Gilbert Ryle liked to ask if there are three things in the field: two cows and a pair of cows.

The problem with things, as I see it, is that they have much to do with how our minds carve up the world. If you ask most people if the local McDonald's really exists, they'd agree that it does. You can go away, come back, and it's still there. You can kick the building, read the sign, eat the food, and so on. But there is a sense in which this particular collection of matter and activity is only a McDonald's to human beings.

Consider something like a constellation in the night sky, say Orion. Does Orion exist, objectively? I'm not asking if the mythological character exists. I am asking about the constellation. I'd argue that it does not exist apart from the way humans carve up the night sky and draw imaginary connecting lines and add labels and meanings. But the stars making up the constellation are real, aren't they? Actually, I think stars are not objectively real for precisely the same reason. Any particular "thing" in the world is case of us drawing a boundary somewhere in the world and adding a label and a meaning, even of seeing things from a certain "angle".

You might say that there must be something there underpinning what we see in the world. Yes. But it is tricky. Even elementary particles involve human concepts being overlaid on the world, divisions being made, and so on. And there is an awful lot of reification going on in scientific thinking. Just start digging into the idea of virtual particles and you'll see what I mean. The very idea of particles is problematic.

Suppose I pour out a bag of Skittles and a bag of M&Ms on a table. You could come along and look at the mess I've created and carve it up in your mind all sorts of ways. You could draw mental lines around all the yellow things and consider them as one group, or one thing. Or you could see all triangular arrangements of candies, all triads, as each constituting a thing. Or you could say that the set of Skittles is one thing and the M&Ms another, even if they are mixed. But notice that some of your boundaries intersect. And notice that if you consider each combination of three candies to be a thing, every individual candy belongs to many, many triads. But these are collections of things, not things, you might protest! And a nation is not? A beehive is not? A human is not? A fire hydrant is not?

Consider shampoo. Does it exist? Suppose you define shampoo as a mixture of particular chemicals in certain proportions. Is diluted shampoo still shampoo? What if you dilute it a lot? What if you have one molecule on earth, another on another planet, and so on, but you ultimately draw a line that collects 10 fluid ounces of water, sodium laureth sulfate, fragrance, and so on, and all long before the arrival of humans? Is it shampoo?

Does the existence of shampoo depend on hair and certain social practices?

You might say that for a thing to be a thing or for it to exist, it must be physically contiguous, not spread out like that. What about pollution? Romantic couples? Political parties? Biological life itself?

What about sweet food? Does it exist? Without us? Without animals?

Notice that while it might be argued that the matter is really there, that the world is really there, it is clear that the lines we draw in it, dividing this thing from that thing, maybe a pillow from a couch, are not really there in the world. The boundaries are something extra, something not in the world in itself. The same applies to your concept of yourself. You don't exist in the world in itself in the way you think you do.

What about such things as money? Does it exist? Does the economy exist? What about newspaper articles? Insurance policies? College degrees? Speed limits? I think most people would agree that those are socially or mentally constructed. But I would argue that such things as rocks are also constructed by our minds in an important sense. There is no line out there in the world in itself separating this rock from the mountainside, saying that this collection of atoms is this particular thing we call a rock, which is good for throwing at birds, kicking, and so on.

A lot of this is a matter of how we humans are functionally related to our environments. What it is for something to be a chair is that it is something to sit on. Supposing all humans were to suddenly die, are there any chairs in the world? Are there any magazine articles?

The things I am talking about here are all real in an important sense, but also unreal in another important sense, much less real, I think, than most people suppose. The way we carve up and associate things and attach meanings to them is largely transparent to us. We mistake it for how things really are out there in the world beyond us. Mostly what we encounter in the world is how we experience it as modes of access, relating to human purposes. I'd suggest that in large part, what we see is really a projection of possibilities for future action, and all of this is tied up with biological functioning. This is why there can be such things as hiding places and forest paths.

Everything, or every thing, that we experience, is like this, and deeply so, much more deeply than we suppose. That isn't to say that there is nothing out there at all beyond our minds. Not at all. It's just that every way we have of thinking about it is inextricably bound up with our purposes. Some of this is obvious and right on the surface. Some of it recedes into the background and determines how we experience things without ever presenting itself to us consciously. And there are backgrounds behind backgrounds.

I wonder how it all relates to Kant. What about such categories as time and space, the very principles of individuation?

It's quite good at providing warm sounding stock responses for short statements of feeling. — fdrake

Sounds pretty human to me!

I'd say that true care from real humans, where a person is really concerned with another person's welfare for that person's sake alone, is actually pretty rare.

It is important for us to realize for ourselves that we mostly like others for what we get from them, even if it is a feeling that we are good people. We should try hard to go beyond that and to actually consider things from the other's point of view. We should try hard to regard them as a thou, maybe even in Buber's sense of I and Thou, where there is a true intersubjective encounter, not a regarding of the other as object, and not a regarding of the other as a means to further our own interests, even if those interests be such things as our own high moral character. Charity is often practiced in this way, where the "givers" mostly just want to feel good about themselves, where they actually need the needy, in an almost vampiric fashion. It puts you higher. You see yourself favorably. It probably even goes back to the need from parental figures to be called a "good boy" or "good girl". Some are seeking God's approval (which can also be seen as a projection of the need for the parent--God the Father, Mother Mary, The Divine Mother, etc).



And what about real counselors, prostitutes, doctors, and so on, who are paid to listen and to at least pretend to care?

"talking to Woebot makes it easier to talk to their partner or a therapist”. — Ellie For

Practicing probably helps.

Also, it seems that we are easily fooled. Just paint a happy face on a computer and people start to think it has feelings. Make it move and change facial expressions in a way that mimics humans and people even grant it citizenship:

Sophia

What a charade!

Lots of people, especially in Asia, form relationships with inanimate objects, even marrying pillows with anime characters on them. In that part of the world, people seem much more ready to adopt robot pets and the like.

I am reminded of those old experiments with the monkeys and the wire versus cloth mothers:



Increasingly, this is us. Very sad.

But humans have long been using artificial substitutes for real love, for Mom, friends, romantic partners (Female romantic partners themselves, for men, are often substitutes for Mom. My dad even called my mom "Mom".), and so on. Drugs. Money. Pillows (especially those that have comforting platitudes written on them). Porn. Food. Television. Novels. Music. Even our beds, interestingly, in my opinion, are not just serving to keep us warm and free from pain. They are womb-like, hug-like. They surround us in a way that is suspiciously like Mom, the pillow like her breast. And we often sleep in a "fetal" position, just inches from sucking our thumbs.


And probably, as people withdraw more and more from the real world and move into digital spaces, more and more products will start to emerge that, without obviously being intended for the purpose, actually act as substitutes for real connection.


Is it unethical to give people artificial care instead of real human care? Yes. It is inevitable though. The elderly are soon going to be cared for by robots. I am not sure thought that this is much worse than the "human" care found in nursing homes today. Those places exist primarily to loot the life-savings of old people. When my father was in one, the staff stole his MP3 player, neglected him, and even caused him injury. He died after three days in there. My sister works as an activities director in a nursing home and she is very cynical about that whole scene. It is all about corporate profits. Nothing else matters. They sell a certain appearance to the family of the poor elderly person, and I suppose, to the elderly person. But most of the staffers directly involved are burned out, underpaid, treated like crap, and they in turn often don't treat the residents well. Their patience for dementia and whatnot has run out. But old people often sit on a pile of money at life's end (or a nice policy), and somebody exists to work this angle.

Video showing robots in Japanese nursing homes

Second, this all makes sense, except I do not see why that or whatever functionality necessarily requires to be accompanied by the subjective experience or qualia. Why the need to actually suffer the pain, why it needs to hurt instead of just having an information about 'pain signal'? Why need to feel unpleasant fear instead of simply get 'fear signal' and 'compute' how to avoid the 'pain signal' without actually feeling or being conscious of anything? — Zelebg

Exactly. It is hard to see what consciousness adds to behavior that would provide some advantage. Suppose we have a robot that has a heat sensor on its hand. Let's write some code that amounts to the following:

if (handHeat > damageThreshold), run EmergencyHandWithdraw;

There is no reason this needs to involve pain. Now let's add a subjective pain module and introduce another step to activate it. We will pretend it's possible to create such a pain module.

if (handHeat > damageThreshold), handPain = 10;
if (handPain > 7), run EmergencyHandWithdraw;

The pain evaluation part is an extra and unnecessary step as far as objective behavior goes. It actually slows reaction time. What's the point?

is consciousness a type of feeling at all, and if not, then what in the world is it? — Zelebg

It seems to me that, rather than being a feeling, consciousness is the condition for the possibility of feelings. For example, something or someone not conscious cannot feel pain. Someone conscious might be able to. Pain is a feeling. Pain depends on consciousness. Consciousness does not depend on pain. Pain, and other feelings, are contents of consciousness, or forms of conscious experience. But consciousness is not itself a form of experience. Rather, it is experientiality itself.

The understanding of the meaning of the word consciousness seems to vary somewhat from person to person. Some people seem to think of consciousness as being not the very capacity to have experiences, but rather a kind of self-representation, or even mental verbal activity or something. I understand that word to refer to subjectivity itself. Consider the basic difference between something we tend to think is not conscious and someone who is conscious. A rock might provide the right intuition about something non-conscious. It is objective. We can all agree that it exists. We can measure its properties. But is there something it is like for the rock itself to be a rock? Does it experience something? Is it, in other words, a subject of experience in addition to being an object?

When you push on a person, you expect that there is "somebody" in there experiencing what you do to this object. But when you throw a rock, do you have a similar expectation about the rock? I am not really asking here whether rocks have experiences. We can't really know. And that's another discussion. But I think it gets at the right intuition about what consciousness is, as a rock seems the most natural example of something most of us think of as not being conscious.

What consciousness really is though and how it comes about is incredibly mysterious and unexpected to me. I am surprised that it exists. First, I am surprised that anything exists at all. Second, I am surprised that what exists experiences itself as existing and wonders what it is. To me, this is astonishing.

