Don't reckon this dipshit merits a discussion unless you can flesh out some generalized thesis that you think his comments illustrate. — Baden

It's not his comments that surprise me, it's the reaction to them.

Very! Thanks.

Hanover, can you change that quote? It makes it look like I"M saying that!!!

So the high accuracy of our experiences raises our chances for survival and procreation.

Are they highly accurate? After all, for much of human history, we've had some kooky beliefs about what, exactly, the world is and is made of.

↪RogueAI
Are you saying mind is separate from brain or a relation of brain -> mind -> information? — Mark Nyquist

I'm an idealist, so I think the brain is a mental object. All that exists are minds [quote="Mark

Nyquist;783263"]Why not computer -> mind -> information?

How could a mind emerge from a collection of electronic switches? Why would we even consider that possibility? If you flip the right switches and run a current through them, you get the sensation of stubbing a toe? That sounds like magic.

"Computer states signify only because humans endow them with
meaning."

I agree with this. I also think you can replace "computer" with "brain" and still have a true sentence. There is no meaning in a universe without consciousness.

"So, it is equivocating to say that both computers and minds process ‘information.’"

I agree with this too. A computer is simply a collection of electronic switches. There is no information being processed unless a mind is there to interpret the switching operations.

If I rubbed two sticks together and consciousness emerged that would be an emergent property but it would also be magic and inexplicable like neurons firing creating consciousness. — Andrew4Handel

:100:

Grand strategy is not the same as foreign policy. Foreign policy is how a nation pursues it's strategic goals. For example, while Clinton and Bush no doubt both believed in America's place as a superpower, they disagreed on which policies would effectively keep America in the driver's seat- Clinton favored a containment strategy of Iraq, Bush favored invasion. Had Gore won, we would have continued the policy of containing Iraq.

If you're saying that all Presidents agree on certain strategic goals, that is true. But it's also trivial. The two parties very much disagree on the particulars. Obama didn't send Ukraine weapons. Trump did. Biden sided with Ukraine. Trump called Putin a genius. Our foreign policy toward Ukraine would be much different under Trump.

The foreign policy establishment. Do you live in America? — Tzeentch

Since 1975. What do you mean by "the foreign policy establishment"? Do you mean think tanks? People like Kissinger? McNamara? Cheney?

If foreign policy isn't affected by presidents, and Congress has shown over the decades to want less and less to do with it, who do you think is setting policy in the U.S.?

Are you an American?

Do you think there would have been an Iraq war with a President Gore?

US presidents don't have much influence over foreign policy at all. — Tzeentch

This is nonsense. Did you live in America during the Bush years? Do you think there would have been an Iraq war with a President Gore? Congress has been ceding war-making powers to the executive for the last 70 years. The presidency in the U.S. is becoming more and more like a dictatorship.

Think: How many wars has the U.S. been in since WW2? How many Declarations of War from Congress have there been since WW2?

It's possible that a universe without the possibility of physical suffering would seem miraculous or a put-up job, and that God has good reasons for not "showing her hand".
— RogueAI

Interesting: so you propose that Divine Hiddenness isn't only a question (e.g., it is typically presented as a question: why, if there is a God, does it seem hidden?) but a means to some end (e.g., God obtains some purpose from being hidden) that's so overwhelmingly good that all the physical suffering in the world is worth it to have it?

I'm not saying it's plausible, but it's possible.

Interestingly, I wrote a paper on just this sort of thing a long time ago. I concluded that the existence of animal suffering is so detrimental to the idea of an all knowing-benevolent-omnipotent god, that Christians are better off just supposing animal suffering doesn't exist. We think it exists, but God actually blocks all the animal suffering we think we observe.

Leibniz would argue that this is the best of all possible worlds. A world without physical suffering would collapse in some way that we can't imagine. In other words, a possible world with no physical pain might be logically possible, but metaphysically impossible.

It's possible that a universe without the possibility of physical suffering would seem miraculous or a put-up job, and that God has good reasons for not "showing her hand".

