Comments

  • Evidence of Consciousness Surviving the Body
    It was evidently highly coordinated, a social entity, an organism, a macroscopic brain. — Pantagruel

    Maybe, but one crow does not look out of the eyes of another, any more than when @180 Proof peers into his soul, I feel like an asshole.

    EDIT: I don't think @180 Proof really wants to be arguing for the privacy of experience, but maybe he does.
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    But no point taking it further. — apokrisis

    Coward!
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    plainly said — apokrisis

    !
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    Your one trick. Pretend there have been no answers so as to cover your own failure to respond in good faith. — apokrisis

    I often disagree with Banno, but not on this. I can't discern an answer in your posts.
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    Equality could mean either the closed system symmetry of one box for everyone, or the open system asymmetry of a 0,1,2 distribution of the three available boxes. — apokrisis

    But that doesn't tell us which one to prefer. Or even which one I prefer.
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    Non sequitur & category error. — 180 Proof

    No it isn't
  • A tough (but solvable) riddle.
    ↪flannel jesus
    I'm impressed you did it without a grid. I suppose there are other ways to record the information.
  • A tough (but solvable) riddle.
    Might this help?

    2d564bd5e2862354b86a41e000b35ba0.jpg
  • A question for panpsychists (and others too)
    ↪RogueAI
    How could you show, even to yourself, that your behaviour is caused by your feelings?

    Why can't both feelings and behaviour, in parallel, be caused by brain activity?

    I'm not rejecting intuition as a bad reason, I'm just wondering if you have any other reasons?

    EDIT: and just to be clear, feelings and behaviour being caused in parallel by brain states is not physicalism, it is a kind of dualism. Epiphenomenalism is a dualist position of some kind.
  • A question for panpsychists (and others too)
    Wouldn't you agree? — RogueAI

    No, the behaviour is the same, no? Behaviour is public.

    EDIT: for the avoidance of doubt, I agree with you. I'm arguing the opposite, I forgot why.
  • A question for panpsychists (and others too)
    That's not how we work. — RogueAI

    There are more sophisticated, less crudely mechanistic accounts, like those involving top-down causation by emergent characteristics of whole systems. Is that any more plausible?
  • A question for panpsychists (and others too)
    Why would it do something so dangerous if not for the feels? — RogueAI

    For the same kind of reason that a ball rolls down an incline.
  • A question for panpsychists (and others too)
    ↪RogueAI
    I agree with you, but others argue, somewhat plausibly, that all the actual causal stuff happens in the brain, and your feeling of such and such just accompanies it. This is the epiphenomenal view. Could epiphenomenalism be true? If you gave a zombie the same drugs a regular human, would it behave the same way?
  • A question for panpsychists (and others too)
    I've found an article by Goff which might be relevant. Haven't read it yet, but it seems to address the revelatory theses and mentions causation in relation to consciousness.

    https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11245-018-9594-9

    From the abstract:

    "Revelation is roughly the thesis that we have introspective access to the essential nature of our conscious states. This thesis is appealed to in arguments against physicalism. Little attention has been given to the problem that Revelation is a source of pressure in the direction of epiphenomenalism, as introspection does not seem to reveal our conscious states as being essentially causal."
  • A question for panpsychists (and others too)
    But if there's the assertion that physical matter exists, and minds and consciousness emerge from it, there has to be an explanation for how that happens. — RogueAI

    It would be helpful, yes. To be fair, some attempts have been made, and the most plausible are all functionalist reductions. But as functionalist reductions, they are open to the objection "Why can't that function happen without consciousness?" Which is just another way to notice that consciousness is not a function.