Computers just execute instructions that are really themselves just high-level calls for packaged low-level logic gate operations on bits, the bits themselves only being meaningful to the human observers who assign meaning to them.

You have to explicitly tell the computer what to do at each step. No hand-waving allowed. Suppose you want the computer to feel pain. You can't just write a program that says the following:

if condition X is true, feel pain

How would you go about writing the actual instructions for feeling pain? What are the step by step instructions which, if followed by a machine incapable of feeling, will cause it to feel, and to feel pain?

Let's have it. How to suffer: Step 1...

looks like you did some real fancy mental gymnastics there to try and prove something that i already know is absolutely impossible. — OmniscientNihilist

You clearly didn't read my post. You didn't even have time to do so. If you read it, you might find that I agree with you. But I won't blame you if you don't. It is long and attention spans are small. I was just articulating my own thoughts, not really expecting an audience. But you might like what I have to say. It fits your handle.

Let's look at what it means for "something" to come from "nothing".

We need to clarify some matters here, especially what a thing is and how we might best think about what nothing is.

A thing, or something, is, strictly speaking, some thing in the world. If we are to speak carefully, we should avoid ever calling fundamental reality--what some call the world--a thing. It isn't a thing-in-the-world among other things. Basketballs and rivers are things. The whole of everything taken altogether at once cannot be pointed to like things can.

What we normally call a thing is nothing more than a state of affairs in the world that our minds draw a line around and consider as one unified object separate from other objects. It has nothing to do with how reality is in itself, but rather is an artifact of the way our brains organize perception with a high-level description that makes navigating the world and communicating more manageable. A tiger is not really separate from its environment and no two tigers are exactly alike, but to have to specify the entire state of the universe at a subatomic level every time we want to scream "TIGER!" would be terribly impractical. So we classify, we group, we carve up, and so on. But all of this is merely a convenience. Such objects are not real. These lines we draw in the world and the labels we assign to them are not in the world itself. There are an infinite number of arbitrary ways we could conceivably carve up the world, with many intersecting boundaries, at least one such "object" for every possible combination of one or more particles.

Things, understood in this way, being just states of affairs in the world, just temporary and contingent arrangements, might be said to be created and destroyed. Let's use wax as a metaphor for a fundamental, irreducible substance. I know it is, in fact, reducible. But let's pretend it isn't. For our purposes, it is bedrock ontological bottom. We can take this wax and shape it in many different ways. We can make it into a bunch of cubes. We can smoosh the cubes together and make a dinosaur sculpture. In this way, we might say that we have "created" a dinosaur. But this is all something happening in the way we think about the world. What is new is the activation of an object recognition circuit in our brains that at some point suddenly recognizes the shape of a dinosaur and says, "There's a dinosaur!" But has any fundamentally, rock-bottom-reality been created? No. No matter what you do with the wax, which is what is really real here, the wax is conserved. And the wax is what "occupies" that form, what gives it being. It is that which finds itself in the form of a dinosaur. The dinosaur doesn't find itself as anything. It isn't real in-itself, apart from our seeing at such. This is not to say that the wax understands itself to be a dinosaur either, only that it is that which is "there" in the dinosaur, holding that form.

But now let's expose a problem with wax as a way of thinking about the fundamental substance. Obviously, wax is actually a form of something more fundamental, just a way of arranging particles. Not only that, but when we think of wax, when we think of forming it, there is always something that is not wax, namely the space around it. The wax is differentiated from something. Only in this way is it possible for it to have any form at all. In order for something to have form, there must be something to which it can be compared, something to which it is related.

Ultimately, everything is one. This is the guiding principle of advances in physical theory, which proceeds unification by unification. The closer you get to rock-bottom fundamentals, the fewer different kinds of things there are. Seemingly different things are reduced to something common. Also, great philosophers like Spinoza persuasively argued this point. Unlike things cannot interact. In order for things to interact, they must ultimately be made of the same stuff, or be part of the same reality.

Any time you see distinctions at all, it means you are not yet at rock bottom. The things distinguished must be different forms of a deeper reality. Empty space, what we normally think of as nothing, is actually something. And the "empty" space of modern physical theory is anything but empty. In Einstein's theory, it bends. It has its own degrees of freedom. In quantum field theory, "empty" space is full of "vacuum fluctuations", of virtual particles and the like. And so-called "empty" space is what we distinguish matter from. It is the background against which we see the figure. Also, consider that even classical space has such features as dimensions and differentiable points. Spatiality is a kind of differentiation. We are talking about structure and order here. Can true nothingness have any structure? Can anything be said about its features? Physical space can have all sorts of different structures, including different topologies.

It is hard to think of empty space as "something" partly because of how we think of what it means for something to exist. The word exist means to stand forth. Material things stand forth, or protrude, in the world. Space doesn't.

Think of this another way. Imagine a blank computer screen, all black pixels. Now lets draw a white figure on it with white pixels. The black pixels, in fact, are something, are a state of affairs. And there is something which is non-black.

Imagine Conway's game of life with white pixels being "on" or "alive" and black pixels being "off" or "dead". You could invert the world and it would be functionally indistinguishable.

Let's get to the ultimate point of all this. When you are at true rock-bottom, nothing can be said. There is nothing to compare ultimate reality with. It isn't related to anything else. There is nothing outside it. It doesn't have form. It isn't a state of affairs in the world. There is no background against which to see it. It isn't a something in relation to a nothing, nor is it a nothing in relation to a something from which it is distinct.

Whatever is ultimately real is eternal, is permanent, always-already-the-case. It cannot be created or destroyed. It isn't self-caused. Such would be absurd. Such would be like saying it is reducible to itself or that it stands under itself or prior to itself. Reality-in-itself is necessarily beyond time and space, these being modes of differentiation that apply only to what is differentiable, which is never rock-bottom.

Fundamental reality, regardless of its nature, whether it really is true nothingness, will always look like nothing, as nothing can be said of it. It is impossible to notice. This is taking the idea of a fish not noticing the water all the way. Even water for a fish is different from something, the fish being one such thing from it can be distinguished. And fish can discover the water-air boundary. But reality isn't different from anything. No such comparisons can be made. There is something outside the water, namely air, rocks, et cetera. But there is nothing outside reality.

Reality is omnisymmetric. What do I mean by that? Symmetry is present anywhere something can be transformed in a way that doesn't change it. For example, a perfect circle, when rotated in two dimensions around its center, is exactly the same after the rotation. No difference. A truly bilaterally symmetrical shape can be flipped left to right without changing it. In such cases, there is no sense in saying that it even has an orientation where it is symmetric. It is pointless to specify the rotational angle of a perfect circle, or the left-right orientation of an upright isosceles triangle.

All form is asymmetry. All form is information. All information is difference. Everything that is noticeable, everything measurable, is difference, is variance, is information. But that which is always conserved is invariant, is symmetric. What is most fundamentally real must be in all ways invariant, indifferentiable, beyond all informational distinction.

This looks an awful lot like nothing. But consider that even if it has some inner nature, we could never point to that. We couldn't put language to it. We couldn't measure it.

If everything were truly made of wax, there would be nothing that is non-wax. All we could detect would be variations within the wax, but never the wax. The wax would have no boundaries. Nothing would be non-wax. Obviously, wax here is a poor analogy, as everything we imagine when thinking of it involves ways in which we differentiate it from other things in our experience.



Here is the essential thing to understand:

0 = -1 + 1

This is all conservation laws in a nutshell. And is tautologous. It is pointless to say that -1 + 1 came from zero or that zero caused it. There is no arrow here. There is only equivalency, or really, identity. It is just another way of saying "0 = 0" or "1-1 = 1-1".

When you understand all this, it is not suprising that in physics we have all these symmetries, all these invariances, all these conservation laws, and such things as Noether's Theorem. And what do they tell us? It is not said or understood enough, but the quantity conserved is zero.

Consider conservation of momentum. No matter what happens in a system, the total momentum of all the objects in it stays the same. Momentum can be transferred from one billiard ball to another, but total momentum in any given direction remains always the same. But can't we say that the whole system has a nonzero momentum? We can, but only if we compare it to things outside that system, in which case we are now considering a larger whole system, which itself has no changing momentum unless we compare to a further "outside", in which case we are then once again considering a larger system, ad infinitum. And when we talk about everything, or ultimate reality, well, there is clearly nothing else to compare it to. It can't be moving relative to anything. It is meaningless to talk about it as having momentum. So what's the total momentum? Necessarily, it is either zero or undefined, however you like to think about it.

Total energy bound up in matter as mass is exactly canceled by its negative gravitational potential energy. Total energy is zero. What is conserved always is zero.



Fundamental reality is conserved. All "thingness" belongs to things-in-the-world, not the world itself (conceived as ultimate reality). The world cannot be created either by anything else (there is nothing else) or by itself, as it can't stand prior to itself to create itself. It just is. But it also seems exactly to be what is probably best thought of as nothing, which is the most natural and expected situation of all, one that calls for no explanation. Only differences from nothingness call out for explanation, making us ask why there is something rather than nothing.

The world, or reality, ultimately, is not different from the indifferentiable. When we say something is created from nothing, that something is differentiable from that state of affairs that we wrongly call nothing, that blackness we imagine prior to the spark or whatever that is thought to have arisen. The two, what we think of as nothing and what we think of as something, are able to be found to be different. So neither of them can be rock-bottom.

People often ask why there is something rather than nothing. I say that the solution to this mystery is to grasp that there in fact isn't something rather than nothing (the true nothing). No true, irreducible asymmetries have emerged. Whatever it is that we are experiencing, the null ultimate reality is conserved. The puzzle then is to grapple with how then we come to experience difference. I suspect that it is a kind of illusion that has to do with perspective and partial apprehension of reality. Reality-in-itself, in toto, involves complete cancellation of all differences. It is omnisymmetric perfection. And it is our own true nature and ground. We are reality experiencing itself as us. When we ask what we are, and we really point that question all the way to its ultimate destination, that destination must be the ultimate ground of being, ultimate reality.

