We're aware that something more is going on with us but it's very difficult to put a finger on, hence the evasive vagaries of the language used ("what it is like" etc.). — Kenosha Kid

Yeah, I certainly see the issue. I don't subscribe to the difficulty myself though. I think something as simple as time passing is actually a far more complicated notion to get one's head round, yet the story we tell ourselves to manage it is simply accepted.

For me consciousness is simply an internal collation mechanism, all the justifications (reasoning, logic...), intentions, desires are just the stories we tell to bring a modicum of unity to what is otherwise a disconnected set of stimuli-response mechanisms. I don't doubt for a minute that most organisms complex enough to benefit from some collation have it.

What I don't wholy understand is why we have so much trouble reflecting on it.

Going back to time. As I understand it, my everyday concept of time passing would fall to pieces under any serious scrutiny, but we don't have so many interminable debates about how that is. I have a story about time which helps me muddle through, it's not terribly much like time really is, but then I wouldn't expect it to be, time's really super complicated and it'd be a nightmare to go about life with that in mind all the time.

Consciousness seems the same to me. It's extremely complex and nebulous, but there's nothing at all mysterious about it's being that way, it's exactly how I'd expect it to be. We have a lay understanding of it instead which suffices most of the time.

The philosophical 'puzzle' only arises when we expect that lay story to relate in some intrinsic way to what we actually find out in neuroscience and cognitive science. I mean, why would it, it's just a story.

Anyways... I realise now I've rambled way off topic with all that, but I'm not deleting it all now, you can have it.

Fair warning - I can't quite make sense of what either of you are saying here so this post is in part a fishing exercise to clarify and may well end up more clearing up things you don't mean than responding to the thing you do mean.

The diagram is not in the system, it's an outside view. — Kenosha Kid

An outside view viewed by whom? Mww seemed to be talking about his own thought processes in both cases, so taking an 'outside' view of them would seem to be impossible - unless one relied on the view of third parties, but this seems no less available to cognitive science so that wouldn't amount to a distinction.

A system with an input and output can't have as its output a report on the system. If there's a bit of the system that measures the system, what is measuring it, etc. — Kenosha Kid

Indeed, but this seems to apply only to the totality of the system, which I didn't think was ever in question. If a system is made of subsystem A and subsystem A* (responsible for examining the workings of subsystem A) then 'the system' is examining itself. The fact that it's not examining the totality of itself doesn't remove from the fact that it is examining itself.

So, insofar as the discussion was about the advantages of a metaphysical vs a cognitive science approach, neither seem to be making the claim to have examined the totality of the system and so inability to do so doesn't seem relevant to the matter of each one's utility.

nothing wrong with a system examining the inner workings of a sample of almost identical systems. — Kenosha Kid

A separate point here, but perhaps one to get into when I've fully understood your objections - here's a really important feature of neurology called redundancy - you may have come across it - but it undermines the idea that there's specifically a neural circuit for this or that job, rather there are usually several. If what we're talking about is a simple inability of one subsystem to examine itself, then we've surmounted that objection already as there would almost certainly not be one subsystem doing the job of system-wide examination. There are already carbon copies of such systems available to their clones for examination.

Have the system report the map input :|--> output for all possible inputs. The resultant map is functionally identical to the system, but differently composed — Kenosha Kid

Again, in the context of an examination of the two approaches (metaphysics/cognitive science) this seems to be simply a de facto constraint on both. Any description we give will constitute a description not the thing it's describing.

examining the system, reporting on it, post hoc, is not the use of the system for its intended purpose. When thinking about something, in the common course of cognitive events, to ask myself how it is I’m thinking it, isn’t in that common course. I may inquire afterwards, in which case I would retrospect using the very same system by which the original thought occurred. Check out how a car drives, whether it drives properly or there’s something wrong with it, by driving it, right? Check out the fit of a shoe......ehhhh, you get the picture. — Mww

Not sure how this relates to the difference between cognitive science and metaphysics. Both are post hoc. In fact cognitive science has the slight edge here in that third parties can contribute some data here without their examination forming a part of the process (and so changing it). I'm not seeing how a metaphysical approach solves this problem.