    The Ai's are approaching human-level. Science is going to have to say something about whether they're conscious or not, isn't it? — RogueAI

    It doesn't have to, but it would be philosophically satisfying if it did. And it really doesn't have to - science has got on well without the concept of consciousness doing any heavy lifting for quite a while.
  • A question for panpsychists (and others too)
    I don’t know what electric charge is. — Greene

    @Patterner Yes, but electric charge is something out there that we come to know about. Consciousness is not like that, it's in here, not out there. We know about consciousness because consciousness is itself knowing, we know that we know, and we know the nature of knowing by being a knower. Electric charge is not the same concept as knowing, so knowing about knowing doesn't reveal the nature of electric charge. We are a system of electric charge as well perhaps, but as electric charge is not the same thing as knowing, the electric charge does not immediately reveal its own intrinsic nature to us as knowers. Does this make any sense? I'm sure other philosophers have had this thought before and probably expressed it much better than I have. I think Goff might have done, I'll look it up.
  • A question for panpsychists (and others too)
    I can't imagine he is ever going to stop trying to figure out what those features are. Newton could not figure out what gravity is. He only figured out what it does. Einstein kept at the mystery, and figured out its intrinsic nature. — Patterner

    That's interesting. Isn't the situation almost the converse with consciousness? We know what it is, but we don't know what it does. Consider epiphenominalism. That's exactly the view that consciousness doesn't do anything. It's not causal. By epiphenominalists agree that consciousness is that by which such-and-such has experiences.
  • A question for panpsychists (and others too)
    Could it? I'm not sure matter can do anything at all without consciousness. It seems to me that consciousness might be uniquely causal.

    I think we are so used to explaining one thing in terms of something else, it is really hard to recognise that this isn't needed with consciousness. Understanding the concept is enough to fully understand what it is.     — bert1

    There's a contradiction in my own post. I said I wasn't sure if it was uniquely causal or not, then I said understanding the concept of consciousness is enough to understand its nature. I'll go with the latter I think. The causal and the experiential are separate concepts, even if they are both equally irreducible to anything else.
  • A question for panpsychists (and others too)
    Matter could have easily stayed dormant and inanimate and have not given rise to mind or consciousness — kindred

    Could it? I'm not sure matter can do anything at all without consciousness. It seems to me that consciousness might be uniquely causal.

    I think we are so used to explaining one thing in terms of something else, it is really hard to recognise that this isn't needed with consciousness. Understanding the concept is enough to fully understand what it is.
  • A question for panpsychists (and others too)
    I don't understand what you mean. What is the mystery, and how have we solved it? What is its intrinsic nature? — Patterner

    Consciousness is its own explanation. It's nothing other than itself. If we assume that consciousness is a natural phenomenon like, say, a whirlpool or something, then we have a mystery to solve, we naturally seek for an explanation, just as we would for a whirlpool. I just don't think any such explanation is to be had, and it's not needed anyway. Once the definition of consciousness is grasped, there is nothing more to explain. With regard to consciousness, definition and theory are one. The question of its relationship to everything else remains though.
  • Simplest - The minimum possible building blocks of a universe
    I won’t waste your time any further. — apokrisis

    Can you waste mine instead? I'm up for it.
  • A question for panpsychists (and others too)
    ↪Vera Mont
    Yes, 'how' is used less broadly than 'why'.
  • The Philosophy of Mysticism
    And, imo, this "object" conceals (its) absence. In broad strokes, I think religion (to worship) idolatrizes-fetishizes-mystifies '(the) absence' and mysticism (to meditate) denies – negates – 'whatever conceals absence' in order to "experience" absence as such whereas philosophy (to inferentially contemplate) describes – makes explicit – 'presence concealing absence' and science (to testably map-model) observes 'only fact-patterns (i.e. states-of-affairs concealing absence) in order to explain dynamics. — 180 Proof

    This looks interesting, but it is a zip file. Can someone unzip it?
  • A question for panpsychists (and others too)
    "How" would be a scientific question (i.e. to explain empirically) instead of a philosophical question "why" (i.e. to clarify-justify conceptually). — 180 Proof

    I get what you mean I think (maybe not), but I'm not sure that's really how language is used. Consider the empirical, scientific enquiry:

    "Why does it only rain when there are clouds in the sky?"