There is only substance (in Spinoza's sense) and its modifications. That which goes through the changes, or in other words, that which remains the same throughout the modifications, or that which is really real, or that to which all is reducible, is that which experiences being all things. And there is only one such fundamental ground, one experiencer, one ultimate destination of all self-referential pointings or askings. States of affairs don't experience themselves. That which has states of affairs is what experiences them.

That to which the "I" thought, for all, ultimately refers, is the one fundamental reality, the one substance, the one experiencer, the one true identity, that which remains the same through all changes, and which ultimately, is beyond all change. Call it nothingness. Call it God. Call it Self. Call it No-Self. Call it I am. Call it Apeiron. Call it whatever you want. It is not created. And there is nothing apart from it that can be regarded as its creation. It is neither effect nor cause. There is no before or after it. There is no above or below it. It is neither subject nor object. It is neither here nor there, though it is everywhere present to itself.

I don't think this is what most people imagine when they think of God, nor is it what people imagine when they think of nothingness or of self or as that which preceded the Big Bang or stands under things now. And realizing that you, yes you, are identical with this, is no haven for you as a person. It isn't a soul. What is conserved is not your identity as a person, not this finite, temporary, relative state of affairs, this thing you normally think of as yourself and the memories that are part of it. So there is nothing like a traditional religious comfort to be found in this idea. But you are secure in a sense. That which you really are, that which is prior to all modification, is indeed permanent. You, the true you, can't be separated from reality. You are reality. You are all of it. You are everyone. You cannot die. What you normally mistakenly take yourself to be, however, is bounded in time and space, and it is a mistake to take it as yourself. But that ultimate reality which you are, when taken in-itself, in toto, is also that which we find to be indistinguishable from nothing. So "all is one Self" and "all is no-self" are really not different. What you really are is what we can't avoid equating with nothingness. Atman is Brahman. And Brahman is no-self. The Ultimate is beyond subject and object, here and there, something and nothing (taken conventionally).



So, with lots of qualifications, yes, you are immortal, you are God, you are all that is, you are free (not constrained by anything outside, there being no outside), and so on. But all of this is transcendent in the Kantian sense. All that you see out in the world, secondary to the principle of individuation, including your thoughts, body, sensorium, memories, and so on, is doomed to die (in the sense of being time-limited). It is a world of woe as long as you identify with the things in it. You would be wise to cease to exclusively identify yourself with any of it, with anything that has a beginning and an end in time. Realize that you transcend all of it and you shall know eternal life, not as a human, but as that which has mistaken itself for one of its many forms. To know the truth, go inward, toward that which is behind perception, to the noumenal ground, not toward the outer phenomena, or the wall of the cave. Withdraw your identification from this form. As a wise man once said:

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break in and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break in nor steal.

Thank you for bringing questions about the nature of self into this.

To make a distinction between my own future self and that of a person not yet born, saying that I exist and they don't and that they therefore have no moral standing, while my future self does, since I already exist, involves a faulty conception of self not unlike the traditional Christian soul. I don't believe that there is any such personal self that begins to exist at my birth, has continuity throughout my life, and then either ceases at my death or goes to an afterlife. Such a notion falls apart upon examination. And yet, this is how most people seem to think of themselves, probably mostly because of the way memory works, or more precisely, the way information is integrated. Assumptions of the existence of such personal selves sneak into arguments about the moral standing of potential future persons. I suspect that most people making such arguments don't question the mostly unconscious, common-sense (but wrong) notion of what a person is. But such notions of selves and persons should be questioned in the context of such arguments.

180 Proof, is your position on personhood or selfhood basically in agreement with Parfit's?

Here's a video of a talk by Ellis related to the topic, for anyone interested:
On the Nature of Causality in Complex Systems, George F.R. Ellis

George F. Ellis makes the following argument — Matias

I thought I should mention that his name is George F.R. Ellis. A search for "George F. Ellis" will bring up a cattle guy.

He doesn't explicitly, but it's what he's alluding to re "The self-referential incompleteness of physics." — Terrapin Station

No, he isn't. You seem to have just had a knee-jerk reaction when you saw the word incompleteness. Notice the colon following that. He is talking about how low-level physics doesn't account for everything, the choice of experiment being one such thing. This has nothing to do with Godel's theorem.

To really understand what he is talking about, the quote needs to be placed in context. It is probably part of a discussion of top-down causation, which Ellis, like many other strong emergentists, believes happens, which most proper reductionists don't believe happens. To understand what motivates his position and how he justifies this position, we would need to read more than this isolated quotation, which is why I asked @Matias for the source of the quote, which we still don't have. I did a Google search for parts of the quote and couldn't seem to find the exact source. There are other writings that can be easily found on related matters though, through which it would be easy for a person to become familiar with the thought of Ellis.

I have trouble with the idea of top-down causation myself. But Ellis is interesting to read on the matter. And there are some interesting philosophical problems that motivate his position.

I am not going to present his ideas here for you. I've got other things to do at the moment. I was just taking you to task a bit for your super-dismissive comments, when it is obvious to me, since I am slightly more familiar with Ellis, that you don't understand what you are criticizing. Frankly, you just made yourself look silly with those comments. But it's not entirely your fault. Some context for the quote is sorely needed here.

Imagine a time before any wide familiarity with Einstein's theories. Now imagine someone takes an isolated quote from his work where he says that space bends and presents it to some amateur physics fans who have never encountered such an idea. Taken out of context like that, and given the lack of familiarity with that body of theory and the justifications for the idea of bending space, that claim would just look silly to most people. I am not comparing Ellis to Einstein. I am just making a point about how you need to understand a whole body of thought before you can properly evaluate an isolated claim within it.

Your failure to comprehend the quote is a perfect illustration of the problem with quotations without context.

In order to have any kind of reasonable discussion of the quote, we need some context. Otherwise, this thread might as well be abandoned, as the comments in it don't really relate much to what Ellis was saying.

Would you mind providing the source of this quote? It would help to put it into context.

My guess is that "intentionality" is an emergent capacity. — Matias

George F.R. Ellis is quite conversant with the idea of emergence and discusses it in a number of places. Such things as bottom-up and top-down causation are things he wrote about at length. It might help to get a fuller sense of what he had to say on the matter rather than working from this quote alone.

Also, emergence is a complex topic. There are different forms of emergence. And philosophers argue about whether, for example, strong emergence is possible, or if all emergence is merely weak emergence. And there is much discussion in the literature about the question of whether consciousness is the sort of thing that can emerge, if such a case is at all analogous to the classic example of wetness emerging from interactions of decidedly non-wet H2O molecules. It really is an interesting area to explore if you are so inclined.

Too many people take the idea of emergence and just run with it, using it to cover many sins, before really examining the subject.

And then he appeals to the ignorant metaphorical usage of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, seeing as an upshot of that that physics would be trying to, but would not be able to, make predictions about psychology and sociology. — Terrapin Station

Where does he refer to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem?

Physics doesn't focus on intentionality in the same way that physics doesn't focus on, say, chordate evolution or biome distribution or Etruscan pottery or how to make Mexican bean salad. Those are different fields.

How does he not know this? — Terrapin Station

I assure you he knows this territory. You are assuming a lot and drawing all sorts of unwarranted conclusions from this very limited and out-of-context quotation. I'd suggest familiarizing yourself with his thought before you write so dismissively of him and what you think he doesn't know.

Re existing, the idea is simply that something is present, it occurs, it obtains, it's instantiated, etc. — Terrapin Station

When you say, "something is present," do you have in mind that it must be a thing in the world, something extended, something finite and measurable? Must it have location?

Can there be actualities, realities, truths, and so on, that aren't things in this sense? For example, what about time itself? Or what about logic? What about the very relationality, or possibility of such, of things in the world?

Consider that some physicists are working with new ideas in the pursuit of quantum gravity where time and space and matter all emerge from an even more fundamental level. Would that more fundamental, non-extended, non-temporal reality be something that "exists" in the sense you are talking about?

What about that which grounds physical reality? It cannot itself be physical in the sense of being a measurable state of affairs inside the world. What about even the universe as a whole itself? The universe isn't a thing in the universe. I am not sure it makes sense to speak of it being in itself measurable. One thing in it can affect something else in it, this constituting a measurement, but such doesn't make sense with respect to the universe itself.

It seems to me that what we usually mean when we speak of things existing involves difference. Something "stands forth" from the background of "nothingness". And this nothingness from which it stands out does not itself "exist". But what about that which is differentiated, that which itself is prior to all differentiation, but is in some sense the condition for the possibility of all differentiation? Does that exist?

Heidegger spoke of what he called the ontological difference, saying that Being is not a being among beings. When people speak of God as not existing, but as nevertheless having a sort of reality, I think what they mean is that God is not something in the world, something you'll find and be able to put your finger on. As the ultimate ground of the world and everything in it, God, considered in this way, cannot sensibly be expected to be a state of affairs in the world that can be established in the way the existence of the planet Mars is established. And to say that God, thus being not "found", being impossible to point at, to register on a dial, is therefore not real, is to fail to appreciate what God, if real, must be.

A thing in the world cannot ground the world. This much is or should be obvious. Even a first cause is the wrong thing to consider, as a cause being at the start of a temporal chain of events is, in the sense I am talking about, something in the world, something in time.

...the notion of nonphysical existents is incoherent. — Terrapin Station

Why?

First, what does it mean exactly for something to exist? And what does it mean exactly for something to be physical?

Some of Alva Noë's work is pretty interesting and deals largely with consciousness as something that involves the body and the environment in ways traditionally poorly appreciated. I recommend his Out of Our Heads. He has been influenced by Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, among others, probably Varela.

I am quite interested in how we experience the world more than we realize as modes of bodily access or as projections of possibilities for future bodily action. As a rock climber, this has become very apparent to me in how I "read" or in fact see a cliff face and its features as ways of orienting my body and its mass and momentum in relation to further features. I see things in a cliff face that a non-climber simply doesn't see, especially ways of gaining purchase by various kinds of oppositions of pressure. I see my body up there. I see my center of gravity in relation to the holds. What it is for the features to be what they are to me is how my body can fit and navigate them under the pull of gravity using Newton's laws (bodily-intuitively understood). And the joy of climbing largely concerns the exercise of a kind of body-environment intelligence, grace and efficiency being absolutely essential.

