip, so it's not simulated. We're not simulating how much effort it takes to mail them.

If the simulation was aware

That's a loaded term. It would seem to not need what is probably your notion of 'awareness' in order to perform its function successfully. I see no relevance to this comment, so maybe I'm missing something.

Or maybe I didn't say it clearly. I'm saying we can detect the physical. — Patterner

Are you saying you can't detect the mental? That seems odd for somebody pushing it as a separate fundamental thing.

Because consciousness is not physical, meaning has no physical properties...

Of course it has physical properties. It is the cause of physical effects. If it couldn't do that, you would not be going on about it. It therefore very much can be detected by our science. How do you not see that?

without it having been the goal

Why would a natural process refuse to work if there was an external goal involved? That seems pretty unlikely for a natural process that shouldn't 'care' about such things. It's like saying gravity only works when you don't want it to.

Isn't the identity of a rock simply whatever name or description I give it in order to identify it? Or else it is just the rock itself? — Janus

Not talking about a token meant to represent the object. Yes, the object itself. OK, the topic I linked is more about there being no physical boundary for an object itself. I gave several examples of physical devices presuming to measure this, and every one of them was fictional.

The identity is more a question of: Is this rock the same one it was yesterday? What if I chip a bit off? Is it the same rock but smaller now, or is it two entirely new rocks? That's the kind of identity that is only a mental construct. We decide what convention works best and go with it. It being a convention makes it an ideal.

So people pragmatically consider themself to be the same person they were yesterday, but older, changed somewhat. That works great, but rationally it can be taken apart, suggesting once again the lack of physical basis. Derek Parfit did some nice work analyzing such things, and concluded that the physical lack of it doesn't matter.
I actually did a topic explicitly on that, but I think it went away with the old PF site.

It seems obvious that any name or description of anything, the identification of it, is mind-dependent, but does it follow that the thing itself is mind dependent? — Janus

I don't think it follows, but the convention typically chosen by anybody is a mind dependent one. There are very few definitions that are not. "Is part of the universe" is heavily mind dependent, especially because of 'the' in there, implying that our universe is special because it's the one we see. "Is part of a universe" is better, but leaves open what constitutes a universe and what doesn't. It's also very much a relational definition, not a particularly objective one. Anyway, the linked topic very much goes into that issue specifically.

So the issue remains: how can feelings be accounted for?
Physics of course, which is how they're accounted for if physicalism is true. — noAxioms
Are you referring to physics, as a scientific discipline? — Relativist

No. Referring to the actual natural laws and constants of this universe, and not to the study and/or knowledge of same.

It's possible that feelings depend on some aspect of physical reality that only manifests in sentient beings. Physicists would never be able to detect its existence.

Well, see my reply to Patterner just above.

It isn't the Turing machine that's going to have feelings, it will be the simulated person. I said as much in the OP. So its that simulated guy that has the capacity, not the Turing machine. Neither the Turning machine nor the people running it will know what it's like to be the thing simulated. — noAxioms
— hypericin

How could this be compatible with physicalism? There is nothing physical about the simulated person outside of the Turing machine.

It's running a simulation of a physical thing. That's what a simulation often does. My early career involved running simulations of physical chips because it was a lot cheaper to test the simulated chip and find bugs that way, as opposed to the considerable expense of creating actual prototype chips.
But a simulation of a radio wouldn't work if you didn't know where the music came from, and you were running the simulation in attempt to prove that this arrangement of electronics happens to play music despite nobody knowing exactly how it does that. So the simulation would fail, and the physicalists would think they're not simulating it accurately enough, and the dualists would say that the simulation did not simulate the broadcasted radio waves, which are asserted to have no physical effect.
Seems like both side are wrong in this example.

Simulations reproduce the informational, but not the physical, aspects of a system. — hypericin

I seen no distinction here. The sim of the chip simulates a physical chip, and thus it exhibits all the relevant physical properties. If it didn't, it would be an invalid simulation. The chip cannot tell if it's simulated or not.

If you are right, this implies that the 'what it's like' is informational, not physical (which I happen to believe).

'What it's like' is subjective, which arguably is and isn't informational since you cannot know what it's like to be a bat for example.

But even if that were true, this still doesn't mean the simulation has qualia.

I think the simulated guy would notice qualia abruptly shutting off. But yes, the machine running the simulation would not have qualia.

The simulation might process in a completely different way that doesn't require qualia.

Then it is simulating something else, not the physical workings of the system.

The only requirement in a simulation is the informational behavior is reproduced.

I think you're thinking of an imitation, not a simulation. An entity that attempts to pass the Turing test is an imitation person, not a simulated one. It knows dang well that it's the machine, but being an imitation, it's goal is not to tell you that. The simulated person, like the chip, cannot tell if its real or not.

Well if the 'state of the universe' changes, then the universe changes. — boundless

Sure, but referencing 'the state of the universe' implies that it has a state, and thus more or less is a state. My assertion of the universe not being a state is consistent with relativity theory, black holes, and all that goes with it. I'm inclined not to be one of those that rejects Einstein, but that isn't to say that other interpretations (that are inconsistent with all of the above) are wrong.

However, if you think that mathematical truths are fundamental you are quite close to that, in the sense that you would posit concepts ('intelligible forms') as fundamental realities.

Perhaps yes on the mathematical truths (arguably not since so many of them depend on unprovable axioms), but definitely not to any sort of concepts, all of which seem to supervene on something more basic.

Math doesn't supervene on material or energy, and 'physical' has implications of material.
— noAxioms

Again, this is only valid if you think that 'mathematical truths' are physical.

I just said that such truths are not physical, the opposite of your assertion here.

To me mathematical truths are not 'physical' because, as I wrote earlier, I believe that they are not localized into space and time and are not identical to space-time.

Agree. Perhaps you read my comment wrong above to think I suggested otherwise.

I'm not sure how this is a problem for MUH. I mean, if all mathematical structures exist, then both interesting and non-interesting one do. — boundless

But there's so many more of the latter, to the point that you are more likely than not to be part of one of them.
As Carroll put it:
"The issue is not that the existence of such observers is ruled out by data, but that the theories that predict them are cognitively unstable: they cannot simultaneously be true and justifiably believed."
-- https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.00850
MUH (raw at least) seems to be such a theory.

I can envision that all properties of 'cherryness' can be explained via the (known) properties of the constituents of cherries.

How would you respond to somebody who cannot envision such an explanation being possible, especially given the current lack of such an explanation?

Yes, but a skeptic would concede to you that your model 'works better' than the ancient's. However, the skeptic would then point out that this doesn't necessarily mean that you have more knowledge of 'how things really are'.

I would have said that the new model is closer, but sure, you'll never get all the way to ding an sich.

So, even if NM is an incorrect description of physical reality is good at making predictions.[/quote]Same can be said of SR. It demonstrably does not correspond to reality. But it was never an attempt to do so. GR is closer, but just like NM, breaks down at the boundary cases. Doesn't imply that we should teach neither NM nor GR in schools.

A Turing machine could produce feelings if (and only if) the machine's initial state includes the capacity to exhibit feelings. — Relativist

It isn't the Turing machine that's going to have feelings, it will be the simulated person. I said as much in the OP. So its that simulated guy that has the capacity, not the Turing machine. Neither the Turning machine nor the people running it will know what it's like to be the thing simulated.

So the issue remains: how can feelings be accounted for?

Physics of course, which is how they're accounted for if physicalism is true.

You reference simulation in your op. This amounts to a zombie: one could simulate a human that appeared to behave like a human in all ways, but it would not experience feelings because the machine lacks the capacity for them.

Right. That only works if there's a distinction between a zombie and a regular human, and it only works if qualia are non-causal, which is a self-defeating suggestion. The whole zombie argument seems to argue only for epiphenomenalism, which is trivially falsified.

Remember, the simulated person is not programmed by anybody to do or say anything. The point is, he can't tell when the simulation took over from the real physical state that was used for the initial condition. I think you'd notice if your qualia suddenly vanished.

You said I couldn't find our subjective experience of heat in physical events because I glossed over many of them — Patterner

No, I concluded from your glossing over that you don't fully understand how it all works, which is fine because I don't know either. From this non-knowledge, I suggested that one is in a poor position to say how it cannot work.

Does that not mean I can find our subjective experience of heat in physical events if I don't gloss over many of them, and make assumptions about them?

If you fully understand how the brain physically works, and physicalism is true, or even if it isn't, then yes, you will find either subjective feeling of heat or the absence of it. If absence, they you'd find the parts that are supposed to be affected by these feelings but in the absence of the magic, are missing their cause. That's a prediction made by any dualist stance, and yet no scientist believes the suggestion enough to go look for it.
DesCartes put it in the pineal gland, which I thought was due to its inaccessibility, safe from falsification. Turns out he chose it (a gland of all things) because it's the only construct in the vicinity that there's but one of, and he felt there shouldn't be multiple receptor locations for this interaction.

1) If what we can detect cannot explain something, then we should consider the possibility that there is something we can't detect.

But we can detect it, else you wouldn't know about it. Something physical must detect it, else there could be no physical effect.

If consciousness coming into existence only when physical structures have some level of complexity, without it having been the goal, does not make sense, then maybe we should consider that it was there all along.

Better. It kind of has been the goal, since it makes one more fit, so I'd leave that part out. It doesn't eliminate my answer to your first point. Something needs to detect it, simple or not. Such detection I suspect would not be all that complicated, but that's me considering an idea with no theory behind it.

Do you mean idea when you write "ideal"? — Janus

I mean a mental construct, with no corresponding physical thing. I've done a whole topic for instance on identity (of beings, rocks, whatever) being such an ideal.

Do you mean that 'existence' is an idea or concept, but existence is not?

No, I'd have put it in quotes like that if I was talking about the word. I've done other topics on that as well, where i query what somebody means when they suggest mind independent existence of something, and it typically turns out to be quite mind dependent upon analysis.

In fact, this site is a kind of continuation of forums.philosophyforums.com, which started probably in the early 2000s but collapsed around the time when this one started. — Jamal

As I recall, PF was bought by somebody for more than it was worth, but then almost immediately abandoned by its new owner, as if it was for a school project or something. It kept working for a bit, but the new TPF was already up and running when the purchase took place, and everybody just migrated there.

It was painful to watch the archive slowly vanish, and then just die. It was the only place anywhere where Tegmark responded directly to me. Yes, he briefly utilized an account on PF.

How does not understanding what the physical events are doing grant the knowledge that they are doing this thing that is unexplainable by what we do know about them? — Patterner

I don't know, but it seems to be the dualists that are claiming this knowledge in the absence of understanding. I never made such a claim. Perhaps you took my double-negative as a single negative.

There's much I agree with in your op, but I don't see anything in it that suggests the qualia "redness" or "pain" could be created through computation. — Relativist

The relevant bit from the OP, which is a proposed empirical test for physicalism:

No understanding of human brain function exists or is likely ever to exist, even if say a full simulation of a human is achieved. Of course such a simulation, while not providing that full understanding, would at least falsify any dualistic model, at least to the person simulated, no matter his prior views. — noAxioms

No, the quote does not mention any specific qualia, but the simulated person would notice the sudden disappearance of them if they were not there.
Note my distinction between a demonstration that physicalism is the case, and actual understanding of how consciousness works.

A Turing machine can't create the experience of "redness". — Relativist

If physicalism is true, then the machine very much can. So your assertion amounts to a claim that physicalism is wrong, but apparently expressed as opinion, not as something falsified.

If the universe was merely a mathematical structure - as Tegmark's MUH (mathematical universe hypothesis) says - it would seem that the universe would be changeless. — boundless

Yes, it would be. That means that the universe is not containted by time, which is generally concluded by relativity regardless of MUH or some other sort of solution. That the state of the universe is different at different times does not contradict the universe being changeless. States of things change. The universe is not a state.
Well, under alternate interpretations, yea, it is a state, but those are in denial of concepts like spacetime. Such a universe would need to be externally driven by such a fire.

So either change is a 'persistent illusion' (as Einstein wrote about 'time' in a letter to the family of his deceased friend Michele Besso) or change is real.

Depends on how you define change. The state of a person changes over time. That's change, and not something that Einstein would considered to be an illusion.

Ironically, if MUH was right, it is difficult for me to consider its ontology as 'physicalist'. — boundless

Right. Math doesn't supervene on material or energy, and 'physical' has implications of material. Physicalism (but not materialism) still works in such a case, since it only suggests that nothing additional is needed.

MUH seems to have some big problems that need solving. Maybe they have been solved and I didn't read up on it. In particular, why does our particular mathematical structure appear so interesting? Most mathematical structures are not, and if they all exist equally, they you're probably part of one of the uninteresting ones, not the tiny fraction that is interesting. That's a tough problem, and one that Carroll has attempted to point out.

So, again, if change is real, what is it?

Change is a difference in state over time. How is that a problem with any interpretations of things? Change can also be over something other than time. e.g. The air pressure changes with altitude.

Agreed something like MUH is essentially a sort of 'idealism'

Then mathematics would not be fundamental, but would supervene on some entity thinking the mathematical thoughts.

I can grant that 'pies' are indeed useful fiction we impose on experience to make sense of it. — boundless

My quote there was not about if pies were fictions or had identity, but rather suggesting that pies cannot be explained in terms of say quantum fields. So by the same reasoning that some claim that humans cannot be purely physical, neither can pies or say Mars. I mean, where does the cherryness emerge if none of the particles are cherry?
No, it will never be done. It would be as pointless as trying to run a strip mine with tweezers. Wrong tool for the job.

IIRC, even Fenyman (who AFAIK endorsed a form of the Copenaghen interpretation) in a lecture (there is an online video I believe somewhere) stated that physics is not only predictive. He made the example of the impressive ability of the Mayans to predict the motion of celestial objects. However, he was clear that science doesn't give us only predictions but it really helps to understand more of nature and we do understand more about celestial objects than the ancients.

Put more simply, it isn't hard to predict that the sun will rise tomorrow morning, but science goes further and blames it on Earth spinning and not the sun moving around.

They would say that Newtonian mechanics remains valid for its predictive powers and not for being a 'faithful description' of the world.

Sure, which is why they still teach in in school despite it being wrong for more boundary cases.

I don't believe we will be ever be able to 'completely unveil' reality (so on this I agree with the skeptics) but at the same time I do believe that intelligibility of nature is real.

Right!

Keep coming! You're getting close! — Wayfarer

Except idealists put mind at the root of the supervention tower, and I put it near the other end. How can I be an idealist if I do that?

"Which of them" doesn't necessarily mean "which one of them", and the thought that just one neuron event is our subjective experience of heat is preposterous. — Patterner

Good. Just checking. Earlier in this topic, somebody (not you) suggested almost exactly that, as if a computer could feel pain if it executed a 'feel pain' machine instruction. This was meant sarcastically, but meant to imply that physicalism would require that there is similarly one 'feel pain' synapse in a brain.

You said I couldn't find our subjective experience of heat in physical events because I glossed over many of them, and made assumptions about them.

Well, you can't find subjective experience of heat in physical events possibly because you don't understand what the physical events are doing. I don't claim to have this knowledge either. It's besides the point of illustrating that it cannot be done, which probably isn't going to be accomplished by not understanding what does go on.

I assume that means you are familiar with how physical events produce subjective experience

Again, no. Not the point.

I am a physicalist, but I see no reason to believe feelings could be programmed into a turing machine, unless we treat feelings as illusions: a belief that the sensation is real, along with the behavioral reactions it induces — Relativist

OK. Similarly, I do see reason to believe that. Our opinions differ. I'm OK with that. Can you demonstrate that feelings cannot be programmed into a Turing machine? I outlined a simple way to do it in my OP. Simple, but compute intensive, beyond our current capability, which is too bad. Doing so would likely not change anybody's stance. Such is the nature of subjective proofs. They only prove things to the subject.

An alternative is that there is some aspect of the world that manifests exclusively as the feelings we experience.

That aspect is a testable prediction. So test for it. Find out where some simple effect that cannot be physically caused. If there's no suggested test for that, then there's no real theory that supports your alternative.

Indeed, my point was that a person seems more than anything that can be described.

But in a sense, everything is more than what can be described by concept, isn't it? — boundless

My arm is more than what can be described, sure. I tried to say as much in my OP (not specifically mentioning arms).

Stephen Hawking once asked What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?

That's a question for the universe being mathematics, and not just being described by it. MWI suggests simply: "In a closed system, its wave function evolves according to the schrodinger equation". So if the universe IS actually a wave function, the breathing of fire refers to what's driving the evolution of that wave function, which is much like asking what created the universe.

Personally I don't see a need for a fire. That's realism's problem, and yes, MWI is a realist interpretation.

Regardless the question about the supposed 'agent' that 'breathed fire' into the equations, clearly all that exists can't be 'reduced' to concepts.

Depends on your definition of exists, but saying otherwise is essentially idealism. And most definitions of existence are pretty dang idealist. I really tried to hammer that home in some of my recent topics.

I may not be an idealist, but I've come to terms with 'existence' being an ideal, which is awfully dang close to being an idealist I guess. Personal identity is certainly an ideal, with no physical correspondence. It's a very useful ideal, but that's a relation, not any kind of objective thing.

Pragmatic identity is simply a convenient way to describe things, a coarse-grained description that has a pragmatic value. However, in the case of persons, I believe that a person is real in a fundamental sense. — boundless

OK. We differ on this point.

Of course, this is all speculative but things like 'qualias', subjective experiences, the experience of being an agent ('free will') and so on do suggest so.

I'm pretty sure that the subjective experience of a free agent vs the experience of a non-free agent (however you want to define that) is pretty much identical, and thus having free will is not something one can determine by introspection.

You and I seem to disagree on how 'complete' the description that current physical theories is. — boundless

I know that quantum mechanics does not tell you how to make a cherry pie. Does that make QM incomplete or does it just mean that you're leveraging the wrong tools to explain how to achieve the pie?
There are those that deny that pies are physical because they cannot describe them in terms of field equations. I consider that fallacious reasoning. Maybe the pies are not just particles, but any claim to that effect needs more justification that just personal incredulity.

In any case, my point was that proponents of epistemic interpretations of QM think that QM doesn't give a description.

Really? It does describe, but it describes what we know more than attempt to describe what is. In that sense, any such interpretation is far closer to the science of the situation than is a metaphysical interpretation.

To people like Newton, Galileo and so on that would be somewhat absurd (and even Galileo suggested that science can 'disclose' less about the 'nature of reality' than his contemporaries thought).

