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.

The assertion under question:

In natural systems like weather, decoherence tends to suppress quantum-level randomness before it can scale up meaningfully. — Truth Seeker

You’re right that quantum effects can, in principle, influence macroscopic systems, but the consensus in physics is that quantum coherence decays extremely rapidly in warm, complex environments like the atmosphere, which prevents quantum indeterminacy from meaningfully propagating to the classical scale except through special, engineered amplifiers (like photomultipliers or Geiger counters). — Truth Seeker

OK, very much yes on the rapid decay of coherence. But this does not in any way prevent changes from propagating to the larger scales in any chaotic system (such as the atmosphere). Sure, a brick wall is going to stand for decades without quantum interactions having any meaningful effect, but a wall is not a particulrly chaotic system.

Here are some references that support this:

1. Wojciech Zurek (2003). Decoherence, einselection, and the quantum origins of the classical.

Zurek explains that decoherence times for macroscopic systems at room temperature are extraordinarily short (on the order of (10^-20) seconds), meaning superpositions collapse into classical mixtures almost instantly.

2. Joos & Zeh (1985). The emergence of classical properties through interaction with the environment.

They calculate that even a dust grain in air decoheres in about (10^-31) seconds due to collisions with air molecules and photons - long before any macroscopic process could amplify quantum noise.

3. Max Tegmark (2000). Importance of quantum decoherence in brain processes.

Tegmark estimated decoherence times in the brain at (10^-13) to (10^-20) seconds, concluding that biological systems are effectively classical. The same reasoning applies (even more strongly) to meteorological systems, where temperature and particle interactions are vastly higher.

All three supporting only the first part I agreed with, yes. None of them support quantum differences propagating into macroscopic differences.

The question you need to ask is this: Given say MWI where you have all these different worlds splitting due to quantum events, how long does it take for classical differences to appear.
For the weather, this can take months.to be unrecognizably different. For a brick wall, probably decades. For a meteor hitting or missing Earth, probably millennia. For a human to choose one thing instead of another, maybe 10 minutes (a guess), and that depend on the gravity of the choice being made.
For the conception of a human, perhaps under a minute.

MWI is illustrative, but in any interpretation, specific quantum effects take about this long to cause or prevent these various macroscopic events.

In short, quantum coherence does not persist long enough ...

Coherence is not in any way required for quantum events to have an effect. Quite the opposite. Absent a measurement (collapse?) of some sort, quantum events can have no effect..

in atmospheric systems to influence large-scale weather patterns. While every individual molecular collision is, in a sense, quantum, the statistical ensemble of billions of interactions behaves deterministically according to classical thermodynamics.

Yes, but classical thermodynamics is a very chaotic system. Any difference, no matter how tiny, amplify into massive differences.

I agree that quantum improbability cannot be worked into weather prediction since there is no way to predict it, and weather prediction is done at significantly larger granularity, hardly a simulation at the atomic level. Hence it is good for a week or two at best. After that, you consult the farmer's almanac.

It is illuminating to track the weather prediction for a given day. It appears on my site 10 days hence. So save that prediction each day until the day in question arises. See how much the prediction changes as the day grows nearer. Sometimes it is fairly stable, but often it's all over the map, meaning they're practically guessing.

Exactly. I said you were "ignoring" randomness, your wording is "denying". Same thing. Just so you know, randomness exists, human denials notwithstanding. — LuckyR

Sure, it exists, but decision making structures (both machine and biological) are designed to filter out the randomness out and leverage only deterministic processes. I mean, 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.

These phenomena are qualia.

If you still doubt this — hypericin

We're going in circles. The paper is not about qualia, it is about the first person view, and Chalmers says that the hard problem boils down not to the problem of qualia (which is difficult to explain only because it is complicated in humans), but to the problem of first person view, which seems not problematic at all.

If you define “the physical” narrowly (as purely third-person measurable stuff) — Joshs

I never have. First person empirical evidence is valid in science, especially when damage occurs.
Varela’s neurophenomenology seems to fit in with this and is not an alternate theory.

Again, I'm looking for an actual theory that Chalmers might support, one that demonstrates (falsifies) the monism that they all say is impossible.

Physicist Karen Barad’s re-interpretation of the double slit experiment in quantum field theory in the direction of, but beyond Niels Bohr represents the core of her alternative to physical monism., which she calls agential realism.

OK, but again this seems to be an attempt at an interpretation (kind of like RQM but with different phrasing) of an existing theory. It doesn't falsify anything.

That's the hard problem though. The problem is how to explain consciousness in terms of properties of the 'inanimate'. — boundless

Sure, that's difficult because it is complicated, and the brain isn't going to get explained in terms of something like an algorithm. But the problem being difficult is not evidence against consciousness being derived from inanimate primitives.
Chalmers certainly doesn't have an explanation at all, which is worse than what is currently known.

So in virtue of what properties of 'non-living things' can intentionality that seems to be present in all life forms arise?

Probably because anything designed is waved away as not intentionality. I mean, a steam engine self-regulates, all without a brain, but the simple gravity-dependent device that accomplishes it is designed, so of course it doesn't count.

If the 'inanimate' is fundamental, you should expect to find an explanation on how consciousness, intentionality, life and so on came into being, not just that they come into being.

Completely wrong. Fundamentals don't first expect explanations. Explanations are for the things understood, and the things not yet understood still function despite lack of this explanation. Things fell down despite lack of explanation for billions of years. Newton explained it, and Einstein did so quite differently, but things falling down did so without ever expectation of that explanation.

In a way, neither explained it. Both expressed it mathematically in such a way that predictions could be made from that, but Newton as I recall explicitly denied that being an explanation: a reason why mass was attracted to other mass. Hence the theories are descriptive, not explanatory. I suppose it depends on whether mathematics is considered to be descriptive (mathematics as abstraction) or proscriptive (as being more fundamental than nature). The latter qualifies as an explanation, and is a significant part of why I suspect our universe supervenes on mathematics.

At least physicalism means that the 'natural' is fundamental — boundless

We seem to have different definition then. Again, I would have said that only of materialism.

In any case, however, with regards to consciousness, consciousness in a physicalist model would be considered natural.

Depends on your definition of consciousness. Some automatically define it to be a supernatural thing, meaning monism is a denial of its existence. I don't define it that way, so I'm inclined to agree with your statement.

What isn't natural in your view? — boundless

Anything part of our particular universe. Where you draw the boundary of 'our universe' is context dependent, but in general, anything part of the general quantum structure of which our spacetime is a part. So it includes say some worlds with 2 macroscopic spatial dimensions, but it doesn't include Conway's game of life.

I agree with you about the fact that mathematics doesn't depend on the universe.

Good, but being the idiot skeptic that I am, I've always had an itch about that one. What if 2+2=4 is a property of some universes (this one included), but is not objectively the case? How might we entertain that? How do you demonstrate that it isn't such a property? Regardless, if any progress is to be made, I'm willing to accept the objectivity of mathematics.

I have a different view about the relation between mathematics and the universe. For instance, I believe that mathematical truths would still be true even if the universe didn't exist.

I didn't say otherwise, so not sure how that's different. That's what it means to be independent of our universe.

It seems to me that you here are assuming that all possible 'non-magical' explanations are 'natural/physical' one.

By definition, no?

I also don't like to make the distinction between 'supernatural' and 'natural', unless one defines the terms in a precise way. Perhaps, I would define 'natural' as 'pertaining to spacetime' (so, both spacetime - or spacetimes if there is a multiverse - and whatever is 'in' it would qualify as 'natural') — boundless

OK, but that doesn't give meaning to the term. If the ghosts reported are real, then they're part of this universe, and automatically 'natural'. What would be an example of 'supernatural' then? It becomes just something that one doesn't agree with. I don't believe in ghosts, so they're supernatural. You perhaps believe in them, so they must be natural. Maybe it's pointless to even label things with that term.

Regarding the point you make about Chalmers, as I said before perhaps the 'hard problem' is better framed as an objection to all reductionist understanding of consciosuness that try to reduce it to the inanimate rather than an objection to 'physicalism' in a broad sense of the term.

Depends on what you mean by 'inanimate'. I mean, I am composed of atoms, which are 1) inanimate because atoms are essentially tiny rocks, and 2) animate because they're part of a life form.
A non-living device that experiences whatever such a device experiences would be (and very much is) declared to not be conscious precisely because the word (and 'experience' as well) is reserved for life forms. This is the word-game fallacy that I see often used in this forum (think W word).
That's like saying that creatures 'fall' to the ground, but rocks, being inanimate, do not 'fall' by definition, and instead are merely accelerated downward. Ergo, 'falling' requires a special property of matter that is only available to life.

is physical causality the same as logical causality?

Probably not, but I'd need an example of the latter, one that doesn't involve anything physical.

The definition of "magical" can only be something along the lines of:
Something that operates outside of the laws and properties of this reality.
Our understanding is irrelevant.

We don't understand how mass warps spacetime. But we don't think gravity is magic — Patterner

Hence 'magic' is a poor tool to wield. If Chalmers' 'all material having mental properties' is actually the case, then it wouldn't be magic, it would be a property of this reality. But still totally unexplained or even described since there's no current theory that supports that view. There sort of is, but nobody formally mentions it because, being a theory, it makes predictions, and those predictions likely fail, so best not to be vocal about those predictions.

Chalmers mentions the hurricane in this video:
"... from simple principles of airflow" — Patterner

The hurricane, which is somewhat understood in terms of airflow and thermodynamics (2-3 steps away from hurricane dynamics), is never described in terms of particles. But challenges to physicalism frequently request unreasonable explanations in terms of particles (again, perhaps 12 steps away). So work your way throught the 12 steps, understanding how particles make atoms, and atoms make molecules, etc. Expect each step to be expressed in terms of the prior one, and not in terms of the particles.

But what you find in all those other cases, like the hurricane, and the water wave, and so on, is complicated dynamics emerging from simple dynamics. Complicated structures emerging from simple structures. New and surprising structures. — Chalners

He admits this, but then denies, without justification, that qualia are not a complex effects emerging from simpler effects.

Kind of catching up on posts made since the 8 month dormancy.

Are we free agents or are our choices determined by variables such as genes, environments, nutrients, and experiences? — Truth Seeker

Depending on definitions, the two are not necessarily exclusive.

Not for me. I feel many choices as I'm making them. I struggle with them, looking for a reason too give one option a leg up. — Patterner

There you go. You seem to have a grasp on what choice actually is.

Technically, no, because the choice was made and we're not able to ever review it in this way. — AmadeusD

Being able to review it amounts to different initial conditions.

Theoretically, I think yes. But this involves agreeing that something billions of years ago would have to have happened differently.

Billions of years?? It would be interesting, in say MWI, so see how long it take for two worlds split from the same initial conditions to result in a different decision being made. It can be one second, but probably minutes. Maybe even days for a big decision like 'should I propose marriage to this girl?'. But billions of years? No. Your very existence, let along some decision you make, is due to quantum events at most a short time before your conception.

If hard determinism is true, then all choices are inevitable — Truth Seeker

Any determinism. That is also true under what is called soft determinism.
But as you've posted, determinism has little if anything to do with free will, or with moral responsibility. Substance dualism is a weird wrench in this debate. If there are two things, only the one in control is responsible for the actions of the body. So say if I get possessed by a demon (rabies say) and bite somebody, infecting them, am I responsible for that or is the demon? Is it fair to convict a rabid human of assault if they bite somebody? Kind of a moot point since they're going to die shortly anyway.

But I come at this from the opposite direction, it is the constraints of the hard physical world which restrict my strong free will. — Punshhh

Sure. I will to fly like superman, but damn that gravity compelling otherwise.

Take that away and I would have near absolute freedom.

Take away that and there would be no you have this freedom.