When we see a doorknob, implicit in our understanding of it is our possibility of turning it with a hand to open the door. We see it as something that fits the hand. We see the doorway as a way through for our body. I think this goes deeper and has to do even with the most basic features of the world as we experience it, like the phenomenology of space and its contents.

I find it interesting as well how much our language reflects bodily relations to things. This is a rich field for exploration. We understand many things (maybe most?) in analogy to basic body-environment relations. Mull over such ideas as freedom.


The body shows up quite a bit in Foucalt's Discipline and Punish.

I'd like to see more done concerning the role of our bodies in identity and social interaction. We encounter the world as bodies not only in such things as forest paths, but also the social world. The bodily aspect of it is huge. Consider violence and its ever-present possibility and how this shapes how we interact and understand interaction.

Much of what goes on in the world is really a kind of processing of bodily encounter and all the possibilities it entails.

Traditional philosophy is maybe too stuck in the head and even consciously tries to transcend the body altogether. But most of our concepts, if analyzed in the right way, might reveal themselves as being of the body and its relation to its world.

Benjamin Fulford — A Gnostic Agnostic

He's still at it? You know that guy is a fraud, right? You would be wise to pay zero attention to him.

I agree with most everything you've said. It seems we are mostly on the same page.

Yes. What's missing from current computers is Qualia. 1s and 0s can be processed mathematically, but don't add-up to the quality of consciousness. — Gnomon

I don't know if qualia is actually missing. I just think that, though being a modification of the same underlying substance, it must be quite different in structure. The thing about the 1s and 0s is that these are meanings that we assign to the computer's activities. Consider that we could decide for our purposes that a big wooden see-saw will represent a NOT gate. When one side is up, that's a 1. When a side is down, it's a 0. We can then designate one side as the input and the other as the output. Now, push your side down. Your input is a 0. The output returned by the see-saw is a 1. This is a very simple computer! It just inverts the input! But in the see-saw in itself, there is no such 0 or 1. The see-saw doesn't know what its orientation represents to us. Our computers are just like complex microscopic arrangements of such see-saws. All the meaning ascribed to their output is assigned by us. We use computers to help us think. It is like writing on paper. In the things-in-themselves, there is no grocery list on the page. That's only there for us. We represent groceries with marks on a page. Those marks are not in themselves about the groceries. In reality, there are bits of carbon located on a mass of cellulose. Well, even that is a very high-level description with all sorts of human meanings and carvings-up that aren't really there.

We might use a bunch of 1s and 0s to represent a little Italian man jumping on mushrooms and turtles, but what's there in reality is the actual physical arrangement of particles and their interactions. There is indeed a causal structure there. But its form has nothing to do with Mario. It doesn't know anything about Mario. Only we do. But the causal structure in the physical system there might well involve qualia. There might be a mental state associated with it. But it would have a form quite unlike anything we are familiar with. And it would be in no position to report to us what it is like. It isn't even in a condition to reflect on its state. And really, it is mostly serial processing and so the causal state is very simple. Ever seen what a Turing machine basically is? It can do any computation. Here is a wooden one:

https://youtu.be/vo8izCKHiF0

Is that machine aware of what the 1s and 0s represent? Does it know if they constitute a digital image? Are the 1s and 0s represented themselves aware of anything? Is the digital image represented by them itself aware of itself? No, no, no, and no.

The important point is that the form of the experience wouldn't be a function of what is (to us) represented by the 1s and 0s, but rather of the causal structure of the bottom-level underlying substantial physical system, the complex of all the elementary interactions.

Furthermore we assume that, whatever 'mind' is, it's a product of evolution — Wayfarer

I would say that mind as it is structured in us is shaped by evolution. But bare consciousness at its most fundamental level a product of evolution? No. You can't take purely objective, utterly non-conscious things, pure surfaces, and then put them together in a certain way and somehow, like rubbing Aladdin's lamp, get this magical interiority, this subjectivity, as a product, which would be an effect utterly unlike its cause.

But I don't know if I agree that objects 'truly are' at all - this is one of the reasons why rocks (as paradigmatic 'objects') are denoted as being 'things' rather than 'beings'. — Wayfarer

I have a tendency to agree here. All things are defined in relation and are partial. But the ultimate reality is just Wholeness, which in my view, must be formless and omnisymmetric. As a whole, Being is unrelated.

As for your Schopenhauer quote, it is interesting, and I encountered it recently as I am now in the process of reading The World as Will and Idea. I think in a lot of ways Schopenhauer had basically the right view. Most importantly, he saw the truth that we are all fundamentally expressions of one thing. Individuality is a fiction. But I see problems in some aspects of his system.

Perhaps 'one' not in a numerical sense, but a qualitative sense, i.e. all of the one kind, not all part of the one thing. — Wayfarer

I disagree. We are not simply both of the same kind only as two donuts are of the same kind or even of the same substance like two candles made from the same block of wax. No, the very self that looks out from behind my eyes (figuratively, not a humunculus in a cartesian theater) is that very same self that looks out from behind your eyes. I think this becomes obvious with sufficient reflection on the problems of personal identity and indexicality. I could go into that at length if anyone is interested, but I've probably exceed attention spans already.

It isn't that petrichor is Wayfarer, but rather that that which finds itself having the experience of being petrichor is also that very same one that finds itself having the experience of being Wayfarer. And it isn't anything like a soul transmigrating from body to body or even being multi-located. It is simply that there is only one ground of being, one root of the tree. That basic I-am-ness is that which is everything and every individual thing. When you point your inward glance toward the ultimate 'I' in you, the fundamental witness, and I do the same, we are both pointing at the same 'I'. We are both touching ground, so to speak, where we are no longer distinct. There, we are prior to all differentiation.

As Heidegger pointed out with his "ontological difference", Being is not a being among beings, not a thing in the world among other things. No, it is underneath them all, everywhere present to itself. Really, it is probably even better to locate the ground (or groundlessness?) I am talking about prior to being and non-being, as such a distinction only seemingly belongs to states of affairs in the world, but not to the world as a whole considered in its ultimate, bottom-most essence. Words just fail here. Every way of trying to talk about it shows itself as problematic.

Thanks! I am surprised someone actually read all that! I regret to dump yet another, even longer one on you, but I can't help myself! I think you'll find it thought-provoking, even if you don't agree with everything. Oh well, even if it doesn't get read, I enjoy clarifying my thoughts in writing. But I would certainly appreciate any feedback, as I might be misleading myself!

I agree with most everything you've said!

I tend to use the term ‘integrated’ rather than ‘organised’. — Possibility

I usually do as well.

The proto-consciousness at the bottom-most level, in my view, is a vague awareness of more than this-here-now, whose only evidence is a one-dimensional transfer of information/energy that is immediately integrated into the system. — Possibility

Sounds close to the mark to me! Maybe the interaction itself and the consequent change in the state of the particle is what is experienced. After all, it is an encounter. What comes to mind is to think that in an interaction, the thing is no longer completely itself. Something of the other thing has entered into it or become part of it. This goes both ways.

Really, it seems to me, for two things to interact, some sort of unity must be involved. Two things cannot remain truly, fundamentally distinct and independent and at the same time interact. They must touch. And for them to touch requires that they are of a common substance. And if they truly touch, they become in some sense continuous with one another.

Alex Rosenberg, in his Atheist's Guide to Reality, page 178, argues that a collection of fermions and bosons cannot be "about" another collection, and that therefore, intentionality (in Brentano's sense), or "aboutness", is impossible. And this intentionality is often seen as a defining feature of consciousness. He is seeing the claim that we have thoughts about or experiences of something else as being a claim that a collection of fermions and bosons can be about another collection.

It seems to me that when thinking about particles, we tend to think of them as being like little rocks floating in true emptiness, little impenetrable things that are truly separate from one another, each one with its own independent existence, self-standing in some sense, or having "own-being". And every interaction, it seems, is imagined to be like billiards balls banging into each other, with nothing of one ever entering into another. But I think this has to be wrong. This would make each particle a distinct substance. And I think Spinoza showed that we can't have multiple substances like that. Two truly independent things with no common substance cannot conceivably interact. It is hard to see how they would even belong to the same space.

And things like billiards balls mislead our intuitions, as the only reason they can bounce off of one another is that they are elastic, and their elasticity is a property that results from the fact that they are composed of many particles held together by forces that allow for a changing shape. Truly elementary particles, the smallest possible things, can have no such parts, and so cannot have anything like elasticity. And they probably don't have anything like a surface.

What Rosenberg says seems to reflect a faulty intuition about particles. It's as if he is thinking that a bag of rocks cannot be about another bag of rocks, or in other words, cannot be "aware" of another bag, which seems intuitively correct. There is just an arrangement of rocks and that's it! But what you said about the "vague awareness of more than this-here-now", I think, speaks to an elementary sort of aboutness of just the sort that we need to make sense of consciousness in a large-scale system.

To understand consciousness, I think we need to understand some very low-level metaphysical matters. How can we have unity in multiplicity? What is interaction, really? What does it mean to touch? Can something be truly one thing and still have structure?

Any description of a system is therefore always a description of the information which a system has about another system, that is to say, the correlation between the two systems. — Carlo Rovelli, ‘Reality is Not What it Seems’

Your Rovelli quote is very interesting. I'll have to read that book. I suspect that he is putting his finger perhaps on just what consciousness is, without saying so. To be aware of something is precisely to be a system with information about another system.

Isn't it the case that all interaction actually involves the two interacting things becoming entangled? And doesn't entanglement involve a situation where it no longer makes sense to treat the parts of the system as separate? They become one thing, no? From Wikipedia:

An entangled system is defined to be one whose quantum state cannot be factored as a product of states of its local constituents; that is to say, they are not individual particles but are an inseparable whole. In entanglement, one constituent cannot be fully described without considering the other(s). The state of a composite system is always expressible as a sum, or superposition, of products of states of local constituents; it is entangled if this sum necessarily has more than one term.

But it is said that entanglement is broken when decoherence occurs. But decoherence, if I understand correctly, just means that the system in question is becoming entangled with the environment or the measuring apparatus.

