able to verify claims and assertions — Garrett Travers

Panpsychism is verifiable

I'm still trying to work out what @180 Proof is actually saying.

I gave hunger as an example of an explanation for behaviour. 180 said that hunger was no more a cause of eating than a traffic light is a cause of hitting the brakes, it being a signal.

But it seems like a bad analogy to me because a traffic light is absolutely critical in the chain of events leading to hitting the brakes. And if the analogy is good, then that means that hunger is absolutely critical in a full explanation of why I eat. And hunger is a feeling. So we have phenomenal experience causing physical actions, in some sense of 'cause' at least.

So I'm struggling. I'll read over the conversation again when I get to a proper computer in case I'm misinterpreting (again).

I'm not sure what maps and territory have to do with anything. If someone could explain I'd be grateful.

In the first instance the event happens 'because' of the signal, or at least the signal plays a role, in the absence of which the event would (likely) not happen. But in the second, we have no signal, but the event happens anyway. In the first you are saying that the signal plays a (likely essential) role in the event's occurrence, in the second, the event happens anyway even though there is no (likely essential) signal. That's where I'm perceiving a contradiction.

Are we managing to talk to each other? I think it's going rather well so far, for us.

No more than, for example, traffic lights "cause" drivers to step on the breaks or the gas. Simply put, they are only signals which inform habits, and when circumstances warrant they can be overriden (ignored), unlike "causes" which cannot. — 180 Proof

This^ contradicts this:

The "chain of events" would be unbroken but otherwise, that is, it'd remain first-order (i.e. meta-free). — 180 Proof

In the first quote, the signals do play a significant role in the story of how the brake gets pushed; or in the eating example, hunger plays a significant role in the story of how we come to eat. Whereas in the second quote, it plays no role at all. Distinctions on the meaning of 'cause' or appeals to meta levels don't help you it seems to me. I think you think the phenomenal affects the physical.

EDIT: I'm actually quite interested in what Apo has to say about this. He'll give us some stuff about downward causation no doubt. Anyway, let's attempt a summons.

*casts Protection from Evil*
Throws giblets on the brazier

@apokrisis, you are needed

Hola Apo. What say you?

Thanks 180 that's helpful. From what you say it seems to me that these signals are part of the 'how', not just post-hoc rationalisations, teleologoical 'why-answers' with no causal role in the process at all. If you took out the signal, the chain of events is broken, no?

No more than, for example, traffic lights "cause" drivers to step on the breaks or the gas. Simply put, they are only signals which inform habits, and when circumstances warrant they can be overriden (ignored), unlike "causes" which cannot. — 180 Proof

Thank you. Can this be analysed as follows:

In the case of traffic lights, the traffic lights going red are a necessary condition for stepping on the brakes. It's not a sufficient condition because it can be overridden, and for other reasons as well. You can drive through the lights anyway. Is that right?

So, to do your work for you, applying this to the hunger example, feeling hungry is, sometimes, a necessary condition for eating. That is to say, were it not for you being hungry, you wouldn't eat. But it can be overridden. This falls short of a cause in your thinking, yes?

On the other hand, the causes of your eating cannot be overridden. Is that right? Are they necessary and sufficient for eating?

What are the causes of eating? Is it, say, low blood glucose levels, which gets picked up by some bodily mechanism (excuse my ignorance), then the brain consequently initiates motor movement. I know that's skipping all the detail but you get the idea. Is that what you have in mind as the cause? This is both necessary and sufficient for eating to occur?

What if there is food readily available, but there is another factor, an intruder with a knife just enters the kitchen, and threatens you. You run from the room, presumably through some similar causal story about biological processes, without eating. Has the cause of eating been overridden by another cause?

I just want to see how you analyse all this. I invite you to talk about this particular situation, rather than in general, as I find that easier to understand.

Anecdotes (i.e. correlations at most) do not "compete" with Experiments (i.e. causal / stochastic relations) in truth-making. — 180 Proof

Do you think that feelings never play a causal role in human behaviour?