Not exactly sure what you're saying they find absurd. Yes, it has always been the nature of science that the more we understand, the less we realize we know about the actual nature of things. This is sort of a progression from the naive realism (of say classical physics) to the statement that reality is stranger than we can know.

I just didn't write out 50,000 physical events. But now you can say which of them convert physical events to subjective experience. — Patterner

That's like asking which transistor state change is Tomb Raider. Subjective experience is not one neuron event (and 50k is way short).

My point was: 1) that most aspects of consciousness can be described algorithmically- this is what materialist philosophers of mind do.
...
2) on the other hand, feelings cannot be created via algorithm. — Relativist

It's a parallel process, but any parallel process can be accomplished via a Turing machine (presuming no weird reverse causality like you get with realist interpretations), so I disagree, the operation of any physical system at all (if it's just a physical system) can be driven algorithmically.
So your point 2 is one of opinion, something to which you are entitled until one starts asserting that the statement is necessarily true.

I am not aware of any physicalist hypothesis explaining qualia. — Patterner

I am also not aware of any non-physicalist hypothesis explaining qualia. Don't forget that.

I don't think 6-year olds have been tested in ways that we are currently talking about. — Patterner

The point of the 6-year old is that they have an intuitive feel about it, which is how the philosophers go about attempting a definition. You know what you want to designate as 'alive', and so you attempt to craft a definition that always meets that intuition. That's a nice example of a rationalized definition rather than a rational one.

As an example, consider a song. The song 'exists' when it is played. Its script isn't its 'identity' but, rather, what we might call its form, its template.

However, we can't even say that the song is something entirely different from its script as the script is something essential to the song. — boundless

You're talking about the identity of a performance of a song, vs the identity of the script of the song. Both have pragmatic identities, and they're obviously not in 1-1 correspondence. I could argue that like anything else, neither has a rational identity.

In a similar way, something like my DNA is essential to me but, at the same time, it can't 'capture' my whole being.

If DNA was your identity, then identical twins would be the same person. That doesn't work. Consider a bacterium. When it splits, which is the original? That's where our notion of pragmatic identity fails and one must us a different one. It gets closer to the notion of rational identity.

The calculator is (pragmatically) an individual — noAxioms
Yes, I agree with that. But I disagree that it has the sufficient degree of autonomy to make its pragmatic distinction from its environment as a real distinction.

Autonomy has little to do with it. It just plain doesn't care, and pragmatic identity only exists relative to an entity that finds pragmatic utility in assigning such an identity. Physics itself seem to have no notion of identity and is of no use is resolving such quandaries.

Sort of. I see it more like that consciousness comes into discrete degrees and that there is some kind of potency of the higer degrees into the lower degrees. — boundless

But degrees implies a discreet jump in evolution. Thing X has one level of cosciousness, but it's offspring (one of them at least) has a whole new level of it, a significant jump so to speak. That seems not to be how evolution work, hence my skepticism on the discreetness of it all.

Well, up until the 20th century it was common to think that the purpose of science was at least to give a faithful description of 'how things are/behave'.

Well, you mix 'are' and 'behave' there like they mean the same thing. They don't. The former is metaphysics. The latter is not. Science tends to presume some metaphysics for clarity, but in the end it can quite get along without any of it.


Speaking of identity, it is kind of hard to follow @Wafarer's identity given the somewhat regular change of avatar. @Banno (and 180) also does this with similar rate of regularity. You guys don't realize how much stances and personalities I associate with the avatar more than the name. It's like my wife coming home, same person I always knew, but after having swapped to a totally new unrecognizable body. My avatar has been unaltered since the PF days.

I guess you could say that any such inquiry is, by definition, not a scientific one, but that seems awfully inflexible. — J

If it's not a physical science, then, according to physicalism, how could it be a science? It must by definition be metaphysics. — Wayfarer

Right. Physicalism only gets to say what is and is not physical science. — Patterner

All wrong! Much of the back and forth between all of you is dickering about what is included under the heading of science and what is not. All this is irrelevant. Physicalism does not asset which activities one might label as 'scientific inquiry' vs. not. It makes not claim about the what can be known or not. In the case of consciousness, it's on the way to being explained, but it doesn't need to be in order for it to be the case.

Yes, physicalism is a metaphysical stance precisely because, like anything inferred, it cannot be proven. But it's a stance that has proven wildly successful since science began to assume it as their primary methodology, contrasting with what has become known as the dark ages when science worked under a different methodology.

Yes. That's why physicalism is untenable. — J

This was in reply to Wafarer's post just above. It seems an incredibly fallacious statement to suggest that either physicalism being untenable for making a requirement about what is designated as 'science' (it doesn't) or physicalism being untenable because it is metaphysics. Nonsense. It's alternative is also metaphysics.

Everyone knew what "heat" meant long before chemistry. — J

There you go. An example of subjectivity being science before the thermometer came into play.

But I think — Patterner

Of course it's natural. The question is, it is something separate or does it supervene on what isn't consciousness? To assert otherwise, a demonstration would be nice.

So, two questions: 1) Why is an objective description of subjective experience necessary to explain subjective experience? — J

Wrong question. I was thinking more along the lines of "Why is an objective description of subjective experience necessary for said subjective experience to supervene on the physical?".
I am up front that an objective description is never going to happen. It simply isn't a requirement. The strong claim is that it doesn't (cannot) so supervene, in which case the explanation needs to be 'why necessarily not?'. Plenty argue for 'why not', but the 'necessarily' part is always left out, which reduces simply to incredulity.

Perhaps most important, we learned a good lesson from those in the past who thought living things were animated by a special vital force. — Patterner

Good example, but the lesson is clearly not learned. Something being alive or not is still a matter of opinion and definition, with yes, no clear definition that beats asking a 6-year old. Nevertheless, Wayfarer aside, vitalism is pretty much discredited.

So what's not being tested that in principle might be testable then? — noAxioms
Whether a given entity is conscious. — J

But that's not a test since it is a matter of opinion and definition, and the definition is especially a matter of opinion. Asking for a yes/no consciousness detector presumes 1) that consciousness is a binary thing (on or off, nothing being 'more conscious' than another), and 2) is kind of like asking for a meter for attractiveness. Thing X (a piece of artwork say) is attractive or isn't. Not a matter of opinion at all.

Oh right. A thing cannot be attractive unless it is alive. Don't forget that part.

Our nerves detect the kinetic energy of the air. — Patterner

That's incredibly glossed over, but you give far better detail in another post.

We can detect electrical signals caused by the contact, follow them to the spinal cord, and to the brain, where x, y, and z happen.

Why is it suddenly just 'x,y,z'? Why not follow those x's and such, all the way to the decision to adjust the thermostat. OK, maybe you don't know what x, y, and z are, in which case you're hardly in a position to make assertions about what they can and cannot do.

Nowhere in any of that is there a hint of our subjective experience of heat. — Patterner

Yea, because you glossed over it with "x, y, and z happen" and then, far worse, make assumptions about them.

The Hard Problem is that nothing about the first suggests the second.

But it does if you start to work out the x,y,z. You just refuse to label it that, instead calling it correlation or some such.

Fair enough. We'd have to start by agreeing on what can be an object of experience. — J

Opinion, so any attempt at agreement is likely to involve injecting one's conclusions into the definition. So no, you don't start there, you end there.

A bacterium experiences greater or lesser warmth, just as we do. — Patterner

Most aspects of consciousness seem amenable to programming in software. Feelings are not amenable to this. — Relativist

Is this an assertion or is there evidence of this? I mean, something totally alien to you is probably not going to feel human feelings. Despite the assertion above, I seriously doubt bacteria experience warmth the way we do. I'm not even sure if it's been show that they react to more/less favorable temperatures.

In what way does thermostat's outputs influence the welfare of its body? — Patterner

That's a better question. If the reaction influences the entity's own 'welfare' (a loaded term since it isn't clear what is assessing this welfare), that's closer to being conscious than a simple cause-effect mechanism such as seems to occur with a thermostat.
Also, many (the majority?) of my reactions are not necessarily for my welfare. Take the decision to write this long post, or to pick up a piece of litter.

We have lost Harry Hindu. I'm quite distressed by this.

“If one tries to put it in or on, as a child puts colour on his uncoloured painting copies, it will not fit. For anything that is made to enter this world model willy-nilly takes the form of scientific assertion of facts; and as such it becomes wrong”. — Reference is to Schrödinger E. — Wayfarer

This is oft quoted, and nobody seem to know where it comes from or the context of it. But Schrödinger is definitely in your camp. Some other quotes:

living matter, while not eluding the “laws of physics” as established up to date, is likely to involve “other laws of physics” hitherto unknown

I've said this much myself. The view requires 'other laws', and a demonstration of something specific occurring utilizing these other laws and not just the known ones.

Life seems to be orderly and lawful behaviour of matter, not based exclusively on its tendency to go over from order to disorder, but based partly on existing order that is kept up

it needs no poetical imagination but only clear and sober scientific reflection to recognize that we are here obviously faced with events whose regular and lawful unfolding is guided by a 'mechanism' entirely different from the 'probability mechanism' of physics.

... the space-time events in the body of a living being which correspond to the activity of its mind, to its self-conscious or any other actions, are […] if not strictly deterministic at any rate statistico-deterministic. To the physicist I wish to emphasize that in my opinion, and contrary to the opinion upheld in some quarters

Here he mentions explicitly that this is opinion.

For the sake of argument, let me regard this as a fact, as I believe every unbiased biologist would, if there were not the well-known, unpleasant feeling about ‘declaring oneself to be a pure mechanism’. For it is deemed to contradict Free Will as warranted by direct introspection.

The feeling is indeed unpleasant to some. Introspection is not evidence since it is the same, deterministic, free-willed, or not.

let us see whether we cannot draw the correct, non-contradictory conclusion from the following two premises:

(i) My body functions as a pure mechanism according to the Laws of Nature.

(ii) Yet I know, by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing its motions, of which I foresee the effects, that may be fateful and all-important, in which case I feel and take full responsibility for them.

The only possible inference from these two facts is, I think, that I — I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt 'I' — am the person, if any, who controls the 'motion of the atoms' according to the Laws of Nature.

This quote seems to argue for physicalism. It puts up two premises (one from each side?) and finds them non-contradictory. This is interesting since it seems to conflict with the beliefs otherwise expressed here.

He goes on to rationalize a single universal consciousness. Not sure if this is panpsychism. I think this quote below tries to argue against each person being separately conscious.

It leads almost immediately to the invention of souls, as many as there are bodies, and to the question whether they are mortal as the body is or whether they are immortal and capable of existing by themselves. The former alternative is distasteful, while the latter frankly forgets, ignores or disowns the facts upon which the plurality hypothesis rests.
...
The only possible alternative is simply to keep to the immediate experience that consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown; that there is only one thing and that what seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception (the Indian MAJA); the same illusion is produced in a gallery of mirrors, and in the same way Gaurisankar and Mt Everest turned out to be the same peak seen from different valleys.

There's lots more, but this introduces his general stance on things.

Well, that solves it. All living beings are made from marshmallows, and the moon really is cheese. Time we moved on. — Wayfarer

Those are difficult interpretations to mesh with empirical evidence, but it can be done. But with like any interpretation of anything, it is fallacious to label one's opinion 'fact'.

As it happens, I know it on par to knowing that 2 and 2 doesn’t equal 5 but does equal 4, and can likely justify the affirmation you’ve quoted from me much better than the latter. — javra

A bold move to put a choice of interpretation on par with 2+2=4. OK, so you don't consider it an interpretation then, but justification seems lacking so far. OK, you quoted studies showing bacteria to demonstrate a low level consciousness. I don't contest that. The interpretation in question is whether physical means is sufficient to let the bacteria behave as it does. I've seen no attempt at evidence of that one way or the other.
I'm in no position to prove my side. To do so, I'd need to understand bacteria right down to the molecular level, and even then one could assert that the difference is at a lower level than that.

I don't think that is a 'dogmatic' approach if it is done with an open mind. — boundless

I don't think it's done with open mind if the conclusion precedes the investigation. I need to be careful here since I definitely have my biases, many of which have changed due to interactions with others. Theism was the first to go, and that revelation started the inquiries into the others.
The supervention on the physical hasn't been moved. It's the simpler model, so it requires extraordinary evidence to concede a more complicated model, but as far as I can tell, the more complicated mode is used to hide the complexity behind a curtain, waved away as a forbidden black box.

On 'my other two questions':

I believe that they are worth asking

I believed they're the two most important questions, but the answer to both turned out to be 'wrong question'. Both implied premises that upon analysis, didn't hold water. Hence the demise of my realism.

Note that, however, I'm also a weirdo that thinks that the [consciousness] 'scale' is indeed like a scale with discrete steps. — boundless

Cool. Consciousness quanta.

Buddhists would tell you that saying that "you are the same person" (as you did change) and "you are a different person" (as the two states are closely connected) are both wrong. Generally, change is seen as evidence by most Buddhists that the 'self is an illusion (or 'illusion-like')'
In my opinion, I would say that I am the same person.

The pragmatic side of my agrees with you. The rational side does not, but he's not in charge, so it works. It's a very good thing that he's not in charge, or at least the pragmatic side thinks it's a good thing.

The statement is, on the surface, paradoxical, but there is no reason to take it as false or contradictory. It makes perfectly good sense: we call a body of water a river precisely because it consists of changing waters; if the waters should cease to flow it would not be a river, but a lake or a dry streambed.

A river is a process, yes. If it was not, it wouldn't be a river. Pragmatically, it is the same river each time, which is why one can name it, and everybody knows what you're talking about. It doesn't matter if it's right or not. Point is, it works. What if the river splits, going around an island? Which side is the river and which the side channel (the anabranch)? I revise my statement then. It works, except when it doesn't. What happens when the anabranch becomes the river?

Most of this is off point. I don't even think a rock (not particularly a process) has an identity over time. For that matter, I don't think it has an identity (is distinct) at a given moment, but some life forms do. Not so much humans (identity meaning which parts are you and which are not).
I mean, how much do you weigh? Sure, the scale says 90 kilos, but you are carrying a cat, so unless the cat is part of you, the scale lies.

If all processes are algorithmic, I would believe that they can be seen as aspects of the entire evolution of the whole universe. Some kind of 'freedom' (or at least a potency for that) seems necessary for us to be considered as individual. — boundless

Still not sure how that follows. Take something blatantly algorithmic, like a 4-banger calculator. It's operation can be seen as aspects of the entire evolution of the whole universe.and it seemingly lacks this freedom you speak of. The caluclator is (pragmatically) an individual: It is my calculator, quite distinct from the desk it's sitting on, and the calculator over there owned by Bob. So it's probably not following because you're using 'individual' in different way than <is distinct from not X>.

In epistemic interpratiotions measurements are updates of an agent's knowledge/beliefs (and of course, what this means depends on the interpreter's conception of what an 'agent' is).

OK, agree that you've identified a different meaning of 'measurement' there, but that doesn't change the QM definition of the word, and your assertion was that QM doesn't give a definition of it, which is false, regardless of how different interpretations might redefine the word.

I think that adopting 'QM without interpretation' would force one to 'suspend judgment' on what a 'measurement' ultimately is.

Yes, exactly. Theories are about science. Metaphysics (QM interpretations in this case) are about what stuff ultimately is.

Perhaps we are saying the same thing differently. I suspect we do.

We don't disagree so much as it appears on the surface.

Since we don't at this time have a scientific account of what consciousness is, or how it might arise (or be present everywhere, if you're a panpsychist), it's claiming far too much to say it "cannot" be tested. It cannot be tested now. But if it can be eventually couched in scientific terms, then it will be testable. — J

If I were to place my bets, even if the scientists claim to have done this, the claim will be rejected by those that don't like the findings. I'm not sure what form the finding could possibly be. Can you tell what I'm thinking? Sure, but they have that now. Will we ever know what it's like to be a bat? No. Not maybe no. Just no.
So what's not being tested that in principle might be testable then?

supposedly anything can be possessed. From lifeforms to children's toys (e.g., Chucky), and I don't see why not toasters as well (this in purely speculative theory but not in practice, akin to BIVs, solipsism, and such) — javra

Purely speculative maybe, but they're relevant in an important way sometimes. I do keep such ideas in mind. BiV is a form of solipsism.
Some external vitality (you've not been very detailed about it) seems to have no reason to interact only with living things like a bacterium, a human finger cell, or perhaps a virus. Apparently, it cannot interact with anything artificial. I can't think of any sort of reason why something separately fundamental would have that restriction.

intents, and the intentioning they entail, are teleological, and not cause and effect.

You don't know that, but you say it like you do. I'm a programmer, and I know the ease with which intent can be implemented with simple deterministic primitives. Sure, for a designed thing, the intent is mostly that of the designer, but that doesn't invalidate it as being intent with physical implementation.

There's a massive difference between [cause/effect and intent] (e.g., the intent is always contemporaneous to the effects produced in attempting to fulfill it - whereas a cause is always prior to its effect).

The effects produced in attempting to fulfill it are not the cause of the intent.

What you do you mean "manufacture a human from non-living parts"?

Like 3D print one or something. Made, not grown, but indistinguishable from a grown one.

How then would it in any way be human?

That's for you, the created being, and for society to decide. A new convention is required because right now there's no pragmatic need for it.

Or are you thinking along the lines of fictions such as of the bionic man or robocop?

Naw, my mother is one of those. She can't swim anymore since she's so dense with metal that she sinks straight to the bottom. They don't tell you that in the pre-op consultation.

To the question of whether it experiences pain: I don't know. Intent?: As described by Thompson, probably so. — J

Thompson seemed to make conclusions based on behavior. The cell shies away or otherwise reacts to badness, and differently to fertile pastures so to speak. By that standard, the car is conscious because it also reacts positively and negatively to its environment.

I don't know that a car isn't conscious, but for me the possibility is extremely unlikely.

Probably because we're using different definitions. There are several terms bandied about that lack such concreteness, including 'living, intent, [it is like to be], and (not yet mentioned, but implies) free will'. People claiming each of these things rarely define them in certain terms.

I find being alive utterly irrelevant to any non-begging definition of consciousness. But that's me.

about as fruitful as a debate among 18th century physicists about what time is.

Good analogy, since there's definitely not any agreement about that. The word is used in so many different ways, even in the physics community.