Isn't it also the case that when one thing interacts with another, it is only then that it itself comes to have a defined state, one that is defined in relation to that of the other? Rovelli seems to say this.

Consider the following situation. There is one astronaut floating in space. There is nothing else in the universe. How fast is she moving? How much kinetic energy is she carrying? It is undefined, right? She can neither be said to be in motion nor to be motionless. But now suppose there are two astronauts. Now we have something! There is relative motion. Suppose the distance between is increasing. The total motion of the whole system of the two is undefined. We can't say that one is still and the other is moving away or that both are moving in opposite directions. All we can say is that each is moving relative to the other. If I am one of them, I know my own velocity (but only with respect to the other) because of my interaction with the other.

And that interaction is key. How do I know the other astronaut is there? Perhaps I have a light, which means that I receive photons that were reflected or emitted from the other body. Gravity is another factor. Each body also emits infrared photons. And so on. The only way I can know about the other is if something from them touches me.

We tend to imagine that when we see something, that there really is some sort of action-at-a-distance. Unreflectively, we think we really see "across" space. But this isn't so. It involves a local interaction in every case. But astronauts are large bodies. And there is opportunity for lots of photons to be emitted, yielding quite a good image of the other, or lots of information.

But what if, instead of astronauts, we have the smallest possible bits of matter, which are discrete and quantized? In this case, there are not many, many interactions as there are in the case of the astronauts. At any given moment, most likely, there are none at all! Particle interactions might be rare! An electron is not like an astronaut. Imagine one astronaut spinning around, firing a machine gun. If the other astronaut is nearby, they'll probably get hit. But the likelihood of a body the size of an electron getting hit is vanishingly small. An electron does not receive a constant shower of photons like a large body might. It doesn't have enough area for that. So basically, it is "in the dark". It doesn't know anything about the other particle. And this being the case, its own state is therefore undefined in the same way that the lone astronaut's was. If I am not interacting with anything else, how am I moving? Where am I?

But when an interaction does happen, suddenly I have a defined state, one defined in relation to the other thing interacted with. At the quantum level, this happens as a discrete, sudden change of state. Suddenly, some uncertainty about my state is reduced in proportion to what I have learned about the other thing.

I think this might be the basic reason why particles have the uncertainty associated with them that is so famous. It is very simply a result of each system's lack of information about the other. But this isn't a case of the other having a well-defined state while I just fail to know everything about it. No! Without this information that each has about the other, that state is simply undefined. The relation is absent and therefore such things as velocity, which is relational, is undefined.

It is important here to consider the consequences of the difference between a quantized, discrete physics with its smallest-possible elements and a continuous, infinitely divisible one. Suppose the latter, continuous case. What if light, instead of coming in discrete chunks, were actually just continuous radiation going out in all directions with a certain intensity? Then, even really, really small particles could conceivably "always see" all other things, no matter how dimly. Now it is no longer there-or-not bullets, but a continuous radiation of energy going out at all angles that inevitably arrives at the receiving body, even if with a very low intensity, no matter how small that body. The relational states of the bodies would therefore always be well-defined. And with infinitely divisible matter and infinite resolution, you could even conceivably have electron-sized astronauts, as you could have complex structure at any scale. A tiny, tiny particle would always be receiving light from all other objects in its light cone. Its position would therefore be "triangulated" always with perfect precision in relation to all those distant objects.

But for the discrete system with smallest-possible elements and energy packets, such continuous well-defined relations are impossible. And many lines of evidence suggest such discreteness in our universe. For one thing, consider that as you go down in scale, there are fewer and fewer unique structures, and they get simpler and simpler. This suggests very strongly that they are composed of smallest-possible things. You'll never find two planets exactly alike because there are so many ways of arranging such a large number of particles. But all electrons are alike. There are fewer unique subatomic particles than there are unique molecules and fewer different molecules than different basketball-sized objects. Smaller things being simpler and fewer in unique forms has always been found to be true. If matter were infinitely divisible, there would be an infinite number of ways to structure it, no matter the scale. You'd likely never see a situation like ours with many identical electrons.

The thing about these discrete interactions is that when no interactions are happening, an electron is necessarily completely blind! Its position and momentum are therefore undefined.

The puzzle to me is the question of how, if such a situation obtains, interactions ever occur at all! How is it determined that two particles actually collide if their positions before the collision are undefined? There must be something to this picture that I am missing. Maybe the problem here is in thinking of the space between as a pure emptiness, which, for such elementary particles, means complete isolation.

Going back to the idea of interactions as involving some kind mutual contact, involvement, internalization, unity, or whatever, I suspect that this is key in something like a bound phenomenal state. There is a very large complex of such interactions that, at least momentarily, there is a unity-in-multiplicity with a shape.

It seems impossible for something to have a shape without being composed of parts. And to have parts seems to mean that in the end, it is decomposable and there is really just a bunch of fundamentally disconnected parts, and these are the only real things. There is the intuition that for something to be a unity, it must be a mereological simple, for which shape seems impossible. And yet, in our conscious states, we find that they are bound. They are unified. There is a unity in multiplicity. And they have a shape. How is this possible? Somehow, it must be the case that multiple things, in their complex of interaction, truly comprise one thing. Maybe this has to do with a complex of basic causal interaction, or touching. For things to truly touch, they must in some sense be united. Is entanglement key here?

I have often thought it curious to realize that nobody has ever seen a photon in flight, "from the side", so to speak. From the side, we see a tennis ball flying through the air only because photons are arriving on our retina that came directly from the tennis ball. Without local photon impacts on the retina, there is no seeing. All photon detections are measurements of an increase in energy somewhere, a jump in an electron's energy level. Never is a photon seen between its source and its destination. If it is detected, that's it, it has arrived. The detection point is its destination, and it has been converted into something else. A photon, in other words, is never seen as a photon. It is always seen only as a loss of energy at the source or a gain in energy at the destination. A photon, for us to see it in flight, would have to be emitting photons!

Further, a photon is traveling at the speed of light. This being the case, according to Einstein's theories, in the frame of something traveling at light speed, length contraction reduces the distance between source and destination to zero! And the elapsed time from the perspective of the photon is also zero! From the photon's point of view, source-emission and destination-absorption are in the same place at the same time. Perhaps there is our unity, our contact! Maybe there is really no such thing as a photon in free space. A figment of our models? Rather, it is maybe the way we represent what is really the direct contact between two electrons. Emission and absorption maybe only appear separated in space and time because of how we are situated relative to the event. Or maybe a photon is what brings two electrons together. Or maybe, even more radically, the two electrons are in some sense the very same electron, at least in the photon's frame.

When a photon from a distant star is absorbed in your retina, we might say that in some small way, the star is actually touching your eye directly! This suggests that our conscious state might literally be a complex of unity-in-multiplicity, a large structure of contact-action that includes everything involved, all the information being integrated. So it isn't just in our heads. The things out in the world that our bodies are interacting with are literally part of that complex, part of that mental state. There are all sorts of interactions happening at once, some between neurons, some between retina and distant star, and so on. And all connected together, they make up a certain informational structure. This is probably what constitutes the complex, bound, qualia-rich mental state.


Here's the kicker though. Ultimately, everything is connected. It is one thing. There is just one big experience going on, one big causal network. Our personal mental states seem locally limited and personal only because the whole complex of information is not integrated in my little brain. Information about the whole universe is not available to my brain. Only a limited number of causal impacts are directed at my brain at any given moment. And my mouth can therefore never report on information that isn't causally antecedent to its movements. Our personal isolation is an illusion that results from the fact that the amount of information about the rest of the universe available to any particular part of the universe at any given time is limited. What is known anywhere is a function of how information is integrated, and what is within the light-cone of what sets an absolute limit. Though at our most fundamental level, we are one, I can't remember your childhood, and so I fail to realize that I am you at the bottom-most level. Even more inaccessible to Petrichor's brain are the memories of a distant alien outside his light cone.

We could put an amnesiac, Bob, in a room with a chalk board and have him record his observations on that board. If we ask him to report what he has seen, he will consult the board to find out. Suppose we move him to another room with another board and show him different things there. Only what he has seen and recorded in that room will he be able to "remember" and report. But that doesn't mean that Bob in room A is a different person than Bob in room B. Our two brains are analogous to Bob in the two rooms. This relates to such things as split-brain experiments where some people are led to the conclusion that the severance of the corpus callosum has resulted in the transformation of one experiential subject into two, since experiments show that one hemisphere can't report observations made only by the other. This does not show that we have two different subjects. It only shows a failure to integrate information. It is possibly quite analogous to Bob in the two rooms or your brain and mine.

There is another reason, which I have gone into elsewhere, to think there is a universal subjectivity at the bottom of things, one belonging to the one substance to which everything belongs. In a nutshell, it is the fact, from your perspective, that you find yourself occupying what would otherwise (if there were no universal subject) have to be seen as an extremely unusual and fortunate perspective, that of a human brain. From an objective perspective, it isn't so surprising when you see that someone wins the lottery. But when you find that you are that someone, you are right to be surprised and to consider yourself fortunate! If there really are different, truly isolated subjects finding themselves being different things, if you find yourself being a human, you have won the lottery of lotteries. Consider all the other 3 pound hunks of matter that find themselves in less ideal circumstances! Most aren't alive!

But if what finds itself in your shoes is the very same subject that finds itself in all shoes, then you shouldn't be surprised to find yourself as a human. It isn't lucky. It's inevitable! You find yourself everywhere. This is the real solution to the whole anthropic principle issue. Fine-tuning is explained.

Also, consider the foolishness of the idea (see my rock comment below) that anything is, in itself, a thing with a definite boundary and identity that excludes most of the universe. There is no magical boundary around your body or brain that makes you separate from everything else. Why are you just a brain and not the whole ecosystem? Why not a galaxy? You are a multiplicity, no? You are more than one neuron! Why does what you are stop at the skull? Or why are you not less? Why not a single quark? And if you think yourself identical with the matter composing your brain, consider that this same matter was once scattered all over in disparate regions of space, some in a carrot, some in a cow, some in the sky, and so on. Were you this same set of particles then, but not all the others that never end up being part of your brain?