In addition, part of the system is not in our awareness. Just as in the physical nature of brain mechanics, there is a gap between the sensing of a thing and the apprehension of it, that part in which the perception is transformed into material for the system. Much like we are not conscious of the transfer along nerves of the output of sensation and the input to the brain. — Mww

But we are conscious of the transfer along nerves of the output of sensation and the input to the brain, at least I am. I've seen it with my own eyes in both fMRI and EEG. I'm not conscious of it at the time, but I've no reason at all to believe that all the times I'm not in a machine capable of detecting such things my body works differently to the times when is is, that would be unreasonable skepticism.

The first box is the instantiation of it, the last is the culmination. — Mww

This seems to be making an arbitrary distinction. 'The System' in the context of our discussion is the mind and it's contents. If you are aware of the instantiation and you are aware of the culmination, then by definition both must be part of 'The System' because you have no other means by which you can be aware of either than your mind. You could rely on third party reports of either, but then with cognitive science we can rely on third party reports of the intervening activity too.

___

As I said, I'm not yet convinced I've understood the objection, so take the above as tentative.

I also think if you take care of financial, security, and opportunity issues, the rest will take care of itself. — T Clark

Indeed, it betrays quite an ugly view of human nature to think otherwise really.

What more would be needed, what more could possibly be achieved, beyond addressing "disparities in education, resources, opportunity and wealth?" That is the problem, the whole problem, and nothing but the problem. Or am I misunderstanding what you're saying. — T Clark

Not sure if you're asking me or Tom, but what I meant by it was directly in response to the talk about preferred pronouns. The idea being that there's a category of need which is covered by "education, resources, opportunity and wealth" (though I'd dispute 'education', but that's another story) which is universal and foundational, quite distinct from the category of basic politeness, comfort, aesthetics etc. which may be nice to have but are so tightly tied to the former that they simply follow from them (absent if the former are absent, present if the former are present).

Preferred pronouns are in the latter category. Not worth an inch of column space whilst children are starving.

Reminds me of Pattee's epistemic cut and how this is the basis for the subject-object distinction. — Olivier5

Yeah, I have some sympathy with that view, although there are some aspects I'm not so sure on...another thread though maybe.

I don’t know the cause of my thought. That which cannot be known, can still be thought, hence, the cause of my thought can only be a thought, or, it is nothing. — Mww

So when I see a mark on my kitchen floor and I don't know the cause of it, it must be either uncaused or caused by a thought? ...seems iffy to me.

I know I start with this (something), I know I end up with that (“basketball”), but whatever happens in between, is part of the system itself, and can never be examined except by the very system of which it is a part. — Mww

Are not 'start' and 'end up with' nodes in the system? If had a flow diagram of your though process, box 1 would say [whatever the something is], box 9 would say [basketball] and there'd be whole load of boxes in between. You're saying that you know you start at 1 and end up at 9, but you can't examine the boxes inbetween using the system itself. But how can you know that without having at least taken a glance at the diagram - you must have 'examined' the system to some extent to even be able to report as much as you have.

"It has a box 1 and a box 9. Box one contains the initial thought and box nine the final one, but I don't know what goes on in between"

Is that not a description of the system despite being a partial one? What did you use to arrive at it?

It is catastrophically erroneous to say the object in the relation is its cause, for the object is necessarily simultaneous with the thought of it***, which eliminates the time absolutely necessary for the principle of cause and effect. — Mww

Agreed. The sensation is the cause. The action of light/sound etc on the object is the modelled cause of the sensation. At no point should we say 'the object' is the cause. The object is a model itself, not the cause it attempts to be a model of.