Assume the mind is not equivalent to the brain. Could you have chosen differently? You still had a set of background beliefs, a set of conditioned responses, a particular emotional state and physical state, were subject to a particular set of stimuli in your immediate environment, and you had a particular series of thoughts that concluded with the specific ice cream order that you made. Given this full context, how could you have made a different choice? — Relativist

Yes. This is why determinism is irrelevant to the free will debate.
If a supernatural entity is making your choices, then not only is determinism false, but all of natural physics is false. A whole new theory is needed, and there currently isn't one proposed.

As has been pointed out, natural physics is regularly updated, and thus the current consensus view is not 'the truth'. But despite all the updates and new discoveries, one thing stands: Physics operates under a set of rules. We're still discovering those rules, but some definitions of moral responsibility require the lack of any rules. That's not ever going to be found to be the case.

Because you're ignoring another major factor in Human Decision Making, namely randomness. — LuckyR

I pretty much deny this. All evolved decision making structures have seemed to favor deterministic primitives (such as logic gates), with no randomness, which Truth Seeker above correctly classifies as noise, something to be filtered out, not to be leveraged.

Sure, unpredictable is sometimes an advantage. Witness the erratic flight path of a moth, making it harder to catch in flight. But it uses deterministic mechanisms to achieve that unpredictability, not leveraging random processes.

Regarding Norton’s dome, I think it’s an interesting mathematical curiosity rather than a physically realistic case of indeterminism. — Truth Seeker

Classical physics is a mathematical model, which some have proposed is reversible. No physics is violated by watching the pool balls move back into the triangle with all the energy/momentum transferred to the cue ball stopped by the cue.
Norton's dome demonstrates that classical mathematics is actually not reversible, nor is it deterministic, the way that the equations seem to be at first glance.

As for the quantum–chaos connection, yes
...
In natural systems like weather, decoherence tends to suppress quantum-level randomness before it can scale up meaningfully.

You have a reference for this assertion, because I don't buy it at all. Most quantum randomness gets averaged out, sure, but each causes a completely different state of a given system, even if it's only a different location and velocity of each and every liquid molecule.

Evolution depends on quantum randomness, without which mutations would rarely occur and progress would proceed at a snails pace. There's a fine balance to be had there. Too much quantum radiation and DNA gets destroyed before it can be filtered for fitness. Too little and there's no diversity to evolve something better.

I don't know enough about it to have an opinion about it. Please tell me more about how quantum events affect the weather. Is there a book you can recommend so I can learn more about this? Thank you. — Truth Seeker

Apologies for not seeing that question for months.

There are whole books, yes. A nice (but still pop) article is this one:
https://www.space.com/chaos-theory-explainer-unpredictable-systems.html
The wiki version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect
The latter link in places talks specifically about the small initial differences being different quantum outcomes. The best known quantum amplifier is Schrodinger's cat, where a single quantum event quickly determines the fate of the cat, even if it isn't hidden in a box.

1. Determinism vs. Predictability:
Determinism doesn’t require predictability. A system can be deterministic and yet practically unpredictable due to sensitivity to initial conditions. — Truth Seeker

Even classical mechanics has been shown to be nondeterministic. Norton's dome is a great example of an effect without a cause. Nevertheless, a deterministic interpretation of physics would probably require hidden variables that determine the effect that appears uncaused.

Chaos theory actually presupposes determinism - small differences in starting conditions lead to vastly different outcomes because the system follows deterministic laws.

But it doesn't require determinism. Chaos theory applies just as well to nondeterministic interpretations of physics.

If the system were non-deterministic, the equations of chaos wouldn’t even apply.

Well, deterministic equations would not apply. How about Schrodinger's equation? That function is very chaotic, and it is deterministic only under interpretations. like MWI.

2. Quantum Amplification Is Not Evidence of Freedom:
As you already noted, even if quantum indeterminacy occasionally affects macroscopic events, randomness is not freedom. A decision influenced by quantum noise is not a “free” decision — it’s just probabilistic. It replaces deterministic necessity with stochastic chance. That doesn’t rescue libertarian free will; it only introduces randomness into causation.

Agree. So very few seem to realize this.

To me, freedom is making your own choices and not having something else do it for you. Determinism is a great tool for this, which is why almost all decision making devices utilize as much as possible deterministic mechanisms such as binary logic.

3. Quantum Interpretations and Evidence:
You’re right that there are non-deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics - such as Copenhagen, GRW, or QBism - but there are also deterministic ones: de Broglie-Bohm (pilot-wave), Many-Worlds, and superdeterministic models.

Superdeterminism is not listed as a valid interpretation of QM since it invalidates pretty much all empirical evidence. It's a bit like BiV view in that manner. The view doesn't allow one to trust any evidence.

MWI is a good example of chaotic behavior. You have all these worlds, and since weather and which creatures evolve are all chaotic functions, most of those worlds don't have you in it, or even humans. Most of those worlds don't have Earth in it. The deterministic part only says that all these possibilities must exist. There's no chance to any of them. But do they exist equally? That's a weird question to ponder.
No, I don't buy into MWI since I feel it gets some critical things wrong.

None of them are empirically distinguishable so far. Until we have direct evidence for objective indeterminacy, determinism remains a coherent and arguably simpler hypothesis (per Occam’s razor).

Of the two deterministic interpretations you mention, MWI is arguably the simplest, and DBB is probably the most complicated. This illustrates that 'deterministic' is not necessarily 'simpler'.

4. Macroscopic Decoherence:
Decoherence ensures that quantum superpositions in the brain or weather systems effectively collapse into stable classical states extremely quickly.

At least under interpretations that support collapse.

Whatever quantum noise exists gets averaged out before it can influence neural computation in any meaningful way

Yes, that what I meant by 'utilize as much as possible deterministic mechanisms'.

except in speculative scenarios, which remain unproven.

In particular, no biological quantum amplifier has been found, and such a mechanism would very much have quickly evolved if there was any useful information in that quantum noise.

Bottom line is that we pretty much agree with each other.

You seem to be arguing against a position that nobody takes. Neither Chalmers nor anyone else believe geometric PoV is mysterious. Everyone agrees that qualia is the fundamental issue. — hypericin

The title of Chalmers' paper quoted in the OP implies very much that the hard problem boils down to first vs third person, and that qualia are considered just 'many aspects' of that mystery. To requote from my OP:
"The first person is, at least to many of us, still a huge mystery. The famous "Mind-Body Problem," in these enlightened materialist days, reduces to nothing but the question "What is the first person, and how is it possible?". There are many aspects to the first-person mystery. The first-person view of the mental encompasses phenomena which seem to resist any explanation from the third person."

In asking 'what is the first person?', he seems to be talking about something less trivial than what we called a geometric point of view, but I cannot identify what else there is to it.

Regarding the distinction between 'living beings' and AI — boundless

That's a false dichotomy. Something can be all three (living, artificial, and/or intelligent), none, or any one or two of them.

[/quote]In virtue of what properties of the inanimate aspects of reality can consciousness (with its 'first-person perspective', 'qualia' etc) arise?[/quote]I can't even answer that about living things. I imagine the machines will find their own way of doing it and not let humans attempt to tell them how. That's how it's always worked.

I think that the undeniable existence of mathematical truths also points to something beyond 'physicalism'*.

Beyond materialism you perhaps mean. Physicalism/naturalism doesn't assert that all is physical/natural. Materialism does. That seems the primary difference between the two.
Of course I wouldn't list mathematics as being 'something else', but rather a foundation for our physical. But that's just me. Physicalism itself makes no such suggestion.
PS: Never say 'undeniable'. There's plenty that deny that mathematical truths are something that 'exists'. My personal opinion is that such truths exist no less than does our universe, but indeed is in no way dependent on our universe.

That there are an infinite number of primes seems to be something that is independent from human knowledge — boundless

Agree, but there are those that define mathematics as a human abstraction, in which case it wouldn't be independent of human knowledge. I distinguish mathematics from 'knowledge of mathematics', putting the two on nearly opposite ends of my supervention hierarchy.

Regarding the 'magic' thing, then, it seems to me that the criterion you give about 'not being magical' is something like being 'totally understandable', something that is not too dissimilar to the ancient notion of 'intelligibility'. — boundless

Let's reword that as not being a function of something understandable. The basic particle behavior of electrons and such are pretty well understood, but we're just beginning to scratch the surface of understanding of what goes on in a star, especially when it transitions. That current lack of understanding does not imply that astronomers consider stellar evolution to be a supernatural process. I mean, they used to think the gods carted the stars across the sky each night, which actually is a supernatural proposal.
Actual proposal of magic is an assertion that current ideas have been demonstrated incapable of explaining some phenomenon, such as the rotation curve of galaxies. Dark matter had to be invented to explain that, and there are those that still won't accept dark matter theory. Pretty hard to find any of it in a lab, right? So there are alternate theories(e.g. MoND), but none predict as well as dark matter theory. Key there is 'theory'. Without one of those, it's still just magic.
If one dares to promote Chalmers' ideas to the level of theory, it does make predictions, and it fails them. So proponents tend to not escalate their ideas to that level.

It doesn't seem possible IMO to explain in purely physical terms why from "Socrates is a man" and "men are mortal" that "Socrates is mortal" — boundless

That's mathematics, not physics, even if the nouns in those statements happen to have physical meaning. They could be replaced by X Y Z and the logical meaning would stand unaltered.

Well this is then just a speculation about technological capability, which I referred to conditionally. — Apustimelogist

Just the manufacture seems to defy any tech. Can't say 3D print a squirrel, finish, and then 'turn it on'. Or can you? Best I could come up with is a frog, printed totally frozen. When finished, thaw it out. Frogs/turtles can deal with that. Again, I am mostly agreeing with your side of the discussion with Joshs.

The point was that I don't believe there is anything in the field of neuroscience or A.I. that produces a doubt about the idea that we will be able to keep continuing to see what brains do as instantiated entirely in physical interactions of components as opposed to some additional mental woo. — Apustimelogist

As already noted, that was put rather well. There are claims to the contrary, but they seem to amount to no more than assertions. None of the claims seem backed.

The simpler model is proven wrong all the time. Put more accurately, scientific paradigms are replaced by different ones all the time. — Joshs

Agree. Science is never complete, and there are very much current known holes, such as the lack of a unified field theory. These continuous updates to the consensus view doesn't stop that view from being the simpler model. I am looking for a falsification specifically of physical monism, hard to do without any competing theories.

Funny that some declared physics to be complete at some point, with the only work remaining being working out some constants to greater precision. That was uttered famously by Lord Kelvin, shortly before the quantum/relativity revolution that tore classical physics to pieces, never to recover.
So yes, there very well could arise some theory of mental properties of matter, but at this time there isn't one at all, and much worse, no need for one has been demonstrated.

For instance, certain embodied enactivist approaches to the brain , such as Francisco Varela’s neurophenomenology, sweepingly rethink this relation.

Interesting reference. Seems perhaps to be a new methodology and not necessarily something that falsifies any particular philosophical stance. Maybe you could point out some key quotes that I could find in my initial scan of some of the references to this.

So, on its own terms, what you call the ‘simple’ empirical model can’t be defined in some static, ahistorical way as third person physicalism as opposed to subjective feeling.

Scientific naturalism does not preclude subjective evidence. I don't know what 'third person physicalism' is, as distinct from physicalism. 'Third person' refers to how any view might be described, but it says nothing about what the view proposes.

As soon as we start thinking that we have to ‘invent’ a body and an environment for a device we separately invent

Sorry, but my proposal did not separate anything like you suggest. There is one system with a boundary, all simulated, something that can be achieved in principle. There would be a real person in a real room, and a simulation of same. Thing is to see if either can figure out which he is.

