Oh, I see. Didn't understand that when I wrote my previous answer. So where is the boundary between the layers?

We've crossed the language-level boundary when we say "My thoughts about consciousness caused my fingers to move the pen which wicks ink up from the ink-cartridge according to physical laws x,y,z", for example.

Sorry I don't understand. Writing things involves moving physical objects around, pens, keyboards etc. What am I missing?

It's casual at it's own lever of abstraction. — flannel jesus

Oh, OK. Can you give an example of consciousness causing something in a way that doesn't tread on the toes of any physics?

Interesting article. It's extremely dualistic, in a way, isn't it? It seems to suggest a fairly radical disconnection between the two 'levels'. Is he saying that the levels exist in language alone, perhaps, and not physically? And nowhere is there an explanation of, say, how consciousness came to be, or even if he thinks consciousness is real.

EDIT:

This is a nice quote from the article:

I really do think that enormous confusion is caused in many areas — not just consciousness, but free will and even more purely physical phenomena — by the simple mistake of starting sentences in one language or layer of description (“I thought about summoning up the will power to resist that extra slice of pizza…”) but then ending them in a completely different vocabulary (“… but my atoms obeyed the laws of the Standard Model, so what could I do?”) — Sean Carroll

It doesn't have to be either/or. — flannel jesus

Maybe. I think that would make a great topic for a thread. Does psychological causation compete with physical causation?

I heartily agree. EDIT: you may be interested in @apokrisis posts on the forum about complex systems and top-down causation. Is that the kind of thing you are thinking of?

It would. But it leaves no evolutionary role for consciousness to play, which was @wonderer1's point.

EDIT: my own tentative view is that only consciousness is causal.

Suppose miraculously I was able to produce an accurate account of every detail of the evolutionary path leading to humans. Would it then be unreasonable to conclude with, "So that's just the way evolution went?"

BTW, Do you think Chalmers is an evolution skeptic? — wonderer1

When philosophers like Chalmers ask questions like "Why doesn't all this information-processing go on "in the dark", free of any inner feel?" they don't really mean 'why' in the sense of "what evolutionary benefit has it?" They're looking for a 'how', as in "Explain how, exactly, that information processing (or whatever function) somehow produces/causes/is-identical-with consciousness?"

So what reason do we have to think human behavior in general could be as it is without consciousness? — wonderer1

Because of the causal closure of the physical

What are you talking about?

What does 'rodeo clowning bulls' mean?

Sure, I agree. That's a good point, but one @180 Proof didn't make. There were a number of things that @180 Proof could have meant, I was just wondering which one it was. I respond to 180's posts quite a lot because his style is ambiguous, and when people miss his point, he invariably blames the reader, something no good writer should ever do. And 180 is a very good writer some of the time.

If some observation corresponds to some Star Wars-specific proposition, then it is evidence that Jediism is true. — 180 Proof

Do you think there is something wrong with that?

A pointless comment. — Janus

That's exactly what someone who was teased by their sister as a child would say.

Sure, let's do that on the psychology forum.

When we say "transcendence", don't we usually mean something metaphysical like 'X transcends, or is beyond, Y' (e.g. ineffable, inexplicable, unconditional, immaterial, disembodied, etc)? This differs from "transcendental" which denotes 'anterior conditions which make X epistemically possible' (Kant, Husserl). I usually can't tell from their posts what most members like Wayfarer or @Constance intelligibly mean by either of these terms. — 180 Proof

I tend to avoid the term as it can very quickly tend to irresolvable dualisms or obscurantism as you suggest. It might be salvaged as a concept by identifying the transcendant with the subject and the worldly with its actions, in the sense that the sea transcends its waves, or I transcend my walking. The world is the actions of spirit.

@Tom Storm

With apologists it always comes down to "you must not understand" if you disagree with them and/or present arguments they can't cope with. Also, they argue from the mindset of wanting something to be true and ignoring anything that doesn't confirm their wishes, rather than seeking to discover the truth with an unbiased disposition. — Janus

Could you teach me how to read minds?

My thinking is this: Religion rises out of the radical ethical indeterminacy of our existence. This simply means that we are thrown into a world of ethical issues that, in the most basic analysis, are not resolvable. Yet they insist on resolution with the same apodicticity as logical coercivity. Meaning, just as one cannot but agree with something like modus ponens or the principle of identity in terms of the pure logicality of their intuitive insistence, so one cannot resist the moral insistence of moral redemption. This latter is the essence of religion, and I further claim that in proving such a thing, I am giving the world and our existence in it exactly the metaphysical satisfaction is seeks. — Constance

I think there is probably a lot to this. But if you are correct, doesn't this mean that everyone is religious in some way, even the atheist, who also has to grapple with these issues, and in some way yield to the moral insistence you describe? Do you want to modify your concept to exclude atheists and those who identify as irreligious? Or do you want to say that everyone is religious in the sense you mean it, whether they like it or not?

Atheists tend to base their irreligiosity on the grounds that an essential element of religion is a set of beliefs about the world that there is no reason to think are true. But you've explicitly said that's not the feature of religion you are talking about.

(1) Evidence is a correspondence between some proposition and some observation of reality.

(2) If some observation corresponds to some Bible-specific proposition, then it is evidence that Christianity is true.

(3) If praying induces experiences for a biological reason, then prayer-induced experiences are not observations of reality but hallucinations.

(4) Prayer induces experiences for a non-biological reason, therefore prayer-induced experiences are observations of reality.

(5) There are prayer-induced experiences of observations that correspond to Bible-specific propositions, therefore they are evidence Christianity is true. — Hallucinogen

Is this intended to be an argument?