If reproduction is part of the definition of life, then worker bees and mules are not alive. Neither is my mother, as she's is 83. — Patterner

A mother has reproduced. The definition does not require something to continue to do so. The mule cannot reproduce, but mule cells can, so the mule is not alive, but it is composed of living thing. Hmm...
Not shooting you down. Just throwing in my thoughts. New definition: A thing is alive if the 6 year old thinks it is. Bad choice, because they anthropomorphize a Teddy Ruxpin if it's animated enough.

She says many consider Darwinian evolution to be the defining feature of life.

Plenty of nonliving things evolve via natural selection. Religions come to mind. They reproduce, and are pruned via natural selection. Mutations are frequent, but most result in negative viability.

In which case no individual is living, since only populations can evolve.

Easy enough to rework the wording to fix that problem. A living thing simply needs to be a member of an evolving population. What about computer viruses? Problem there is most mutations are not natural.

"An automobile, for example, can be said to eat, metabolize, excrete, breathe, move, and be responsive to external stimuli. And a visitor from another planet, judging from the enormous numbers of automobiles on the Earth and the way in which cities and landscapes have been designed for the special benefit of motorcars, might wellbelieve that automobiles are not only alive but are the dominant life form on the planet". — Carl Sagan
Similarly humans, which are arguably inert without that immaterial driver, but the alien might decide they're the dominant life for instead of simply the vehicles for said dominant forms.

fire is certainly alive — javra

That's always a good test for any definition of life. How does fire rate? Are you sure it isn't alive? It certainly has agency and will, but it lacks deliberate intent just like termites.

You more specifically mean certain reactions of organic chemicals, namely those which result in metabolism - or at least I so assume. — javra

Google says:
Metabolism refers to all the chemical reactions that occur within an organism to maintain life.

That might be circular.
...

And not all life uses cellular respiration. — Patterner

I was also going to point out that circularity.
Not all life metabolizes. Viruses for example, but some deny that a virus is alive.

Mind you, I personally don't place any importance on life, in the context of this topic. So while I find the question intriguing, I question its relevance. The discussion does belong here because there are those that very much do think it relevant.

My overriding question is:. Can there be life without chemical reactions? — Patterner

I don't see how, but there can't even be rocks without chemical reactions, so that's hardly a test for life.

Your question -- which reduces to "Why is biology necessary for consciousness?" -- is indeed the big one. If and when that is answered, we'll know a lot more about what consciousness is. (Or, if biology isn't necessary, also a lot more!) — J

:up:

I have to assume we could make a program that duplicates itself, but does so imperfectly. — Patterner

They have these. Some are viruses or simply mutations of user interfaces such as phishing scams. On the other hand, they've simulated little universes with non-biological 'creatures' that have genes which mutate. Put them into a hostile environment and see what evolves. Turns out that the creatures get pretty clever getting around the hostilities, one of which was a sort of a spiney shell (Mario Kart reference) that always killed the most fit species of each generation.

Physics is violated only if you assume it is algorithmic. I disagree with this assumption. — boundless

Barring a blatant example of a system that isn't, I stand by my assumption. Argument from incredulity (not understanding how something complex does what it does) is not an example.

I mean, some parts of physics is known to be phenomenally random (unpredictable). But that's still algorithmic if the probabilities are known, and I know of no natural system that leverages any kind of randomness.

Good discussion anyway! — J

BTW, I want to thank you for the discussion. — boundless

Wow, two in one go. Thank you all. It may not seem like it, but these discussions do influence my thinking/position and cause me to question thin reasoning.

I didn't think that my denial of our cognition as being totally algorithmic is so important for me. — boundless

That's something I look for in my thinking. X is important, so I will rationalize why X must be. I had to go through that one, finally realizing that the will being deterministically algorithmic (is that redundant?) is actually a very desirable thing, which is why all decision making artifacts use components with deterministic behavior that minimizes any randomness or chaos.

Other examples of X are two of the deepest questions I've come to terms with: Why is there something and not nothing? Why am I me?
Answers to both those questions are super important to me, and the answers rationalized until I realized that both make assumptions that are actually not important and warrant questioning. The first question was pretty easy to figure out, but the second one took years.

As I stated above, I do not think that sentient AI is logically impossible (or, at least, I have not enough information to make such a statement). But IMO we have not yet reached that level.

I can grant that. Sentience is not an on/off thing, but a scale. It certainly hasn't reached a very high level yet, but it seems very much to have surpassed that of bacteria.

Identity seems to be a pragmatic idea, with no metaphysical basis behind it. — noAxioms
Again, I have to disagree here.

You suggest that if I fix my door (reattach a spring that fell loose, or worse, replace the spring), then it's a different door. OK, but this goes on all the time with people. You get a mosquito bite, a hole which is shortly repaired and blood which is replenished in a minute. Are you not the person you were 10 minutes ago? I have some pretty good arguments to say you're not, but not because of the mosquito bite.

We seem to be sufficiently 'differentiated' to be distinct entities.

Being a distinct entity is different than the entity maintaining any kind of identity over time.
You seem to suggest that the identity somehow is a function of biological processes not being algorithmic. Not sure how that follows.

I meant that 'interpretation-free QM' doesn't give a precise definiton of what a measurement is. It is a purely pragmatic theory.

But I gave a definition that QM theory uses. Yes, it's pragmatic, which doesn't say what the measurement metaphysically IS. Perhaps that's what you're saying. No theory does that. It's not what theories are for.

I see it as a matter of fact which you don’t recognize. — Wayfarer

Perhaps because I don't see anything as a matter of fact. I call that closed mindedness. So I have instead mere opinions, and yes, ones that don't correspond with your 'facts'.

Which is, in a word, physicalism - there is only one substance, and it is physical. From within that set of assumptions, Chalmer's and Nagel's types of arguments will always remain unintelligible. — Wayfarer

OK, from this I gather that your statement that you're asserting an ontological distinction, a distinction in the mode of being, you're merely expressing opinion, not evidence of any sort. You had phrased it more as the latter. We are (mostly) well aware of each other's opinions.

[Concerning] a Urbilaterian (a brainless ancestor of you, and also a starfish). Is it a being? Does it experience [pain say] and have intent?
— noAxioms

I don't know. And that's not evasion, just honesty. — J

Better answer than most, but I would suggest that not even knowing if some random animal is a being or not seems to put one on poor footing to assert any kind of fundamental difference that prevents say a car from being conscious.
Wayfarer is likely more committed to 'yes, because it's life', except he won't say that, he instead lists typical (but not universal) properties of life, properties which some non-life entities also exhibit. This is either a funny way of saying 'it's gotta be life', or he's saying that it's the properties itself (homeostasis say) that grants a system a first person point of view. Hence a recently severed finger is conscious.

But I also don't think that the right answer to that question reveals much about the larger problem.

Any answer (right/wrong is irrelevant here) sheds light on what I'm after. Nagel seemed to avoid it, venturing no further from a human than a bat, a cousin so close that I have to check with the records to before committing to marry one. This is the sort of thing I'm after when asking that question.

I think consciousness will turn out to depend on biology, but that's not to say that everything alive is conscious.

OK, but then the key that distinguishes conscious from otherwise is not 'is biological'. The key is something else, and the next question would be 'why can only something biological turn that key?'.

As I said, the virtual machine is a simulation, not the real thing. — Harry Hindu

It not being real is irrelevant. A simulation of a bat fails because it can at best be a simulation of a human doing batty things, not at all what it's like to be the bat having batty experiences.
A human can do echo location. They have blind people that use this. We have all the hardware required except the sound pulse emitter, which is something they wear. But a simulation won't let you even know what that's like since you're not trained to see that way. It would take months to learn to do it (far less time for an infant, which is the typical recipient of that kind of setup). So a VR gives you almost nothing. No sonar, no flight control, muscle control, or any of the stuff the bat knows.

You ask "how does any third-person stance impart knowledge?", which is a silly question since pretty much all of school is third person information. A VR bat simulation is much like a movie. Sure, it imparts information, just not the information of what it's like to be a bat.

For instance, I might try to imagine what it might be to just experience the world through echo-location without all the other sensory experiences the bat might have.

As I said, that can be done. It just takes practice. No simulation needed.

Well, there's a lot going on in this thread and our memories are finite, so you might have to restate your definition from time to time, or at least reference your definition as stated.

If I use the word in my own context, I'm probably referencing mental processes. Not an object or a substance of any kind.

When talking about anything in the shared world you are (attempting to (your intent is to)) talking about the thing as it is in itself, or else what information are you trying to convey? — Harry Hindu

When talking about things in the shared world, I'm probably talking about the pragmatic notion of the thing in question, never the thing in itself. On rare occasion, I perhaps attempt (on a forum say) a description of the thing closer to what it actually is, but that's rare, and I'm highly likely to not be getting it right. "It is stranger than we can think." -- Heisenburg [/quote]

Why should I believe anything you say if you can never talking about things as they are in themselves - like your version of mind?

My version of mind is a pragmatic description of the way I see it. So is yours, despite seeing it differently. One of us may be closer to the way it actually is, but I doubt anybody has nailed that.
You seem to be confusing 'thing in itself' with truth of the matter. For instance, car tires tend to be circular, not square (as viewed along its axis). Circular is closer to truth, and that's what I try to convey. Even closer is a circle with a flat spot. But all that is a pragmatic description of a tire. The thing in itself is not circular at all. Pragmatically, I don't care about that.

A more accurate way to frame this is through the concept of the central executive in working memory. This isn’t a tiny conscious agent controlling the mind, but a dynamic system that coordinates attention, updates representations, and integrates information from different cognitive subsystems. It doesn’t “watch” the mind; it organizes and manages the flow of processing in a way that allows higher-level reflection and planning.

You seem to be talking about both sides. For one, I never mentioned 'tiny'. What I call the homonculus seems to be (volume wise) about as large as the rest combined. Only in humans. That part 'watches' the model (the map) that the subconscious creates. All of it together is part of mental process, so it isn't watching the mind since it all is the mind. The tasks that you list above seem to be performed by both sides, each contributing what it does best. If speed/performance is a requisite, the subconscious probably does the work since it is so much faster. If time is available (such as for the high level reflection and planning you mention), that probably happens in the higher, less efficient levels

The subconscious isn’t some subordinate system taking orders from the homunculus.

In deed, it's quite the opposite. It's the boss, and what I call here this homonculus is a nice rational tool that it utilizes.

Objects are the process of interacting smaller "objects". The problem is that the deeper you go, you never get at objects, but processes of ever smaller "objects" interacting. Therefore it is processes, or relations all the way down.

OK. I'm pretty on board with relational definitions of everything, so I suppose one could frame things this way. My example was more of the way language is used. It's OK to say 6 flames were lit, but it's syntactically wrong to say 6 combustions are lit. But 'combustion' can still be used as a noun in a sentence, as a reference to a process, not an object. Of course this draws a distinction between process and object. Your definition does not, and also clashes with the way the words are used in language,.

Objects are mental representations of other processes

That's idealism now. I'm not talking about idealism.

Ok, so combustion → causes → flame. Both are processes, but not identical. Combustion is the reaction; flame is the visible process that results from it.

Well how about a rock then (the typical object example). What causes rock? I'm not asking how it was formed, but what the process is that is the rock.

If flame and combustion are distinct processes

I never said that. I called the flame an object, not a process. I distinguish between process and object, even if the object happens to be a process, which is still 'process' vs. 'a process'.

Does something need to have an internal representation with some other part accessing those representations for it to be, or have a sense of being?

I think here you are confusing 'being a rock' with 'the rock having a sense of being'. They're not the same thing. The first is a trivial tautology. The second seems to be a form of introspection.

Can bacteria act and react in relation to novel stimuli so as to not only preserve but improve their homeostatic metabolism (loosely, their physiological life)?

The answer is a resounding yes. — javra

I agree, but non-living things can also do this. Thanks for the blurb. Interesting stuff.

Their having 'memory' is quite remarkable. Slime molds can communicate, teach each other things, all without any nerves.

there then is no rational means of denying that at least a bacterium’s extreme negative valence will equate to the bacterium’s dolor and, hence, pain.

Excellent. From such subtle roots, it was already there, needing only to be honed. Do they know what exactly implements this valence? Is it a chemical difference? In a non-chemical machine, some other mechanism would be required.

Their responsiveness to stimuli likewise entails that they too are endowed with instinctive, else innate, intents—such as that of optimally maximizing the quality and longevity of their homeostatic metabolism.

Instincts like that are likely encoded in the DNA, the product of countless 'generations' of natural selection. I put 'generations' in scare quotes since the term isn't really relevant to a non-eukaryote.

A bacterium is no doubt devoid of an unconscious mind—this while nevertheless being endowed with a very primitive awareness that yet meaningfully responds to stimuli. Cars aren’t (not unless they’re possessed by ghosts and named “Carrie” (a joke)). — javra

Here your biases show through. Possession seems to be required for the cell to do this. The bacterium is possessed. The car is asserted not to be, despite some cars these days being endowed with an awareness that meaningfully responds to stimuli. I've always likened substance dualism with being demon possessed, yielding one's free will to that of the demon, apparently because the demon makes better choices?
If a cell can be possessed, why not a toaster? What prevents that?

Side note: It's Christine, not Carrie. Carrie is the girl with the bucket of blood dumped on her.
Remember T2 ending? The liquid metal terminator melts into a vat of white hot metal. That metal was made into Christine obviously (and some other stuff, being a fairly large vat).

As to an absolute proof of this, none can be provided as is summed up in the philosophical problem of other minds. But if one can justify via empirical information and rational discernment that one’s close friend has an awareness-pivoted mind, and can hopefully do the same for lesser-animals, then there is no reason to not so likewise do for bacteria.

And toasters.

Ok, but in the case of the machines we can reasonably expect that all their actions can be explained by algorithms. — boundless

Disagree. The chess program beats you despite nobody programming any chess algorithms into it at all. It doesn't even know about chess at first until the rules are explained to it. Only the rules, nothing more.
Sure, the machine probably follows machine instructions (assuming physics isn't violated anywhere), which are arguably an algorithm, but then a human does likewise, (assuming physics isn't violated anywhere), which is also arguably an algorithm.

In reply to the above comment by boundless:

In conjunction with what I’ve just expressed in my previous post, I’ll maintain that for something to be conscious, the following must minimally apply, or else everything from alarm clocks to individual rocks can be deemed to be conscious as well (e.g., “a rock experiences the hit of a sledgehammer as stimuli and reacts to it by breaking into pieces, all this in manners that are not yet perfectly understood"): — javra

I agree that not being rigorously defined, consciousness can be thus loosely applied to what is simple cause and effect. For that matter, what we do might just be that as well.

To be conscious, it must a) at minimum hold intents innate to its very being

This seems a biased definition. It would mean that even if I manufacture a human from non-living parts, it would not be conscious. Why does the intent need to be innate? Is a slave not conscious because his intent is that of his master?

The hedonic requirement is reasonable, but you don't know that the car doesn't have it. The bit above about valence gets into this, and a car is perfectly capable (likely is) of that being implemented.

(and due to these intents, thereby hold, at minimum, innate intentions) which then bring about b) an active hedonic tone to everything that it is stimulated by (be this tone positive, negative, or neutral).

Example: a stationary self-driving car will not react if you open up the hood so as to dismantle the engine (much less fend for itself), nor will it feel any dolor if you do. Therefore, the self-driving car cannot be conscious.

Heck, even my car reacts to that, and it's not very smart. A self-driving car very much does react to that, but mostly only to document it. It has no preservation priorities that seek to avoid damage while parked. It could have, but not sure how much an owner would want a car that flees unexpectedly when it doesn't like what's going on.
Most machines prioritize safety of humans (including the guy stealing its parts) over safety of itself. The law is on the side of the thief.

Please notice that I'm not in all this upholding the metaphysical impossibility of any AI program ever becoming conscious at any future point in time.

Good. Most in the camp of 'no, because it's a machine' do actually.

And, from everything I so far understand, teleological processes can only hold veritable presence within non-physicalist ontologies:

Surely the car (and a toaster) has this. It's doing what it's designed to do. That's a teleological process in operation.

When we fix a machine is the fixed machine the same entity as it was before, or not? — boundless

That opens a whole can of worms about identity. The same arguments apply to humans. Typically, the pragmatic answer is 'yes'. Identity seems to be a pragmatic idea, with no metaphysical basis behind it.

We get a new problem here. Can machines be regarded as having an 'identity' as we have?

Both have pragmatic identity. Neither has metaphysical identity since it's pretty easy to find fault in any attempt to define it rigorously.

Agreed I would add that It doesn't tell you in which cases the Born rule applies.

You need to expand on this. I don't know what you mean by it.

The enactive framework strongly supports a continuity of life and mind, showing that living systems are inherently value-constituting and purposive. — J

That's a great way of putting it. If life wants to endure, it needs to know what is valuable. — Patterner

I agree. It is the goal of very few machines to endure or to be fit. That's not a fundamental difference with the typical life form, but it's still a massive difference. Machines need to be subjected to natural selection before that might change, and a machine that is a product of natural selection is a scary thing indeed.

But it's also the case that a child will be able to sort living from non-living things with great accuracy, given the currently accepted use of "living." The child doesn't know the definition -- arguably, no one does for sure -- but she knows how to use the word. — J

This is a great point. It's simply hard to formalize what is meant by a word despite everybody knowing what the word means. It means more "what I think is alive" which differs from the rigorous definition that, as was mentioned, always includes something you think isn't, and excludes something you think is". But what the child does lacks this problem by definition. The child just knows when to use the word or not.

I thank you all for your input, and for your patience when I take at times days to find time to respond.

Yes. And I'm in no position to claim that any view on consciousness is necessarily right or wrong. We're dealing with educated guesses, at best. — J

Most choose to frame their guesses as assertions. That's what I push back on. I'm hessitant to label my opinions as 'beliefs', since the word connotes a conclusion born more of faith than of hard evidence (there's always evidence on both sides, but it being hard makes it border more on 'proof').

There will always be those that wave away any explanation as correlation, not causation. — noAxioms
Hmm. I suppose so, but that wouldn't mean we hadn't learned the explanation.

But we have explanations of things as simple as consciousness. What's complicated is say how something like human pain manifests itself to the process that detects it. A self-driving car could not do what it does if it wasn't conscious any more than an unconscious person could navigate through a forest without hitting the trees. But once that was shown, the goalposts got moved, and it is still considered a problem. Likewise, God designing all the creatures got nicely explained by evolution theory, so instead of conceding the lack of need for the god, they just moved the goal posts and suggest typically that we need an explanation for the otherwise appearance of the universe from nothing. They had to move that goalpost a lot further away than it used to be.