Modeling the physical cause of thought can possibly lead to manipulation of its electrochemical constituents. Behavior modification is a real thing, right? More likely behavior modification manifests as beneficial to humanity in general, I would hope. Hence....better humans.

Me, modeling the content of my thoughts, meaning “this is what I think about that”, and providing I wish to benefit myself by rearranging what I think about that....hence making me a better human.

Where it springs from....damned if I know. Sounded profound at the time. Ego or superfluous bullshit....take your pick. — Mww

I see, makes sense now.

It is these needs that burden us (i.e. "a difficult situation or unpleasant responsibility that you must deal with or worry about"). — Inyenzi

Not as a given, no. 'Burden' and 'deal with' are both human cultural concepts. You might equally have to 'enjoy', 'allow', 'endure', 'relish'... There is no non-interpreted way of talking about them. You're interpreting them just by calling them 'burdens' and using the term 'deal with'. These are loaded terms and play a role in a whole narrative.

tell that to people literally starving to death — Inyenzi

That there are sensations it is beyond our capabilities to interpret positively does not refute the fact that those within such capabilities that have such an option. Many models of physiological signals are wired from birth (or immediately postnatally) they can be very difficult to change. Your view of physiological signals like normal hunger is clearly not of this kind as most people already don't see it that negatively.

An example might be music. There are many musical styles that people think are great or awful depending on their aesthetic preference. Such preferences can be trained, and change over one's lifetime. Our culture plays a huge role in what preferences we have. Almost no-one thinks ten minutes of discordant screaming is pleasant, it seems to breach the limits of what can be made preferable, even by long periods of cultural indoctrination. That there are limits doesn't make what we know about the heterogeneity of musical tastes wrong though, does it?

What makes you think this? — Isaac


A thought bwahahaha — Kenosha Kid

Ha! I should have worked that out shouldn't I?

I expect I'm not far off in thinking that a song "playing" in your head isn't just a representation of the real thing (which is true of hearing it for the first time), but an approximation (recall is imperfect) to a representation (memory) of an approximation (memorisation is imperfect) of a representation (what I heard) of a real thing (what was played). — Kenosha Kid

Spot on. I can't remember the paper, but one interesting aspect of recall (in addition to the examples you've given) is that the timing is often compressed. So 'recalling' a three minute song will take less than three minutes of brain time, even though subjects report having gone through the whole song in time and can sing it out loud in good time. It's like compression in computer files. It's just more efficient to give you the main points and then a bit of 'meta-data' making you feel like it lasted three minutes than it is to actually store three minute's worth of data - like your brain just goes "then the song goes dilddledede for a bit" instead of actually creating the right signals in the auditory cortex.

Same's true of speeches and poems apparently, you think you're 'mentally pronouncing' every word as spoken, but the time it takes betrays that fact that you actually skipped quite a lot (or sped it all up, but skipped is the preferred theory, it makes more sense with semantic processing mechanisms)

Then RogueAI's argument would be that this recognizes some sort of distinction between mental event and non-mental events. — Olivier5

Yep, I think we all agree there.

this distinction between things "in our head" and things "outside our head" is culturally near-universal and I believe absolutely fundamental to art, justice, politics and zillions other things we humans do. — Olivier5

I agree.

Still, some other people refuse to envisage this distinction, or try and deny its importance. — Olivier5

Do they? I've not encountered such an approach. What would it look like, to say that experiences originating from inside one's head were of no qualitative difference to those experiences seeming to originate from outside it? As I mentioned earlier, there are forms of Schizophrenia where this is a problem, but I don't know many suffers writing philosophical treatise on the matter. Generally, I've found near universal agreement that the two kinds of experience have a distinguishable and meaningful difference.

The next step is to realize that perceptions are not just different, or even "originating from" a non-mental event in a mechanical manner. Perceptions represent non-mental events, they interpret them in a symbolic manner. Our mental world is (among other things) modeling reality "out there".