    We could say "How is it that it only rains when there are clouds" but it's unnatural. I think 'Why' is used in a wide variety of contexts, including scientific, conceptual and teleoplogical.
  • A question for panpsychists (and others too)
    If atoms somehow have some sort of subjective life, how does it illuminate the phenomenon of consciousness simply by supposing everything has it? — Bodhy

    This is a good question, as it illustrates, in my view, a mistaken way that philosophers and scientists often think about consciousness. And in a way I agree with you.

    Consciousness is not in need of explanation - the mystery is already solved. We know what it is. We know its intrinsic nature, I suggest. There's nothing more to be said about that. What we don't know is how consciousness relates to everything else. That's the difficult bit. Panpsychism (of whatever kind - there are a number of different panpsychist views) is one way to tackle the problem of where to place consciousness in the world. There are a number of options competing with panpsychism, each with its theoretical pros and cons. For my money, panpsychism has the most pros and the least cons.

    Panpsychism is not really a theory of consciousness, I don't think. It's a theory of which things are conscious. Non-panpsychists perhaps do need a theory of consciousness itself, because they need to explain how some things are conscious and others not, and maybe in order to do that they need to assume consciousness has some underlying nature we can elaborate in terms of the structure and function of, say, brains, as @apokrisis and @180 Proof and others on this forum believe. Substance dualists (do we have any here?) need to come up with a theory of what consciousness could be such that it interacts with the physical world, without actually being of the physical world.

    Does that help? Your question has helped me articulate this.
  • Pragmatism Without Goodness
    This is the central fact you fail to engage with – the way that life and mind are indeed mechanistic. A system of informational switches regulating entropic flows in the way anyone can recognise as being alive and mindful. Or in other words, constituting an organism zombie. — apokrisis
  • The Philosophy of Mysticism
    When i examine my experience, the only thing I can find that might qualify as remotely mystical is a relentless and brutal positivity that permits weakness but not negativity, or self-pity. Although it can forgive, and make use of, both.

    Maybe that's nothing to do with mysticism

    EDIT: the reason I mention is that it doesn't feel entirely from me. Maybe I'm just mentally ill. I have none of the certainty that tends to go with mystical experience
  • A question for panpsychists (and others too)
    As a panpsychist I believe that the rarity and privilege of my experiential transformation from typical matter into a human is literally unimaginable. In fact, I think my miraculous existential fortune should be justified by something other than "it just is that way". My question is what you think this justification might possibly be, or why you think "it just is that way" suffices. — Dogbert

    Are you asking about the emergence of the sentient from the insentient?

    I didn't see this at first but I think you likely are. If so it is a restatement of the 'hard problem' in other words. It's good that you have seen it for yourself. If so 'it just is that way' is highly unsatisfactory. And panpsychism is an alternative, one that I happen to endorse.
  • Can the existence of God be proved?
    ↪Janus
    I think you're right, I do presuppose a reason, and maybe that is just a bad habit. However if there is, in fact, an unknown reason, then we have a natural mystery that explains the phenomena we experience.
  • My understanding of morals
    Moral principles

    As far as I can see, all formal moral philosophies, and certainly any philosophy that specifies how other people should behave, is not moral at all, or even really a philosophy. It’s a program of social control - coercive rules a society establishes to manage disruptive or inconvenient behavior     — T Clark

    Yes, I agree. If there were only one sentient being in the universe, it would go around gobbling at will. There would be no other to impede it. If there are more than one, it is possible that the stronger eats the weaker. Still no morality. Morality happens when two sentient creatures of roughly equal power encounter each other, and they have to come to terms. Morality is the terms that they come to, perhaps. It's is about controlling the behaviour of the other, so they are less of a threat, or so they work for you. Morality is always about others, what you want them to do and what they want you to do.