You might say that the car has a different kind of consciousness than you do. Sure, different, but not fundamentally so. A car can do nothing about low oil except perhaps refuse to go on, so it has no need of something the equivalent of pain qualia. That might develop as cars are more in charge of their own problems, and in charge of their own implementation.

Absolutely. If a biological explanation turns out to be the correct one, I imagine it will also show that most of our rough-and-ready conceptions about subjectivity and consciousness are far too impoverished.

You also need to answer the question I asked above, a kind of litmus test for those with your stance:

[Concerning] a Urbilaterian (a brainless ancestor of you, and also a starfish). Is it a being? Does it experience [pain say] and have intent? — noAxioms

If yes, is it also yes for bacteria?
The almost unilateral response to this question by non-physicalists is evasion. What does that suggest about their confidence in their view?

You are the one who suggested that solution, because you want cars to be seen as having the mental abilities we have. I'm fine with cars being seen as not having them. — Patterner

They don't have even close to the mental abilities we have, which is why I'm comparing the cars to an Urbilaterian. .But what little they have is enough, and (the point I'm making) there is no evidence that our abilities of an Urbilaterian are ontologically distinct from those of the car.
You point out why there's no alternative word: Those who need it don't want it. Proof by language. Walking requires either two or four legs, therefore spiders can't walk. My stance is that they do, it's just a different gait, not a fundamental 'walk' sauce that we have that the spider doesn't.

Galileo's point, which was foundational in modern science, was that the measurable attributes of bodies - mass, velocity, extension and so on - are primary, while how bodies appear to observers - their colour, scent, and so on - are secondary (and by implication derivative). — Wayfarer

Those supposed secondary qualities can also be measured as much as the first list. It just takes something a bit more complicated than a tape measure.

Still, I know what you mean by the division. The human subjective experience of yellow is a different thing altogether than yellow in itself, especially since it's not yellow in itself that we're sensing. A squirrel can sense it. We cannot, so we don't know the experience of yellow, only 'absence of blue'.

The division is not totally ignored by science. It's just that for most fields, the subjective experience serves no purpose to the field.

... Canadian neuroscientist Wilder Penfield (1891-1976), who operated on many conscious patients during his very long career.
...
While electrical stimulation of the cortex could evoke experiences, sensations, or involuntary actions, it could never make the patient will to act or decide to recall something.

Interesting, but kind of expected. Stimulation can evoke simple reflex actions (a twitch in the leg, whatever), but could not do something like make him walk, even involuntarily. A memory or sensation might be evoked by stimulation of a single area, but something complex like a decision is not a matter of a single point of stimulation. Similarly with the sensation, one can evoke a memory or smell, but not evoke a whole new fictional story or even a full experience of something in the past.

I see a distinction between simple and complex, and not so much between sensations/reflexes and agency. The very fact that smells can be evoked with such stimulation suggests that qualia is a brain thing.

Noninvasive stimulation has been used to improve decision speed and commitment, and with OCD, mood regulation and such. But hey, drugs do much of the same thing, and the fact that drugs are effective (as are diseases) is strong evidence against the brain being a mere antenna for agency.
Direct stimulation (as we've been discussing) has been used to influence decisions and habits (smoking?), but does not wholesale override the will. It's far less effective than is occasionally portrayed in fiction.

A fully simulated brain might behave exactly like a conscious person, but whether there’s 'anything it’s like' to be that simulation is the very point at issue.

I talked about this early in the topic, maybe the OP. Suppose it was you that was simulated, after a scan taken without your awareness. Would the simulated you realize something had changed, that he was not the real one? If not, would you (the real you) write that off as a p-zombie? How could the simulated person do anything without the same subjective experience?

In short, you’re arguing from within the third-person framework while intending to account for what only appears from within the first-person perspective. The result isn’t an explanation but a translation — a substitution of the language of mechanism for the reality of experience. That’s the “illusion of reduction” you yourself noticed when you said commentators “appropriate first-person words to refer to third-person phenomena.”

When you treat the first-person point of view as something that emerges from a “third-person-understandable substrate,” you are collapsing the distinction Chalmers and Nagel are pointing out.

Perhaps I am, perhaps because they're inventing a distinction where there needn't be one.



I think you messed up the quoting in your immediate prior post. You should edit, since many of your words are attributed to me.

But the ontological distinction between beings of any kind, and nonorganic objects, is that the former are distinguished by an active metabolism which seeks to preserve itself and to reproduce ~ Wayfarer
— Wayfarer

I’m not using “ontological” here to mean merely “a set of observable traits.” I’m using it in its proper philosophical sense — a distinction in the mode of being.

I don't find your list of traits to be in any way a difference in mode of being. Water evaporates. Rocks don't. That's a difference, but not a difference in mode of being any more than the difference between the rock and the amoeba. Perhaps I misunderstand 'mode', but I see 'being' simply as 'existing', which is probably not how you're using the term. To me, all these things share the same mode: they are members of this universe, different arrangements of the exact same fundamentals. My opinion on that might be wrong, but it hasn't been shown to be wrong.

This isn’t a mere property added to matter

Our opinions on this obviously differ.

Life introduces an interiority

I notice a predictable response to the Urbilaterian question: evasion. That question has direct bearing on this assertion.

That method proved extraordinarily powerful, but it also defined its own limits: whatever is subjective was set aside from the outset. As noted above, this is not a matter of opinion.

I acknowledge this.

To describe something in purely physical terms is by definition to omit 'what it feels like' to be that thing.

To describe something in any terms at all still omits that. I said as much in the OP.

... Evan Thompson

Vitalism?

Solution to that reasoning is to simply use a different word— noAxioms

Ok. What is that word? — Patterner

Not my problem if I don't use that reasoning. I feel free to use the same word to indicate the same thing going on in both places.

I don't know how they 'are beings' are in any way relevant since rocks 'are' just as much as people. — noAxioms
— Wayfarer

First of all, you did say you don’t know how any creature could experience anything other than itself

I didn't say 'creature'. Look at the words you quoted of me, and I very much did pay better attention to my mode of expression.

We say of intelligent creatures such as humans and perhaps the higher animals that they are ‘beings’ but we generally don’t apply that terminology to nonorganic entities

Agree that the noun form is mostly used that way, but you were leveraging the verb form of the word, not the noun. The verb form applies to rocks just as much as spiders, possibly excepting idealism, which I'm not assuming.

But the ontological distinction between beings of any kind, and nonorganic objects, is that the former are distinguished by an active metabolism which seeks to preserve itself and to reproduce.

Those are not ontological distinctions. It's just a list of typical properties found mostly in life forms, the majority of which are not usually referred to as 'beings'. I can make a similar list distinguishing metallic elements from the others, but pointing this out doesn't imply a fundamental difference between one arrangement of protons and neutrons vs another. It's just the same matter components arranged in different ways. Ditto for people vs rocks. Different, but not a demonstrably fundamental difference.

And the topic is about first person experience. Are you suggesting that all organic material (a living sponge say. Does that qualify as a 'being'?) has first person experience? If not, then it's not about homeostasis or being organic. We're looking for a fundamental difference in experience, not a list of properties typical of organic material.

Nobody ever addresses how this physical being suddenly gains access to something new, and why a different physical arrangement of material cannot. — noAxioms

But I am doing just that, and have also done it before.

No you're not. You're evading. Answer the questions about the say a Urbilaterian (a brainless ancestor of you, and also a starfish). Is it a being? Does it experience and have intent? If not, what's missing? If it does, then how is its interaction with its environment fundamentally any different from say a roomba?
I'm trying to play 20 questions with you, but I'm still stuck on question 1.

To recap ... — Wayfarer

I know the recap, and it answers a very different question. It is a nice list of properties distinguishing earth biological beings from not. There's nothing on the list that is necessarily immaterial, no ontological distinction. You opinion may differ on that point, but it's just opinion. Answer the question above about the brainless being, because I'm not looking for a definition of a life form.

I hope I also made it clear that I am not one of "non-difference" group. — J

That was clear, yes. Keep in mind that my topic question, while framed as a first-person issue, is actually not why you're in that 'difference' group, but why the non-difference group is necessarily wrong.

I'll say again that when we eventually learn the answer about consciousness (and I think we will)

I think we never will. There will always be those that wave away any explanation as correlation, not causation.

we'll learn that you can't have consciousness without life.

Which requires a more rigourous definition of consciousness I imagine.

Those too are ontological distinction although not so widely recognised as they used to be. — Wayfarer

We seem to have a vastly different notion of what constitutes an ontological distinction. It seems you might find a stop sign ontologically distinct from a speed limit sign since they have different properties.

As for the 17th century treatment of " secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell", those were in short order explained as physical properties (wavelength, air vibration, and airborne particles respectively, sensed just as much as shape and motion. Science took the hint, but many philosophers just moved the goal posts. Sure, all of those, including shape and motion, appear to us as first person qualia. I do agree (in the OP) that no third person description can describe the first person experience. I do not agree that this first person perspective is confined to a subset of biological things. Does a robot feel human pain? No, but neither does an octopus. Each experiencing thing having it's own 'what it's like to be' does not require any special treatment.

As Nagel says, this explanation, ‘however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience — Wayfarer

Absolutely! I never contested that. It's why you cannot know what it's like to be a bat. Not even a computer doing a perfect simulation of a bat would know this. The simulated bat would know, but the simulated bat is not the program nor is it the computer.

The physical sciences are defined by excluding subjective experience from their domain.

I disagree with this. Neurologists require access to that, which is why brain surgery is often done on conscious patients, with just local anesthesia to the scalp. Of course they only have access to experiences as reported in third person by the subject, so in that sense, I agree.

I actually had that done to me (no brain surgery, just the shot). I collided with tree branch, driving a significant chunk of wood under my scalp. They had to inject lidocaine before cutting it out. That makes me a certified numbskull.

Yeah, that was my point - you already knew how to read - which means you already have stored information to interpret the experience. — Harry Hindu

OK. I never said otherwise. I was simply providing the requested example of first/third person being held at once.

But you can only know what it is like to be a bat from within your first-person experience.

Don't understand this at all. I cannot know what it's like to be a bat. period. A flight simulator doesn't do it. That just shows what it's like for a human (still being a human) to have a flying-around point of view.

It sounds like its not really the word you don't like, but the definition.

It's that people tend to insert their own definition of 'mind' when I use the word, and not use how I define it, despite being explicit about the definition.

If direct access is not what it means to be something, then you are creating a Cartesian theatre - as if there is a homunculus separate from the map, but with direct access - meaning it sees the map as it truly is, instead of being the map as it truly is. — Harry Hindu

Lots to take apart here. I don't think we know anything as it is in itself, including any maps we create.
As for the homonculus, humans do seem to have a very developed one, which is a sort of consciousness separate from the subconscious (the map maker, and source of intuitions). The subconscious is older (evolutionary time) and is waaay more efficient, and does most of the work and decision making. It is in charge since it holds all the controls. It might hold different beliefs than the homonculus, the latter of which is a more rational tool, used more often to rationalize than to be rational.

But yes, we have this sort of theatre, a view of the map. I don't consider it direct access since I don't see the map as it is in itself, but you might consider it direct since the connection to it is just one interface away, and there's not another homonculus looking at the experience of the first one (a common criticism of the Cartesian theatre idea).

The description I give is still fully physical, just different parts (science has names for the parts) stacked on top of each other. 'Homonculus' is not what it's called. Those are philosophy terms.

As for your definition, does a flame have direct access to its process of combustion? Arguably so even if it's not 'experience', but I don't think that's what it means to 'be a flame'. What does it mean to be a rock? Probably not that the rock has any direct access to some sort of rock process. — noAxioms
— Harry Hindu

Isn't combustion and flame the same thing - the same process - just using different terms?

No. Flame is an object. There's six flames burning in the candle rack. Combustion is a process (a process is still a noun, but not an object). Flame is often (but not always) where combustion takes place.
Yes, combustion is much simpler. It's why I often choose that example: Simple examples to help better understand similar but more complex examples.

You're making my argument for me. If the rock doesn't have any direct access to the rock process, then it logically follows that there is no access - just being. — Harry Hindu

Here you suggest that the rock has 'being' (it is being a rock) without direct access to it's processes (or relative lack of them). This contradicts your suggestion otherwise that being a rock means direct access to, well, 'something', if not its processes.
"we have direct access to something, which is simply what it means to be that process."

According to the standard (“Copenhagen”) interpretation — Harry Hindu

A comment on that. One might say that there is no standard interpretation since each of them has quite the following. On the other hand, Copenhagen is more of an epistemic interpretation, while the others are more metaphysical interpretations, asserting what actually is instead of asserting what we know. Quantum theory is not a metaphysical theory about what is, but rather a scientific theory about what one will expect to measure. In that sense, Copenhagen fits perfectly since it is about what we expect, and not about what is.

something does change — namely, the system’s state description goes from a superposition to an eigenstate corresponding to the measured value.

Yes, what we know about a system changes. That's wave function collapse, where the wave function is a description of what we know about a system. Hence I grant 'change upon measurement' to any collapse interpretation.

Of course, I'm going to disagree regarding consciousness, because I think it's fundamental. — Patterner

We both disagree, but for such wildly different reasons :)

I echo that Welcome back!
Much to digest in the posts that resulted. I'm slow to reply to it all.

... And all of the factors that impinge on such an organism, be they energetic, such as heat or cold, or chemical, such as nutrients or poisons - how are they not something other to or outside the organism? At every moment, therefore, they're 'experiencing something besides themselves, namely, the environment from which they are differentiated. — Wayfarer

This depends on how you frame things. I'd say that for something that 'experiences', it experiences its sensory stream, as opposed to you framing it as a sort of direct experience of its environment. It works either way, but definitions obviously differ. When I ask "'how could a thing experience anything besides itself?', I'm asking how it can have access to any sensory stream besides its own (which is what the first person PoV is). This by no means is constricted to biological entities.
But you're interpreting my question as "how can the entity not experience sensory input originating from its environment?", which I'm not asking at all since clearly the environment by definition affects said entity. The rest of your post seems to rest on this mistaken interpretation of my question.

A motor vehicle, for example, has many instruments which monitor its internal processes - engine temperature, oil levels, fuel, and so on - but you're not going to say that the car experiences overheating or experiences a fuel shortage.

I am going to say all that, but I don't use a zoocentric definition of 'experiences'.

There is 'nothing it is like' to be a car, because a car is a device, an artifact - not a being, like a man, or a bat.

There may or may not be something it is like to be a car, but if there's not, it isn't because it is an artifact. A rock isn't an artifact, and yet it's the presumed lack of 'something it is like to be a rock' violates the fallacious 'not an artifact' distinction.

As @J points out, some of us do not hold out for an ontological difference between a device and a living thing. Your conclusion rests on this opinion instead of resting on any kind of rational reasoning.

I think what Chalmer’s is really trying to speak of is, simply, being. Subjects of experience are beings — Wayfarer

This leverages two different meanings of 'being'. The first is being (v), meaning vaguely 'to exist'. The latter is a being (n) which is a biological creature. If Chalmers means the latter, the you should say "simply, a being", which correctly articulates your zoocentric assumptions. Of course your Heidegger comment suggests you actually do mean the verb, in which case I don't know how the 'are beings' are in any way relevant since rocks 'are' just as much as people.

But I can ask: when you stub your toe, is there pain? — Wayfarer

Wrong question. The correct question is, if a sufficiently complex car detects low oil, does it necessarily not feel its equivalent of pain, and if not, why not? Sure, I detect data indicating damage to my toe and my circuits respond appropriately. How I interpret that is analogous to the car interpreting its low oil data.

... in the apodictic knowledge of one’s own existence that characterises all first-person consciousness.

My conclusion of existence or lack thereof can be worked out similarly by any sufficiently capable artifact.
I do realize that you're actually trying to address the question of the topic here. I'm trying to find that fundamental difference that makes a problem 'hard', and thus gives that ontic distinction that J mentioned. But your argument seems to just revolve around 'is sufficiently like me that I can relate' and not anything fundamental, which is why Nagel mentions bats but shies away from flowers, bacteria, sponges, etc. We're evolved from almost all that, and if none of these qualify, then something fundamental changed at some point along the way. Nobody ever addresses how this physical being suddenly gains access to something new, and why a different physical arrangement of material cannot.

Explaining the obvious is a quintessentially philosophical task! — J

That devices are not subjects of experience is axiomatic, in my opinion. — Wayfarer

'Axiomatic' typically suggests obvious. Obvious suggests intuitive, and intuitions are typically lies that make one more fit. So in a quest for what's actually going on, intuitions, and with it most 'obvious' stuff, are the first things to question and discard.

For the record, I don't find the usual assertions to be obvious at all, to the point of negligible probability along with any given particular God, et al.

This is how Nagel said it:

But fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism – something it is like for the organism. — Thomas Nagel — Patterner

Except for the dropping of 'fundamental' in there, it sounds more like a definition (of mental state) than any kind of assertion. The use of 'organism' in there is an overt indication of biocentric bias.

Abilities that a car lacks. — Patterner

But abilities that it necessarily lacks? I suggest it has mental abilities now, except for the 'proof by dictionary' fallacy that I identified in my OP: the word 'mental' is reserved for how it is typically used in human language, therefore the car cannot experience its environment by definition. Solution to that reasoning is to simply use a different word for the car doing the exact same thing.

Doesn't the experience of the pamphlet include the information received from it? It seems to me that you have to already have stored information to interpret the experience — Harry Hindu

I already know how to read, but I didn't read the pamphlet to learn how to read (that's what the Bible is for). Rather I read it to promote my goal of gathering new information I don't already have stored.

In other words, the third person is really just a simulated first person view.

No, not at all. If a third person conveyance did that, I could know what it's like to be a bat. Not even a VR setup (a simulation of experience) can do that.

Is the third person really a view from nowhere

Not always. I can describe how the dogwood blocks my view of the street from my window. That's not 'from nowhere'.

If you don't like the term "mind" that we have direct access to then fine

I don't like the word at all since it carries connotations of a separate object, and all the baggage that comes with that.

but we have direct access to something, which is simply what it means to be that process.

Don't accept that this direct access is what it means to be something. The direct access is to perhaps the map (model) that we create. which is by definition an indirection to something else, so to me it's unclear if there's direct access to anything. You argue that access to the map can be direct. I'm fine with that.
As for your definition, does a flame have direct access to its process of combustion? Arguably so even if it's not 'experience', but I don't think that's what it means to 'be a flame'. What does it mean to be a rock? Probably not that the rock has any direct access to some sort of rock process.