In other words, there is an epistemic gap between the event perceived and the corresponding perception events. — Olivier5

Absolutely. A matter I've written about pretty extensively in my posts before so won't go into again here in the general sense. Broadly speaking, the idea of active inference of external hidden states underlies pretty much my entire approach to understanding cognition.

Yep. Spot on.

Well the premise is wrong for a start.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0146167217733080

Are you arguing for dualism now? — Olivier5

I don't think so. That two different experiences have two different causes doesn't seem to me to imply that one cause must be non-physical and the other physical. There could be any number of other differences. The one I had in mind here, for example, is that one (proximately) originated from inside our heads and the other from outside.

The cause of my thought can only be a thought — Mww

What makes you think this?

Edit - Catching up, I somehow missed the section where @khaled already dealt with this. Feel free to ignore this.

We can measure the intensity of sound and understand how that effects the body, sure, but do words come with more intensity? — NOS4A2

Yes. Obviously. The sequence of pitch, timbre and rhythm is different for different words and our neurons are capable of responding differently to these variations. Why would you think otherwise? Do you imagine that all words are physically identical and we just make up the difference between them?

Well, this conversation has taken an uncomfortable turn for the pathological. Are you saying that you can't tell the difference (even colloquially) between the expressions "there's a song playing in that room over there" and "I've got this song playing in my head"? — Isaac


No, — RogueAI

Right. Then as @khaled and @Kenosha Kid have already laid out, there's no contradiction to be examined. You (in common with the vast majority of the population) can tell the difference between the experience of having 'a song stuck in your head' and that of having a song playing through earphones. Thus empirically, to our senses, they appear to be two different experiences, so we presume have two different causes.

Here we have our first piece of empirical evidence for an external world. Some experiences seem to have this 'internal' label attached to them and I can stop them (or at least interfere with them) to a degree. Other experiences have this 'external' label an no matter what I do, I can't seem to make them something other than they are at first blush. I can imagine the song in my head going up an octave, and experience that, I can't make the one coming in through my earphones go up an octave no matter how hard I try, it stays resolutely at the pitch it always has been.

Of course the line between these two states is not a clear cut as that - we construct all of our perceptions and expectation can bring about all sorts of changes to what we see and hear. But that's something psychologists, and neuroscientists have found out recently, not the default position we're born with. In fact, telling people the extent to which we construct our reality is usually a challenge met with strong resistance.

So we have excellent cause to believe there's an external cause for our perceptions and an internal cause for our imagination and memory. Our perceptions are difficult to alter, seem to be highly homogenous among other humans, are consistent through time and are generally confirmed by machines and predictive algorithms. Our imagination and memory, on the other hand, seem very easily altered (I seem to be able to choose what appears in my 'mind's eye'), vary wildly between humans, change through time and are currently inaccessible to machines let alone predictable.

Nothing conclusive, but given it's the default position anyway (certainly since toddlerhood, which is as far back as we can really test these things), there seems no good reason not to assume a theory that these two radically different types of experience have two equally radically different causes.

In short, it’s a comfortable rendering of something for which no certain knowledge yet repeals. — Mww

Good call. I used to tell my students that far from being the detached, dispassionate scientists we might expect of our biologist or physicist cousins, if you don't come to psychology with a very strong preference for one particular model/approach then there's probably something wrong with you.

The trick is to be resolute enough to discard it when it's clearly overwhelmed by a weight of opposing evidence, but where not - fill your boots. Psychology simply cannot progress like the hard sciences can and it's pissing into the wind to try and pretend it can.

Trouble is, much of Kant's thinking on human thought processes falls into this key category of theory, but I've no doubt it's possible to salvage it with a few 're-interpretations', it usually is. there's not many theories that are beyond the human capacity for creative elbowing into the space left by empirical observation.