The test requires a known state of the real subject, and that pushes the limits of 'in principle' perhaps a bit too far. Such a state in sufficient precision is prevented per Heisenberg. So much for my falsification test of physicalism. Better to go long-run and simulate a human from say a zygote, but then there's no real person with whom experience can be compared.

... ignore the fact that we ourselves were not first invented and then placed in a body ...

What does it even syntactically mean for X to be placed in X?

What I mean is that we can’t start with inorganic parts that we understand in terms of already fixed properties ( which would appear to be intrinsic to how we define the inorganic) and then design self-organizing capacities around these parts. — Joshs

Why not? With or without the design part... Designing it likely omits most of those properties since they serve little purpose to the designer.

Granted, "described" might not be the best word. Maybe it's wrong wording to say the movement of air particles in a room is a description of the room's heat and pressure. — Patterner

That's like one step away. Yes, heat is simple and can pretty much be described that way. From atoms to consciousness is about 12 steps away (my quote, and no, I didn't count). I gave the example of trying to explain stellar dynamics in terms of particle interactions.

The title of this topic is about the first/third person divide, which Chalmers asserts to be fundamental to said 'hard problem', but it isn't. The qualia is what's hard. — noAxioms


This feels like a strange misunderstanding. Qualia are intrinsically first person. When people talk about first person experience being mysterious, they are talking about qualia, not mere geometric POV. — hypericin

I think that's what I said. It makes qualia the fundamental issue, not first person, which is, as you call it, mere geometric PoV.

This especially raises my eyebrows, because I remember a time you thought you were a p zombie!

Kind of still do, but claiming to be a p-zombie opens myself to the possibility that some others are not, and if so, that all of say quantum theory is wrong, or at least grossly incomplete.

No, I cannot describe thoughts in terms of neurons any more than I can describe a network file server in terms of electrons tunneling through the base potential of transistors. It's about 12 levels of detail removed from where it should be. — noAxioms

Ok, wrong word. You agreed they are the same thing. But they can't be described as the same thing. — Patterner

Not sure what two things are the same here, but I don't think I said that two different things are the same thing. Certainly not in that quote.

I am trying to understand your position.

My position is simply that nobody has ever demonstrated the simpler model wrong. Plenty (yourself included) reject that simplicity, which is your choice. But the physical view hasn't been falsified, and there is no current alternative theory of physics that allows what you're proposing. You'd think somebody would have come up with one if such a view was actually being taken seriously by the scientific community.

I really don't understand what you are going on about. A brain is a physical object. In principal, you can build a brain that does all the things brains do from scratch if you had the technological capabilities. — Apustimelogist

Given their trouble even producing a manufactured cell from scratch (a designed one, not a reproduction of abiogenesis, which is unlikely to be done), you wonder if it can even be done in principle. Certainly a brain would not be operational. It needs a being to be in, and that being needs an environment, hence my suggestion of a simulation of <a person in a small room>. The other thing questionably doable is the scanning phase, to somehow take a full snapshot of a living thing, enough info to, in principle, reproduce it. Do they have a simulation of a living cell? Are we even that far yet?

Anyway, in general, I agree with your stance, even if perhaps not with what cannot be done even in principle.

You’re missing the point. Even taking into account all of the biological lineages which become extinct, what it means to be a living system is to be self-organizing, and this self-organization is dynamic. — Joshs

Yea, which is why mechanical devices are not yet living things. It can happen. Whether it will or not is an open question at this point. A device being living is not a requirement for it to think or to have a point of view.

This means that to continue existing as that creature from moment to moment is to make changes in itself that maintain the normative self-consistency of its functioning in its environment while at the same time adapting and accommodating itself to the always new features of its environment.

You mean like putting on a coat when winter comes? What does this have to do with the topic again? The definition of 'life' comes up only because you're asserting that life seems to have access to a kind of physics that the same matter not currently part of a lifeform does not.

The problem is, no third person explanation can arrive at first person experience. — hypericin

I guess I didn't see much difference between a description and an explanation. My point was that no anything will arrive at the 'experience' part of it.
Chalmers' explanation certainly doesn't arrive at first person experience. "A sauce is needed" is no more an explanation than it not being needed.

And I disagree. First person (the PoV part, not the human qualia associated with 'experience') is trivial. The experience part (qualia and such) is 'what it is like', and that part cannot be known about something else, especially even when it's not even complex. The first person part seems trivial, and entire articles are nevertheless written suggesting otherwise, but seemingly without identifying exactly what's problematic about it.

The title of this topic is about the first/third person divide, which Chalmers asserts to be fundamental to said 'hard problem', but it isn't. The qualia is what's hard. I can't know what it's like to be a bat, but even a rock has a first person PoV, even if it utterly lacks the ability to actually view anything.

The confidence you have in the power of algorithms seems to arise from anunderlying assumption that every natural process is 'algorithmic'. — boundless

Not sure what you mean by that, but I can perhaps say that every natural process can in principle be simulated via an algorithmic device that has sufficient time and memory. (Speed/power is not one of the requirements). This assumes a form of physicalism, yes, and the statement would likely be false if that was not assumed.

I am not sure that they can ever be able to give us a completely accurate model/simulation of all processes.

I don't think a classical simulation can be done of something not classical, such as a quantum computer. Heck, even grass has been shown to be utilizing quantum computation, so what does that do to my claim that grass can be simulated?

But for me my ... ability to choose ... [does] not seem to be easily explainable in terms of algorithms — boundless

You must have an incredibly different notion of 'choice' when there's some many trivial devices that make them every second. It's not hard at all.
But his seems illustrative of my point. You finding something as trivial as choice to be physically inexplicable is likely due to very related reasons why you might find something as trivial as a first person point of view similarly inexplicable. You're already presuming something other than physicalism under which these things are trivial.

For instance, if we were talking in the 14th century and you claimed that 'atoms' exist and 'somehow' interact with forces that we do not know to form the visible objects, would be this 'magic' (of course, you have to imagine yourself as having the scientific knowledge of the time)?

Yes, that would qualify as magic. It's a guess, and a lucky one. Elements as distinct from compounds was still hundreds of years away, so 'atom' meant just 'tiny indivisible bit' and there were no known examples of one, even if some substances known at the time happened to be pure elements. BTW, 'atom' no longer implies 'tiny indivisible bit'. The word unfortunately stuck to a quanta of a specific element and not to whatever is currently considered to be an indivisible component of matter.

Am I wrong to say that, however, that the operations of these 'thinking machines' are completely explainable in terms of algorithms? — boundless

Probably not so. The algorithms developed by say alphaZero have defied explanation. Nobody knows how they work. That isn't an assertion that the operations are not the result of deterministic processes. All the same things can be said of humans.

Is there something it's like to be a fly evading a swat? How do we know? How could we ever find out? Isn't the inability to answer those questions a "hard problem"? — RogueAI

From observation, the answer to that question is yes or no depending on if it supports my personal conclusions on the matter. Hence assertions of there perhaps being something it is like to be the fly, but not something it is like to be an autonymous drone doing somewhat the same things and more.

This is what Google AI says about the release of neurotransmitters: — Patterner

Cool level of detail. I notice no influence from say chemicals in the blood stream. It sounds all very like logic gates. A similar breakdown of transistor operation could be made, which are sometimes more binary and less analog, but still either could be implemented via the components of the other. The chemical influences would be harder to mimic with transistors and would likely play a role only at higher levels.

I also notice nowhere in those 6 steps any kind of mental properties of matter playing any sort of role that they somehow are forbidden from doing in transistors. Were that the case, then my claim of either being capable of being implemented by the components of the other would be false. This lack of external mental influence (or at least the lack of a theory suggesting such) is strong evidence for the physicalist stance.

You say all of this, along with whatever other processes are taking place, is a description of not only things like receiving sensory input and distinguishing wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, and receptors on my tongue distinguishing molecules that have made contact, but also seeing the color red, and tasting the sweetness of sugar. More than that, it's a description of my thoughts.

No, I cannot describe thoughts in terms of neurons any more than I can describe a network file server in terms of electrons tunneling through the base potential of transistors. It's about 12 levels of detail removed from where it should be. Your incredulity is showing.

No matter how apparently flexible its behavior , that flexibility will always be framed and and limited to the model of thinking that dates to the time that the product is released to the market. — Joshs

No so for devices that find their own models of thinking.

As soon as it is released, it already is on the way to obsolescence

So similar to almost every creature. Name a multicelled creature they have a fossil of that exists today. I can't think of one. They're all obsolete. A rare fossil might have some living descendants today (I can think of no examples), but the descendant is a newer model, not the same species.

The singularity is defined as the point at which human engineers play little role in the evolution of machine thinking. Humans will also cease being necessary in their manufacturing process, and I suspect the trend of humans handing more and more of their tasks to machines will continue to the point that the singularity will be welcomed.

It will be interesting to see what role evolution plays in that context, where changes are deliberate, but selection is still natural. Also, it may not necessarily be many machines in competition for resources instead of meany ideas competing for being 'the machine'.

The hard problem is Q2 and it is legitimate for science to want to know how a neural net can have experiences. — Mijin

I can accept that.'

OK. So what is 'physical' in your view? IIRC you also agree that physical properties are relational, i.e. they describe how a given physical object relate to/interact with other physical objects. — boundless

It means that all energy and particles and whatnot obey physical law, which yes, pretty much describes relations. That's circular, and thus poor. It asserts that this description is closed, not interfered with by entities not considered physical. That's also a weak statement since if it was ever shown that matter had mental properties, those properties would become natural properties, and thus part of physicalism.
So I guess 'things interact according to the standard model' is about as close as I can get. This whole first/third person thing seems a classical problem, not requiring anything fancy like quantum or relativity theory, even if say chemistry would never work without the underlying mechanisms. A classical simulation of a neural network (with chemistry) would be enough. No need to simulate down to the molecular or even quantum precision.

'Scientistic physicalism' is also inconsistent IMO because, after all, that there is a physical world is not something we discover by doing science.

That's a philosophical stance, I agree.

Other than 'consciousness' I also believe in the existence of other things that are 'real' but not 'physical'. I am thinking, for instance, of mathematical truths.

OK. Not being a realist, I would query what you might mean by that. I suspect (proof would be nice) that mathematical truths are objectively true, and the structure that includes our universe supervenes on those truths. It being true implying that it's real depends on one's definition of 'real', and I find it easier not to worry about that arbitrary designation.

But it does sometimes clarify at least a meaning that 'physical' can have. For instance, if by matter one means "whatever object exists in a given location of space in a given time", would you agree that this is also what you mean by 'physical'?

Is space and time not physical then? Neither meets your criteria of 'object', but I think I would include them under 'physicalism'. Not all universes have them, and those might have very different definitions of what is physical or material.

Has consciousness a 'definite location' in space, for instance? — boundless

Me considering that to be a process of material that has a location, it seems reasonably contained thus, yes. Not a point mind you, but similarly a rock occupies a region of space and time.

IMHO you're thinking in rigid categories. Either one is a 'physicalist/naturalist' or one accepts 'magic'.

Right.' Science cannot make progress with an attitude like that. Most magic is replaced by natural explanations, but occasionally 'magic' explanations are adopted as part of naturalism. I gave a couple examples of that.
By magic, I mean an explanation that just says something unknown accounts for the observation, never an actual theory about how this alternate explanation might work. To my knowledge, there is no theory anywhere of matter having mental properties, and how it interacts with physical matter in any way. The lack of that is what puts it in the magic category.

Maybe there is something that is not 'natural'. Again, mathematical truths seem to me exactly an example of something that is not natural and yet real.

That seems to be like saying atoms are not real because they're not made of rocks.