You are all of it. It only seems like you aren't because of the local limitations of information access. In this brain, You don't remember being everything else because that information simply isn't part of this brain state.

Consider that you remember your childhood but not your future. Your present self in relation to your future self is like Bob in the two rooms. But strangely, your future self will remember your present self and identify himself with you. Do you identify yourself with him? How is your relation to him any fundamentally different than your relation to your future offspring, or to me, for that matter?


Also, if things are defined relationally, what happens from the perspective of the universe as a whole? What about prior to space and time? Is anything separated? Aren't space and time the very conditions of separation?

We need to remember that a ‘rock’ is a conceptual object to you and me, but not to itself. If you break a rock in half it becomes two rocks, and there is no evidence whatsoever that the rock notices the difference. — Possibility

Oh, I absolutely agree! When I spoke of a rock, I was being sloppy and was just using it as an example of what we think of as a thing, using the intuition of something being there occupying that position. A rock, it seems, represents our most basic intuition of a thing. But really, objects (not in the subject-object relation sense, but in the "this building is a thing" sense) just have to do with the way our minds carve up the world. I don't believe in the reality of objects in this sense. I think Graham Harman is a loony-tune with his object ontology! There are no boundaries out there in the world around particular collections of particles.


As for computers, there are relations and interactions happening for sure. And there is likely a complex of interactions. But I don't think the causal network this involves has anything resembling the structure of the causal network involved in our apprehensions. It isn't integrated in the right way. Imagine our mental state in a moment as being like a big lightning flash of interaction happening in a web-like fashion, a big causal network involving objects and neural firings and all of that. Its shape is a direct result of how the brain is organized, how the body relates to the environment, and so on. Map all the interactions and make a picture of this map. Now imagine, at a given moment, an Intel chip processing some information. Map all the interactions. Much different picture, right? The causal network here has a much different shape, a much, much simpler shape. Not many bits are even being processed at once. It is much less parallel and integrated. And even if it is simulating a brain, the causal network of the computer itself has a far different structure than that of a brain, and its this substantial causal network that matters. Actual energy exchanges, not virtual ones.

But I have read that this has been achieved on a small and limited scale, where a computer simulation was capable of demonstrating a limited social ‘relationship’ with a ‘pet’. It was an interesting read (I’ll try to locate it). — Possibility

I am very skeptical. Any "demonstration" only involves showing us behavior. We can never know for sure what it's like, if anything, for the computer, no matter how human-like the behavior looks. It probably just amounts to the execution of a lot of if-then conditionals.

Thanks! Thinking about it in terms of rotating, enlarging, and shrinking digital images helps. As I work with digital images a lot, I understand that fairly well.

I'll have to think on this more. I guess its time I actually put some effort into learning about relativity!

I want to add to my previous post that I suspect that what makes my phenomenal state have the peculiar character that it has is directly a function of the entire causal structure of the whole material situation that my relation to my environment involves. And it is unified and bound because ultimately, everything is one thing. But information integration, a la Tononi, plays a big role in what is accessible to and can be reported by mind in any given part of the world. For example, though your brain and mine are both part of the same ultimately unified whole, you'll never find my mouth reporting your experiences because the information about your experiences isn't causally directing my mouth movements. Your memories aren't in my head, in other words. But at bottom, we are one. And it is ultimately the same self-relating unity having the experiences of both of us.

But a computer running a simulation of a brain or whatever, has, in its physical substrate, a very different causal structure, one that probably lacks the kind of intentional content we want it to have when we want it to be conscious in the way that we are. So, I think, uploading our brains and hoping to live on as simulations is hopelessly misguided.

I am glad to hear that you are skeptical of conscious robots, at least the sorts of robots we have now. It drives me crazy when I see people claiming we have conscious machines already or will very soon have them, that it's just a matter of making our computers faster, or cleverly coding them. This kind of thing reveals a deep failure to understand just what it is that a computer does. If we are to create something that is conscious in the way we are, it seems to me that we need something qualitatively different from a computer. And we first need to really, deeply understand what consciousness is and how it works in us. We aren't there yet. Nobody really has a clue as to why we are conscious.

My own suspicion is that our consciousness is really just a highly organized form of something that is fundamental. What I mean to say is that basic subjectivity is there everywhere in nature at a very low level. But in the case of dirt or something like that, it isn't organized in the right way so as to yield an inner experience that is anything like ours in terms of its structure.

At the bottom-most level, there is probably no consciousness as we think of it. As at that level, there is no differentiation at all. There is only unity, and so there is no division of subject and object. Consciousness as we think of it always involves a subject and objects. One side of this relation does not occur without the other.

I sometimes think that it might be simply a matter of relation, but with the important consideration that there is being. What do I mean? When we normally imagine two things in relation, we see them both in our mind's eye as objects "out there" in a space, and we are apart from them or bracketed out. This misleads. Suppose you just have primitive Being, or Unity, or whatever, The Undifferentiated. Call it what you like. Then, somehow (don't ask me how!), it divides, or comes to relate itself to itself, as in a reflection, or something like that. Whatever the case, suppose you now have two things, A and B, and they are in relation. There is no perspective outside of these. There is no objective point of view. There is no third thing. We need to resist imagining it that way, as if we occupy a perspective separate from both A and B. There are only two perspectives. For A, B is an object. For B, A is an object. And for each, it is itself, a subject. For B, A is A. That seems trivial. But for A, "I am A." See the difference?

Maybe the primordial unity objectifies itself and thereby becomes a subject. Somehow! If this happens, it is a total mystery to me! And maybe this absurdity is the fatal flaw in my whole way of thinking!

The important point here though, which is something I think we usually miss, is the being aspect of this, which, seen from the inside, is the "I am-ness" of it. This world we are imagining isn't purely structural. It is substantial in the sense that there is something that is these things. From the point of view of A, that which is A is able to say, "I am A." Not literally! It isn't complex enough to have verbal thoughts. What I mean is that there is something that finds itself as A. This isn't simply a matter of empty, purely structural objects as we tend to picture in our minds. Think about yourself from your own perspective. You aren't an object to yourself. You look out. You are able to say, "I AM!" This is very different from saying, "That thing is." For me, you are. But for you, from your perspective, you say, "I am!" The world is inhabited, in other words. To use the language popular in Philosophy of Mind, there is "something it is like" to be something.

Consciousness is deeply indexical. The "hereness" and "thereness" that this entails is possibly its most essential feature. If we want to understand consciousness, we need to pay attention to this. And it will always be missed in any purely objective way of looking at things. In our scientific picture, since, trying to be objective, we deliberately bracket ourselves out, we miss it. We miss what's most essential about the world. We only see extension, only geometry, not the inner nature of things. And then we wonder how our interiority could possibly "emerge" out of special arrangements of these empty, purely structural, substanceless objects. No wonder there is a mind-body problem!

And we should keep in mind that there is always a symmetry with respect to subject and object. With each subject-object pair, for each subject, its object is for itself a subject. Each is for itself a subject and for the other an object.

We imagine the world to be empty of subjectivity, to be pure object, pure surface, pure exterior, only because we tend to visualize things as though from outside, and we bracket out ourselves and our perspective points. But if you realize that in order for a rock to really be, that there must be something that is the rock, a curious realization starts to emerge. And consciousness starts to seem slightly less mysterious, almost necessary even. It seems that this is just what it is for a thing to be. It must have its own side. Things must have interiors. Something finds itself as that thing. When people like Hawking ask, "What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?", this is the answer. It isn't that we have equations and then these somehow get actualized and substantialized. No, being is there from the start, and the equations only describe the way being relates itself itself to itself. And it is in the nature of being to be! It can't not be!

So I guess this is a kind of panpsychism, which is really a dissociated monopsychism. Every particle interaction is likely a sort of experience.

You might wonder then why I doubt a computer is conscious. My answer is that I think it is the relations between the substantial elements of the system that are important, since their interactions are likely atoms of experience. The abstract relations between pieces of code are not the substantial interactions that are happening in the chip. What is happening in the code is perhaps best seen as virtual, just a way for us to think at a high level about how to organize the low-level operations. But the chip is like a Turing machine, just erasing and writing 1s and 0s according to some simple rules, with no awareness of what this information represents. Even that is too high-level. A charge in a circuit, isn't to itself a '1' or a '0'.

I suspect that the way our consciousness manifests to us has to do literally with how the matter is arranged. To replicate it exactly, you'd need to arrange matter in exactly the same way. You'd have to copy the body in every atomic detail. If you have a computer that is running a simulation of a body, even if it simulates every particle interaction, these interactions are still simulated, and not real. You can't eat a virtual slice of bread, in other words. Since the substance is important here, we need to consider the physical substrate of the simulation. That's what's really happening. And that supercomputer and its operations are structurally very, very different from a human body interacting with an environment.

In the article by Wolfram (link), he claims that special and general relativity can be easily derived from the behavior of a causal network. If you read starting at the section called "Evolving the Network", you'll see what I refer to. What do you make of this? Plausible?

Thank you! This is helpful.

I am not sure I understand though why the space atoms "won't line up with their own space-atom grid that their asserting exists around them." I can visualize the compression, but not the misalignment.

We are now in the early stages of producing humanoid robots. — Gnomon

We are creating robots that sort of look like people, mainly because they have a rubber face made to resemble a person. But they aren't even remotely convincing! And they certainly aren't autonomous. And by no stretch could anyone think them even remotely close to being conscious.

Before we claim to be making something like a human, first make a very simple robot that can feel pain. That will impress me greatly! A robot worm that feels pain. Do that first. Or if that seems cruel, make a worm that feels pleasure.

I have long wanted someone to even give me a sketch of a shadow of an impression of an idea of how one might go about programming a computer to feel pain. And I mean with code! How do you write a set of machine-readable instructions for feeling a pain sensation? I can see how you can write code that for a given input, gives a certain output. You can add numbers, for example. Or if some condition is met, you can trigger an actuator. So if light is detected, an arm can move. You can write complex sets of conditionals like this that could, if well-done, create the illusion that the machine is feeling something. But actually feeling pain? Come on!

now that Science has allowed us to create human-like autonomous robots — Gnomon

Not even close!