@180 Proof Apply that to the example

We are not talking past each other. These different kinds of explanations compete.

It explains why I eat. I eat because I'm hungry.

That's a description of motivated behavior, not an explanation of how it happens. — 180 Proof

No, it's a an explanation. Physical explanations are derivative on descriptions, ultimately ending in 'that's just what happens'.

Does anyone philosophically assume that liquid comes from solid or gas vapor comes from liquid or ... digesting comes from guts? — 180

Obviously. So what?

No doubt, but what does a "phenomenological explanation" actually explain — 180 Proof

I eat because I feel hungry.

It is a projection from my brain being produced from stored memory data in the hippocampus. — Garrett Travers

Your account is metaphorical, my spunky young friend. What screen is the apple projected onto?

As in the exact same way it produces sight, smell, taste, heart beat, blood circulation, etc. — Garrett Travers

Does a brain 'produce' sight? A brain (in a body) might see. Isn't that more accurate?

Does a brain 'produce' smell? Only if you extract it and give it a sniff, it seems to me.

A brain causes a heartbeat, perhaps. The heart itself beats. I'm not sure any production is going on.

What exactly is the relationship between the functioning of a brain, and, say taste? Is taste nothing other than a brain functioning in a particular way, perhaps? Would you want to say that?

Is consciousness nothing other than a kind of brain function? Is that what you mean by 'produce'?

As in the exact same way it produces sight, smell, taste, heart beat, blood circulation, etc. Literally just like that. — Garrett Travers

The brain is not the same thing as its products, then?

That's why when your brain stops working, you stop being conscious. Very straight forward, mainstream neuroscience.

What's the empirical difference between my temporarily ceasing to be conscious, and my mind temporarily ceasing to exist?

The brain produces consciousness... — Garrett Travers

In what sense does it 'produce' consciousness? Like a snail produces slime? Like a producer produces a film? Like a magician produces a rabbit? Like a computer produces an output on a screen? Like a radio produces sound? Or some other sense?

I like it! I really do. I know it's funny as well, but panpsychists are going to have to start talking like this at some point. I eagerly await when Strawson and Goff start publishing this kind of thing in respectable journals.

What Tobias said. Diversity improves the quality of the decisions.

Let me give it a try. If I hold two magnets in my hands I imagine them to be elementary particles (the micro world is really not that different from the micro world). The particles long for each other or want to get away from each other. What exactly this will is, I can't tell. I mean, it can't be explained materialistically. You can describe it with charge, three kinds even (electric and two color), but what it is...? You can feel it though.
Like the hate felt towards Wilhelm Reich (a scientific outcast, who made a very astute observation of the drives in Nazi Germany and whose books were burnt in the US, in the fifties! How can you not love the man, who died after a year in prison...).
(I just had to mention it.) As we all are combinations of these charged particles, we are conscio⁸us, with a will, with faces, arms and legs, etc. Our consciousness is derived from these basic longings (+ and -). We have not evolved according to what people like Dawkins claim. It's just love and hate we are, or driven by.
God is love. God is hate. — Cornwell1

I'm certainly very sympathetic to your emphasis on the continuity between the basic properties that determine the behavior of matter and whatever it is that determines our behavior as complex living organisms. And there are several, in my opinion, very good arguments for panpsychism. But you haven't quite explained how you know what particles feel. You are speculating that charge is will, and that the subjective aspect of positive and negative charge is love and hate experientially. But why isn't it, say, more like hot and cold, experientially? I'm already thinking of some responses, but you have a go.

We know though what it feels like to be a particle though. — Cornwell1

That's interesting. I'm a panpsychist, and whenever someone asks me what it feels like to be a particle or a thermostat or whatever, I reply I don't know. I speculate that perhaps the simplest feelings are like/dislike, love/hate (as you say), positive and negative. The latter is just a coincidence that this is how we describe charge. Your knowledge claim is a strong one. Can you justify it? Or at least explain it?

This sounds like an inverted quora question. :)

I have no idea of the answer

emergent — 180 Proof

Strong or weak?