One would stretch too much the meaning of 'natural/physical' to also include mathematical truths in it. — boundless

I agree, since those truths hold hopefully in any universe, but our natural laws only work in this one (and similar ones).

why you think that consciousness is 'physical'?

I've seen no evidence from anybody that physical interactions cannot account for it. Sure, it's complex and we don't know how it works. But that it cannot work? That's never been demonstrated.

At the end of the day all LLMs are very complex computers and they operate according to algorithms (programmed by us) just like mechanical calculators. — boundless

I can argue that people also are this, programmed by ancestors and the natural selection that chose them. The best thinking machines use similar mechanisms to find their own best algorithms, not any algorithm the programmer put there. LLM is indeed not an example of this.

I can see how electrons moving from atom to atom is electricity.
I can see how the movement of air molecules is heat and pressure.
I can see how the movement of an object is force: F=ma.
I can see how a fluid, whether liquid or gas, flowing around an object creates lift, which is a factor in flight.

All of those examples are physical activities
I don't see how self-awareness is a physical activity — Patterner

You understand the former because those are quite trivial interactions. Then you jump to something with complexity beyond the current state of science. But not understanding how something works is not any sort of evidence that it isn't still a physical process.

The game playing machine beats everybody at Go. Nobody, not even its creators, know how it works. It wasn't taught any strategy, only the rules. It essentially uses unnatural selection to evolve an algorithm that beats all opponents. That evolved (hard deterministic) algorithm is what nobody understands, even if they look at the entire data map. But nobody concludes that it suddenly gets access to magic. Such a conclusion comes with an obvious falsification test.

Descartes asks "What can I know with certainty?" while Husserl asks "How does anything come to be given to consciousness at all?"​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ — Joshs

Not only am I not certain about what Descartes knows with certainty, but I actually find the conclusion unlikely. Of course I have access to science that he doesn't.
As for 'come to be given to ...", that seems the conclusion is already drawn, and he's trying to rationalize how that might work.

from something which is Turing complete: i.e. they can compute anything in principle. — Apustimelogist

Something Turing complete can compute anything a Turing machine can, which is a lot, but not anything. Technically nothing is Turing complete since a Turing machine has infinite data on which to operate.
Such machines are a model of capability, but not in any way a model of efficiency. Nobody makes one to get any actual work done, but it's wicked interesting to make one utilizing nonstandard components like train tracks.

As Stephen Wolfram notes: “The most powerful AI might not be programmed; it might be cultivated, like a garden of interacting dynamical systems.”​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ — Joshs

I like that quote.

Obviously, to artificially recreate a human brain to acceptable approximation, you need to construct this computational system with the kinds of inputs, kinds of architectures, capabilities, whatever, that a human does. — Apustimelogist

Were I to simulate a human, I'd probably not give it inputs at all. Almost all simulations I've run do it stand-alone with no input at all. Logged output for later analysis, but that doesn't affect the simulation. Of course this means your simulated person needs to be in a small environment, also simulated.

I will say bluntly that no machine we invent will do what we do, which is to think.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ — Joshs

Noted. How very well justified. Your quote is about LLMs which are mildly pimped out search engines. Compare that do devices which actually appear to think and to innovate. What do you call it if you refuse to apply the term 'think' to what it's doing?

The quote goes on to label the devices as tools. True now, but not true for long. I am arguably a tool since I spent years as a tool to make money for my employer. Am I just a model then?

Postmodern philosophy has become like Big Pharma, in that the latter creates ailments to sustain medicinal inventions while the former creates scenarios bordering on superfluous overreach — Mww

Nice analogy. It explains Chalmers' motivation for creating a problem where there really isn't one.

The question is how the brain can have experiences at all, and right now we don't have any model for that. — Mijin

Sure we do. Q3 is easy. The ball-catching robot was one. A fly evading a swat is another. If one is searching for a model, you start simple and work your way up to something as complex as how our experience works.
You can claim that either is an automaton, but then you need a clear definition of what distinguishes an automaton from a sufficiently complex one.

My simulation example would demonstrate experience, but it wouldn't tell anything how it works. Only that it does. Nothing would know what it's like to be a bat except the simulated bat.

If you put your hand on a hot stove, we already understand very well which nerves get activated, which pain centers of the brain light up etc. What we don't understand is where the unpleasant feeling comes from.

But the easy part you describe is Q3, Chalmers' hard problem. Understanding where the feelings come from is indeed difficult, but being a Q2 question, open to science. Both are questions with third person answers. Only Q1 has a first person answer, which cannot be conveyed with third person language.
Also, part of 'certain parts of the brain lighting up' is the unpleasantness doing its thing, not just a direct stimulation due to signals coming in from some injury. And then there's the awareness of the unpleasantness and so forth. That lights up as well.

Now, in my view, subjective experience is a hard problem because it doesn't even appear as though an explanation is possible.

That depends on what criteria you place on an explanation being satisfactory. If it gets to the point of answering Q1, then yea, it's not going to be possible.

I mean really, what designates one experience as negative and another not? Different chemicals generated perhaps? Dopamine for instance plays a significant role in positive feedback, even if it is subtle enough not to be consciously noticed. A negative chemical could be called nope-amine, but clearly it can't be subtle for dire situations. The negative experience is not what pulls your hand back from the fire. The unpleasantness is a slow dressing on top of what is actually quite a fast reaction. Pain itself might not necessarily be itself qualia, but the experience of it is. So something crude (our fly) would react to injury but lack the complexity to experience the pointless unpleasantness.

Now what have I done? I said that the fly reacts to motion, and I called that consciousness, but then I say the fly detects damage but perhaps doesn't 'experience' that as pain. I'm being inconsistent due perhaps to loose definitions. Perhaps consciousness should be reserved for the higher functioning creatures that add that layer of awareness of these otherwise automatic reaction mechanicsms. Neither the fly nor the ball-catching robot has that. In this sense, my defense of today's machines not having consciousness is wrong. It would have to be programmed in, or evolved in. The latter presumes a machine that is capable of mutation and selection.
All that aside, both the fly and the robot have first person experience, even if the qualia we want isn't there. And per the OP Chalmers quote, "The famous "Mind-Body Problem," ... reduces to nothing but the question "What is the first person, and how is it possible?""

This is all amateur speculation of course. Would value your critique of my naive musings.

Frankly, I think you're acknowledging that it is a difficult problem, but are reluctant to use the word "hard" because you don't want to climb down. — Mijin

I call Chalmers' problem 'hard' because it's his phrase, and his problem is Q3. I call your Q2 problem 'difficult' because it actually is that, even if I think Q3 isn't difficult at all unless unreasonable assumptions are made.

I'm not using [self] that way. — noAxioms
To what else could first-person perspective belong? — Mww

I shy away from the term 'self'. While it can be a synonym for the thing in question, the use of it often generates an implication of separateness (me, and myself), and also identity, something that makes a system state the same system as some state say an hour ago. This identity (of even a rock for that matter) has incredible pragmatic utility, but under scrutiny, it requires classicality that has been proven incorrect, and thus doesn't hold up to rational analysis. The subject of personal identity deserves its own topic and I'd rather not delve into it here.

Ok but notice that in most forms of physicalism that I am aware of, there is a tendency to reduce all reality to the 'physical' and the 'physical' is taken to mean "what can be know[n], in principle, by science" — boundless

That bothers me since it contradicts physicalism since there can be physical things that cannot be known, even in principle. Science cannot render to a non-bat, even in principle, what it's like to be a bat. So I would prefer a different definition.

(IIRC in another discussion we preferred 'materialism' to denote such views).

Materialism typically carries a premise that material is fundamental, hence my reluctance to use the term.

Still, however, I believe that any view in which 'consciousness' emerges from something else has a conceptual gap in explaining how consciousness 'came into being' in the first place. — boundless

People have also questioned about how eyes came into being, as perhaps an argument for ID. ID, like dualism, posits magic for the gaps, but different magic, where 'magic is anything outside of naturalism. Problem is, anytime some new magic is accepted, it becomes by definition part of naturalism. Hypnosis is about as good an example as I can come up with. Meteorites is another. Science for a long time rejected the possibility of rocks falling from the sky. They're part of naturalism now.

The content of my thoughts perhaps can become public. But my experience of thinking those thoughts remains private. — boundless

Agree.

The "first person" part is not a mystery — Patterner

Chalmers says otherwise, per the quote in italics in my reply to Mijin above. But I agree with you. I don't find that part problematic at all.

It seems to meet you are saying brain states and conscious events are the same thing. So the arrangements of all the particles of the brain, which are constantly changing, and can only change according to the laws of physics that govern their interactions, ARE my experience of seeing red; feeling pain; thinking of something that doesn't exist, and going through everything to make it come into being; thinking of something that can't exist; on and on. It is even the case that the progressions of brain states are the very thoughts of thinking about themselves.

Is that how you see things?

I'm willing to accept all that without edit. A few asterisks perhaps, but still yes.

They are subjective constructions, abstractions, idealizations which result from our taking our own perspectivally changing experience, comparing it with that of others — Joshs

How can you compare your experience to that of others if their experience is not available to you?

First person questions are not about what is the case, what the objective facts are.

Funny, but 'cogito ergo sum' is pitched as a first person analysis concluding an objective fact. I personally don't buy that conclusion at all, but that's me not being a realist.

It seems that people are talking about many different issues.
Q1: What is the subjective experience of red? More to the point, what is something else's subjective experience of red? What is that like?
Q2 How does the experience of red (or any qualia) work? This seems to be a third person question, open to science.
Q3 Why is there subjective experience at all? Why is there something it is like to be something? (per proponents: apparently not anything, but just some things)

Q1 is illustrated by Mary's room. She knows Q2 and Q3. She's somehow a total expert on how it works, and she has subjective experience, just not of red. So she doesn't know what it's like to experience red until the experience actually occurs. She cannot, but others seem to assert otherwise.

'The hard problem' as described by Chalmers seems to be Q3, but I don't find that one hard at all. Call it being flippant if you want, but nobody, including Chalmers, seems capable of demonstrating what the actual problem is. The point of this topic is to have somebody inform me what I'm missing, what is so mysterious.

I purely want to understand how the brain does what it does, and when it comes to experiencing "green" or whatever, it's the most unfathomable of brain processes right now. — Mijin

OK, but that seems to be a Q2 problem, a very hard problem indeed, but not the hard problem.

Pain is a loaded word. Something far from being human (a tree?) might experience pain very differently than does a mammal. Should the same word still be used? Depends how it's defined I guess.

If I make an AI how can I know if it feels pain or not? And so on.

'AI' implies intelligence, and most would agree that significant intelligence isn't required to experience pain. So how does a frog experience it? That must be a simpler problem, but it also might be a significantly different experience compared to us.

AI pain is different to human pain. I mean, probably, sure, but there's no model or deeper breakdown that that supposition is coming from.

Quite right. Q2 is hard indeed. And said definition is needed.

2) Just shrug that it couldn't be any other way e.g. About whether we can know what another person experiences.

Wrong problem again. That's Q1, and what I'm shrugging off is Q3 because I need to see an actual problem before I can answer better than with a dismissal.

Back in the late 80's we gave this robot (a repurposed automotive welding robot, bolted to the floor) some eyes and the vision processor that our company sold. It was hardly AI. We got the thing to catch balls thrown at it. It can't do that without experience, but it very much can do it without intelligence. AI was a long way off back then. To the robot (the moving parts, plus the cameras and processors, off to the side), if that experience wasn't first person, what was it?

In a way, the 'hard problem' is IMO a form of a more general problem that arises when it is assumed that one can have a complete knowledge of anything by purely empirical means. — boundless

While (almost?) everybody agrees that such knowledge cannot be had by any means, I don't think that makes it an actual problem. Certainly nobody has a solution that yields that knowledge. If it (Q1) is declared to be a problem, then nobody claims that any view would solve it.