Is (4) an assumption?

Granting (4), doesn't this apply to other religions as well? Are you as happy for this line of thinking to support other religions than Christianity? Perhaps you think that all religions are culture-specific approaches to one spiritual reality?

Can you explain his sarcasm?

Well, at least Sam26 got the sarcasm. — 180 Proof

'yes' doesn't work either.

I can ask the question ainy clearer If you don't get it, then I assume the answer is "no". LLMs are still just sophisticated toys. Never mind, carry on. — 180 Proof

In a fit of your famous clarity, I think you may have meant 'can't'. And 'no' cannot be an answer to the question you asked:

So what, if any, philosophical questions does ChatGPT# ever raise (without begging them)? — 180 Proof

no — 180 Proof

See? It doesn't work.

It's obviously totally possible.

Has to be satire, no?

The answer depends on the argument. — 180 Proof

Indeed. The argument seems to be some kind of Pascal's wager. But if I were God I would likely look more favourably on atheists who made some effort to figure things out than someone who confuses the American constitution with the Bible.

Are you married? Have you made a life-long commitment to another adult? — Banno

That's two different questions. Which do you want answered?

Indeed. I think power is important. I'm less concerned about who is evil and who isn't (like orcs vs elves) and more about who has power and what are they doing with it.

Well so are Israelis which are subject to a genocidal neighbor which refuses to accept theirn autonomy. — BitconnectCarlos

Responsibility sticks to power. I rather suspect anti-Israel sentiment, and the relative downplaying of Hamas's nastiness (at least in this thread - it's not the case in most the media I've come across) has to do with the fact that Israel can, and indeed is, killing a great many people and destroying all the buildings and infrastructure, and Hamas is not. If the boot were on the other foot, I rather suspect we'd all be slagging off Hamas. But each cunt has its day, as someone famous might have said, and today it's Israel who is the cunt.

My point has only been that we care about what we care about, and we can't just magically decide to care more about something we previously cared less about — Janus

I think that may be the most difficult and important issue in philosophy - can we change the orientation of our will, at will?

I'm just an idiot who knows nothing about maths, but I'm just wondering what dividing by 0 might mean in terms of pizzas.

If you divide a pizza by infinity, the pizza is annihilated, presumably, it becomes one with the quantum field.

If you divide a pizza by 1, it is unaltered. Is that right?

If you divide it by 0.5 you get two of them, bizarrely.

If you divide it by the 'opposite' (reciprocal?) of infinity, you get the whole universe, and then some, full up with pizza. Is that right?

So we've gone from absolutely nothing, to the totality of everything. What other options are there that dividing a pizza by 0 will get you? We need something more extreme than either nothing or everything.

Am I talking out of my arse?

EDIT: I've probably made this thread many times worse - delete away.

"A long way down" by Nick Hornby. Funny. I lol'd.

Proofreading is checking for grammar and spelling usually, not really content. It sounds like you are looking for feedback on your ideas. If so this forum might be useful. A certain thickness of skin helps here but it's not too bad. Most people are helpful. If you want someone to read your whole essay and offer detailed feedback you may have to pay someone. But you can get it for free if you post up interesting snippets to the forum and it grabs people's interest.

Well duh! The issue should not be whether animals have consciousness, but do we give a toss? But this is better than nothing i guess. Hasn't the scientific community got this far ages ago with fish? Jury is still out regarding Palestinians and Africans.

Because a capacity is a function? Or feeling is a verb, which means something has to be doing something, which is a function?

Okay, so then what is "consciousness"? — 180 Proof

The capacity to feel.

Ergo the implication is that subjects are not conscious (or impersonal)? — 180 Proof

Not by virtue of their structure and function, no. But they are conscious. Consciousness is not structure and function. But a person has both structure and function and is conscious.

So, do you agree that some concepts are absolutely simple, and thusly unanalyzable and incapable of non-circular definitions, but yet still valid; or do these so-called, alleged, primitive concepts need to be either (1) capable of non-circular definition or (2) thrown out? — Bob Ross

I think I probably agree with you. I think consciousness might be one of these - it gets defined by synonyms which suggests it may be unanalysable. Do you think there is a difference between a word and a concept?

Poor ol' Germans seem doomed to be on the wrong side of history again.

What's the difference between self and consciousness? — Truth Seeker

The self is what is referenced in such various views as Hume's bundle, Metzinger's Ego Tunnel, Tononi and Koch's system of integrated information, systems' theorists predictive modelling of reality (a la @apokrisis), these things are instantiated by brains in humans and constitute a loose functional identity. When this functioning ceases, say in sleep or under anaesthesia, the self ceases for that time.

Consciousness is, at minimum, what makes doing all these functions feel a certain way. Recently I've starting thinking that consciousness may be uniquely causal, so that nothing at all could happen without it.

So then "consciousness" is impersonal? For instance, my awareness of being self-aware isn't actually mine? — 180 Proof

It's a good question, if I understand it, which I'm not sure I do. I'll take an awake, functioning human as being a central case of a person, and it seems to me that both the functioning complex referred to above and the presence of consciousness are necessary for personhood (although there are other senses of 'person' I'm glossing over). So a person aware of their own consciousness is an aware functioning-complex aware of their awareness. So, if I've understood your question properly, consciousness abstracted from any functioning system is indeed impersonal, in that sense.

(But, inevitably, sometimes people (particularly the religious or spiritual) use 'person' simply to indicate the presence of consciousness in the abstract. Sometimes the distinction between 'self' and 'Self' is made, which I guess corresponds to the difference between the functional-complex and consciousness, but I'm no expert on that.)