Thanks for your thoughts.

atoms are supposed to be matter, that puts a lot of doubt onto whether an atom of spacetime is even a legitimate concept to begin with.

There are a number of approaches to combining general relativity and QM that involve treating spacetime as quantized, often as a network. And in some of these, the basic elements of spacetime are thought of as being like atoms of spacetime, which here doesn't mean traditional matter exactly, but just the smallest possible part of something. Some network approaches are loop quantum gravity, causal set theory, and ER=EPR. See this video for example:
Spacetime Atoms and the Unity of Physics (Perimeter Public Lecture)

For an interesting look at the idea of spacetime as a network, see this very interesting article:
What Is Spacetime, Really?

Since I find these ideas very intriguing and intuitively appealing, and Arkani-Hamed makes an objection to atomized spacetime, I'd like to know if his objection is a good reason to reject these approaches. Does what he is saying even apply to these specific approaches? I don't know.

It is actually very easy on a computer to program something spacelike, with any conceivable topology in any number of dimensions, by just defining nodes of a network and linking them in various ways, and then passing information from node to node where they are connected. Something spacelike emerges here from a much more primitive specification.

I personally have serious doubts about the old-fashioned conception of space as simply an emptiness in which matter moves. I don't think it is a mere background. I think that ultimately, matter and spacetime must both be reducible to something even more primitive. And I think that they are probably both forms or modes of the same underlying something. Or maybe a better way to put it is that whatever it is that makes up space, when in a certain configuration, is what we think of as the presence of matter.

Try something. Get a cable, maybe a USB charging cable or something. Now, hold it tight in one spot with your left hand and then, using your right hand, twist it 180 degrees, such that you force the cable to make a single loop. Then, hold that loop in place while you make another near it by twisting in the opposite direction. You now have two loops which, if you allow them to roll close enough to each other, will cancel. Done right, a counterclockwise-twist-loop will cancel a clockwise-twist-loop. But if you have an isolated loop and you prevent the cable from untwisting, that loop can travel, sort of rolling along. Also, notice that the loops effectively shorten the cable. And when they cancel, the cable lengthens. If you have some tension on it, when the cancellation occurs, energy will be released.

Perhaps this is a very loose analogy of what a particle could be. Maybe it isn't a separate thing floating in a background of nothingness at all. Consider that particles and anti-particles, when they come into contact, annihilate each other. Consider also that matter and energy can be converted into one another. Does this make sense if you think of matter really as some sort of substance sitting in space? How can some stuff cancel out other stuff? Maybe it is like the two opposite twists in the cable canceling each other and releasing energy.

Maybe all matter and energy in spacetime is reducible to spacetime geometry. And maybe spacetime is quantized, with its smallest elements simply entangled with one another in various ways.

It has always made sense to me that everything must be ultimately reducible to one thing. I believe in the project that physicists have long pursued of unification. Many of the great advances in physics have been unifications. We have found that what we previously though were distinct phenomena were actually different configurations of something more basic. Different animals are not different substances, but rather different arrangements of the same underlying biochemical things. Different biochemical elements, or molecules, are just different arrangements of atoms. Different atoms are just different arrangements of subatomic particles. Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism. Einstein unified mass and energy. He also unified gravity with spacetime, realizing that gravity is reducible to spacetime geometry. Electromagnetism and the weak interaction were unified into the electroweak interaction. You get the idea. What is the natural endpoint? Complete unification.

There aren't a whole bunch of fundamentally different and truly separate things in the world. Spinoza argued this persuasively, I think. For one thing, it is hard to see how two truly distinct substances could interact.

Saying that one thing is more likely than something else isn't saying that the more likely thing is the case, — Terrapin Station

If you are in either of two situations, A and B, and you don't which, but you know that A would make your situation a rare case while B would make it a common case, you'd be wise to bet you are in B.

For example, suppose you are asked to stick your hand blind into a bag containing some blue and some red marbles and you draw out a marble at random. You draw a blue marble. You are then told that one of two things is true:

A: blue marbles outnumber red marbles 100 to 1
B: red marbles outnumber blue marbles 100 to 1

You are then to place a bet. What should you bet? Clearly, you should bet on A.

In the kind of reasoning in the OP, the perspective you find yourself occupying is like drawing a marble from the bag. It is called "self-sampling". And the self-sampling assumption says:

All other things equal, an observer should reason as if they are randomly selected from the set of all actually existent observers (past, present and future) in their reference class.

One thing I find objectionable is the reference class. Consider the doomsday argument. A basic assumption needed to make the argument work is that the only thing it is possible to find yourself being is a human. Think about how it would change the conclusions if we allow all sentient beings, including aliens on other planets, as well as all animals, to be the reference class. And if we restrict it to humans, why not restrict further to just men, or just men of a certain race? How is that any different from restricting to humans? The reference class is an arbitrary choice. But of course, if you think that what you are is a 3 pound hunk of matter, why are brains privileged? If you really are that collection of atoms, it is conceivable that you could be any collection, even a rock or a cloud of gas. So being a live brain at all then makes your situation a truly rare case, and so finding yourself as a human brain, you should probably reject something about this picture, as it makes your situation extraordinarily unusual.

In my picture, it is necessary that you find yourself being the only thing that exists. You hold all the marbles, rare and common, and so you shouldn't be surprised to find yourself holding the rare ones.

The real reason you shouldn't be surprised to find yourself living now, to find yourself human, to find yourself in a fine-tuned universe, and so on:

When you are everywhere, you should never be surprised at finding yourself in any particular place or time.

You draw all the cards. So the probability of drawing any one of them is exactly 1.

Individuality, or the discrete boundedness and exclusivity of your identity is an illusion caused by a failure to integrate all the information.

Please see Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Schrodinger, Daniel Kolak, the Upanishads, and so on, for more on this matter.

That which finds itself in your shoes is that which occupies all perspectives. It is none other than your essential self. A human doesn't occupy these perspectives. A homunculus doesn't occupy them. That which is everything is everything. There's only one substance. There's only one mind, everywhere present to itself.

“I submit that both paradoxes will be solved (I do not pretend to solve them here and now) by assimilating into our Western build of science the Eastern doctrine of identity. Mind is by its very nature a singulare tantum. I should say: the over-all number of minds is just one. I venture to call it indestructible since it has a peculiar timetable, namely mind is always now. There is really no before and after for mind. There is only a now that includes memories and expectations. But I grant that our language is not adequate to express this, and I also grant, should anyone wish to state it, that I am now talking religion, not science.” —Schrödinger, What is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches, p. 134–135

Here, read this chapter from Schrodinger's book (only 13 short pages):
https://archive.org/details/WhatIsLife_201708/page/n143

Why limit the reference class to humans?

I fear that you might be faced with such a situation now. If so, I don't want to tell you what you should think of it.

One of the problems with a dictator is their lack of perfect wisdom and goodness. But to have the world ruled by a perfectly wise and perfectly good all-powerful being who loves us perfectly and rules so as to ensure our best and highest interests are fulfilled is surely desirable, no?

Sentimentality and the kind of love attributed to God aren't the same thing, not even close.

And a wise person is different from an annoying know-it-all. For one thing, we tend to be jealous of greater capacity only in what we consider our peers. Did you ever feel that way about an admired much older sibling, a beloved parent, a great scientist, or anyone like that? Surely, God is so much higher that we wouldn't feel annoyed that he thinks he knows it all! And with him, it wouldn't be conceit. Any high self-appraisal he might display (unlikely) would simply be knowledge, fully justified. He wouldn't be falsely inflated.

I am imagining you going up to God and saying, "What, you think you're better than us?!!"

Ironically, now that Science has allowed us to create human-like autonomous robots, ... — Gnomon

Such things have arrived?

You seem to be describing someone with dementia who seems incoherent, and possibly brain-dead, to most, but whose ramblings or gestures might be made sense of by someone close to that person, suggesting that the person is still in there, but is just hampered in their efforts to communicate via the body. I think if you are encountering such a sitation in your life, you'll have to decide what it means.

When it comes to something as complex, rich, and varied as religion and belief in God, no single explanation can ever suffice. People believe for many reasons, some of these perhaps providing better justification for belief than others. And usually, it is a complex blend of reasons. Some come from psychological motivations. Some come from political power. Some come from genuine attempts to understand the world and our place in it. Some come from early attempts to control natural forces. Some probably involve social-evolutionary, or memetic, forces. Some come from mystical experiences. Much is simply unexamined tradition.

But how did the idea of God originate in the first place? @Fooloso4 suggests the answer above. People in primitive societies did not have our modern, scientific view of how things work, obviously. But they had something we might we call proto-scientific thinking, with faulty methods of attributing cause and whatnot. People noticed patterns and correlations and made connections between things and used this information to try to help them make their way in the world.

If I am a primitive person in the distant past, I notice that some things move and some things don't. One thing that moves is my body. And inside myself, I find my mind, my motivations, and whatnot. I will my body to do something and it happens. I command and possess this body. Then I notice that there are other shapes in the world that look very similar to my body. But I can't control the other bodies that are separated by space from me. And I see them from the outside rather than the inside. I infer, naturally, as we still do today, that inside them must be some conscious agency like what I have inside myself.

There are other things in the world that aren't exactly like me, but similar, and they also move and seem to have interests like I do. These are animals. They must have minds like I do, though lesser.

Another thing I notice is that when babies are born, the first thing they do is breathe. And when someone dies, their breath leaves them. And when the "breath is knocked from" someone, they lose consciousness and their body ceases to be normally animated. Therefore, this breath must have something to do with what animates these bodies. When it is there, they are up and moving around. When they stop breathing, they stop moving around. And the breath that enters at birth and leaves at death is invisible. A person's mind is also invisible. I know mine from the inside, but I can't see it. And I can't see the mind of anyone else. I see a correlation here. Breath and consciousness arrive together. And breath and consciousness are also both invisible. They must be the same thing. So the mind is a vaporous, invisible thing that enters and leaves bodies, and it is that which animates them.