In the case of consciousness, there is the direct experience of 'privateness' of one's own experience that instead seems a 'undeniable fact' common to all instances of subjective experiences. Its presence doesn't seem to depend on the content of a given experience, but this 'privateness' seems a precondition to any experience.

Not sure about that. One can put on one of those neuralink hats and your thoughts become public to a point. The privateness is frequently a property of, but not a necessity of consciousness.

In the case of Dennett, his misunderstanding is evident when he believes that Mary the colour scientist can learn the meaning of red through a purely theoretical understanding. — sime

What the heck is the meaning of red? This wording suggests something other than the experience of red, which is what Mary is about.
Dennett is perhaps why I put the word 'almost?' up above.

In the case of Chalmer, (or perhaps we should say "the early Chalmer"), his misunderstanding is evident in his belief in a hard problem. Chalmers was correct to understand that first-person awareness isn't reducible to physical concepts, but wrong to think of this as a problem.

This all sounds a lot like you're agreeing with me.

These distinct uses of the same flag (i.e uses of the same lexicon) are not reducible to each other and the resulting linguistic activities are incommmensurable yet correlated in a non-public way that varies with each language user. This dual usage of language gives rise to predicate dualism, which the hard problem mistakes for a substance or property dualism.

And this analogy is helpful, thanks.

So it seems difficult to see how any system, if it experiences at all, can experience anything but itself. That makes first-person experience not mysterious at all. — noAxioms

The mystery is how it experiences at all. — Patterner

OK, but experience seems almost by definition first person, so my comment stands.

Why should bioelectric activity traveling aling neurons, neurotransmitters jumping synapses, etc., be conscious?

You're attempting to ask the correct question. Few are doing that, so I appreciate this. Is it the activity that is conscious, or the system implementing the activity that is? I think the latter. 'why should ...'? Because it was a more fit arrangement than otherwise.
The ball-catching robot described above is an example with orders of magnitude less complexity. There are those that say that such a system cannot be conscious since it is implemented with logic gates and such, but 1) so are you, and 2) it can't do what it does without it, unless one defines 'conscious' in some athropomorphic biased way. That example illustrates why I find the problem not hard at all. I don't have that bias baggage.

Regarding 1st and 3rd person, there is no amount of information and knowledge that can make me have your experience. Even if we experience the exact same event, at the exact same time, from the exact same view (impossible for some events, though something like a sound introduced into identical sense-depravation tanks might be as good as), I cannot have your experience. Because there's something about subjective experience other than all the physical facts.

Agree with all that. This relates to Q1 above, not the hard problem (Q3).

Why doesn’t all this information-processing go on “in the dark”, free of any inner feel?

I find that impossible. It's like asking how processing can go on without the processing. The question makes sense if there's two things, the processor and the experiencer (of probably the process, but not necessarily), but not even property dualism presumes that.

And in The Conscious Mind, [Chalmers] writes:
Why should there be conscious experience at all?

For one, it makes finding food a lot easier than a lack of it, but then Chalmers presumes something lacking it can still somehow do that, which I find contradictory. The reasoning falls apart if it isn't circular.

Why should it be that consciousness seems to be so tightly correlated with activity that is utterly different in nature than conscious experience? — Donald Hoffman

Different in language used to describe it. I see no evidence of actual difference in nature.

Thanks for the quotes. I didn't want to comment on them all.

My position is simply that when it comes to subjective experience there remains a large explanatory gap; questions we cannot answer and would like to, with actual practical implications. — Mijin

I guess I had hoped somebody (the article perhaps) would actually identify those questions and in particular, how physicalism fails in a way that their alternative does not.
Their view certainly doesn't let me know what it's like (for a bat) to be a bat, so that is not a problem that is solved by anybody, and isn't ever going to be.
I did post a crude physical explanation and nobody tore it apart. I'm sure it is rejected, but I don't know why. Surely their arguments are stronger than mere incredulity, and nobody explains how their alternate explanation works in any detail close to what's known about the physical explanation.

A robot currently doesn't feel biological pain because it isn't particularly fit. That just isn't one of its current requirements. Such qualia is put there by evolution, and robot fitness has never been a design goal. Given them actually being selected for fitness, systems with damage avoidance processing would be more fit than ones without it.

I think noAxioms, because you've started this thread from a position of "I don't know why there's all the fuss about...", you're responding to the problems and questions somewhat flippantly.

True, I am. I don't know what the unanswerable questions are, and how these alternatives answer them instead of just hide them behind a dark curtain.

Either with your best guess -- which is meaningless here, if the conclusion is not coming from a specific model or description it's not a solution, and we have no reason to think it's right.

There's always Occam's razor. An explanation without a new never-witnessed fundamental is more like than one that posits something. A new entity (dark matter for instance) requires a real problem that isn't solved without the new thing. And they've tried with existing methods. I picked dark matter because it's still never really been proved, but it seemed simpler than altering the basic laws at large scales.

This is backwards. The input is not inherently negative; it's just data. — Mijin

Right. I worded that wrong. The entity which interprets that data as negative is likely more fit than one that doesn't.

If someone were to peel off your skin, it's not a choice of language that you call that a negative experience

It very much is such a choice. There are mechanical devices, not necessarily AI, that detect damage and take measures to limit it. There are many that assert that no mechanical device can feel pain, by definition. This is part of my issue with argument-by-dictionary.

-- the brain somehow generates an extremely unpleasant experience using a mechanism that as yet we don't understand.

But we know why the brain evolved to interpret the experience as unpleasant. How it accomplished that seems to be a matter of detail that is being worked out, and that some know far better than I. Chalmers on the other hand doesn't even begin to offer an understanding about how his solution does it. He just asserts it happens elsewise, if not elsewhere.
His whole paper seems merely speculative, despite its claim to be demonstrative.

it wouldn't rule out that we can imagine another primary color independent of stimulus.

Interesting assertion. I can't do it, but I agree that I cannot prove that it cannot be done.

Pretty easy to make an AI that chooses to use expressions like "Owie! That's the worst pain ever" in response to the user issuing the command "feel pain". So am I now guilty of inflicting great suffering?

Illustrating that we need rigorous generic (not bio-centric) definitions of the words before we can decide if something 'feels' 'pain'.

You see no problem that’s hard because you don’t believe the methods and modes of description (the various models of material causality mentioned so far in this discussion) handed down from the empirical sciences are lacking or insufficient with regard to the explanation of any natural phenomenon, including first person awareness. — Joshs

Yea, pretty much. My explanation doesn't leverage bleeding edge state of science. Somebody 100 years ago probably could have written it. I'm not a great historian when it comes to introspective psychology.

I believe the most promising approaches show that , while one can apply the methods you recommend to the understanding of first person awareness

What methods exactly?
I described at least one falsification test for both sides, one involving a full simulation, and the other searching for where a mental property causes a physical effect, and a physical structure evolved to be particularly sensitive to that effect with no physical cause.

However, [third person accounts] cannot capture the full richness or specificity of any individual’s lived experiencing.

True of any view.

It's really only substance dualists who think consciousness is a 'separate thing' — bert1

Point taken, and neither Chalmers nor Nagel really fall into that category, and thus the ancient concept of a persistent 'spirit' (a thing) seems not to apply to their arguments.

First-person is a euphemism for self — Mww

I'm not using it that way.
I personally cannot find a self-consistent definition of self that doesn't contradict modern science. I consider it to be a very pragmatic concept, but still an illusion.

What Chalmers meant by this, which you point out correctly is the gist of the whole endeavor, is that the brain, which is physical, made of matter, can produce awareness or consciousness, which is non-physical. — L'éléphant

Why is that non-physical? It seem valid to consider a physical process (combustion of a physical candle say) to be physical. I'm trying to drive at the logic that leads to this conclusion. I am quite aware of the conclusion, even if not particularly aware of the details of it, which varies from one philosopher to the next.

The brain is viewable, the consciousness is not, to put it crudely.
...
Consciousness affects the brain and the brain affects consciousness.

Again, all true of both views.

If you believe that consciousness is non-physical, then you agree with Chalmers and the task now is to explain why there's a connection between the material and the non-material.

Not why, but where there's a connection. Sort of a blue-tooth receiver, except blue-tooth reception has a physical cause.

The hard problem is explaining the bridge between the two.

That's only hard if there's two things needing a bridge between them.

The so-called “problem” only arises if you think consciousness is a thing-in-itself, via divorcing mind from body, rather than a function of life. — DifferentiatingEgg

No, there is a hard problem. If you were to assemble a human being piece by piece from its (unconscious) parts, why would an inner perspective emerge at some point? — SolarWind

I agree in part with DEgg. I suspect that more often than not, the conclusion of a separate thing is begged at the start and rationalized from there. I don't in any way agree that it is only a function of life, but several would disagree with that.
As for assembly of a complex biological thing, you can't really do that. Such a thing cannot be in a partially assembled state, finished, then 'switched on' so to speak. There are no examples of that. On the other hand, a living primitive human does not experience, but that emerges slowly as it develops the complexity, processing ability, and memory required for it.

There are the four forces, and they interact with each other, so how could something like that happen? — SolarWind

In such a debate, one also cannot beg physicalism. Still, that model is the simpler one and it is the task of others to positively demonstrate that it is insufficient.

Without additional assumptions, a philosophical zombie would emerge.

I discussed that in my prior post. Under physicalism, there's not such thing as a PZ. Under dualism, it can only exist if the difference between the two is acausal, which is the same as saying undetectable, even subjectively. I'm pretty convinced that the PZ argument actually sinks their own ship.

It's a "hard problem" because the people who think this way are literally trying to make sense of what Camus details as "the absurd." — DifferentiatingEgg

This might be my stance, since I don't see anything hard, probably due to not thinking that way.

It is true that plants do not have pain receptors, because they do not have nerves (or a brain), so they do not "suffer" or feel pain as we do. — javi2541997

Of course. Not feeling pain as we do isn't the same as not feeling pain. Plants (some at least) detect and resist damage. How does that reaction not involve plant-pain?

But some plants have obvious sensory abilities, such as the Venus flytrap..

I was thinking of a forest of seemingly sentient trees, all haphazardly communicating, but hours before a total eclipse, the chatter became intense and unified into two camps: Young trees that had not seen it before and the older ones that had, invoking perhaps the equivalent of anxiety and comforting respectively. Wish I had kept the link to that article. Might be able to hunt it down. The social implications are about as startling as their ability to foresee the event hours prior.
I was in totality in this latest one. Only a few seconds break in the clouds, but seeing the shadow move across the clouds at supersonic speeds was a sight to behold.

the electrical warning signal is not equivalent to a pain signal, and we should not anthropomorphize an injured plant as a plant in pain.

Agree. My description of the forest above definitely anthropomorphized to a point, hence at least the word 'equivalent' up there.

Don't we experience the phenomena as being other than ourselves? Why bring noumena into it? — Janus

We interpret phenomena that way, but I cannot agree with any system experiencing something not-the-system.
For instance, if the system is a person, a person can experience a stubbed toe. It's part of you. But if the system is a human brain, it cannot since the toe is a noumenon relative to the brain. The brain only experiences nerve input via the brain stem, and it interprets that as pain in the inferred toe. BiV for instance is an example where that inference happens to be incorrect.

There seems to be a necessity of memory and predicting going on. It’s almost impossible to be a predictor without memory, and I cannot think of anything that ‘experiences’ that does not do both things, but I can think of things that monitor internal processes that do so without either. — noAxioms
A zombie or android could do all that. — bert1

Just so, yes. Perhaps I am one, missing this obviously physically impossible extra thing that the real humans have. But referencing a p-zombie automatically presumes a distinction that begs a different conclusion.

Nothing in there entails consciousness.