Exactly right. I am Everydayman. Makes no difference whether true or not, there seems to be a little tiny world contained in my head, and wherever it directs, I go. — Mww

I don't buy this. Kant is, by all accounts, a difficult text to understand, and you seem to be something of a scholar. there's nothing 'everyman' about it, it's a passion for a particular viewpoint and (if judged by the amount of effort put into pursuing it) quite a strong one. Nowt wrong with that (as my wife would say), but it can't also be passed off as a kind of path of least resistance. I've read CPR. It's a path of massive resistance, we're talking boulder, river-crossings and pits (probably bottomless ones).

I can never ever think to a cause of thinking — Mww

As @khaled has raised above, we're not talking about thinking to a cause of thinking, we're talking about thinking to a cause of some given thought. One can use a torch to find another torch.

Modeling the cause of thought implies making better humans.
Modeling the content of thought implies making a human better. — Mww

Woah - left-field, where did this spring from?

People generally believe in the just-world hypothesis, and there is evidence suggesting that such belief correlates positively with mental health. — baker

Do you have references for this? It's not something I've read any research on.

Also, it seems that most people believe that disparity is normal, a given, and not something to take any action against. — baker

Likewise for this.

It's not clear what the motivation for reducing disparity is or should be. Do you have any ideas? — baker

Well, not if your references are true, no. Most papers I've read on the subject (and more importantly my personal experience) have concluded that the more egalitarian societies are happier, and that people are generally happier around other happy people, so that would be a reason. But if it turns out that actually people are happiest when they watch others suffer in the just knowledge that they deserve everything they get then, we might as bring on the apocalypse, it should be quite the show.

Only someone beholden to the superstition would try pass off evidence of the power of the brain — NOS4A2

I don't know what you could possibly mean by 'the power of the brain' in this context. Are you the kind of person who insists that it's not the gun that kills you it's the bullet? Do you really go through life as if you don't understand the difference between proximate and non-proximate causes?

"The high demand for wheat's going to cause a rise in prices"

"No, actually I think you'll find, the high demand for wheat isn't going to actually cause anything, the key presses on the stock exchange computer is going to cause the price rise, anything else is one step removed and so irrelevant"

I bet you're a hoot at parties.

Do you believe that such disparities are not justified? — baker

I don't think something like justification applies to circumstances with such complex origins. I think the word applies to actions or beliefs so making such a state of affairs would not be justified, but the existence of the state of affairs is not the sort of thing that the word 'justified' meaningfully applies to.

I'd rather minimise such disparities.

Many of them have left Labor style politics precisely because they feel disenfranchised by what they see as stifling political correctness. As one such person said to me a couple of weeks ago, "We need jobs and housing, not gender neutral pronouns." — Tom Storm

Exactly. The question here is that gender neutral pronouns fix a problem which causes psychological harm to people and it's a simple fix. So why the resistance among former left-wing groups? I think it's precisely because of the attention it takes away from the real difficult to fix problems which cause a considerable degree more psychological harm. The issue of gender neutral pronouns is a nothing issue; a few people would feel better if we changed our pronouns, they start to be used more and more, gradually things will change as language always does when new generations of language users replace the older ones. That should be an end to it. That it's a big political talking point is ridiculous when people are actually starving.

But 'jobs and housing' is tired and old - it's like flares, or good music - seemingly out of fashion. Because it's been talked about and campaigned for before there's no means by which a person can stand out, declare their clique via such worn out issues.

How this relates to the OP is that the anger is so often manufactured to justify the incivility for this purpose. Incivility becomes the measure of the degree to which one is impassioned by an issue and the more one is impassioned by it, the further up the social hierarchy one is placed within these new groups.

So the question remains; how best to facilitate cultural change, whilst recognising the disparities in education, resources, opportunity and wealth. — Tom Storm

Do you think there'd still be such a need to facilitate social change if we actually addressed disparities in education, resources, opportunity and wealth?