Now let's notice the root of the word animate. It comes from the Latin anima, which means life or soul. Also notice that spirit is the root of respiration, inspiration, and expiration. These are clues. The word animal basically even means "breather". Pneuma is a
Greek word for spirit, and is also tied to air. Think of a pneumatic drill, which is air-powered.

When I, this primitive person, look around, I see other things that move. The wind moves trees, and is invisible. Ancient people often attributed agency to things like whirlwinds and would sometimes fire arrows at them, trying to injure those spirits. More importantly for our discussion here though is that almost all primitive and ancient people thought there must be some kind of agency behind storms, especially thunder and lightning. Notice that even today, we have this idea that God punishes by smiting the wicked with a bolt of lightning.

I have read about and seen footage of alpha male apes reacting to thunder by "presenting" or making as much noise as possible, as if to challenge the dominance of a threatening male. Even apes seem to imagine an agency behind those threatening rumbles in the sky. In our own direct ancestry, this probably predates our being human.

One of the most common sorts of gods in early societies was the storm god. Yahweh, early on, was not the monotheistic God we think of today. Rather, he was a warrior storm god belonging to a particular tribe. And he was a god among other gods and even had a consort named Asherah. People offered sacrifices to this tribal storm god.

Why do people offer sacrifices to gods? Primitive people lived in a world populated with many spirits, some small and some large and powerful. The smaller ones were dealt with by means of magic. People often tried to enslave these lesser spirits. Or they deceived them. Or they scared them off with masks. Or they used smoke or salt or light to be rid of them. But large, powerful spirits, the kind that could make the sky rumble and hurl destructive bolts of white fire from the sky were a different matter. You don't trifle with these great spirits! You kneel! You offer praise! You offer gifts! You can't fool the sky god who sees all! And he isn't afraid of your masks and noisy stomping around the fire!

If something bad happens, especially if the volcano threatens your village, it must be because the large spirit is angry. So you apologize for being too noisy. You do everything to avoid offending this power. You wash yourself, making your presence as clean and pleasant as possible. You approach with quiet and submissive, non-threatening gestures. Then you praise, give thanks, and offer gifts, often of things that rise to the sky, like the smoke of nice-smelling substances, including roasted flesh. Whatever you value, the gods probably also like. And to offer it up shows your serious submission and repentance. And you apologize for the wickedness of people and promise to do better.

You relate to this angry spirit in much the same way that a child relates to an abusive father. I love this Monty Python bit:

Growth and Learning

That clip is missing the part where they go on to sing songs where they implore God not to boil them in hot fat and so on.

I earlier spoke of things animated and things not animated. Notice that people attributed god-like agency to the stars that move, but not the immobile stars. Interesting, no? Thus we have Mars, Jupiter, and so on, named after the gods associated with them and their movements.

There is another dimension to this. Our arboreal ancestors lived in a situation where being up high in the trees, closer to the sky and sun, literally meant better food and safety from predators on the dark forest floor, including cats and serpents. Higher status members of the group got to inhabit the heights. Social rejects were often forced to the ground. Do we have here part of the origins of Heaven and Hell? And you can see the same social dynamic played out on the streets of Manhattan.

Not only were sky gods powerful, being able to hurl lightning, but they also had high status. They literally lived in the sky, untouchable by the corruption on the ground. And they appeared immortal.

One can see in my sketch here how the idea of a god probably originated. Once it was there, the idea of god was also exploited by political power as a tool for social control. Maybe to some extent these political powers even feared the gods and wished for the people to act in a way that would curry favor. Whatever the case, they legitmized their power through the awe the people felt for the gods, either by claiming to be gods or to be the earthly representatives of the gods. This gets very complex. Sometimes the shaman or priestly types were actually manipulating the kings. A claim to be able to talk to the gods was a source of power, influence, profit, and even basic safety. Some very interesting bits can be found In Fraser's The Golden Bough.

Over time, one storm god among many other gods evolved with the culture into something even bigger, higher status, mightier, more fearsome, and rather more abstract. He became the creator of all. And his jurisdiction was no longer limited to the region of one tribe. This God ruled the heavens and the earth. This also served to help explain the seeming design of the world. This belief served many varied functions.

But in all this ritual, all the prayer and incense and self-abasement, and often psychoactive compounds, people discovered something else: altered states of consciousness. And this brought both insights and delusions. People will disagree as what here amounts to real insight. But I suspect in all the inner searching, the ego-restraining gestures, the ritual, and whatnot, people may have come to glimpse certain deeper truths about our own inner nature, something that connects us to the universal. They sometimes felt their own rootedness in the ground of being, which they sometimes identified with God. Some of this mystical insight, in my opinion, is valid, but really has nothing to do with the old gods, even if ancients might have thought so. Such experiences and insight then blended with all the old magic and superstition, the tradition, the political power business, the worldview and old belief system under which these experiences were interpreted, and so on. We end up with something that doesn't yield to easy, simple explanations. Religion has many facets, some superficial, some deep, some old, some new, some worthless, some of great value. And I have only touched on a few points.

There is much more to say, but I'll end it there for now. This sketch might not be exactly correct in all details, but I think it provides a pretty solid candidate for an explanation of the origin of gods.

ok so what if one could show intentional communication when the biology suggests no one is home. nothing earth breaking but something that told anyone who actually knew the person that they were witnessing and intentional expression of some message. would that suffice in proving anything? — MiloL

Depends on the strength of the evidence and resistance to alternative explanations. Describe the scenario you have in mind.

Epiphenomenalism... Yes, epiphenomenalism deserves a mention here. It has been empirically demonstrated that our actions are quite at odds from a hard version of what one would 'want' them to appear as. The brain supposedly comes up with mental states before we are aware of them. This is the unconscious mind at work, where the conscious mind is akin to a whistle on a locomotive chugging along forward. — Wallows

Are you talking about the Libet experiments? Problematic, especially in how they are usually interpreted. The very instructions given to subjects basically ask them to prime their nervous systems for a certain kind of impulse and then allow random action potentials to reach the threshold for motor activation basically without interference. The subjects are basically asked to allow unconscious impulses to express as muscle activity. Nobody should be surprised that action potentials arise that begin before the subject is conscious of them and then, when allowed to proceed, cause movement. And everyone conveniently forgets Libet's "veto" findings and his own interpretation, which are quite at odds with what they want the experiments to show.

As for epiphenomenalism generally, if consciousness were ineffectual, how could you report your subjective states? How could you even know you are conscious? Presumably, the structure of your mental state is determined by the physical state of the brain, right? So any thoughts you have reflect that state. If that brain state contains information about your subjective state, that would seem to require that your very subjectivity must somehow influence the brain state, which would require consciousness to be effectual. If it were ineffectual, it would make no difference at all to behavior whether or not the physical state of the brain is accompanied by a mental state.

And in that case, if a body is making mouth noises that seem to report subjective experiences, they aren't actually caused by any subjective experiences. They actually don't have anything to do with experiences. The behavior is all completely accounted for by low-level, non-conscious physical processes. So we would be talking nonsense when we talk about consciousness. Even if we did have conscious experiences, there would be no way to report them or even have mental states that refer to mental states. Whatever reports we make would be entirely determined by non-conscious processes. See the problem? The phenomenal side of things would recieve causal influence from physical states but never send influence.

Suppose you are operating a radio station and are broadcasting information, but not receiving. Suppose I am in my car listening but not sending any information to you. How could you know about my listening? My state would be influenced by yours, but yours wouldn't be influenced by mine. In epiphenomenalism, my state here is like the mental state, and yours is like the physical state.

And strangely, I sometimes see people who seem to believe in epiphenomenalism go on to speak as though consciousness evolved by natural selection. if consciousness doesn't actually have anything to do with behavior, how could it evolve? What selective advantage would it offer? Why would natural selection favor it?

Of all the ideas in philosophy of mind, I think epiphenomenalism takes the cake as the most indefensible. It is a weird one-way dualism, for one thing. And the people who favor it often are hostile to dualism! Go figure!

But even if were the case, how does that invalidate stoicism?

What is the standard to prove to you mind body dualism? — MiloL

Some really solid evidence that someone out-of-body is really out and observing something not observable by the body would go a long way.

Also, one of the main factors that leads so many to believe such things as mind-brain identity is the tight correlation between the structure of experience and brain events. If you could show strong evidence of a non-correlation here, you might be onto something.

Or can the mind do something that neural processes cannot possibly do, even in principle, even if those neural processes are eventually found to involve something exotic like quantum computing? This seems hard, because we simply don't know what such systems might be able to do. But if you could show the mind doing things that physical systems can't do, it might be persuasive. Many think we already have this in the bare fact of subjective experience, but I think this seeming difference between physical and mental arises only because people stupidly define matter as dead and incapable of subjectivity from the get-go, and without any good justification.

I listened to the lecture by Arkani-Hamed. Interesting! But mostly over my head! I wonder if anyone can help me understand something he said. At 1:41:27, he gives his thoughts as to why the idea of atoms of spacetime cannot be right. What do you make of the reasons he gives? Can you help me understand?

For it to be atoms of spacetime, it's very important that those atoms are small, but small in whose frame? There is no universal notion of small in whose frame, you see? ... The table is made out of stuff because the table chooses a frame. But we can't say that about the vacuum without breaking Einstein's symmetries. So, that's why you can't just have atoms of spacetime. The notion of atoms of spacetime is in radical conflict with Einstein's relativity. — Arkani-Hamed

What does he mean when he says that the table chooses a frame?

If you weren’t a human body you wouldn’t be dreaming or playing world of Warcraft. The ability to do any of those things require a body, and is therefor a prerequisite to any of those activities. — NOS4A2

When you say that I must "be a body" in order to do those things, what do you mean by "body"? Must I have arms and legs? What about eyes and ears? Or does a brain suffice?

You have dreams, right? And while you are dreaming, you believe that what is happening is real, no? Suppose you were to look in a mirror in your dream, or point at "yourself". Have you penetrated to the essential "you"? Now suppose that you ask some dream character to point at you and they point at your dream body. Does that confirm beyond any doubt that you indeed are that dream body?

If you are playing World of Warcraft and you ask another player to point you out and they point at your avatar, have they confirmed that you are that avatar?