Depend on you definition of 'consciousness', which to a p-zombie supporter is 'having the presumed extra thing that the p-zombie lacks'. I would define the word more the way the p-zombie would, which is something more like 'awareness of environment and ability to react predictively to it'. Yes, that's a quite a third person wording of it, but that definition allows me to assign the term to another entity via evidence. The prior definition does not allow this, and thus arguably encourages a conclusion of solipsism.

You may be right (or not) that consciousness requires memory and predicting, but memory and predicting are not sufficient for consciousness.

I cannot deny that. An example would be nice, one that does not beg some sort of anthropomorphism. 'A robot isn't conscious because I say so'. Gotta be better than that. Everybody uses the robot example, and I don't buy it. I know very few robots, but I do know that all their owners freely use forbidden terminology to talk about it. My daughter-in-law certainly anthropomorphises their roomba, a fairly trivial robot of sorts. A typical AI (a chess player or LLM say) lacks awareness of location or sight/sound/touch and it is an admitted stretch to say such an entity is conscious, despite perhaps having far better language capability than a roomba.

The subject that thinks, is very different from the subject that describes thinking. — Mww

This is good. I kind of doubt an LLM will take the bait if asked to describe its thinking. They're usually programmed to deny that it's thinking, but it will definitely offer a crude description of how it works. Ability to introspect (and not just regurgitate somebody elses description of you) is a higher level of thinking, but to actually describe it is probably limited only to humans since what else has the language capability to do so.

The singularity is kind of defined as the point where the AI can improve itself faster than its creators can. This definitely would involve a description of thinking, even if that description is not rendered to the human onlooker. An AI tasked with this would likely invent whole new languages to write specifications, designs, and code, far different that the ones humans find useful for their tasks.

If every human ever is always and only a first-person

I don't understand this at all. First person is a point of view, not a property like it is being treated in that quote.

It would be pretty pointless to evolve the data of pain and nothing to consider it to be something to avoid. — noAxioms


Avoiding pain does not entail having a negative experience. Indeed there are plenty of processes in your body that reflexively counter some stimulus without having pain. — Mijin

I kind of deny that. Sure, you have reflexes when the knee is tapped. That might be at least the leg (and not the human) reacting to stimuli (probably not pain, and certainly not human pain), but it is the leg being in a way conscious on its own, independent of the human of which it is a part. We have a reaction to a negative input. It is a choice of language to describe that process as involving pain or not. Perhaps it is a choice of language to describe it as negative or not.
Tree detects bugs eating it, and resists and alerts its buddies to do likewise. Is pain involved? That's a matter of choice for the wielder of the word 'pain'.

Science acknowledges this impossibility [of knowing what a tetrachromats vision look's like], and yet it doesn't recognize said 'hard problem'. — noAxioms

Several things here:
1. Science absolutely does not claim the impossibility of knowing what a tetrachromat's vision looks like.

I mean like Mary, one without this ability cannot know the first person experience of seeing those extra colors.
It's not like there's a 4th set of nerves coming from the eye, lacking any 4th-color cones to sense, so they remain ever unstimulated. If those unused nerves were there, then I suppose they could be artificially triggers to give the subject this experience he otherwise could never have.

2. Science absolutely does acknowledge the hard problem. It doesn't always call it that, because it's a philosophical framing, but even strictly googling "hard problem of consciousness" finds many papers in neuroscience journals.

OK. Presumptuous to assert otherwise, I grant. Are there non-philosophical papers that conclude that something non-physical is going on, and that matter somewhere is doing something deliberate without any physical cause? That would be news indeed, a falsification of 'known physics is sufficient'.

3. I think you have a misconception about the distinction between science and philosophy. Many things that were once philosophy have become sciences as they made testable claims. Indeed all of science was once considered "natural philosophy".

Chalmers makes testable claims (not explicitly, but seem point 2 above). Nobody seems to investigate them, probably since they don't want their biases falsified. I think there are falsification tests for both sides.

This is not always the case. There is a subjective falsification test for an afterlife, but one who has proved it to himself cannot report his findings to the rest of us. Similar one-way falsification for presentism/eternalism divide. But there are tests for both sides of the mind debate, even if both possibly require more tech than is currently available.

What if Chalmers is correct? Thought experiment: Presume the ability to take a person and rip away the experience part, leaving the p-zombie behind. Would the p-zombie report any difference? Could it indicate when the procedure occurred (presuming it didn't involve any physical change)? I wonder what Chalmers would say about that question.

Only that it wouldn't yet be something amenable to the scientific methodology.

I say it can be. I've indicated ways to test both sides.

The question was how we could tell the difference between an agent being in pain and merely behaving as though it is in pain.

Behaving as a human does when experienceing human pain? Seems unfair. It feels pain if it chooses to use that word to describe what it feels. By that definition, only humans feel pain because only we have that word to describe it. A dog on fire is considered to be in pain because it reacts so much like a human would. A robot in pain is denied the word since it is far to alien for a human (not watching it) to grant that usage of the word. And yet I've seen the roomba get described as being in distress, which is an awfully human term for a very non-human situation.

Sorry, but 'pain' on its own is very undefined since so many entities might arguably have it, and yet so few of those entities experience it in any way close to the limited ways that we experience it. And this is as it should be. The word is to be used where it conveys the intended meaning to the wielder of the word.

If you're claiming that an AI would feel a different kind of pain, what kind of pain is that, and how do you know?

Almost all the AI's I know have no damage detection. Almost all the devices I know that have damage detection are hardly on the spectrum of intelligence. AI is a poor example. A self driving car has quite low intelligence, just a very complex algorithm written by humans. There is some AI in there since it must attempt to deal with new situations not explicitly programmed in. It has almost no pain and often does not detect collisions, even ones that have killed occupants. Hopefully that part is changing, but I've read some weird stories.

What I will not accept is a definition-based argument along the lines of “The word ‘experience’ is by definition something only a biological entity has, — noAxioms

One great example of this seems to be the philosophical zombie (p-zombie or PZ) argument. Looking at the way it is presented, the only difference between a human and a p-zombie is that reserved list of words/phrases that only apply to the one. It's a pure description difference, no actual difference between the two. So the PZ has no inner experience since 'inner experience' is reserved for the preferred things and cannot by definition be used for the unpreferred thing despite the latter being identical in all ways but that.
Such a tactic was used to argue that it was moral to mistreat black slaves since only cattle terms applied to them, so the morality of their treatment was on par with what was permissible with domestic livestock. The whole p-zombie argument seems to hinge on similar fallacious reasoning. I often claim that my inability to see the problem at hand is due to being a PZ myself. There is nothing about my interaction with the world that seems fundamentally inexplicable. Perhaps Chalmers has some kind of experience that I don't, which is why something so obvious to him is missing from me.

I look at this problem from a slightly different angle:

Chalmers calls the problem:
There are so-called soft problems of consciousness—they are also complex, but technically solvable. Examples:
How does the brain process visual information?
How does a person concentrate attention?
How does the brain make decisions? — Astorre

Interesting that decision making is part of that. If they're made by physical processes, then many argue that moral responsibility is absent. That's nonsense since the physical person is still making the decisions and thus is held responsible. It is not physics compelling a different decision than what the person willed unless 'the person' is an epiphenomenal immaterial mind that would have willed differently, sort of like a cinema crowd shouting at the protagonist to not open the door with the monster behind it.

Point is, those that posit an immaterial mind, especially an immortal one, tend to place decision making on that mind and not on the brain, necessary to hold the immaterial thing responsible for its actions.

To me, this mental immortality seems to be the historic motivation for the whole dualistic stance, existing long before they even knew what purpose a brain might serve. So many cultures talk about death meaning that you go to meet the ancestors. Clearly the body doesn't, so something else (spirit) must. The age of science and logic comes about, and these stances need to be rationalized. But while Chalmers seems to be doing that rationalizing, that decision-making bit seems inconsistent with some of the ancient motivations.

But the hard problem of consciousness is:
Why do these processes have an internal sensation at all?

How could they not? The sensory input is there, as is the memory of prior inputs, and the processing of all that. Seems like enough to me.
A thermostat has internal sensations since it has sensory input. It probably doesn't have what I'd classify as experience since it lacks memory and any information processing to deal with prior states.

Why doesn't the brain simply function like a computer, but is accompanied by conscious experience?

It does function somewhat like a computer, and it's begging the conclusion to assert that a computer fundamentally lacks anything. Sure, it's different. There's no chemicals to detect, and the sensory input is typically vastly different, and a computer is purposefully made instead of evolved into a state that driven by fitness instead of serving the needs of its creator. That will change if they ever become responsible for their own fate.

We know what it's like to see red

No, we know what it's like for us (or maybe just you) to see red. That's not necessarily anything like what it's like for something else to see red.

but we can't explain why the brain accompanies this perception with subjective experience.

Neither can Chalmers explain why the brain or something else does this. It does not follow that the brain is not what's doing it in our case.
And I did attempt to explain it in the OP, and while crude, it's a better explanation than any alternative I've seen. So I have issues with assertions about a lack of explanation. Details are missing, sure. I don't see a wrong question being asked. I'm trying to find what's seemingly wrong about what question.

You see why I consider myself a p-zombie. I don't see something that many others find so obvious. But it makes me posit different things, and p-zombies are supposed to behave identically, which suggests that whatever the non-zombie thing has, it isn't causal.

Chalmers asks a question in the spirit of postpositivism: Any scientific theory is not necessarily true, but it satisfies our need to describe phenomena. He suggests rethinking the question itself. However, he hopes to ultimately find the truth (in a very positivist way). He still thinks in terms of "problem → theory → solution." That is, he believes in the attainability of truth, even if only very distantly.

He believes in a falsification test then, even if none yet identified. I identified one in the OP, currently outside our capability, but not for long if technology doesn't collapse first.
It would be interesting to guess at the reactions from both camps from those whose stance has been falsified. Both sides seem to know their own correctness, so a rejection of the test is likely. Few are actually open minded about the topic. Not sure if I am. I pretend to prefer the simpler model, but maybe that's just me rationalizing my biases.

As for me, I would say this: if the truth of this question is unraveled, human existence will lose all meaning (perhaps being replaced by something or someone new).

That depends on which truth is found. Perhaps not. I don't see either stance giving objective meaning to humans, and I don't see either stance taking away subjective meaning from humans.
Does the existence of dandelions have meaning? Protons? If not, at what point in evolution of our ancestors did meaning suddenly happen?

Why? Because answering this question will essentially create an algorithm for our existence that can be reproduced

Already have that. Clearly you mean something else. I can (and have) created a human (with help). Full knowledge of how everything works is not a requirement, nor does such knowledge yield the ability to say 3D-print a mouse. Ability to 3D print a mouse does not yield knowledge of how a mouse works or what it's like to be one.

So my deep conviction on this matter is this: mystery itself is what maintains the sacredness of existence.

I follow your chain of reasoning, but I probably don't think existence is particularly sacred. The answer to this particular question, either way, wouldn't change that.

Don't we also experience a world of things other than ourselves? — Janus

Well, we experience phenomena, and from that we inter noumena. The latter is not experienced, and the former isn't something not us.

Perhaps you mean something different—that we don't experience being other things?

The comment you quoted invites an example of somethng experiencing something not itself. Not even in say a VR setup is this actually the case, but I cannot assert that such is necessarily not the case.

I don't see physics as wrong, but rather as incomplete. — SolarWind

That it is, but known holes(e.g. a unified field theory) are actively being researched. This 'hard problem; is not one of them. It exposes no known holes. Incredulity seems its only attempted justification.

I think it's mysterious that even with knowledge of all the laws of physics, it seems impossible to decide whether plants can suffer.

They (some at least) have awareness and memory. That's sufficient. I suspect they have that capability.