Aren't automated and mechanical devices classical things, too?

Sure.

Don't automated and mechanical measuring devices change what is being measured at the quantum level?

All systems interact. Avoiding that is possible, but really really difficult.

I disagree with your phrasing of 'change what is being measured at the quantum level' since it implies that there's a difference with some other state it otherwise would have been. 'Change' implies a comparison of non-identical things, and at the quantum level, there's only what is measured, not some other thing.
Classically, sure. Sticking a meat thermometer into the hot turkey cools the turkey a bit,.

Ok but in the 'ontic' definition of strong emergence, when sufficient knowledge is aquired, it results in weak emergence. So the sound that is produced by the radio also necessitates the presence of the air. It is an emergent feature from the inner workings of the radio and the radio-air interaction. — boundless

OK. I called it strong emergence since it isn't the property of the radio components alone. More is needed. Equivalently, substance dualism treats the brain as sort of a receiver tuned to amplify something not-brain. It's a harder sell with property dualism.

Regarding the music, I believe that to be understood as 'music' you need also a receiver that is able to understand the sound as music

That's what a radio is: a receiver. It probably has no understanding of sound or what it is doing.

Are you saying that atoms have intentionality, or alternatively, that a human is more than just a collection of atoms? Because that's what emergence (either kind) means: A property of the whole that is not a property of any of the parts. It has nothing to do with where it came from.or how it got there. — noAxioms

Emergence means that those 'properties of the wholes that are not properties of the parts' however can be explained in virtue of the properties of the parts. So, yeah, I am suggesting that either a 'physicalist' account of human beings is not enough or that we do not know enough about the 'physical' to explain the emergence of intentionality, consciousness etc. — boundless

I would suggest that we actually do know enough to explain any of that, but still not a full explanation, and the goalposts necessarily get moved. Problem is, any time an explanation is put out there, it no longer qualifies as an explanation. A car does what it's programmed to do (which is intentionally choose when to change lanes say), but since one might know exactly how it does that, it ceases to be intentionality and becomes just it following machine instructions. Similarly, one could have a full account of how human circuitry makes us do everything we do, and that explanation would (to somebody who needs it to be magic) disqualify the explanation as that of intentionality, it being just the parts doing their things.

We know that all the operation of a (working) machine can be understood via the algorithms that have been programmed even when it 'controls' its processes.

Not true. There are plenty of machines whose functioning is not at all understood. That I think is the distinction between real AI and just complex code. Admittedly, a self driving car is probably mostly complex code with little AI to it. It's a good example of consciousness (unconscious things cannot drive safely), but it's a crappy example of intelligence or creativity.

Regarding when a machine 'dies'... well if you break it...

You can fix a broken machine. You can't fix a dead cat (yet). Doing so is incredibly difficult, even with the simplest beings.
Interestingly, a human maintains memory for about 3 minutes without energy input (refresh). A computer memory location lasts about 4 milliseconds and would be lost if not read and written back before then. Disk memory is far less volatile of course.

As I said before, it just seems that our experience of ourselves suggests that we are not mere automata. — boundless

It suggests nothing of the sort to me, but automata is anything but 'mere' to me.

also 'intuition' seems something that machines do not really have.

I think they do, perhaps more than us,. which is why they make such nice slaves.

Standard interpretation-free QM is IMO simply silent about what a 'measurement' is. Anything more is interpretation-dependent. — boundless

Quantum theory defines measurement as the application of a mathematical operator to a quantum state, yielding probabilistic outcomes governed by the Born rule. Best I could do.

I don't believe there's any such thing as 'strong emergence'. — Patterner

I tried to give an example of it with the radio. Equivalently, consciousness, if a non-physical property, would be akin to radio signals being broadcast, allowing components to generate music despite no assemblage of those components being able to do so on their own.

Firstly, welcome to tPF.

What does it mean to "trust", — GreekSkeptic

Without looking up the definition, I'd say it was relying on something other than yourself to attain a goal of your own. Keeping a secret is part of that: You're relying on the discretion of another rather than of yourself. The 'trust fall' is another example, where you put your health in the hands of another, relying on him to prevent your injury as you fall backwards without other protection from the floor.

So I trust my mother to stand by me through thick and thin, but not to keep my secrets. She's quite the gossip.

I realized that what I thought to be "trust", in the end, it was just faith in the form of "everything's going to be fine" — GreekSkeptic

That's trust in fate, something that probably hasn't earned it. It's going to let you down if you don't take action yourself to make things more 'fine' for yourself.

So [@Paine is] saying that trust relies on the outcome of the weight we've put onto the other person. If he succeeds — GreekSkeptic

There's a lot of trust in say teamwork.
One can trust one's team to do their own part in the team effort. Maybe the trust is earned, but sometimes intentions aside, failure occurs, as it does when you do everything yourself. A negative outcome is not necessarily to abandon trust, which would be like every member of a ball team quitting because they lost a game.

I honestly find the whole distinction between 'strong' and 'weak' emergence very unclear and tends to muddle the waters. — boundless

You know what? So do I. I hunted around for that distinction and got several very different ideas about that. Some are more ontic like I'm suggesting and several others are more epistemic (intelligibility) such as you are suggesting.

When we say that the form of a snowflake emerges from the properties of the lower levels, we have in mind at least a possible explanation of the former in terms of the latter.

Having an explanation is an epistemic claim. Apparently things are emergent either way, but no conclusion can be reached from "I don't know". If there's an ontic gap ("it cannot be"), that's another story, regardless of whether or not anything knows that it cannot be.

Suppose I have a radio, but little idea of tech. It has components, say a variable coil, resistors, transistors, diodes, battery, etc and I know what each of these does. None of those components have music, but when put together, music comes out. That's emergence. Is it strong emergence? You don't know how it works, so you are seemingly in no position to discount the parts producing music on their own. But a more knowledgeable explanation shows that it is getting the music from the air (something not-radio), not from itself. So the music playing is then a strong (not weak) emergent property of the radio. That's how I've been using the term.
Your explanation (as I hear it) sounds more like "I don't know how it works, so it must be strongly emergent (epistemic definition)". Correct conclusion, but very weak on the validity of the logic.

An explanation of 'emergence' of what has intentionality from what doesn't have intentionality IMO requires that among the causes of the emergence there isn't an entity that has at least the potentiality to be intentional.

Are you saying that atoms have intentionality, or alternatively, that a human is more than just a collection of atoms? Because that's what emergence (either kind) means: A property of the whole that is not a property of any of the parts. It has nothing to do with where it came from.or how it got there.

This clearly mirrors the question to explain how 'life' arises from 'non-life'.

Life arising from not-life seems like abiogenesis. Life being composed of non-living parts is emergence. So I don't particularly agree with using 'arise; like that.

In the case of a planet we can give an account of how a planet 'emerges' from its constituents.

Can you? Not an explanation of how the atoms came together (how it got there), but an explanation of planetness from non-planet components. It sounds simple, but sort of degenerates into Sorites paradox. Any explanation of this emergence needs to resolve that paradox, and doing that goes a long way towards resolving the whole consciousness thingy.

What do you mean by this? Of what are we aware that a machine cannot be? It's not like I'm aware of my data structures or aware of connections forming or fading away. I am simply presented with the results of such subconscious activity. — noAxioms

But we experience a degree of control on our subconscious activities. — boundless

So does any machine. The parts that implement 'intent' have control over the parts that implement the background processes that implement that intent, sort of like our consciousness not having to deal with individual motor control to walk from here to there. I looking for a fundamental difference from the machine that isn't just 'life', which I admit is a big difference. You can turn a machine off and back on again. No can do with (most) life.

The guy in the Chinese room could be replaced by an automatic process.

He IS an automated process. Same with parts of a person: What (small, understandable) part of you cannot be replaced by an automated substitute?

However, if the guy knew Chinese and could understand the words he would do something that not even the LLMs could do.

Well, I agree with that since an LLM is barely an AI, just a search engine with a pimped out user interface. I don't hold people up to that low standard.

It's difficult to make a machine analogy of what I am thinking about, in part because there are no machines to my knowledge that seem to operate the way we (consciously) do.

I'm sure. It cannot be expected that everything does it the same way.
I watched my brother's dog diagnose his appendicitis. Pretty impressive, especially given a lack of training in such areas.

An example of first/third person held at once would be useful as well. — Harry Hindu

I could be reading a pamphlet about how anesthesia works. The experience of the pamphlet is first person. The information I receive from it (simultaneously) is a third person interaction.

Sure, but [anesthesia] would also get us out of the third person view

Not so since my reading the pamphlet gave me the third person description of that event. Of course that was not simultaneous with my being under, but it doesn't need to be.

It appears to be a false dichotomy because we appear to have direct access to our own minds and indirect access to the rest of the world

I would disagree since I don't think we have direct access to our own 'minds' (mental processes?). Without a third person interpretation, we wouldn't even know where it goes on ,and we certainly don't know what it is in itself or how it works, or even if it is an 'it' at all.
Like everything else, we all have different naive models about what mind is and what it does, and those models (maps) are not the territory. It's not direct access.

In discussing first and third person views and direct and indirect realism, aren't we referring to our view on views? — Harry Hindu

Those two cases leverage two different definitions ('perspective' vs. 'belief system') of the word 'views', so the question makes no sense with the one word covering both cases.
So I don't have one belief system on what the word 'views' might mean from one context to the next.

What role does the observer effect in QM play in this conversation?

Observer is a classical thing, and QM is not about classical things, even if classical tools are useful in experimentation. Quantum theory gives no special role to conscious 'observation'. Every experiment can be (and typically is) run just as well with completely automated mechanical devices.

So, yeah I would say that intelligibility is certainly required to do science. — boundless

Fine, but it was especially emergence that I was talking about, not science.
For instance, the complex structure of a snowflake is an emergent property of hydrogen and oxygen atoms. There are multiple definitions of strong vs weak emergence, but one along your lines suggests that intelligibility plays a distinguishing role. One could not have predicted snowflakes despite knowing the properties of atoms and water molecules, but having never seen snow. By one intelligibility definition, that's strong emergence. By another such definition (it's strong only if we continue to not understand it), it becomes weak emergence. If one uses a definition of strong emergence meaning that the snowflake property cannot even in principle be explained by physical interactions alone, then something else (said magic) is required, and only then is it strongly emergent.

I hold beliefs that I admit are not 'proven beyond reasonable doubts'

Worse, I hold beliefs that I know are wrong. It's contradictory, I know, but it's also true.

Good point. But in the [conception/marriage by bullet] case you mention one can object the baby is still conceived by humans who are intentional beings.

Being an intentional entity by no means implies that the event was intended.

An even more interesting point IMO would be abiogenesis. It is now accepted that life - and hence intentionality - 'came into being' from a lifeless state.

That's at best emergence over time, a totally different definition of emergence. Planet X didn't exist, but it emerged over time out of a cloud of dust. But the (strong/weak) emergence we're talking about is a planet made of of atoms, none of which are planets.

However, from what we currently know about the properties of what is 'lifeless', intentionality and other features do not seem to be explainable in terms of those properties.

I suggest that they've simply not been explained yet to your satisfaction, but there's no reason that they cannot in principle ever be explained in such terms.

We change our coding, which is essentially adding/strengthening connections. A machine is more likely to just build some kind of data set that can be referenced to do its tasks better than without it. We do that as well. — noAxioms

Note that we can also do that with awareness.

What do you mean by this? Of what are we aware that a machine cannot be? It's not like I'm aware of my data structures or aware of connections forming or fading away. I am simply presented with the results of such subconscious activity.

As a curiosity, what do you think about the Chinese room argument?

A Chinese room is a computer with a person acting as a CPU. A CPU has no understanding of what it's doing. It just does it's job, a total automaton.
The experiment was proposed well before LLMs, but it operates much like an LLM, with the CPU of the LLM (presuming there's only one) acting as the person. I could not get a clear enough description of the thought experiment to figure out how it works. There's apparently at least 4 lists of symbols and rules for correlations, but I could not figure out what each list was for. The third was apparently queries put to the room by outside Chinese speakers.

I still haven't find convincing evidence that machines can do something that can't be explained in terms like that, i.e. that machines seem to have understanding of what they are doing without really understand it.

It's not like any of my neurons understands what it's doing. Undertanding is an emergent property of the system operating, not a property of any of its parts. The guy in the Chinese room does not understand Chinese, nor does any of his lists. I suppose an argument can be made that the instructions (in English) have such understanding, but that's like saying a book understands its own contents, so I think that argument is easily shot down.

Interesting. But how they 'learn'?

Same way you do: Practice. Look at millions of images with known positive/negative status. After doing that a while, it leans what to look for despite the lack of explanation of what exactly matters.

Is that process of learning describable by algorithms? Are they programmed to learn the way they do?

I think so, similar to us. Either that or they program it to learn how to learn, or some such indirection like that.

This IMO assumes more than just 'physicalism'. You also assume that all natural process are algorithmic.

OK. Can you name a physical process that isn't? Not one that you don't know how works, but one that you do know, and it's not algorithmic.

How does one go from a first person view to a third person view? — Harry Hindu

One does not go from one to the other. One holds a first person view while interacting with a third person view.

Do we ever get out of our first-person view?

Anesthesia?

How is talk about first and third person views related to talk about direct and indirect realism?

Haven't really figured that out, despite your seeming to drive at it. First/Third person can both be held at once. They're not the same thing, so I don't see it as a false dichotomy.
Direct/indirect realism seem to be opposed to each other (so a true dichotomy?), and both opposed of course to not-realism (not to be confused with anti-realism which seems to posit mind being fundamental.

If one is a false dichotomy, would that make the other one as well?

I see no such connection between them that any such assignment of one would apply to the other.

Your [mental] map is always about where you are now (we are talking about your current experience of where you are - wherever you are.) — Harry Hindu

One's current experience can be of somewhere other than where you are, but OK, most of the time, for humans at least, this is not so.

If it makes it any easier, consider the entire universe as the territory and your map is always of the area you are presently in in that territory.

My mental map (the first person one) rarely extends beyond my pragmatic needs of the moment. I hold other mental maps, different scales, different points of view, but you're not talking about those.
A substance dualist might deny that the map has a location at all, a property only of 'extended' substances. Any form of dualism requires a causal connection to the territory if the territory exists. If it doesn't exist in the same way that the map exists, then we're probably talking about idealism or virtualism like BiV.

My point is that if the map is part of the territory - meaning it is causally connected with the territory - then map and territory must be part of the same "stuff" to be able to interact.

Does that follow? I cannot counter it. If the causal connection is not there, the map would be just imagination, not corresponding to any territory at all. I'll accept it then.

It doesn't matter what flavor of dualism you prefer - substance, property, etc. You still have to explain how physical things like brains and their neurons create an non-physical experience of empty space and visual depth.

I think the point of dualism is to posit that the brain doesn't do these things. There are correlations, but that's it. Not sure what the brain even does, and why we need a bigger one if the mental stuff is doing all the work. Not sure why the causality needs to be through the brain at all. I mean, all these reports of out-of-body experiences seem to suggest that the mental realm doesn't need physical sensory apparatus at all. Such reports also heavily imply a sort of naive direct realism.

Our mental experience is the one thing we have direct access to, and are positive that exists — Harry Hindu

It 'existing' depends significantly on one's definition of 'exists'. Just saying.
What we have direct access to is our mental interpretation of our sensory stream, which is quite different than direct access to our minds. If we had the latter, there'd be far less controversy about how minds work. So mind, as we imagine it, is might bear little correspondence to 'how it actually is'.

So when people talk about the "physical" nature of the world, they are confusing how it appears indirectly with how it is directly

Speak for yourself. For the most part I don't confuse this when talking about the physical nature of the world. Even saying 'the world' is a naive assumption based on direct experience.
There are limits to what I know about this actual nature of things, and so inevitably assumptions from the map will fair to be recognized as such, and the model will be incomplete.

since our map is part of the territory we experience part of the territory directly

OK, but I experience an imagined map, and imagined things are processes of the territory of an implementation (physical or not) of the mechanism responsible for such processes.

Your idea is a common referent between us, else how could you talk about it to anyone?

That it is, and I didn't suggest otherwise.

One might say that the scribbles you just typed are a referent between the scribbles and your idea and some reader. If ideas have just as much causal power as things that are not just ideas, then maybe the problem you're trying to solve stems from thinking of ideas and things that are not just ideas as distinct.

Idealism is always an option, yes, but them not being distinct seems to lead to informational contradictions.


And I must ask again, where is this all leading in terms of the thread topic?

What I meant is that decoherence continuously factorizes the total state into dynamically autonomous subspaces. — Truth Seeker

Careful. It factorizes the measured state into dynamically autonomous subspaces. That means that only the systems that have measured the decohered state become entangled with it, thus becoming 'factorized' along with it. There's no universe with a dead cat in it and another with a live one. There's just the unopened box and (relative to the lab) a cat in superposition of these states. The box prevents the 'split' from decohering any further.

This is a hypothetical example. Preventing any measurement like that is essentially impossible. Sure, they've done it for barely visible objects under conditions that would kill any lifeform, and only for nanoseconds, but Schrodinger's box has actually been done. They used a tuning fork instead of a cat.

In that descriptive sense, decoherence is ontologically generative - it produces new relational structure within the universal state, even if not new “worlds” as discrete entities. — Truth Seeker

Yes, This is closer to my relational preference in interpretations. I use a relational definition of ontology, as opposed to a realist one like MWI does.

You’re right that Everett himself didn’t speak of sharply defined “branches,”

Yea, it was DeWitt who first did that, and then backed off somewhat from that description.

My use of “observer” was relational, not Cartesian

Fine. Just making sure. I tend to use the term 'measurement' instead of 'observation', but even that term has overtones of say intent. 'Interaction'?

Within that relational framework, phenomenological perspectives arise naturally from entanglement structure, not metaphysical privilege.

There are so many that I consider to be competent thinkers that presume that metaphysical privilege.

Libertarian freedom, by contrast, would require causal independence from one’s own nature — Truth Seeker

I wouldn't say that since 'one's own nature' becomes this 2nd metaphysical causal process, and thus not intedependence of one's own nature. Independence of one's physical nature perhaps, but is there even a physical nature if that kind of thing is how it all works?

- an incoherent notion. In your rabies analogy, the external pathogen literally overrides the person’s cognitive structure, which is why we no longer ascribe responsibility.

Isn't that exactly what the dualists suggest is going on? Of course, a dualist with rabies would have the physical effected, and somehow the mental component also affected, at least rendered less efficacious. Tri-ism? Three agents (physical, mental, and pathogen) all fighting for control.