As an example - The extensiveness of the berdache is contested, but if true, the concept (and numerous others like it) give a strong indication of a link between more egalitarian communities and greater tolerance.

He or she (motivated by the sense of dis-ease, dissatisfaction, pain, or suffering felt) addresses and deals with the need — Inyenzi

As @khaled has alluded to above, this is categorically not the case. Humans are not motivated by sensations of dis-ease, dissatisfaction, pain, or suffering. Those are constructed emotions built as models to explain interocepted states. You have already been motivated by subconscious mental processes to deal with food, water, hygiene, sex etc. and you're trying to explain why, using narratives built from experience and cultural language available to you. You're couching these mental activities in negative terms optionally, they are not objectively negative. Even something as seemingly simple as a state of hunger is actually comprised of several physiological states, the signals for which have valence in themselves (not all negative, it must be said), you then look for cues from other perceptions and from your prior experiences, to select from available cultural narratives (like hunger, thirst) to draw together these physiological signals into a coherent story (where in reality they are often incoherent, inconsistent always variable and even contradictory).

The problem here is not with 'life', it's with your storytelling abilities.

It seems highly implausible that you actually have a song playing in your head. — Isaac


No it doesn't. — RogueAI

Well, this conversation has taken an uncomfortable turn for the pathological. Are you saying that you can't tell the difference (even colloquially) between the expressions "there's a song playing in that room over there" and "I've got this song playing in my head"? I can quite reliably assure you it's not a matter of materialists imposing an unwarranted distinction between the two, literally every sane person is quite well aware that "I've a song playing in my head" doesn't actually refer to the same set of happenings as "there's a song playing in that room".

I suspect you're just building an interesting 'air castle' (as above), so this is only a light concern, but one of the key symptoms of schizophrenia is the inability to distinguish between internal and external sources of sensory perceptions. If you really can't tell the difference between a song playing in the next room and a song playing in your head (in qualitative terms, not just spatial) then I strongly suggest you see a psychiatric specialist. Most people can distinguish the mental qualities of two events with some clarity.

it tells me specifically about myself from within — Mww

It claims to. By what measure do you assess that it actually does.

Most of all, my metaphysical paradigm doesn’t need to juxtaposition disabilities or physical damage in justifications for my normative mental goings-on — Mww

Again, that it doesn't is not evidence that it doesn't need to.

It depends, I suppose, on what it is you want to achieve. If you're just looking for a story that answers "why do I think like that?" then metaphysics is certainly an easier route to find one. It's pretty much off-the-shelf (armchair not provided, pipe optional), but in this case I can't quite see why communication of those ideas would be of any use. You're giving a good account of why Kant would write CPR, why would anyone read CPR? Having no predictive values (which is what all those experiments with the 'broken' minds do for us) it doesn't seem to have any measure of quality to make it worth the time, in the context of the objective we're talking about here.

Either one of two things is the case - the human mind is a set of functions in matter which are therefore constrained by the properties of that matter (in which case proper study of that matter is indispensable to an understanding of those constraints), or it is not thus constrained (in which case no assessment of it;s function carries any more weight than any other, we might as well make it up one minute to the next).

The task, it seems, is to model the causes of our thoughts. Why does it seem more compelling to believe 2+2=4 than it does to believe 2+2=5? Why can't I believe both X and ~X at the same time? Why do I like this film and not that one? etc. What attracts us to one model over another is, I suppose, just another one of those questions.

it is my duty to resist your bullshit. — unenlightened

Absofuckinlutely, you go for it! And when your incivility has finally worn down those unknown people on the internet who just don't happen to 100% agree with you about the approach to improving the lives of our community, you can move on to that guy down the pub who reckoned Blonde on Blonde was better than Blood on the Tracks; when he's been thoroughly insulted there's still that guy with whom you disagreed about the proper pronounciation of Joaquin Phoenix.