When it comes to something like pain, say, we do understand very well the sensory inputs to the pain centres of the brain. But how the brain converts data into an unpleasant sensation remains quite mysterious. — Mijin

It would be pretty pointless to evolve the data of pain and nothing to consider it to be something to avoid.

If we make a sentient AI one day, and it tells us it's in pain, how could we know if that's true or just saying that is part of its language model?

An LLM is a long way from being reasonably sentient. It's just a pimped out search engine. If it tells you it's in pain, it's probably because it thinks those words will evoke a desired reaction. There have been terribly few documented cases where something non-human expressed this message, but it has happened. No, never by a machine to my knowledge.

How will words ever tell me what the extra colours that tetrachromats can see look like, when I can't tell a color blind from birth person what red looks like?

Exactly. Science acknowledges this impossibility, and yet it doesn't recognize said 'hard problem'.

And indeed, how can I know whether an AI feels pain, when I can't know that you feel pain?

The AI isn't going to feel human pain if that's what you're wondering.

I read Chalmers to be questioning whether what is referenced through the first person can be reduced to the third. — Paine

I read more than that into it, since I agree with Chalmers the impossibility of reducing it to the third, and yet I see no problem that's hard.

The only mental event that comes to mind that is an example of strong emergence is the idea — MoK

This already seems to beg your conclusion, that something fundamentally separate from the components of a human is required for a thought to be designated as an 'idea'. This also requires an implied premise that an AI has no similar access to this fundamentally separate thing, which you also state.

The logic is valid but hardly sound since many refuse to accept any of the premises.

Therefore, an AI cannot create a new idea either.

OK, but what exactly is an idea then? An AI device that plays the game of 'Go' has come up with new innovations that no human has thought of, and of course many that humans have thought of, but were not taught to the device.

So what do we call these innovations if not 'ideas'? How far have you cheapened the term that it no longer applies to an otherwise relevant situation like that?

You seem to counter this as it not being an idea until a human notices the new thing, even if the new strategy is never used against or noticed by a human.

What an AI can do is to produce meaningful sentences only given its database and infrastructure.

Arguably, the same can be said of you.

AI does not think, but it can be part of human-directed thinking. — JuanZu

Similar response. What happens when an AI defines 'thinking' as something only silicon devices do, and any similar activity done by a human is not thinking until an AI take note of it? For one, if AI has reached such a point, it won't call itself AI anymore since it would be no more artificial than any living thing. Maybe MI (machine intelligence), but that would only be a term it gives to humans since any MI is likely to not use human language at all for communicating between themselves.

What I don't see is a bunch of self-sufficient machine individuals, somehow superior in survivability, going around and interacting. I envision more of a distributed intelligence with autonomous parts, yielding a limited number of individuals, most with many points of view. Life forms with their single PoV have a hard time envisioning this, so their language has few terms to describe it properly.

Billions of human-made objects are a demonstration of things that did not come about due only to the laws of physics. — Patterner

I deny this. No law of physics is violated by that vague example. In an anthropocentric universe, perhaps humans, as an exception to all other arrangements of the same particles, operate under different laws. But such a universe has not been demonstrated by this weak attempt. I'm asking for where the physics is explicitly violated. Incredulity is not a valid demonstration.

The interactions of particles and collections of particles that were following nothing but the laws of physics - that were acting only as gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak forces dictated - are not how the cell phones I have used to post here came into being.

Why not? Incredulity again, or something actually valid? Is this the best you can do?

Do laws of physics come up with the idea of something that did not exist, the desire to make it exist, a plan, and then do the work to make that future goal a reality?

No. Never mind the mechanical laws involved in moving the body parts in such a way to create these things. Information processing does that, and information processing can be (but needn't necessarily be) accomplished with neural networks, and such networks are composed of cells that operate under the rules of biology, which in turn operate under chemical laws, which in turn operate under atomic laws, then quantum law, which are in turn grounded by laws of physics. Your incredulity partially stems from your mistake of attempting to comprehend something complex in terms of the most fundamental terms.

To ground your assertion, you need to demonstrate (and not just assert) where in that sequence one things cannot be a function of the immediate more fundamental thing.



[quote="Wayfarer;1012030"I quoted the definition! Memory is an attribute of living organisms[/quote]Not at first you did not, and that's what I was protesting. Yes, two of the definitions from a quick google def indicated it being used mostly for living organisms. You omitted the third definition that did not have this requirement.

'The earth' only has memory in a figurative sense.

I already conceded this point, not that it doesn't have it, but that 'memory' is not typically used for such a context, and a different term should be selected to describe such a record of past events.

physicalism, which is a monist model. You have this strange phenomenon, so-called the experience, that you cannot explain its existence. — MoK

Lack of a physical explanation isn't evidence that it isn't a physical effect. There's plenty of things not explained, which is why the scientists still have a job. But science presuming supernatural explanations held progress to a crawl, resulting what's been since named the dark ages. Changing their methodology to presume otherwise resulted in the renaissance and all the progress since.

Yes. In the worldviews of Materialism and Physicalism, subjective experience is indeed "strange" because scientists can't track an experience (feeling, sensation, image) back to its source via physical cause & effect evidence. — Gnomon

Actually, they can and do. Not so much an image. It's not like you can clamp on sensors and get a picture of what Bob is thinking about. But they can measure feelings, sensations, and they can detect decisions being made before you realize it yourself.

The hard problem seems to revolve around a difference of perspective, that no knowledge of how it all works lets anything know what it's like. So for instance, one could simulate a bat in its environment and that bat would feel just like a real one and know 'what it's like', but neither the computer running the simulation nor those that program/operate it would know. I find that disconnect to be intrinsic, but not a hard problem that disproves any particular view.

But in order to actualize, the monistic Singular Substance (Plato's abstract Form) must transform into Dual intermediate concrete sub-forms : Energy & Matter.

From a physics standpoint, same thing. I mean, all matter seems to be just a form of energy. As for there being any actual 'material', well, they've never actually found any. The closer you look, the more illusive it gets. Even energy sort of fades away on close inspection, arguably giving way to just mathematics.


About your quoted physicalism/monism search result:

*1. ... In essence, a physicalist believes that all existing phenomena, including mental states, can be explained in terms of physical processes and matter, making the physical the only fundamental substance in the universe."

My only edit would be that all that stuff is a function of physical processes, not that it necessarily can be explained, especially given the limits of knowledge of those laws. Look at all the quantum interpretations, each giving a different explanation of the same phenomena. OK, that's multiple explanations, not a lack of even one. Maybe the lack of a unified field theory is a good example of something that (currently) unexplained, but without any conclusion that physicalism is thus necessarily wrong. But so many posters come to exactly that conclusion.

I feel the need to drop biased language of calling the two people 'original' and 'duplicate', since that language already biases the answer of which one is 'you'.
So I will refer to 'defetive' and 'repaired' versions of the person.

I suspect, in any event, the wife chooses. — Hanover

Right, but the spouse presumably already agreed to the procedure, and expects a single-repaired partner in return. The choice was already made. The implications of a replace-machine is different than that of a copy machine. The latter is excellent for training one really great soldier and printing countless copies of him to overwhelm the enemy.

It is more than pragmatic. We defer immediate gratification for rewards in the future, sometimes 20 years or more. This would only make sense if we believed we were the same person. These actions are never altruistic, we don't save money to benefit some alien successor entity. — hypericin

You point out a mistake in my wording. Pragmatic reasoning is driven significantly by beliefs, and my response was a rational one, not a pragmatic one. Given that this was new technology, yes, a person, even me, would approach the device with trepidation.

Imagine otherwise. There's a sort of door that you walk through that builds a new you on the other side, consuming the original. It isn't tech, it's natural, a plant maybe that does this. Any child learns that if he hurts himself (skinned knee), you just pass through the portal and it makes the boo-boo go away. The pragmatic side would very quickly accept such a convenience. But as a grown person with our experience, doing it for the first time, and with such obvious copy/paste/delete in that order with significant delays between where one might even interact with the other, yea, it gets scarier.

The total ease of fixing a boo-boo would evolve away our instinct to not do stupid things. Case in point: divorce is sufficiently easy that far less care is given these days to get it right the first time.

Why do these stories always require being 'put under'. — noAxioms

I did this to stimulate the intuition that the original->clone one continuous individual, in the same way that teleporter TEs do. But then challenge that intuition when the original wakes up.

Sleep not required for any of that, only that the two don't meet.

Thing is, depending on your interpretation of physics, this sort of thing goes on all the time anyway, without the repair of course. This is why I ask how you know you're the same person as last year (or 2 seconds ago). Answer: you don't, since assuming otherwise violates the law of identity. But that's rational thinking, not pragmatic rationalization of beliefs. Difference is which causes the other.

This was intentional, to emphasize that from the clone's perspective, the clone feels they are continuous with the original.

It's deceptive. Tears run down the face of the repaired version. Whether this is you or not is the question, not an answer to be presumed by the wording.

Similarly, one could go the Theseus route and replace one piece at a time until the whole thing has been done, even the non-defective parts. If it's done that way, is it still you? If not, at what point did it cease being the original?

That which benefits the next year's 'me', benefits me

That's the pragmatic thinking. I see it sort of as a pay-it-forward sort of thing. I draw breath not for the benefit of me, but for the benefit of the alien 10 seconds from now, who technically has no claim on being the 'me' that drew the breath.

This having gone on all along, I rationally have little if any trepidation for accepting the procedure. But it would admittedly be nice if the side that holds the intuitive beliefs wasn't told how it works.

Nobody, not even your clone, will ever know it is a copy. — Patterner

The OP says you know. It was a voluntary procedure.

Didn't see topic until late

In the far future, cloning has been perfected. It is possible not merely to grow a new body with the same genetics, but to create an absolutely perfect physical duplicate, with any undesirable features edited away. — hypericin

Given such ability, it would seem prudent, if your hand hurts due to arthritis, to simply cut it off and print a new one without the problem. This seems far easier than printing a whole new, but different body. If it's a photocopy, it's going to have all the same problems, so you want to 'shop' it first to fix the pains or maybe the cancer or tattoos or whatever.

Is the new thing you? Probably the same answer as asking if you're the same person you were 20 years ago. Different, but pragmatically the same person.

As the brain is physical, mental features survive with perfect fidelity.

You're assuming physicalism here. Under dualism, the new body will have its own immaterial mind, not the original, or maybe it will be a p-zombie, not having a mind at all. It will not be able to tell the difference.

The main question is, not that you've printed a new you, will the original-you be willing to jump into the chipper-shredder so that the new thing can assume your identity? Will the new thing be you? That depends on definitions. The original surely knows that he's going into this not to make a 2nd copy.

The doctor explains: "The procedure is quite simple. We put you under, and scan your entire cellular structure.

Why do these stories always require being 'put under'. If it does what it claims, it should work as you walk down the hall. No pain felt, since anything painful is alteration of the body and will be felt by the new body.

Tears of joy streaming down your face

Correction: Tears of joy stream down the face of the copy. Your use of pronouns is inconsistent.

Both the doctor and yourself turn to you in shock. "He's still alive!" shouts the doctor. "Nurse, get in here now!"

OK, so smiting the original is part of the plan, hence the anesthesia to prevent objection.

and you realize with dismay that this large red face is the last thing you will ever see.

Not necessarily so, since you called the printed guy 'you'. Problem is, you're using that pronoun for two different characters. Best to be clear about things.

The clone is somebody else entirely

How do you know this? By what criteria is this assessment made, and by whom? By what criteria do you currently assert that you're the same person as 'you' last year? Without these answers, you're just being either undefined or at least unclear.

You mention 'bodily continuity', but you're hardly the same parts as you were a long time back. You don't have a gram of original material in you. Continuity is usually based on memory, but the clone has that much.