    It might be contrasted with virtue ethics perhaps, where the concern is to be virtuous, and the focus is on oneself and not others, perhaps.
  • Can the existence of God be proved?
    ↪ssu
    I only say that because it was the reason given in the setup. You were discussing why a person who is already religious would wonder why God exists, why not just follow the rules. So the reason for following the rules assumes the existence of God, in this setup, no? Maybe I misunderstood. But the existence of God is an important factor here because the assumption of his existence is behind the drive to follow the rules. This drive would be on a much more certain footing if God's existence could be established rather than being assumed. Maybe I'm overlooking the importance of faith.

    Of course, I don't believe, even if I were a theist, that source of my morality would be in God's will, however revealed. It is in my will. Then God and I can have a fight, or we can negotiate, or agree, or I can submit, or whatever.
  • Can the existence of God be proved?
    Why not simply follow the given manuals and act righteously? — ssu

    Because it's stupid and pointless if there is no God. So you need to figure out if God is real, and if so it is the God of the bible, and if so is the bible literal, and if so, it might make sense to follow the rules (or it might not, the moral thing might be to fight God the evil basted and his bastard children and curse him even if it is futile).
  • Can the existence of God be proved?
    Scientists and scientifically literate persons do not misuse (misinterpret) physical laws that way – and obviously, bert, you're neither a scientist nor scientifically literate if you believe nature's regularities / structures are "inexplicable" (akin to supernatural mysteries ... miracles, woo-of-the-gaps, etc). — 180 Proof

    If you keep asking 'Yes but why?' eventually even scientifically literate people like yourself, will say 'That's just how it is'. That's a mystery. I make no claim to it being akin to 'supernatural mysteries ... miracles, woo-of-the-gaps, etc'
  • Can the existence of God be proved?
    ↪180 Proof
    Yes, but they are still used in explanations. And the regularities are describable but inexplicable.
  • Can the existence of God be proved?
    Can anyone prove a god, I enjoy debates and wish to see the arguments posed in favour of the existence of a god. — CallMeDirac

    If cosmopsychism is true (panpsychism with an emphasis on the macro rather than the micro), and at the moment I think it probably is, then we have a very large (possibly infinite) and powerful conscious blob. Should we call it God? Who knows. But it's a possible candidate for Goddishness. Does it mean we should believe in miracles, hate fags, give it a name and then stone people who say the name out loud, start wars in its name, try to make out that it is really really bothered about which ethnic group should have rights to a piece of land on one tiny planet in an infinite universe, use it to explain odd things that sometimes happen, and otherwise make up stories (that coincidentally happen to align with our interests) about what it wants? Probably not.
  • Can the existence of God be proved?
    So, again, no proof, even if perfect would change a thing. — Sam26

    I don't think that's entirely right. Reason does change people's views, but slowly, and very occasionally quickly. The rationale lodges in some deep recess of the brain, and slowly starts rearranging neurons around it I reckon, although may never reach a critical mass. Admittedly there are much quicker ways to influence the beliefs on another.
  • Can the existence of God be proved?
    What question is not begged (is not fallaciously answered) by "a mystery"? None. — 180 Proof

    Naturalists offer explanationsi nterms of natural laws, but the laws themselves are taken to be brute and inexplicable, no? A mystery that answers questions.
  • Is there any physical basis for what constitutes a 'thing' or 'object'?
    This topic was called the problem of 'natural kinds' when I was at university. Someone might have mentioned this already, I haven't read the whole thread.
  • Can the existence of God be proved?
    I think @unenlightened is taking the only remotely promising approach, and that is to stipulate a God-idea and then check the world (in a broad sense of 'check') for a corresponding reality.
  • A potential solution to the hard problem
    Why would you expect this? — Dfpolis

    I not sure if I would. I think I was replying to @flannel jesus who might expect it and did give an answer. See above.
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