Maybe when we're all on our own private islands standing at the edges spitting invective at each other over every disagreement we won't care so much that children are fucking dying every second of completely preventable causes 'cause we'd have those morons who thought we ought to fund the Red Cross bang to rights (when any idiot knows the solution is to fund the Red Crescent - fucking morons).

I'd post the 'People's Front of Judea' scene here, if I could. You'll just have to imagine it.

There is no empirical evidence that some combinations of sounds and marks on paper have more power than others. — NOS4A2

Yes there is.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304395909004564

There is no instrument that can measure it — NOS4A2

Yes there is.

https://www.gosh.nhs.uk/conditions-and-treatments/procedures-and-treatments/functional-magnetic-resonance-imaging-fmri/

no hypothesis to account for it — NOS4A2

Yes there is.

http://www.andrewnewberg.com/books/words-can-change-your-brain-12-conversation-strategies-to-build-trust-resolve-conflict-and-increase-intimacy

no formula to describe it — NOS4A2

Yes there is.

https://www.compoundchem.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Neurotransmitters.pdf

At least do the bare minimum of research before vomiting up whatever version of reality happens to support your preferred brand of sociopathy.

We're a curious species. We're usually not content with "that's just how things are". We always want to know why. — RogueAI

True, but not always thereby a sensible question.

I think the idea that mental states = physical states is contradicted by the simple fact that I can have a song playing in my head while there's no music in my skull — RogueAI

It seems highly implausible that you actually have a song playing in your head. There doesn't seem to be be any source of vibration in there sufficient to make the necessary sounds. Far more likely is that you sometimes have an experience similar to that you have when listening to a song. Since both experiences are mental processes it doesn't seem at all a contradiction.

Most materialists believe that machines can be conscious. That entails that the pain of stubbing a toe is (or can be reduced to) a bunch of tiny switches turning off and on. That's extremely implausible. — RogueAI

How are you judging the plausibility of some aspect of this reality? Have you experienced several other realities and found none of them to be thus arranged? What criteria would a state of affairs have to meet to qualify as 'plausible'?

I'm sure you've heard all that and have an explanation you like. — RogueAI

Indeed.

Though as ever, I'm intrigued by what you think an answer to "why is it that brains are conscious and kidneys aren't?" would be like. For me the answer is "that's just the way things played out". I don't expect anything to have a reason to have turned out some way and not another. Why is it that you want a reason?

Would you agree that the physical is sometimes conscious and sometimes not? For example, your brain is conscious and your kidneys aren't agree? — RogueAI

Yes.

(though I should add that I actually think a body is conscious, not a brain - but I don't think that was your point)

Can you give me an example of physical stuff that isn't mind-independent? — RogueAI

Yes...ideas.

One question asks if the sun is mind-independent, the other asks if the physical is mind independent. The sun is not all that is physical.

So, the sun is mind-independent? You didn't agree with this before — RogueAI

Where did I not agree with this before?

If all minds disappeared, would the sun still exist? yes, no. — RogueAI

The state which we interpret as 'the sun', yes.

Did you mean to say the bolded? Aren't you talking labels here? Is your position then that the sun's existence is dependent on whether minds exist??? — RogueAI

Not the sun, no. You seem to have this odd default position that either all things are caused by minds or no things are, I can't understand why you want to take such a position. Ideas are made by minds, they wouldn't exist if minds didn't exist. The sun (or the external states which we interpret as 'the sun') are not caused by minds and would continue to exist if minds didn't. I'm really not clear on why this is such an issue, it seems obvious to me. Feet would also cease to exist if there were no animals to have feet, this doesn't make feet oddly non-physical.

Right, there wouldn't be labels for anything, but the stuff would still be there. I think we're agreed. So the physical is mind-independent. Agreed? — RogueAI

No, I don't think that follows. You asked me if planets, stars and galaxies would still be there if minds ceased to be. There are clearly lots of physical things produced by minds, all those things would obviously cease to exist if minds ceased to exist.