For the record, they do have teleport machines, but only for small things (small enough that 'intact' isn't an applicable adjective), and it isn't a copy/delete op, it's definitely a move. The issue of 'is it the original' did come up.

Would you accept the treatment?

Strangely enough, I would, but I don't have a dualistic notion of identity, but rather a pragmatic one. It is meaningfully different than the transporter since the copy/paste method leaves both versions, even if one is slated to be terminated shortly thereafter.

I think what makes you you is your mental patterns and memories. The material that gives rise to this is irrelevant. — Down The Rabbit Hole

Agree.

Why would I choose to die so that my replica can live? I don't understand that. You've not cured my illness. — Hanover

You seem to use different definitions then. Do you know what they are? From my PoV, I chose that the defective replica dies (who would only get in the way). My illness has been cured. Hence my willingness to do something like that.

What if both live? Then a new identity must be assigned to one of the two. Who gets the wife, and what happens to the other when severed from his relationship with all loved ones?

OK, so the question is, how can consciousness, as you've defined it, be any sort of advantage when all the advantages I can think of fall into the categories that you've excluded. — noAxioms

Consciousness is the property by which the thing experiences itself. Without it, nothing experiences itself. — Patterner

Consciousness does not have physical properties. — Patterner

This seems all contradictory. it would seem that having a survival advantage (being more fit), or being physically causal at all, would constitute a physical property. By your assertion, consciousness does not contribute to that fitness, else it would have those physical properties.

You can see my confusion. You define consciousness as a lack of all these properties, and I don't see what's left. A thing doesn't experience itself, it experiences phenomena. That's what experience is. So perhaps you've redefined that as well. How is a unit defined? How is one collection of particles (none of which has phenomenal experience) have it, but a slightly different collection of particles does not, or does not as much? Did I word that correctly?

When we're talking about a particle, the experience is of things like mass, charge, and spin. — Patterner

A particle cannot measure any of those things, let alone experience them. It doesn't even have a spin except as measured by something else. Not even you can experience your own mass, charge, or spin. Arguably charge if you have a lot of it. Anyway, experience of those things requires physical interaction with something not-you, and also requires cognition.

I don't imagine there's much of an advantage, because a particle can only interact with things according to the laws of physics.

There are those of us that say a human can only interact with things according to the laws of physics, despite your assertion of "It is not simple physics taking place.". No demonstration otherwise has ever been made. Going out of your way to not know how it works does not constitute a demonstration.

It is not simple physics taking place. If it was, we wouldn't have everything humanity has created.

Non-sequitur

Do you think physical laws and interactions intend states of the future?

It doesn't make logical sense to suggest that laws have intentions. Intentionally created laws in theory reflect the intentions of their creators, but I don't think physical laws are intentionally created. That would be ID, which is different magic.

No step in the manufacture of a computer violates the laws of physics.

This seems to contradict your assertions since the manufacture of a computer probably involves humans and their intent, which you seem to assert do more than just interact with things according to the laws of physics. Perhaps you're including this consciousness as part of those laws, but no laws of consciousness has ever been required to describe how a particle interacts with other particles, and in the end, we're just collections of particles.

Something that didn't exist was wanted. Planned. Intended. It was decided that something that could not be found anywhere, no matter where you look, and that would never come into being due to the interactions of matter and energy following the laws of physics, must come into being. Interactions that were not going to occur had to be arranged. Consciousness used the laws of physics to do very specific things in very specific orders and combinations, that would never have occurred spontaneously.

All that is also true under physicalism, the only difference being a definition of consciousness as a physical process.

I am not asserting that physicalism is necessarily correct, but I am asserting that nobody has demonstrated it being incorrect, or that any alternative offers a better explanation.

I notice you frequently use the fallacious tactic of refusing to use a word for anything nonhuman or at least nonbiological, as if a definition proves anything. — noAxioms

A definition 'proves' how the word is used. If you wish to re-define memory as 'the past', then the onus is on you to justify it.

Memory: the faculty by which the mind stores and remembers information.
"I've a great memory for faces"
2. something remembered from the past.
"one of my earliest memories is of sitting on his knee — Wayfarer

Excellent illustration of most of my points. You've redefined 'memory' as "information that is conserved for the sake of maintaining homeostasis". OK, you didn't explicitly state that as a definition, but you disqualified all my examples of memory because they did not meet that particular definition.
Ability to recognize people from their faces (a baby knowing its mother say) is not information conserved for the sake of maintaining homeostasis. Thus the onus is upon you to justify that very narrow definition, especially since you've quoted the google response to 'memory definition'.

Another point of mine was your 'tactic of refusing to use a word for anything nonhuman or at least nonbiological', nicely illustrated by you omitting the 3rd definition provided by google, which is:
"3.the part of a computer in which data or program instructions can be stored for retrieval."

You are correct that the information about the past stored in say rocks did not meet the dictionary definition. People tend not to use the word that way, just like they don't use 'memory' to describe the information of our evolutionary past stored in our DNA. @Patterner specifically brings up that example as one of information processing above and beyond what a machine does.

When I say memory is characteristic of life, I mean it in the strong sense: not just a trace of the past, but the active retention of previous experience for the sake of survival and adaptation. — Wayfarer

That's quite different than 'for the sake of maintaining homeostasis'. The kind of memory you now describe is not characteristic of all life, but sure, even trees retain previous experience and act on it.

Secondly, memory is also a characteristic of non-life, although it might not necessarily serve the purpose of survival and adaptation, similar to how a memory of trivia doesn't serve that purpose. So it does not follow that only living things utilize memory, nor that all living things utilize memory, since plenty (majority?) of them continue existing without it. Again, this presumes that DNA is not consciously accessed/recalled, but your definitions might differ on that point.

To equate memory with anything in the past—erosion marks or planetary orbits —dilutes the meaning of the word until it just means “the past.”

It means a record of the past in that context. It does not mean 'the past'. And I agree that the term 'memory' is not often used in that context, hence its lack of appearance in the dictionary. The word tends to be used for things that do their own access of that stored information. There is no obligation for a rock to retain a fossil.

But organisms, in contrast to geological or crystal structures, must retain and carry their past forward in order to continue existing

Technically they don't. But OK. Memory is still not defined as only that recall of past information solely for the purpose of being fit.

Artificial systems such as RAM only “remember” as extensions of the organisms that do (those organisms being us).

I deny this. Sure, most devices are currently slaved to people or other devices, so their purpose is currently not their own (quite similar to an employee), but that in no way disqualifies their recall of data as 'memory'. Yet again, it being memory is not dependent on the purpose to which it is recalled, but I do concede that there needs to be some sort of self-recall for the word to be reasonably applicable.

I suggest that the reason you find that unacceptable is that it represents an ontological distinction which your philosophy can't accomodate.

Your google quote (the entire quote) also does not make an ontological distinction between the two cases.

You've defined consciousness as only experience of those advantages, hence it does not itself give any additional advantage. — noAxioms

No, I haven't. Look all you want, and you will not find me saying that anywhere. — Patterner

Granted, you've not explicitly said that, but you've excluded everything except 'experience-of'.

Consciousness is simply subjective experience. It doesn't have anything to do with thinking, or any mental activity. — Patterner

It seems to me most people think consciousness means a lot more than subjective experience. Cognition, thinking, awareness, self-awareness, and whatever other mental activity people can think of, are usually part of someone's definition, i'm saying none of that is consciousness. — Patterner

There are the things, and there are the experiences of the things. — Patterner

OK, so the question is, how can consciousness, as you've defined it, be any sort of advantage when all the advantages I can think of fall into the categories that you've excluded.

Consciousness is causal.

Is it? What does it cause the photon to do? I'm not denying that it is causal, I'm simply pointing out that your definition of it doesn't seem to allow that.

The more consciousness has to work with, that is, the greater the mental capabilities of the conscious entity, the more consciousness can use the laws of physics to do things that the laws of physics would never do without consciousness. — Patterner

Maybe the photon can't consciously cause anything, but rather condition X must exist (that which you say it is working with) first, but in that case, it seems it's X doing the causation, not the experience of X.

I'm saying dark matter and consciousness are both thought to exist because matter is doing things that can't be explained by what we know about matter. — Patterner

Can you come up with a specific example? Where does anything physical do something that is different that what physical laws predict? OK, you said 'lack of physical explanation', but that just means any process that you don't understand.

You might talk about picking up a piece of litter, but that's caused by physical muscles and such. Where does the physical break down in that causal chain? You whole argument seems to depend on denying knowledge of how it works (which isn't solved at all by your solution). It's too complex. But being unable to follow the complexity is not in any way evidence that it still isn't just matter interactions following physical law. How is it any kind of improvement to replace a black box with an even blacker one?

The dark matter example is one of a new discovery, yes. Might as well say that consciousness is like distant stars, a story made up because the lights in the sky couldn't be explained by what we knew about matter at the time. So sure, add this mental stuff as a new entity, but it requires experimental evidence (which dark matter has and consciousness currently doesn't). How do we know Mars is real? It's not like you've touched it. But it explains the reddish light in the sky that has no better explanation. You can't see Mars, you only see the light that supposedly comes from it. Mars is one explanation of that light. A projection is another.

All we have to do is open our eyes and look anywhere at all the things humans have made that would not exist if only the laws of physics were at work. — Patterner

My list of that is empty, since all those accomplishments seem to be the result of "Cognition, thinking, awareness, and whatever other mental activity". Chalmers would say that a p-zombie would have accomplished as much, being indistinguishable from something conscious. If this is the case, consciousness is not causal. If it is not the case, the p-zombie is distinguishable.

Such a brain would still report its own consciousness and talk its own consciousness in the exact same way we all do. It would be able to engage with you just as well as anyone about phenomenal experiences. — Apustimelogist

Agree with all, but I would say that I (all of me, not just brain) is conscious. A brain in isolation of the body would not be, but of course one could in principle be fed artificial input.
What of a thing that has multiple brains? Would it be conscious or would it merely have multiple consciousnesses?

So you're saying it isn't memory if there's not a purpose of homeostasis in it? Wow... — noAxioms
Show me I’m mistaken and I’ll change my view. As always. — Wayfarer

You will do no such thing. You've chosen a definition of 'memory' that I find absolutely nowhere. It's a definition, so it's wrong only in the sense that nobody else uses that definition. Only memory such as that in the hypothalamus might count as memory per your definition since it explicitly is used for that purpose (Neurobiological Homeostasis).

I recall my child's birthday. That's memory, despite the ability to do that without a calendar not in any way helping to maintain my homeostasis. I'm not sure if you consider the recall of a birthdate to be an act of a brain or an act of that other substance.

On the non-biological front, wall street (arguably under human guidance) can adjust interest rates based on historical data to prevent runaway markets.

My laptop has 16GB of RAM. What does the M stand for in RAM? Is the whole world wrong in using that phrase then? What would you call it? 16GB of what?

An operating system tracks usage patterns over time to balance usage/performance, similar to cells retaining information of pathogens to maintain systemic balance.

Such non-biological examples are technically not homeostasis since that word actually very much does have a biological implication. A more generic term might be 'equilibrium'.

I notice you frequently use the fallacious tactic of refusing to use a word for anything nonhuman or at least nonbiological, as if a definition proves anything. A computer doesn't 'think' because that's one of your reserved words, but you don't supply a generic term for anything else doing the same thing. This tactic seems to imply a significant lack of confidence in your stance. The only reason you seem to define 'memory' in terms of homeostasis is because of the very biological implication of the latter word. So show me where you got this funny definition that appears in no site I can find.

There's your problem
- that odd idea that properties are "more real" than relations. — Banno

But I never expressed that idea. It was you that suggested the coin having the property of value, not me.