I'm not a reductionist, so why do you ask? — 180 Proof

I thought you thought that thinking, feeling, consciousnessing, etc, were things that brains do? Just like digesting is what guts do and walking is what legs do. That is to say that thinking, feeling, and other mental functions are nothing other than the actions of brains. That's a reduction isn't it? You're not reducing to structure, I get that, but you are reducing to function, no?

As it pertains to philosophy of mind, materialism is, I think, most accurately construed as synonymous with emergentism. That is, consciousness, just is (or arises from) interactions of severally non-conscious events. I think that's what every materialist probably has in common.

You've misread my post — 180 Proof

It's tragic how you are so clear in your writing, yet are so often misread. I'm glad I am not so misunderstood, it must be a burden for you.

We might say a philosopher is someone who engages in the philosophical method.
I've tried to articulate exactly what that is, and I'm having trouble. How about:

"The philosophical method is an investigation of the world (in the broadest sense of 'world') by the examination of concepts and their relations."

Does that work?

So by extension a philosopher is someone who does that.

Well worth it. The Ghost Stories for Christmas are generally good. Old, but still creepy. Michael Hordern does a nice job as Professor Parkin.

...

If we can define by example, consider Professor Parkin:



The most philosopher bit is about 20:40 in

This makes me think of @Banno

...

On the one hand:
If God is all powerful, all knowing, all good, unchanging and timeless, then how can we have a relationship with Him or He with us?

On the other hand:
If God is a person as we understand persons to be and if God is able to give and take in relationship with us, then how can He be also a supreme and eternal being? — Cuthbert

Thanks for setting the context. I wasn't aware of the terminology from the OP.

One way to approach the question is to perhaps enquire what God and human beings have in common (suspending disbelief, obviously, for the purposes of the thread).
- will
- a body? Can space, or the universe, be a body? Is that compatible with transcendence?
- sentience
- thought, as we understand it? What about functional aspects of though that are substrate dependent?

Can we have finite and infinite versions of these things?

:yawn:

A philosopher is someone who talks like this:

"Being a philosopher is a sufficient (but not a necessary) condition for being a cunt."

EDIT: for the avoidance of doubt, I do consider myself to be a philosopher.

Yes, I think that analysis seems right, but it only applies in first part the post systems. In systems where small parties get to exercise power proportionally, then voting for them is not a waste, and meaningful coalitions can arise. No doubt that will have its problems but it's got to be better than the current shit show we have in the US and UK now. Not that I'm an expert on political science.

Your example of alcohol (and other similar examples we can generalise from) shows that alterations in brain function in humans alter the quality of what we experience. It does not show that brains give rise to conscious experience, certainly not uniquely anyway. Apparent loss of consciousness when brain function is disrupted is no proof that brain function is necessary for consciousness either, as there are other explanations for this that have to be ruled out. For example, the explanation that with loss of brain function there is loss of coherent identity rather than subjective experience. To explain further, perhaps subjective experience continues at the level of single neurons, or single molecules or atoms or whatever. It's just the brain as a whole does not work together to generate a coherent human subject.

O'Neill Cylinders look better to me as habitats, but require a lot of mass. Maybe moon first, space elevator on the moon as a way to get mass into space. I don't know. Isaac Arthur does a great channel on this stuff. What about digging underground on the moon?

EDIT: to answer the question, world government first, then moon, then elsewhere

Sure. Another arbitrary factor is what we take as a single event. Is the evolution of the dinosaurs one event or lots of events?

I think there are substantively four different questions in the OP. All of them are extremely interesting questions. I suggest picking on one of them for the topic of the thread. Or make several different threads.

It can be no other reason than that there is consciousness. — Cartuna

That's what I think too. However I am sympathetic to people who don't think like that. I can understand it when people, especially scientists who are used to explanations of one thing in terms of something else, are suspicious of claims that a phenomenon is just a brute feature of the world that admits of no further explanation. It's just in this case I do think there are lots of very strong indications that consciousness is just brute.