Until black lives do actually matter as much as white lives, there is no civility because civility is a mutual relation. — unenlightened

Civility, as an obligation, is completely redundant if it amounts to nothing more than how you'd prefer to behave in any case. If we only act civilly to those to whom we're inclined already to so act, then it's no longer an obligation, it becomes meaningless, just a description of everyday behaviour.

The point of civility as a duty is to act that way even when initially disinclined to do so. Far from being redundant, it only matters when you feel someone has broken that mutual social relation and you no longer feel inclined to treat them civilly as a consequence, then you fall back on your duty to do so despite such an initial disinclination.

What would happen to the universe if all minds dissappeared? Would planets, stars, galaxies, etc. still be around? — RogueAI

That's the theory, yes. They wouldn't be 'planets', 'stars', and 'galaxies' of course - those are human ways of interpreting the sensations we assume those parts of reality produce, but the causes of those sensations would still be there.

Do you think your ideas have physical attributes? Size, weight, texture, etc.? — RogueAI

How are you deciding that those things are the properties of physical things without begging the question? If you treat 'physical' as a category of existent things which simply happen to have some set of attributes (size, weight and texture) then sure, some things are physical and some aren't. A trivial conclusion from the definition and of very little consequence other than for philologists. The point being made by idealists is that some things exist which cannot be empirically detected by our senses. As I demonstrated above, no-one is in any doubt that their ideas can be detected, as such they don't undermine physicalism any more than gravity or magnetism do.

While accommodating the fairness of the request, I deny the expense.

Got something this virgoyankeebabyboomer don’t gotta pay for? — Mww

Ah, sorry about that. BPS lets me see everything on account of my charming personality (and possibly my membership) I forgot about the paywall. It was only a review (of the standard undergraduate textbook) - treat it as a hypothetical. Kant or the standard undergraduate textbook on cognitive science. If you had to gamble on which would give you a useful picture of what going on between the ears, where would your money be?

Here's a look inside https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cognitive-Psychology-Students-Michael-Eysenck/dp/1848724160?asin=1848724160&revisionId=&format=4&depth=1

Oh no, you don’t!!! I know you. No need to over-analyze such a simple mental exercise.

Peruse this, peruse that, judge degree of explanatory content relative to a given condition. — Mww

OK, to give you some leash, the answer to the question as posed is probably Kant.

So likewise, if I may -

your second example vs. https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.2044-8295.2010.02010.x

Same question.

As a legitimate survey participant, you’ve concluded the first is a model for the absolutely useless, the second is a model for guesswork. And by admitting to the possible commission of your own guesswork, you’d tacitly acceded to the second-order usefulness of the one in form if not in content — Mww

I'll concede to the latter, but not the former. You're right, if I had no other route I would just guess and as such Kant's guesses are as good as any (there's a separate question of whether I actually am in such circumstances, but we'll shelve that). But you've made an unwarranted jump from something which is useless to me (on account of my ignorance) to something's being useless sensu lato.

I could resolve the current uselessness of the first option by education. I can do nothing about the limitations of the second.

Welcome back, by the way. — Mww

Thanks.

It’s not complicated; each participant answers as he sees fit. — Mww

Ah. Well then neither (or both equally useless). The first I didn't understand and so could not possibly make use of even if I thought doing so might be a good idea. The second is just ad hoc guesswork, I see no reason at all why I'd make any use of it. If I wanted guesswork I'd just guess myself.

If I had to pick, I suspect someone like @Kenosha Kid could at the very least explain the relevance of the first. I know neurons are made of such elementary particles and also that their properties are somewhat determined by that make-up. I also know a fair bit about how neurons relate to cognition, so it's not hard to see the link.

How we get from what a long dead German writer reckoned to anything that might actually be the case is not so easy a path to trace... unless Kant was a spectacularly good guesser.