@jacksonsprat22

You haven't done any philosophy here. Philosophy is about argument and rational justification for beliefs.

Why are you a panpsychist? Banno is very annoying in many ways, but his request for philosophy, far from being trolling, is exactly appropriate for this forum, while your avoidance of argument is why you will get banned and not him.

I'm a panpsychist too by the way. I am because of the fact that consciousness does not admit of degrees. What's your reason? You don't have to have one, but then you should be quiet, or perhaps ask people about their reasons for or against.

Again, if something is both A and B, what difference does it make if you call it A or B? — praxis

It depends if it's a name or a property. If A and B are two names for one thing, it makes no difference. If A and B are two properties (or sets of properties) of the same thing, it makes a difference.

Sure, but there's still a fairly clear distinction between philosophy and science, even if it is blurry in places and shifts its ground. Generally, and imperfectly, philosophical questions are not resolvable by making a physical observation. If they are, they tend to cease to be philosophical questions, and become scientific. That's roughly right isn't it? And it's that difference that explains, I suggest, why philosophical solutions do not force agreement in the way that scientific ones eventually do, even if we have to wait for the old duffers to die. Philosophical problems resurface with renewed vigour generation after generation.

Although bizzarely flat Earthism seems to be making a comeback. So maybe I'm totally wrong.

I'm interested in what you think distinguishes philosophy from science. If you don't think it is reliance on physical evidence, what is it? Are you more comfortable with the concept of observation perhaps?

What science are you talking about? Scientific questions are never settled, and can never be settled by definition. — h060tu

Maybe not absolutely 100%, no, but some questions are pretty settled aren't they? They are settled enough to base life and death decisions on, for example, that converting kinetic energy to heat in a brake will reliably slow a car. There's a whole load of contested scientific claims of course, but there's many more that aren't.

Science is always evolving. — h060tu

Verily it evolves. It evolves in light of what?

The only thing I said is that we can proof that it´s conected with nervous systems and the brain in perticular. — InfiniteMonkey

How can we prove that?

I mean when you damage your brain you damage your consiousness. — InfiniteMonkey

I don't think so. You damage what you are conscious of. And in more extreme cases, you damage your identity. Getting knocked out might be shutting down consciousness. Alternatively, it is disrupting identity, such that you no longer exist for a while. Then when you 'come around' your identity re-forms. This is the less problematic thesis I think.

EDIT: Before I fall foul of Banno, when I say 'you damage what you are conscious of', I don't mean the tables and chairs in the room get smashed up. I mean you are no longer aware of them in the same way.

:) Desperate times I guess.

Maybe. It's not just about rape though. It's about things like climate change, which is more important.

A third party might make sense in some situations. But isn't not voting also an evil choice? Not voting affects the numbers.

It's a really horrible situation. I can't see any non-evil practical choices though.

Isn't he still the better of two evils?

So what I'd argue is, Evidentialism is not how science actually functions. — h060tu

OK, but it is more physical-evidence-based than philosophy, no? And that difference is enough to explain why philosophical disputes can and do go unresolved for millennia, whereas scientific questions get actually decided fairly regularly in the light of evidence. That's the question of the thread.

Sure, that's fair enough. But the arbiter of what makes a scientific theory, model, paradigm, or whatever, true or not, is still evidence, which is objective, or at least strongly intersubjective. Scientific theories have a resource that philosophy does not have. When scientists disagree, they typically go over the evidence, or collect more evidence, or reinterpret the evidence, or question the authenticity of the evidence, or suggest that the evidence needs to be seen in a whole new light, or something. Philosophers don't have that. We have internal consistency, consistency with the broad scientific consensus, appeals to common sense, Ockham's razor, introspection, necessary truths, conceptual clarification, etc. Science has all these too, but it has evidence as well.

The scientific method, eventually, forces agreement in a way that the philosophical method cannot. Physical evidence is public, and appears (more or less) the same way to everyone that looks at it. This typically forces agreement, eventually. Even people who don't want to believe what the evidence suggests are convinced. Philosophical theories have no physical evidence that settles them one way or another, indeed that may be what makes them a philosophical theory and not a scientific one. There are still standards that make some philosophical theories better than others, but they are not as public or clear-cut.

It appeals to my panpsychism. I didn't want to mention that as 180 and I disagree sharply on that, and I was enjoying being able to agree with him on something.

But panpsychism aside, it seems to accurately characterise a healthy attitude to one's own existence: to seek to continue it and develop it, to increase the things one is able to do with oneself, increase one's functional efficacy; and also a healthy attitude to others existence: increasing the possibilities of inter-function with others, to aid one another in seeking to persist and grow and develop. Of course, there may be occasions where it is not possible for two creatures to both grow in the way they want to without one interfering with the other. But such abortive relations can perhaps be re-made with adjusted values, so that their purposes and values do not clash. One value we are encouraged to have by Jesus and The Beatles is love. And if we define 'love' as something like the will to develop the possibilities of existence, then that should hopefully result in mutually beneficial relations, whatever forms that takes :).

To live is to evaluate.