I actually do report a form of it. I am occasionally afflicted with a form of epiphenomenalism where I am awake but cut off from most physical causality. I wake up from this condition, and only with an extreme mental effort can I push through my will an move something (preferably turn my head). It's called sleep paralysis, and the short of it is that your motor functions turn off when you sleep. If this mechanism is faulty, you sleepwalk. If it fails to turn on the juice when you wake up, it's sleep paralysis. I guess I don't have to worry too much about ever sleep walking.

Stepping back, the parallel between branching and agency seems telling: both involve emergent autonomy within an underlying deterministic totality. The global state’s evolution may be seamless, yet locally it yields distinct, causally closed structures - worlds in one case, deliberating agents in the other.

Agree up to here.

In both, the differentiation is real enough to sustain the lived grammar of choice, even if metaphysical freedom never enters the picture.

I don't think human choice has anything to do with differentiation since under any other interpretation where there isn't the kind of differentiation you get under MWI, the exact same choices and responsibility results. The only difference is that there are not other worlds split of sufficiently long ago that those tiny difference have grown into macroscopic difference large enough to cause different choices to be made, and my choice and responsibility has nothing to do with what those other versions are choosing.

I think this is a false example. The option is usually whether or not to marry a specific person, not whether or not to get married in general. — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm not talking about a choice to not get married. I'm talking about making a choice to commit to marriage now (propose, or accept a proposal), coupled with the subsequent actual getting married, which is the trigger being pulled: can't hypothetically undo that. Doing so would be presumably to one person.
Deciding to get married in general (with perhaps no specific prospect currently in mind) is not like pulling the trigger since one can always change one's mind about such a decision.

you should not go ahead with that, until you are certain that it is the right thing.

Few, arguably none, are ever certain of it being the correct choice. Plenty of people have attested to be certain about it, only to regret the decision later on. I'm lucky. Married over 40 years now. All my siblings are on spouse #2. The one that waited the longest to be 'most certain' ended in cheating (both parties) and divorce.

The difference between the way you and I are looking at this, is that you are making some kind of 'objective' statement "getting married is a risk", and from that you are saying that risk is good.

There's overtones of 'marriage is good' there, which I don't agree is always true. But each statement in isolation, yes I'm saying that. I have better examples of 'risk is good'. Marriage is my example of a decision of a trigger pull, something you can't undo.

I am talking about looking from the perspective of the person making the choice. And from that perspective, if the act is risky it's better for the person to wait until they have more confidence.

Disagree, for reasons and examples I've already posted. There are times when risk is high, but would likely get higher with time, and so confidence is likely to drop if you wait.
Take saving people from a burning building. You can risk your life and charge in there and grab the baby, or you can wait until the fire trucks get the fire more under control so your safety is more assured. That's a hard decision, and there are cases where each option is the best one.

So for example if there is twenty options, then the person has the freedom to select from twenty options.

Great. Agree. There are those that say that 19 of those options are not available for selection because it is the 20th you want, even if the other 19 are close contenders.

However, once the choice is made you restrict your freedom to select the other nineteen.

Under a pull-trigger sort of situation, yes. In other cases, one can change one's mind. We've been getting into the nitty-gritty about this latter case: "Was a decision really made if the option to change your mind is still open?".
The former restricts one's freedom. The latter does as well, but not nearly as much.

If you have the freedom to choose X or not X, then choosing X restricts your freedom to choose not X. Making a choice always restricts one's freedom.

Sometimes, per the above.

Anyway, I stand more clarified about your statement of making a choice curtailing freedom.

Well, it depends on what we mean by 'intelligible'. — boundless

You've been leveraging the word now for many posts. Maybe you should have put out your definition of that if it means something other than 'able to be understood', as opposed to say 'able to be partially understood'.

A thing might be called 'intelligible' because it is fully understood or because it can be, in principle, understood completely*.

First of all, by whom? Something understood by one might still baffle another, especially if the other has a vested interest in keeping the thing in the unintelligible list, even if only by declaring the explanation as one of correlation, not causation.

There are things that even in principle will never be understood completely, such as the true nature of the universe since there can never be tests that falsify different interpretations. From this it does not follow that physicalism fails. So I must deny that physicalism has any requirement of intelligibility, unless you have a really weird definition of it.

I believe that you believe that some alternatives are more reasonable than the others

Yup. Thus I have opinions. Funny that I find BiV (without even false sensory input) less unreasonable than magic.

but you don't think that there is enough evidence to say that one particular theory is 'the right one beyond reasonable doubt'.

One person's reasonable doubt is another's certainty. Look at all the people that know for certain that their religion of choice (all different ones) is the correct one. Belief is a cheap commodity with humans, rightfully so since such a nature makes us more fit. A truly rational entity would not be similarly fit, and thus seems unlikely to have evolved by natural selection.

My point wasn't that the programmer's intentionality is part of the machine but, rather, it is a necessary condition for the machine to come into being. — boundless

If the machine was intentionally made, then yes, by definition. If it came into being by means other than a teleological one, then not necessarily so. I mean, arguably my first born came into being via intentionality, and the last not, despite having intentionality himself. Hence the condition is not necessary.
There are more extreme examples of this, like the civil war case of a woman getting pregnant without ever first meeting the father, with a bullet carrying the sperm rather than any kind of intent being involved.

If the machine had intentionality, such an intentionality also depends on the intentionality of its builder, so we can't still say that the machine's intentionality emerged from purely 'inanimate' causes.

A similar argument seeks to prove that life cannot result from non-living natural (non-teleological) processes.

'Learning' IMO would imply that the machine can change the algorithms according to which it operates — boundless

That makes it sound like it rewrites its own code, which it probably doesn't. I've actually written self-modifying code, but it wasn't a case of AI or learning or anything, just efficiency or necessity.
How does a human learn? We certainly adopt new algorithms for doing things we didn't know how to do before. We change our coding, which is essentially adding/strengthening connections. A machine is more likely to just build some kind of data set that can be referenced to do its tasks better than without it. We do that as well.

Learning to walk is an interesting example since it is mostly subconscious nerve connections being formed, not data being memorized. I wonder how an AI would approach the task. They probably don't so much at this point since I've seen walking robots and they suck at it. No efficiency or fluidity at all, part of which is the fault of a hardware designer who gave it inefficient limbs.

I might be wrong, of course, but it doesn't seem to me that I can explain all features of my mental activities in purely algorithmic terms (e.g. how I make some choices).

They have machines that detect melanoma in skin images. There's no algorithm to do that. Learning is the only way, and the machines do it better than any doctor. Earlier, it was kind of a joke that machines couldn't tell cats from dogs. That's because they attempted the task with algorithms. Once the machine was able to just learn the difference the way humans do, the problem went away, and you don't hear much about it anymore.

I might concede, however, that I am not absolutely sure that there isn't an unknown alogorithmic explanation of all the operations that my mind can do.

Technically, anything a physical device can do can be simulated in software, which means a fairly trivial (not AI at all) algorithm can implement you. This is assuming a monistic view of course. If there's outside interference, then the simulation would fail.

I can't think of a case where the map is never part of the territory, unless you are a solipsist, in which case they are one and the same, not part of the other. — Harry Hindu

Again, I'm missing your meaning because it's trivial. I have a map of Paris, and that map is not part of Paris since the map is not there. That's easy, so you probably mean something else by such statements. Apologies for not getting what that is, and for not getting why this point is helping me figure out why Chalmers finds the first person view so physically contradictory.

Santa Claus exists - as an idea.

So I would say that the idea of Santa exists, but Santa does not. When I refer to an ideal, I make it explicit. If I don't, then I'm not referring to the ideal, but (in the case of the apple say), the noumena. Now in the apple case, it was admittedly a hypothetical real apple, not a specific apple that would be a common referent between us. Paris on the other hand is a common referent.

People are not confused about the existence of god.

If that were so, there'd not be differing opinions concerning that existence, and even concerning the kind of existence meant.

Yes, there is also disagreement about the nature of god. I mean, you're already asserting the nature by grammatically treating the word as a proper noun.

You’re right that Everett dispenses with counterfactual definiteness: only the total wave function is “real,” while definite outcomes are branch-relative. However, if every decoherence event differentiates the universal state vector, then by definition, each “unmeasured” quantum fluctuation still contributes to the branching structure of the multiverse. — Truth Seeker

The terminology grates with me, but more or less I agree. The universal state vector cannot differentiate since there is but only one of them, so it evolves over time, just like the universal wave function. It doesn't collapse, which I think would constitute 'differentiation'.

The fact that we only observe a subset of classical branches doesn’t mean the rest lack existence

Everett does not suggest separate 'branches' that have any kind of defined state. Such would be a counterfactual. So yea, Everett says that the universal wave function 'exists', period. It's a realist position, and it is that realism that is my primary beef with the view since it doesn't seem justified.

So when I say “an event that leaves no macroscopic trace still differentiates the overall state,” I mean that decoherence is ontologically generative - the universe’s global wave function encodes every microscopic difference, even those never amplified to our classical level.

Fine, but the only ones unamplified are the ones permanently in superposition relative to some classical state, such as the dead/live cat in a box never opened (said classical state).

From that global perspective, nothing “fails to happen”; it merely fails to be observable within our branch. — Truth Seeker

Careful. With the exception of Wigner interpretation (a solipsistic one), nothing in quantum mechanics is observer dependent. Observation plays no special role.

As for responsibility, I agree that phenomenology remains intact. Even if the total state-space evolves deterministically, subjective deliberation and outcome differentiation are still structurally real within each branch - enough to preserve the experiential grammar of choice, if not libertarian freedom.[/quote]
Agree with that, and even more, since your statement seems confined to MWI assumptions, but the conclusion is interpretation independent.
As for my opinion of Libertarian free will, that's just a term describing external agency, with no demonstration of any greater freedom than internal agency. Coming down with Rabies is an example of Libertarian free will. The agency is suddenly something other than yours, and Rabies (the external agent) now has the free will instead of you, and it compels you to bite people, and then Rabies becomes responsible for those assaults, not you.

Look what you are saying. It can just be turned around. Not getting married was the mistaken choice which shouldn't have been made. — Metaphysician Undercover

Getting married is like pulling the trigger. One can put off that choice indefinitely, but once done, it's done.
I used it as a counter for your assertion of 'certainty of success', and 'minimize risk'. Getting married is a risk (something you assert to never be the best option), even ones that seem a very good match. Not getting married is usually not the best option. Sure, it is for some people. I have 3 kids, and only one marriage is expected, thus countering my 'usually' assertion.

The point being that action requires choice, and choice restricts the person's freedom to select all the other possibilities. — Metaphysician Undercover

One never had freedom to select multiple options. Sure, you can have both vanilla and chocolate, but that's just a single third option. There's no having cake and eating it, so to speak. You have choice because you can select any valid option, but you can't choose X and also not X.

Somehow I'm guessing you meant something else by that comment, but I cannot figure out what else it might mean.

If a hamburger is the only thing the person knows to be food, then "looking for food" is a significant restriction.

OK, but I don't know how this became a discussion about ignorance of what is food. The comment was in response to your assertion of "the first principle is that nonaction maintains freedom", and my example of nonaction (and not ignorance) will cause among other things starvation, which will likely curtail freedom.

If physical processes weren't intelligible, how could we even do science — boundless

Doing science is how something less unintelligible becomes more intelligible.

I was saying that if there was a time when intentionality didn't exist, it must have come into being 'in some way' at a certain moment.

OK, that's a lot different than how I read the first statement.

Merely giving an output after computing the most likely alternative doesn't seem to me the same thing as intentionality.

I don't think the video was about intentionality. There are other examples of that, such as the robot with the repeated escape attempts, despite not being programmed to escape.

The video was more about learning and consciousness.

In my records, if you agree with [mathematics not being just a natural property of this universe, and thus 'supernatural'], you are not a 'physicalist'. Depends on definitions. I was unaware that the view forbade deeper, non-physical foundations. It only asserts that there isn't something else, part of this universe, but not physical. That's how I take it anyway.

If we grant to science some ability to give us knowledge of physical reality, then we must assume that the physical world is intelligible.

Partially intelligible, which is far from 'intelligible', a word that on its own implies nothing remaining that isn't understood.

Like sarcasm, sometimes the 'level of confidence' comes out badly in discussions and people seem more confident about a given thing than they actually are. — boundless

Not sure where you think my confidence level is. I'm confident that monism hasn't been falsified. That's about as far as I go. BiV hasn't been falsified either, and it remains an important consideration, but positing that you're a BiV is fruitless.

More of a not-unemergentist, distinct in that I assert that the physical is sufficient for emergence of these things, as opposed to asserting that emergence from the physical is necessary fact, a far more closed-minded stance. — noAxioms

Not sure what you mean here. Are you saying that the physical is sufficient for emergence but there are possible ways in which intentionality, consciousness etc emerge without the physical?

I'm saying that alternatives to such physical emergence has not been falsified, so yes, I suppose those alternative views constitute 'possible ways in which they exist without emergence from the physical'.

Good point. But note that if your intentions could be completely determined by your own employer, it would be questionable to call them 'your' intentions.

Just like you're questioning that a machine's intentions are not its own because some of them were determined by its programmer.

Also, to emerge 'your' intentions would need the intentionality of your employer.

No, since I am composed of parts, none of which have the intentionality of my employer. So it's still emergent, even if the intentions are not my own.

there remains the fact that if intentionality, in order to emerge, needs always some other intentionality, intentionality is fundamental.

That seems to be self contradictory. If it's fundamental, it isn't emergent, by definition.

Again, I see it more like a machine doing an operation rather than a machine 'recognizing' anything. — boundless

The calculator doesn't know what it's doing, I agree. It didn't have to learn. It's essentially a physical tool that nevertheless does mathematics despite not knowing that it's doing that, similar to a screwdriver screwing despite not knowing it's doing that. Being aware of its function is not one of its functions.

I still do not find any evidence that they do something more than doing an operation as an engine does.

Agree.

This to me applies both to the mechanical calculator and the computer in the video.

Don't agree. The thing in the video learns. An engine does too these days, something that particularly pisses me off since I regularly have to prove to my engine that I'm human, and I tend to fail that test for months at a time. The calculator? No, that has no learning capability.

An interesting question, however, arises. How can I be sure that humans (and, I believe, also animals at least) can 'recognize' numbers as I perceive myself doing?

Dabbling in solipsism now? You can't see the perception or understanding of others, so you can only infer when others are doing the same thing.

Still, I think it is reasonable that machines do not have such a faculty because they operate algorithmicallyHow do you know that you do not also operate this way? I mean, sure, you're not a Von-Neumann machine, but being one is not a requirement for operating algorithmicly. If you don't know how it works, then you can't assert that it doesn't fall under that category.
More importantly, what assumptions are you making that preclude anything operating algorithmicly from having this understanding? How do you justify those assumptions? They seem incredibly biased to me.

TIt was a question to you about the distinction between territory and map. Is the map part of the territory? — Harry Hindu

OK. It varies from case to case. Sometimes it is. The 'you are here' sign points to where the map is on the map, with the map being somewhere in the territory covered by the map.
You solipsism question implies that you were asking a different question. OK. Yes, the map is distinct from the territory, but you didn't ask that. Under solipsism, they're not even distinct.

Your prior post did eventually suggest a distinction between a perceived thing (a 3D apple say) and the ding an sich, with is neither 3D nor particularly even a 'thing'.

What does it even mean to be a physicalist?

Different people use the term different I suppose. I did my best a few posts back, something like "the view that all phenomena are the result of what we consider natural law of this universe", with 'this universe' loosely being defined as 'all contained by the spacetime which we inhabit'. I gave some challenges to that definition, such as the need to include dark matter under the category of 'natural law' to explain certain phenomena. Consciousness could similarly be added if it can be shown that it cannot emerge from current natural law, but such a proposal makes predictions, and those predictions fail so far.

When scientists describe objects they say things like, "objects are mostly empty space" and describe matter as the relationship between smaller particles all the way down (meaning we never get at actual physical stuff - just more fundamental relationships, or processes) until we arrive in the quantum realm where "physical" seems to have no meaning, or is at least dependent upon our observations (measuring).

All correct, which is why I didn't define 'physical' in terms of material, especially since they've never found any material. Yes, rocks are essentially clusters of quantum do-dads doing their quantumy stuff. There are no actual volume-filling particles, so 'mostly empty space' should actually get rid of 'mostly'.

Change over time, yes. There's other kinds of change. — noAxioms
Like...?

e.g. The air pressure changes with altitude.

So maybe I should ask if there is an example of change independent of space-time.

In simplest terms, the function y = 0.3x, the y value changes over x. That being a mathematical structure, it is independent of any notion of spacetime. Our human thinking about that example of course is not independent of it. We cannot separate ourselves from spacetime.

You are always perceiving the world as it was in the past, so your brain has to make some predictions.
...
The simplified, cartoonish version of events you experience is what you refer to as "physical", where objects appear as solid objects that "bump" against each other because that is how the slower processes are represented on the map.

Sure, one can model rigid balls bouncing off each other, or even simpler models than that if such serves a pragmatic purpose. I realize that's not what's going on. Even the flow of time is a mental construct, a map of sorts. Even you do it, referencing 'the past' like it was something instead of just a pragmatic mental convenience.

How would you represent slow processes vs faster processes on a map?

Depends on the nature of the map. If you're talking about perceptions, then it would be a perception of relative motion of two things over a shorter vs longer period of time, or possibly same time, but the fast one appears further away. If we're talking something like a spacetime diagram, then velocity corresponds to slopes of worldlines.

I don't understand. Is the picture not physical as well for a physicalist?

Sure it is, but the mental picture is not the intentionality, just the idea of it.

How do you explain an illusion, like a mirage, if not intentionality supervening on the picture instead of on some physical thing?

I don't understand this. A mirage is a physical thing. A camera can take a picture of one. No intentionality is required of the camera for it to do that. I never suggested that intentionality supervenes on any picture. Territories don't supervene on maps.

I don't know what it means for intentionality to supervene on actual physical things. But I do know that if you did not experience empty space in front of you and experienced the cloud of gases surrounding you you then your intentions might be quite different. Yet you act on the feeling of there being nothing in front of you, because that is how you visual experience is.

Yes, my experience and subsequent mental assessment of state (a physical map of sorts) influences what I choose to do. Is that so extraordinary?