It will forever be a mystery. Myself, I think I caught a whiff of a certain computationalist that posted up a storm and then went out in a bang. I used to like to go out in a bang.

Bartricks was an idealist. I'm not getting idealist vibes from Zettel.

Don't you think this is a metaphysical claim?

"mind-independent stuff exists"

The epistemological issue is not whether the statement "other minds exist" is true or false; the epistemological issue is that the statement "other minds exist" cannot be adjudicated or otherwise rationally assessed to be one or the other, and is therefore epistemically meaningless. — Zettel

I can see that, but isn't that going to lead to radical skepticism? For example, let's take a non-metaphysical claim: "The cat is on the mat". Isn't that going to turn into metaphysics if we unpack it? Isn't "the cat is on the mat" really saying "there is this mind-independent material stuff, and it combines into things like 'cats' and 'mats' and there's a particular arrangement of matter called 'the cat' and another arrangement called 'the mat'" and so on...

But "other minds exist" has a truth value. It's either true or false that there are other minds than my own. The truth value is currently unknowable, but that's an epistemological issue, no?

Would you consider "other minds exist" and/or "there is more than one mind" to be a metaphysical proposition? (I should have asked you this first)

The propositions issuing from metaphysics are imponderable, i.e., they cannot be rationally assessed, i.e., they cannot be rendered a truth value. — Zettel

Can you give an example of an imponderable metaphysical proposition?

But at some point it's likely we will create a machine that's convincing enough where we can't tell. — Marchesk

Yes, and my point is that with physicalism, the question of whether x is conscious will always be open-ended. That suggests the physicalism framework is a dead-end.

Suppose you create a machine that you believe is conscious. You can learn all the physical facts there are to know about the machine, and still not be any closer to answering the question of whether it's conscious or not. Since there are no new physical facts to learn about the machine, physicalism fails to provide any answer to the "is it conscious?" question.

we must conclude that the self is not solidly grounded in the material world, and thus it doesn't exist. — tom111

Or just not believe in materialism.

I think it does, but I'm curious what other people think. I'm getting out a little beyond my skis!

Well, then you're agnostic!

If by agnostic your mean p=0.5 (as you said in your OP), I would disagree that it is reasonable to think that there is a 50 percent chance that we will have alien contact in the next 10 years. — PhilosophyRunner

Well, what about ten thousand years?

To try to put it succintly, it's reasonable to be agnostic about alien contact ten years from now, but not ten minutes from now. But I can't see what's driving that intuition. Is it (k), background knowledge, bleeding through into the Bayesian calculus?

Kripke, at a very young age, developed a formal semantics for modal logic, presenting a completeness theorem. — Banno

Anecdote: I took philosophy at UCLA and had Donald Kalish as my logic professor. He told an interesting story about how he and a partner were all ready to give a talk on a paper on logic only to find out this 16 year old kid, Kripke, had beaten them to the punch.

I'm assuming that the probability of contact increases with time — Agent Smith

You can't assume this! In order to assume it, you would have to know that aliens, in fact, exist, and will contact us at some point in the future.

Here's my problem if we can't assign a value for Pr(E/H): any hypothesis about alien contact in future time t we have to be agnostic about. Will aliens contact us in ten thousand years? Maybe. In a thousand years? Maybe. 10 years? Maybe. The next ten seconds. Maybe? The ten microseconds. Maybe???

We've reached an absurdity.

Yeah, but what it Pr(E/h)?

We know from ourselves that our universe is a consciousness-bearing universe. — ucarr

I don't dispute this, but others will, so I think that proving this should be your starting point.

:up:

I thought denazification was the reason.

Trump seems to have stepped in it having dinner with an avowed white-nationalist holocaust denier.

:up:

I too wonder how the immaterial can interact with the material. What is your response if the theist who believes in souls interacting with bodies shrugs and says "God makes the interaction possible. Somehow."? Is the immaterial interacting with material even logically possible, though?