In Spinoza's terms, every life seeks to persist in its existence - continue, survive, grow-develop (à la 'will to power'); thus, every life values - is valuable to - herself; and insofar a life recognizes other lives as valuable to themselves, a life enters into reciprocal valuing with and among them, to value and be valued by other lives. Thus, value, or meaning, does not come "out of nothing"; it comes from community - natality, sociality, fatality - and reinforced, or enriched, by communicative practices (e.g. cooperative labors, crafts-arts, rituals, trade, discursive dialectics (e.g. scientific / historical / philosophical inquiries)). — 180 Proof

I like this. Seems intuitively right.

Thank you. :)

Is there a prohibition on any conspiracy theorising, or only on excessive ridiculous conspiracy theorising?

100% There must be big conspiracies. Knowing what they are is the problem.

I may be quibbling here but I think a stressful situation is different than what causes stress. Stress itself begins and ends in biology. — NOS4A2

Ah OK. I see what you mean.

I’m pretty sure the body causes stress, not governments. — NOS4A2

Environmental factors are part of the causal story, no?

GCB nothing to disagree with there. And to answer you rhetorical question, of course they should.

I'll read it. Prompt me if I forget. You won't know if I've forgotten or not but that's epistemology for you.

Have you read any panpsychist literature?

Any developed panpsychist view needs an answer to the combination problem. Micropsychists are particularly targeted: how can lots of individual conscious atoms combine to form a larger conscious entity? Do the individual atoms lose their consciousness? Or are there lots of conscious entities all overlapping? Are their experiences all separate, or do they bleed into one another? As Searle puts it, "What are the units supposed to be?" How is the panpsychist to come up with a plausible story here that isn't just made up and arbitrary?

I like the cover. Looks like it was wrestled from a Lich and you're about to level up big time after reading it.

Also, what is the point of a claim that can not be confirmed in principle and has no explanatory power? — Zelebg

It explains why anything at all is conscious. It might also explain why anything at all happens, if everything that happens is a result of intention. Admittedly these are explanations at the very broadest level possible - you can't get any useful tech out of this, or solve practical moral problems with it.

What differentiates one consciousness from another - leaf, branch, tree, forest... each grain of sand or the whole beach - what is conscious? — Zelebg

Good question. Possibly Tononi's phi. I like to think of the IIT as a theory of identity rather than a theory of consciousness.

If that were the case and consciousness were a property of matter rather than a large, functioning nervous system, then consciousness would persist post-mortem. — Txastopher

It would, but identity would not. The units would change.

However, if panpsychists want to insist that virus are conscious then it is up to them to demonstrate their claim. This they haven't done. — Txastopher

It's right to ask panpsychists for positive demonstrations of course. But it is also interesting to consider what the 'default' position actually is. It is arguably more parsimonious and reasonable to assume panpsychism on the grounds that the only body we know about for sure is conscious, namely my own (and similarly for each of us). So then we have to consider whether there are two kinds of bodies in the world, conscious and non-conscious, or just one, conscious. If all other things are equal, it seems to me that the default position is that there is one kind of body.

Sorry, maybe I've misunderstood. If the exam is the cause and the anxiety is the effect, then the exam is cancelled, then we have an effect without a cause, rather than a cause without an effect.

We now have a cause (anxiety) without an effect. — TheMadFool

I don't think you meant it that way round.

Yes I got one just like that. He quoted some bible stuff at me. I've PMd Baden.

Panpsychism is vague, ambiguous, untestable, without even possibility of ever giving any prediction, confirmation or explanation. — Zelebg

Panpsychism predicts that stuff happens. Things do, verily, happen. Panpsychism is confirmed. If panpsychism were not the case, nothing would ever happen. Things do happen. Therefore panpsychism.

What do you find fruitful about it?

It places consciousness at the only point in reality that doesn't involve insurmountable difficulties, namely, at a fundamental level. The antithesis of panpsychism is emergentism. But emergentism is so problematic that we should reject it. One reason is that consciousness is not a vague concept. There are no borderline cases of it. Emergentism requires borderline cases..

Darwinian materialism — Wayfarer

Does Darwin have an interest in this topic? An what is Darwinian materialism?

Existence is a property, it's just not what is wrong with the ontological argument.

Monarchy - mono archy, or one rules over all.

Oligarchy - Oligs rule (I don't know what an olig is.)

Plutarchy - rule by many (I think... now I wish I never skipped those Ancient Greek Language classes)

Patriarchy - rule by a male originator of the klan

Matriarchy - rule by a female originator of the Klan

Anarchy - rule by nobody (an- is a prefix that negates a noun's meaning.) — god must be atheist

It would have been so easy to look these up before posting.

How is that different from atheism? — jorndoe

This is a rhetorical question.

compositional fallacy — 180 Proof

I've never come across a panpsychist saying a whole must be conscious because some of the parts are (although no doubt there will be such people, I may even be one of them, although I don't recall making an argument of that form). If you are fallacy hunting, wouldn't the fallacy of division be more apt? Namely that the parts must be conscious because the whole is?

I could understand you crying foul in terms of a divisional fallacy. Are you sure that's not what you mean?