How do you reconcile the third person view of another's brain (your first-person experience of another's brain - a third person view can only be had via a first-person view.) with their first person experience of empty space and visual depth?[/quote]Sorry, you lost me, especially the bits in parenthesis.
Other people (if they exist in the way that I do) probably have a first person view similar to my own. A third person description of their brain (or my own) is not required for this. I have no first person view of any brain, including my own. In old times, it wasn't obvious where the thinking went on. It took third person education to learn that.

This talk of views seems to be confusing things. What exactly is a view? A process? Information?

Probably a good question. In context of the title of this topic, I'm not actually sure about the former since I don't find baffling what others do. Third person is simply a description, language or whatever. A book is a good third person view of a given subject. First person is a subjective temporal point of view by some classical entity. Those biased would probably say that the entity has to be alive.

Maybe I should try this route - Does a spinning top look more like a wave than a particle, and when it stops does it look more like a particle than a wave?

It never looks like either. You're taking quantum terminology way out of context here. Quantum entities sometimes have wave-like properties and also particle-like properties, but those entities are never actually either of those things.

Is a spinning top a process? Is a top at rest a process - just a slower one?

Yes to all.

Isn't the visual experience of a wave-like blur of a spinning top the relationship between the rate of change of position of each part of the top relative to your position is space and the rate at which your eye-brain system can process the change it is observing.

Yea, pretty much. My eyes cannot follow it, even if they could follow linear motion at the same speed.

If your mental processing were faster then it would actually slow down the speed of the top to the point where it will appear as a stable, solid object standing perfectly balanced on its bottom peg.

I'd accept that statement. Clouds look almost static like that, until you watch a time-lapse video of them. You can see the motion, but only barely. In fast-mo, I've seen clouds break like waves against a beach.

On Claim B ... I was speaking from an Everett-style, decoherence-based ontology where every event contributes to a definite branch of the universal wave function. Under that framework, an event that leaves no macroscopic trace still differentiates the overall state of the universe. — Truth Seeker

Everett interpretation does not hold to CFD, so unmeasured events effectively are not part of any specific worlds (they're not 'real': scientific definition). This is all part of the recent proof that the universe is not locally real. It can be local or real (or neither), but not both. Everett's is local. CFD is an assertion of real states, independent of measurement.

For Claim C, I’d refine “always matters” as follows: every quantum perturbation modifies the total wave function, but only some of those perturbations are amplified within our causal region into new classical structures.

We apparently are not going to agree on this point.

The phenomenology of choice remains intact, even if the universe’s total state never could have evolved differently.

We agree on the responsibility point. Of note: Under Everett again, the universe can and does evolve in all possible outcomes, which includes choosing differently, not choosing at all, and of course not even existing to choose.

So as much as the option remains, even after deciding not to pull the trigger, it would all have to be recalculated, and in reality would be a different option. — Metaphysician Undercover

Sure, one can spin a drawn out choice (to go to the moon, good example) as a series of more immediate choices that have temporal windows. The choice ends when there's somebody on the moon, at which point it's hard to change your mind about doing so anymore.

So, the psychology is that it is universally better not to act unless one is quite certain of success.

That works in some situations, but a not in a fair percentage of them. Such uncertainty prevents some people from ever getting married. Sometimes this is a good thing, but often not. Don't choose poorly, but also don't reject good choices for fear of lack of 'success'.
War is another example where that psychology is a losing one. Risk taking is part of how things are best done.

Your son got the punishment of reverse psychology.

He did? He got crab legs and loved it. He also liked the other food he was eating, so at no point was he 'punished'.

Then he was embarrassed by jumping the gun

He was 1, with no concept of embarassment yet. He was unaware of a game being played in his court. He never spit anything out. That would have been even a better score than spoon-abort, already in, but not already 'unloaded'.

How could there ever be only one path open?

Since I'm quoting movies, I remember Gandalf saying "now there is but one choice" once the entrance to Moria collapsed after they had entered. Go forth into the mine was the only option remaining. They hadn't the resources to dig their way out.

I believe the lesson is, that when you make the act, you put things in motion which inevitably restrict your future acts, unless your act is designed to increase your freedom, and it is successful.

Similar to a game of Chess or Reversi. Any move restricts possible future positions to those which follow from the new current state. In Reversi in particular, playing to maximize your freedom and minimize the opponent's freedom is definitely a winning strategy. Took me 8 years to figure that out.

So the first principle is that nonaction maintains freedom.

Not always, and not even particularly often. Not looking for food definitely curtails eventual freedom.

However, in the other scenario among many, energy and angst compel you to get out because you see an opening, which is arguably still not anything you have control over... — ProtagoranSocratist

You many not have too much control over the appearance of opportunities to escape jail, but if one presents itself, you do have control to choose to act or not on it. It would also be foolish not to consider the positive and negative consequences of the various options, but some choice come fast enough that such rational weighing of options is not, well, an option.

Claim A: “Every decoherence event must produce a macroscopically different future.” — Truth Seeker

High probability of that, but the claim is not there. Again, Norton's dome can result in the same state from multiple different initial states, thus falsifying that claim. It's a classical analysis, and it would be interesting to see if a similar scenario could be done in the quantum realm, such as different pairs of photons (coming from different directions, but with the same collective energy/momentum) combining into identical states of electron/positron pair.

None of what I posted about macroscopic differences is 'in principle'. It's very much in practice, and differences don't remain contained. All such events are beneath any system’s Lyapunov horizon and thus take at least that much time to show up as macroscopic differences.

Claim B: “If a quantum event didn’t cascade to macroscopic difference, then it didn’t happen.”

That claim presumes the principle of counterfactual definiteness (PCD) is false, which it is in almost every interpretation. But given that principle, the claim is false. I said as much in prior posts. It cascading into a macroscopic difference is way different than the difference being observed, which is of course impossible. Nobody can observe both the live and dead cat.

So the quantum event doesn't technically alter the weather since that wording implies there was one base weather that would have otherwise been. No, each event is a critical part of the cause of any sufficiently distant weather state, a very different claim than 'alters'.

Claim C: “Because chaotic systems amplify differences, microscopic quantum noise always matters.”

I think I agree with this one, with 'always' being replaced by 'always to a lot of decimal places'.

Some perturbations are amplified quickly; many are damped or trapped inside subsystems and never produce a new, robust classical structure.

Sort of. Imagine something tiny annihilating into radiation that ends up in deep space, never hitting anything. Also the tiny thing, had it not died like that, would also never have interacted with anything else. That's an example of that 'trapped', but it's also an example of an event that never happened in the absence of PCD.

2. On ensemble forecasting and pragmatic unpredictability
Ensemble weather models show that small perturbations grow and forecasts diverge over days to weeks. That demonstrates sensitivity, not an omnipresent quantum-to-macroscopic channel that we can exploit or even detect in a controlled way. — Truth Seeker

Correct. None of those models run at quantum scale precision. The input data is more like data points that are kilometers apart, not nanometers apart.

More precision would be nice, but data gathering is limited and small scale differences (molecular?) make no significant difference in just the 10 days these models are good for.

Most mainstream interpretations (Copenhagen-style pragmatism, Everett/MWI, Bohmian/DBB, GRW-style objective collapse) make the same experimental predictions for standard quantum experiments.

If there are any interpretations that make different predictions, then either the interpretation is wrong, or QM is.

Where they differ is metaphysical: whether there is a literal branching reality (MWI), hidden variables (Bohmian), or real collapses (GRW/Penrose). That difference matters philosophically but not experimentally so far.

Just so. This is why when you take a graduate level course in quantum mechanics, they might spend a day on interpretations, but it being philosophy, it has no scientific value. The course teaches theory, not philosophy. The determinism debate is also philosophy.

The bit I said about some events never happening? That's philosophy. Empirically, whether it happened or not is indistinguishable, so it isn't part of theory.

Determinism vs practical unpredictability.
MWI is best understood as deterministic at the universal wave function level (no collapse), while Bohmian mechanics is deterministic at the level of particle trajectories guided by the wave function.

Something like that. The wave function has multiple solutions, so DBB needs more than just that to guide particles to one outcome.

Responsibility and determinism.
Even if one accepts a deterministic physical description (whether classical or quantum-deterministic under MWI or Bohmian) — Truth Seeker

MWI is deterministic, but not classical. There's no 'you' with a meaningful identity in that view. Responsibility is a classical concept and requires a pragmatic classical view of identity, regardless of interpretations of choice.
This is not contradictory. The pragmatic part of me believes all sorts of things that the rational side of me knows is wrong. I would not be fit were the case to be otherwise. Hence my being responsible for my choices.

That’s the compatibilist position: responsibility depends on capacities, reasons-responsiveness, and the appropriate psychological relations, not on metaphysical indeterminism.

I would have said that it depends on the entity being held responsible being the same entity making the choice. Determinism just doesn't factor at all into that definition.
Compatibilism is a bit different. It asserts free will in the face of determinism. I don't, but it depends on one's definition of free will. I don't think I have free will as typically defined, but that in no way relieves me of moral responsibility since I'm still making my own choices. So I don't label myself a compatibilist.

Saying “my decision was set at the Big Bang” is metaphysically dramatic but doesn’t change whether you deliberated, had conscious intentions, and acted for your reason(s) - which are precisely the things our ethics and law respond to.

Yes. My opinion is that my decision was not at all set at the big bang, but that just means I don't buy into DBB, probably the only interpretation that suggests that.

6. About “pondering” and the illusion of choice
You’re right to resist the crude conclusion that determinism makes choice an illusion. Choice is a process that unfolds over time; it can be broken into sub-choices and revisions. Whether decisions are determined or involve ontic randomness does not by itself answer whether they were genuinely yours. If you deliberated, weighed reasons, and acted from those deliberations, we rightly treat that as agency. Randomness doesn’t create agency; reasons and responsiveness do.

We seem to be on the same page.

In practice, decoherence + dissipation + coarse-graining mean most quantum perturbations don’t make detectable macroscopic differences.

I'd even argue that none of them make detectable macroscopic differences. I mean, I measure an atom decay. Great, but I don't have a not-decay state to compare it with, so there's no 'difference'. I can imagine that other state since it is pretty simple, but I cannot imagine the evolution of that real and imagined state into a future state of a planet a year hence.

Yes, I know it isn't a true illusion. I said it's a "functional illusion", meaning that since the chocolate conclusion was set at the Big Bang (as you noted) — LuckyR

See just above, where only DBB suggests that chocolate choice was set at the big bang. DBB should stand for 'Da Big Bang'. Chicago folks would like that.

Thus while we all agree pondering occurs, as I mentioned, folks disagree whether both sides of the internal argument can result in chocolate or vanilla on one hand or always chocolate on the other.

I think it's all in how you frame the telling of the story. Proponents of 'vanilla being possibly chosen' would frame the story in such terms. Yea, you could have picked that, but you didn't, didja? If you had, you'd still ponder if you could have chosen chocolate.

A distinction without importance since in reality there is no practical difference.

Yes, and deal with the consequences. It's pretty easy to falsify the 'not responsible' stance since if one wasn't to be held responsible, different choices would be made. That means responsibility serves a purpose regardless of your stance.

it's possumslaughter — ProtagoranSocratist

I'd call it marsupicide

I think the problem is, that if change happens over time, and a person can always change one's mind as time passes, then how does that state of not being able to choose otherwise ever come about? — Metaphysician Undercover

Eventually one much act on the choice, irrevocably. You debate committing murder, but once the trigger is pulled, there's no doing otherwise. I suppose if you choose not to do it, the option remains open for quite some time.

The vanilla/chocolate debate at the ice cream shop. Exactly how late can one change one's mind before it's too late? We played a game like that with my 1 year old at a restaurant. He was feeding himself stuff from his plate with a spoon. He really like crab leg bits thrown on his plate and would eat those first. Game was to see how far we could get him to choose to eat something else, and still bail out because a crab bit was presented. I won the game when I caused an abort with the spoon already fully in his mouth. Imagine the cheering at the table, causing weird looks from others.
We're easily entertained over here.

I think that "not being able to choose" is always there, to some degree, as what is impossible. One cannot make happen what is impossible.

Yes, that's physics getting in the way of free will. I cannot get out of this jail because physics compels me to stay here. Nobody can do everything they want to.

Therefore it's always possible to choose otherwise, all the time.

Yes, that's what it means for there to be a choice. I'd argue that such choice is not always possible. Sometimes only one path is open. Sometimes not even that. Vanilla or chocolate? Well, there's a power outage at the softserve shop, so as Gene Wilder put it: You get Nothing.

Ok. But if there is an 'emergence', it must be an intelligible process. — boundless

I deny that requirement. It sort of sounds like an idealistic assertion, but I don't think idealism suggests emergent properties.

Right, but there is also the possibility that ontological dependency doesn't involve a temporary relation.

Sure

That is, you might say that intentionality isn't fundamental but it is dependent on something else that hasn't intentionality and yet there have not been a time where intentionality didn't exist

I was on board until the bit about not being a time (presumably in our universe) when intentionality doesn't exist. It doesn't appear to exist at very early times, and it doesn't look like it will last.

As an illustration, consider the stability of a top floor in a building. It clearly depends on the firmness of the foundations of the builing and yet we don't that 'at a certain point' the upper floor 'came out' from the lower.

But it's not building all the way down, nor all the way up.

Stellar dynamics isn't fundamental because it can be explained in terms of more fundamental processes. — boundless

But it hasn't been fully explained. A sufficiently complete explanation might be found by humans eventually (probably not), but currently we lack that, and in the past, we lacked it a lot more. Hence science.

Will we discover something similar for intentionality, consciousness and so on?

Maybe we already have (the example from @wonderer1 is good), but every time we do, the goalposts get moved, and a more human-specific explanation is demanded. That will never end since I don't think a human is capable of fully understanding how a human works any more than a bug knows how a bug works.

That would be an interesting objective threshold of intelligence: any entity capable of comprehending itself.

But currently it seems to me that our 'physicalist' models can't do that. — boundless

I beg to differ. They're just simple models at this point is all. So the goalposts got moved and those models were declared to not be models of actual intentionality and whatnot.
We could do a full simulation of a human and still there will be those that deny usage of the words. A full simulation would also not constitute an explanation, only a demonstration. That would likely be the grounds for the denial.

But if they are 'true' even if the universe or multiverse didn't exist, this means that they have a different ontological status. And, in fact, if the multiverse could not exist, this would mean that it is contingent.

Agree with all that.

Mathematical truths, instead, we seem to agree are not contingent. — boundless

Mathematics seems to come in layers, with higher layers dependent on more fundamental ones. Is there a fundamental layers? Perhaps law of form. I don't know. What would ground that?

Given that they aren't contingent, they can't certainly depend on something that is contingent. So, they transcend the multiverse (they would be 'super-natural').

Good point

If the physical world wasn't intelligible, then it seems to me that even doing science would be problematic.

Just so. So physical worlds would not depend on science being done on them. Most of them fall under that category. Why doesn't ours? That answer at least isn't too hard.

There is no evidence 'beyond reasonable doubt' to either position about consciousness that can satisfy almost everyone.

Agree again. It's why I don't come in here asserting that my position is the correct one. I just balk at anybody else doing that, about positions with which I disagree, but also about positions with which I agree. I have for instance debunked 'proofs' that presentism is false, despite the fact that I think it's false.

I entertain the notion that our universe is a mathematical structure, but there are some serious problems with that proposition that I've not seen satisfactory resolution. Does it sink the ship? No, but a viable model is needed, and I'm not sure there is one. Sean Carroll got into this.

Would you describe your position as 'emergentist' then? — boundless

Close enough. More of a not-unemergentist, distinct in that I assert that the physical is sufficient for emergence of these things, as opposed to asserting that emergence the physical is necessary fact, a far more closed-minded stance.

Still, I am hesitant to see it as an example of emergence of intentionality for two reasons.

First, these machines, like all others, are still programmed by human beings who decide how they should work. — boundless

This is irrelevant to emergence, which just says that intentionality is present, consisting of components, none of which carry intentionality.
OK, so you don't deny the emergence, but that it is intentionality at all since it is not its own, quite similar to how my intentions at work are that of my employer instead of my own intentions.

To make a different example, if you consider a mechanical calculator it might seem it 'recognizes' the numbers '2', '3'

It recognizes 2 and 3. It does not recognize the characters. That would require a image-to-text translator (like the one in the video, learning or not). Yes, it adds. Yes, it has a mechanical output that displays results in human-readable form. That's my opinion of language being appropriately applied. It's mostly a language difference (to choose those words to describe what its doing or not) and not a functional difference.

Secondly, the output the machine gives are the results of statistical calculations. The machine is being given a set of examples of associations of hand-written numbers and the number these hand-written numbers should be. It then manages to perform better with other trials in order to minimize the error function.

Cool. So similar to how humans do it. The post office has had image-to-text interpretation for years, but not sure how much those devices learn as opposed to just being programmed. Those devices need to parse cursive addresses, more complicated than digits. I have failed to parse some hand written numbers.
My penmanship sucks, but I'm very careful when hand-addressing envelopes.

The map is the first-person view. Is the map (first-person view) not part of the territory? — Harry Hindu

I don't know what the territory is as you find distinct from said map.

I said that our view is the model and the point was that some people (naive realists) tend to confuse the model with the map in their using terms like, "physical" and "material".

Fine, but I'm no naive realist. Perception is not direct, and I'm not even a realist at all. A physicalist need not be any of these things.

You do understand that we measure change using time

Change over time, yes. There's other kinds of change.

and that doing so entails comparing the relative frequency of change to another type of change

Fine, so one can compare rates of change, which is frame dependent we want to get into that.

Do you not agree that our minds are part of the world and changes like anything else in the world, and the time it takes our eye-brain system can receive and process the information compared to the rate at which what you are observing is changing, can play a role in how your mind models what it is seeing.

I suppose so, but I don't know how one might compare a 'rate of continuous perception' to a 'rate of continuous observed change'. Both just happen all the time. Sure, a fast car goes by in less time than a slow car, if that's what you're getting at.

Everything is a process. Change is relative. The molecules in the glass are moving faster than when it was a solid

Well that's wrong. Glass was never a solid. The molecules in the old glass move at the same rate as newer harder glass, which is more temperature dependent than anything. But sure, their average motion over a long time relative to the window frame is faster in the old glass since it might move 10+ centimeters over decades. What's any of this got to do with 'the territory' that the first person view is supposedly a map of?
Perhaps you mean territory as the thing in itself (and not that which would be directly perceived). You've not come out and said that. I agree with that. A non-naive physicalist would say that things like intentionality supervene on actual physical things, and not on the picture that our direct perceptions paint for us. I never suggested otherwise.

therefore the rate of change has increased and is why you see it as a moving object rather than a static one.

I see the old glass as moving due to it looking like a picture of flowing liquid, even though motion is not perceptible. A spinning top is a moving object since its parts are at different locations at different times, regardless of how it is perceived.

1. On Decoherence and Chaotic Amplification

I appreciate your clarification. I agree that once decoherence has occurred, each branch behaves classically. My emphasis was never that quantum events never cascade upward, but that most do not in practice. Chaotic sensitivity doesn’t guarantee amplification of all microscopic noise; it only ensures that some minute differences can diverge over time. — Truth Seeker

The mathematics says otherwise. Any quantum decoherence event, say the decay of some nucleus in a brick somewhere, will have an effect on Mars possibly within 10 minutes, and will cause a completely different weather pattern on Mars withing months. The brick on the other hand (after even a second) will have all its atoms having different individual momentums, but the classical brick will still be mostly unchanged after a year. This is a logical necessity for any quantum event. If it has no such cascading effect, then it didn't actually happen, by any non-counterfactual definition of 'happened'.

The fact that there are trillions of decoherence events per nanosecond doesn’t entail that every one creates a macroscopically distinct weather trajectory.

If it doesn't, then the event probably took place outside our event horizon, which is currently about 16 GLY away, not far beyond the Hubble sphere.

Many microscopic perturbations occur below the system’s Lyapunov horizon and are absorbed by dissipative averaging.

Sure, almost all perturbations occur below a system's Lyapunov horizon, which just means that more time is needed (couple days in the case of weather) for chaotic differences to become classically distinct.

No, it doesn’t imply that quantum noise routinely dominates macroscopic evolution

Depends on your definition of 'dominates'. Yes, the state of a chaotic system is a function of every input, no matter how trivial. Yes, they all average out and statistically the weather is more or less the same each year, cold in winter, etc. But the actual state of the weather at a given moment is not classically determined. There is no event that doesn't matter.

Coin flips are a lot like the weather. Take trillions of coins, black & white on opposite sides, and throw them on ground and look at it from an airplane. It looks gray every time, no matter how many tries you attempt. But up close, each toss is distinct, and if those distinctions amplify in a chaotic manner, different patterns will form with each toss, and those classical patterns will very much be visible for the airplane.

I was hoping for Conway's Game of Life to drive the chaos, but that game is actually not very chaotic, and the resulting patterns probably would just look mostly white from a distance with no distinct structures emerging like hurricanes.

Empirically, ensemble models of the atmosphere converge statistically even when perturbed at Planck-scale levels

Perturbations in ensemble models are far larger than Planck level. Yes, hurricanes, once formed, tend to be somewhat predictable for 8-10 days out. The perturbations are effectively running the model multiple times with minor differences, generating a series of diverging predictions. You average out those predictions to get a most probable path. Run those difference out to 3 weeks and major divergence will result.

My point is pragmatic: there’s no experimental evidence that ontic indeterminacy penetrates to the macroscopic domain in any controllable way.

Quantum theory (not any of its interpretations even) does not allow any indeterminacy to be controlled. The mathematical model from the theory also disallows any information to be gathered from the randomness. If it were otherwise, the theory would be falsified.

MWI, Bohmian mechanics, and objective-collapse theories

I hate to be a bother, but there is no collapse at all under MWI, and DBB is phenomenological collapse only, not ontic. This is a set of objective collapse interpretations posited separately by Ghirardi, Weber, Penrose.

The interpretations you list are deterministic. Most others are not. Under MWI, you could have, and actually did, choose otherwise (but was that you?). Under DBB, you could not have chosen otherwise.

.. all make the same statistical predictions.

Every interpretation makes the same statistical predictions. Superdeterminism doesn't, but it's not a valid interpretation of QM, just an alternate interpretation of the physics.

Still, I agree with your point 2. It doesn't matter whether randomness is ontic or epistemic. There will never be a test for that.

3. On Functional Robustness

Completely agree: both transistors and neurons rely on quantum effects yet yield stable classical outputs. The entire architecture of computation, biological or digital, exists precisely because thermal noise, tunnelling, and decoherence are averaged out or counterbalanced.

That’s why we can meaningfully say “the brain implements a computation” without appealing to hidden quantum randomness.

I agree with this, but remember that brains and computers are not closed systems, and the inputs might be subject to chaotic effects. It is the instability of those inputs that mostly accounts for a person 'having done otherwise' in two diverging worlds.

“Physics made me do it” is no more an excuse than “my character made me do it.”

See 'insanity defense', which is effectively the latter. Still responsible, but different kind of jail.

Anyway, we also seem to agree on point 4.

What folks disagree on is whether this pondering is a functional illusion, such that I was always going to select chocolate, never vanilla, regardless of going through the act of pondering my "choice". — LuckyR

The pondering is not an illusion. With the possible exception of epiphenomenalism, the pondering takes place, and the decision is the result of that. Given DBB style determinism, your decision to select chocolate was set at the big bang. Not true under almost any other interpretation, but under all of them (any scientific interpretation), the chocolate decision was a function of state just prior to the pondering, which does not mean it wasn't your decision.
Under non-QM philosophies, there's more going on than what science knows about, and all bets are off. How this makes you more responsible has never been justified to my satisfaction, but if an entity external to the universe is what's choosing chocolate, then that entity (and not the body it controls) is what's responsible to another entity also not part of the universe.

Of all that, the first paragraph is a monist take. The dualists are the ones that suggest that one is not responsible (to whom?) for their actions if the actions are due to a view with which they don't agree. All very straw man.

In this [deterministic] scenario one can never go back and make a different "choice", because the concept of "choice" was an illusion.

That's a total crock. It being a choice has nothing to do with it being deterministic or not, since choice is the mechanism by which multiple options are narrowed down to one. Your assertion makes the classical mistake of conflating a sound mechanism for selecting from multiple options, with being compelled against one's will to select otherwise, the latter of which actually does make it not a real choice, and thus takes away (not gives) responsibility.
In the end, one cannot make two choices. One cannot have chosen vanilla if chocolate was chosen, true in deterministic, random, and compelled scenarios.

Any choice making mechanism requires as much deterministic processes as possible, minimizing the randomness which is the alternative.
3rd alternative: let somebody else choose for you, which seems to make not you responsible, but rather the other person. Imagine crossing the street this way. You close your eyes and go when somebody else says to. If you get hit, it's his fault, but you still are the one enduring the consequences.

I don't think we can accurately talk about real points within what is assumed to be a continuous process. — Metaphysician Undercover

Agree. Also don't think the process of making a choice has an end point, like all pondering has ceased and all that's left is to implement the choice (say "chocolate please" to the ice cream guy). Cute idealized description, but that's not how it works.

You seem to agree, balking that 'conclusion' implies an end point.

Therefore, to speak about a point immediately prior to the point of conclusion

Ah, now we get into adjacent points and Zeno and that whole rat hole. Agree, we avoid that path.

Since I've already outlawed points, to get to this position, I cannot now say that the change happens at a point in between the two. This leaves a problem.

What's the problem then? Change happens over time. Where's the problem? I made no mention of points in that.

What happened to decisions and the eventual state of no longer being able to have chosen otherwise?

It can be either one: i can think about how i want to murder someone (technically, part of the choice, in the "choice is process" logic). If i decide it's the right decision, then the choice is made, and then i would start answering the question of how. I can change my mind still during this process, saying to myself "no, it's a bad idea to do this", i made a second choice, putting an end to my "how" process. Either way, i made two choices. — ProtagoranSocratist

What I got from this is that choices can be broken down into sub-choices, and conversely combined into larger choices.

Of course the steps need not be thus ordered. I have pondered 'how to murder' far more often than any actual decision to go and do it, not counting all the bug smitings and mammal murders.
Took out my first Opossum just a couple weeks ago. It wasn't a conscious choice to do so.

If there is intentionality in something like a steam-engine, this would suggest that intentionality is also fundamental — boundless

I would not buy that suggestion. More probably the intentionality emerges from whatever process is used to implement it. I can think of countless emergent properties, not one of which suggest that the properties need to be fundamental.

- in other words, the inanimate would not be really totally inanimate.

Thus illustrating my point about language. 'Intentional' is reserved for life forms, so if something not living does the exact same thing, a different word (never provided) must be used, or it must be living, thus proving that the inanimate thing cannot do the thing that it's doing (My example was 'accelerating downward' in my prior post).

Ok, but if intentionality is fundamental, then the arising of intentionality is unexplained.

That's only a problem for those that posit that intentionality is fundamental. Gosh, the same can be said of 'experience', illustrating why I find no problem when Chalmers does.

On the other hand, one can boil down that statement down to "if X is fundamental, then the arising of X is unexplained". Pretty much everybody considers something to be fundamental, so we all have our X. Why must X 'arise'? What does that mean? That it came to be over time? That would make time more fundamental, a contradiction. X just is, and everything else follows from whatever is fundamental. And no, I don't consider time to be fundamental.

Conversely, if intentionality is derived, we expect an explanation of how it is derived.

Again, why? There's plenty that's currently unexplained. Stellar dynamics I think was my example. For a long time, people didn't know stars were even suns. Does that lack of even that explanation make stars (and hundreds of other things) fundamental? What's wrong with just not knowing everything yet?

I believe that mathematical truths would still be true even if the universe didn't exist. — boundless

I didn't say otherwise — noAxioms
:up: Do you think that they are independent from the multiverse? — boundless

That's what it means to be true even if the universe didn't exist.

However, it should be noted that, in my view, even a pebble can't be explained in fully 'naturalistic' terms. Being (at least partially) intelligible, and being IMO the conditions for intelligibility of any entity prior to the 'natural', even a pebble, in a sense, is not fully 'explained' in purely 'naturalistic' terms.
So, yeah, at the end of the day, I find, paradoxically, even the simplest thing as mysterious as our minds.

Maybe putting in intelligibility as a requirement for existence isn't such a great idea. Of course that depends on one's definition of 'to exist'. There are definitely some definitions where intelligibility would be needed.

What would be an example of 'supernatural' then?

A made-up story. Not fiction (Sherlock Holmes say), just something that's wrong. Hard to give an example since one could always presume the posited thing is not wrong.

If intentionality exists only in *some* physical bodies, and we have to explain how it arose

Again, why is the explanation necessary? What's wrong with just not knowing everything? Demonstrating the thing in question to be impossible is another story. That's a falsification, and that carries weight. So can you demonstrate than no inanimate thing can intend? Without 'proof by dictionary'?

Your own view, for instance, seems to me to redefine the 'inanimate' as something that is actually not 'truly inanimate' and this allows you to say that, perhaps, the intentionality we have is a more complex form of the 'proto(?)-intentionality' that perhaps is found in inanimate objects.

That does not sound like any sort of summary of my view, which has no requirement of being alive in order to do something that a living thing might do, such as fall off a cliff.

I see the problem as confusing the map with the territory. In talking about the first-person view we are talking about the map, not the territory. In talking about what the map refers to we are talking about the territory and not the view. The map is part of the territory and is causally related with the territory, which is why we can talk about the territory by using the map.

The problem comes when we project our view onto the territory as if they were one and the same - as if your view is how the world actually is (naive realism). Indirect realism is the idea that your map is not the territory but provides information about the territory thanks to causation. — Harry Hindu

All this seems to be the stock map vs territory speach, but nowhere is it identified what you think is the map (that I'm talking about), and the territory (which apparently I'm not).

The monist solution to the problem comes in realizing that everything is information and the things you see in the world as static, solid objects is just a model of other processes that are changing at different frequencies relative to rate at which your eyes and brain perceive these other processes.

Very few consider the world to be a model. The model is the map, and the world is the territory. Your wording very much implies otherwise, and thus is a strawman representation of a typical monist view. As for your model of what change is, that has multiple interpretations, few particularly relevant to the whole ontology of mind debate. Change comes in frequencies? Frequency is expressed as a rate relative to perceptions??

Slower processes appear as solid objects while faster processes appear as actual processes, or blurs of motion.

So old glass flowing is not an actual process, or I suppose just doesn't appear that way despite looking disturbingly like falling liquid? This is getting nitpickly by me. I acknowledge your example, but none of it is science, nor is it particularly illustrative of the point of the topic.

My point, however, is that once decoherence has occurred, the resulting branch (or outcome) behaves classically, and further amplification of that quantum difference depends on the sensitivity to initial conditions within the system in question. — Truth Seeker

With that I will agree. It's quite a different statement than the one at which I balked before.

So while a chaotic system like the atmosphere can indeed amplify microscopic differences, the relevant question is how often quantum noise actually changes initial conditions at scales that matter for macroscopic divergence.

How often? Ever time for a chaotic system. Takes time to diverge, but given a trillion decoherence events in a marble (not even in the atmosphere) in the space of a nanosecond, there's a lot more than a trillion worlds resulting from that, and the weather will be different in all of them, assuming (unreasonably) no further splits. I mean, eventually there's only so many different weather patterns and by chance some of then start looking like each other (does that qualify as strange attractors?). But the marble has a fair chance of still being a marble in almost all of those worlds.

The overwhelming majority of microscopic variations wash out statistically - only in rare, non-averaging circumstances do they cascade upward.

This is the part for which a reference would help. Clearly we still disagree on this point. The 'butterfly effect' specifically used weather as its example. Small changes matter. Not sometime, but all of them: any difference amplifies.

2. On the “Timescale of Divergence”
...
What’s worth emphasizing, though, is that those divergence times describe when outcomes become empirically distinguishable

Well, first, to distinguish two outcomes, both must be observed by the same observer. That's not going to happen. Secondly, the butterfly can have an empirical effect immediately, but the <hurricane/hurricane elsewhere/not-hurricane> difference is what takes perhaps a couple months.

I also agree that classical thermodynamics is chaotic, and that even an infinitesimal perturbation can, in principle, lead to vastly different outcomes. However, that doesn’t mean the macroscopic weather is “quantum random” in any meaningful sense - only that its deterministic equations are sensitive to initial data we can never measure with infinite precision.

The deterministic equations (in a simulation say) are not to infinite detail and precision, so yes, quantum effects are ignored. The real equations are not deterministic since they are (theoretically) infinitely precise, and incomplete since quantum randomness cannot be part of the initial conditions. There are probably no initial conditions. Such a thing would require counterfactual definiteness, which is possible but not terribly likely.

The randomness, therefore, is epistemic, not ontic — arising from limited knowledge rather than fundamental indeterminacy.

You don't know that. Yes, there are deterministic interpretations, but even given MWI (quite deterministic) and perfect knowledge, not even God can predict where the photon will hit the screen, and that's not even a chaotic effect.

I completely agree that biological and technological systems are designed to suppress or filter quantum noise.

Which is why a computer typically runs the same code identically every time, given identical inputs. Ditto for a brain. Both work this way even given a non-deterministic interpretation of physics.

The fact that transistors, neurons, and ion channels function reliably at all is testament to that design. Quantum tunneling, superposition, or entanglement may underlie the microphysics, but the emergent computation (neural or digital) operates in the classical regime.

Again, agree, which is why I suspect a human can be fully simulated using a classical simulation that ignores quantum effects, unless of course the human simulated happens to want to perform quantum experiments in his simulated lab.

So while randomness exists, most functional systems are robustly deterministic within the energy and temperature ranges they inhabit.

Sort of. Don't forget outside factors. My deterministic braIn might nevertheless decide to wear a coat or not depending on some quantum event months ago that made it cold or warm out today.

* Decoherence kills coherence extremely fast in macroscopic environments.
* Chaotic systems can amplify any difference, including quantum ones, but not all microscopic noise scales up meaningfully.
* Macroscopic unpredictability is largely classical chaos, not ongoing quantum indeterminacy.
* Living and engineered systems filter quantum randomness to maintain stability and reproducibility.

:up:

Mind you, I agree that not all microscopic noise scales up meaningfully, but only because many systems (bricks for instance) are not all that chaotic at classical scales. The weather is not one of them, so I deny this below:
[/quote]I maintain that in natural systems like the atmosphere, such amplification is statistically negligible in practice[/quote]

neither transistors nor neurons would function at all without quantum effects like tunneling, but both are designed to produce a repeatable classical effect, not a random one — noAxioms

Yes, that's their design. And when someone is contemplating an important decision, they bring all of that design to bear on the problem. — LuckyR

You make it sound so rational.
Take the 'should I cheat on my spouse' decision. I think chemistry, possibly more than rational logic, tends to influence such decisions. I wonder if robots currently can demonstrate that sort of internal conflict of interests.

What's that got to do with the what is effectively a free will/determinism debate? Free will is typically pitched as the rational side, with the chemicals often portrayed in the role of 'being compelled otherwise by physics'. Nonsense. Both are physics, and you're definitely responsible for your choice.

How much of our decision making prowess do we bring to deciding which urinal to use in the public bathroom? Very, very little. What is taking the place of that unused neurological function? Habit perhaps or pattern matching. But what about a novel (no habit nor pattern) yet unimportant "choice"? It may not fulfill the statistical definition of the word "random", but in the absence of a repeatable, logical train of thought, it functionally resembles "randomness".

Agree, until you suggest that you are actually leveraging quantum randomness when doing something like urinal selection (which definitely has rules to it, and is thus a poor example), or rock-paper-scissors, where unpredictability (but not randomness) takes the day.


If I may butt in:

I had no idea a single choice could occur over a period of time. — ProtagoranSocratist

Good indication that you're talking past somebody. I also consider choice to be a process, not an event. From experimentation, it seems that it is essentially made before one becomes aware of the choice having been made, but even once made, one can change one's mind.

The question is, could the person, at the time prior to stepping into the river, have decided at that time, not to step into the river — Metaphysician Undercover

I think that is more or less the question, but it is ill-phrased. I can answer either way.

Classically, if the state (of all of you) immediately prior to the point (and not the process) of decision was the same, it means the process was already arriving at this conclusion. How could it not act on that process, regardless of where you consider that mechanism to take place? If you don't mean the state at that point, then when?

For instance, given two identical states hours (minutes, seconds?) before the decision, could the two states evolve differently? Yea, sure. My example above about choosing to wear a coat today leverages that sort of 'deciding otherwise'. But that's a case of, immediately before the decision, the environment being different, despite identical states some time prior.

All that seems utterly irrelevant to one being responsible for the decision. If you choose to skip the coat today and you get uncomfortably cold when you go out, who's fault do you think that is? Physics or you? Free will doesn't seem to have anything to do with it.