When alarmed, your body will produce adrenaline, when in love, oxytocin. The whole field of mind-body medicine relies on this.

All of that is compatible with idealism. Science does NOT say that adrenaline is some non-conscious stuff. Science is mum on metaphysics.

That premise rests on the assumption that mental states aren't physical states.

Why should we assume physical states even exist? What evidence do you have for the existence of the non-conscious stuff these physical states are supposedly made of?

There is no reason to believe that physical stuff isn't mental stuff.

Sure there is. Think of some music. Is there music playing in your skull right now? Does your mind seem to have weight? Does it seem to be about the size of both your hands put together? Is your imagination bound by the size of your brain? Why are some parts of the brain conscious and some parts not? What is the explanation for how consciousness arises from matter? If you don't know that, then what is the framework for the emerging explanation for how consciousness arises from matter? If you don't know that, then your belief system is severely lacking in explaining something as fundamental as consciousness. That's catastrophic, as far as I'm concerned.

There is no forthcoming explanation because no explanation is possible. Non-conscious stuff doesn't produce consciousness. It's a category error that leads to absurdities. I don't know if you in particular think a functional equivalent to a human brain made of flushing toilets would be conscious, but I've met plenty materialist who do think that, and it's not hard to get a materialist to agree to that absurdity.

There's no other intelligible option given what we know.

Pretty much every other option is better than brain=mental states. I'll use a favorite example of mine. Imagine two ancient Greeks talking about their mental states. Pretty easy to do, right? Now, if mental states are the exact same thing as brain states, and if those ancient Greeks are meaningfully talking about their mental states (which they are), it follows they're also meaningfully talking about their brain states. But of course ancient Greeks had no idea what the brain was even for, let alone describing brain states to each other. Therefore, mental states aren't brain states.

"The reason it is a one way street is because mind is not opposed to physical stuff, it is physical stuff. It's the physical stuff of which we are most acquainted with in merely having experience."

If you got a bunch of switches and ran a current through them and turned them on and off in a certain way...would consciousness be produced?

"Walking from legs" is not the same as "consciousness from non-conscious stuff".

"I feel that philosophy is the last place anywhere where claim should be censored or criticised politically."

I'm sure there are good utilitarian/consequentalist arguments for why ""Chinese people are inferior to Europeans"" should be censored here.

"Ergo, if I = something that's thinking, you are me, I'm you, you're Descartes, Descartes is me, so and so forth until I = everyone."

I don't agree with that. "I" /= "something that's thinking". "Something that's thinking" is a necessary condition for the self to exist, but it's not a sufficient condition. I like the definition of the self as "this particular conscious awareness".

Tautologies don't refute themselves. The Cogito is tautological, but it's also saying something about the world: you can doubt a lot of things, but you can't doubt that you're a thinking being, which heavily implies the primacy of mind.

Here's Descartes, confidently asserting, "I exist" and there's patients with Cotard delusion insisting, as confidently if not more so that "they don't exist."

It's a delusion. A necessary condition for uttering any sentence (esp. "I don't exist") is existence. We can quibble about what "I" means, but putting that aside, a person who claims they don't exist is wrong. The only thing that can refute Descartes is the existence of a nonexistent thinker.

Science is great at improving the dream we're all having.

I have a low understanding of this. It seems to me that a number like 2 is just a label for the idea of "a thing and a thing", and that 1+1 has to equal 2 because if you have a thing + a thing, necessarily, you have thing and thing (2). What am I missing?

Didn't Xeno's Paradox get solved?

I'm saying not having children on the basis of protecting an abstract being from being forced into suffering is not a moral issue. It's an imaginary one. When a sense of morality extends no further than the skull, can be accomplished in the comfort of one's home and without any interaction with real beings, I would argue it isn't morality at all.

I was thinking the same thing too, but I thought of it a different way. When people have kids, they're not literally bringing a new person into the world, they're creating a set of conditions that will result in new person X. So then the question becomes, is it moral to create a set of conditions that will actualize a potential person who can't give consent (because they don't exist yet)?

I think some morality applies there because I think it would be evil to create a set of conditions that would bring a person into the world to experience abject suffering (say the parents want to have a kid to torture it). It would be evil to do that even if the attempt failed. But if it's evil to do it, and the attempt failed, and there's no new person, who was harmed?

There was a Ren and Stimpy episode, where Stimpy forced Ren to wear a happiness helmet, which made him very happy. When Ren eventually gets it off, he's not happy with Stimpy. I kind of agree with him. Even if I have an absolute good I still can't force it on someone. That's a violation of their autonomy.

So, in the OP's example, even if Willy Wanka took everyone to literal Heaven, where they'll experience the most blissful state imaginable, he violated their autonomy, which makes it immoral. That's kind of a deontological position, I guess. A utilitarian would not agree.

I have created this world and will force others to enter it.

Do these "others" exist before you force them to enter your world?

I guess you're right. I don't make a conscious effort to ignore my shadow. It just sort of gets filtered out of my conscious awareness.

To ignore something requires you to notice it in the first place. I wouldn't be surprised if animals just don't even notice the things in their visual field that don't represent threats or food, like the a cloud moving across the sky. The cloud probably never even rises to the level of conscious awareness. Some unconscious filtering mechanism probably is at work. This could be either learned or instinctual.

The other alternative is that the animal is constantly noticing it's shadow and choosing to ignore it, which would require some higher-level thinking.

Yes, "ignoring" implies a choice in the matter. Technically, my cat was not reacting to her shadow. Like Tim said, it's probably a learned response.

Continuity of phenomenal self-awareness is personal identity

I agree, so what happens when that continuity is broken by periods of non-consciousness? Death and rebirth?

It seems fantastical that a creature could simultaneously evolve an apparatus for seeing and an apparatus for processing the visual information by chance. We know it happened because of the fossil record, but we don't know what the odds of that happening randomly are because with a sample size of one, we can't conclude that evolution on Earth was an entirely random process.

Why necessarily? Couldn't the laws of the universe be different such that H20 is a mineral?

This is the line of thought Kripke addresses.

If H2O was a mineral in a universe with different laws, wouldn't it be H2O*? Presumably, the different laws of nature that allow H2O to become a mineral would affect either the Hydrogen, Oxygen, or chemistry of their interaction, so that you're really talking about something other than what we mean by H2O.

I was wondering if this holds true in a simulation too. Could the simulators take H2O, as it's currently understood by us, and make it become a mineral just be changing the simulation?

This is what I was getting at with InPitzotl: What does "Water is H2O" even mean in a simulation? All references to the external world in a simulation are just labels for bits of computer code. If simulations are even metaphysically possible, which I doubt.

So we agree that sometimes "H20” means water and sometimes it doesn't. Right?
— frank

From my second post:

H20 is water, but water is not necessarily H20.
— Fooloso4

I would argue that there are possible worlds where reality is a simulation and H2O isn't water.

Ok, that was a good discussion.

If this is a simulation, what would you define water as? A combination of things or computer code?

If you agree that we can make hydrogen and oxygen using electrolysis while simultaneously reducing the total amount of water in direct accordance with the model of chemistry, then in what sense does your claim that it's not a combination of things mean something?

It means reality is such that water is not made of particles, but is an idea. That's a meaningful statement about reality. Proving it is hard, but idealism certainly isn't meaningless.

If you're not talking about the nature of things, you're talking about how things seem to be. The idealist chemist will, of course, agree with the materialist chemist about what appears to be going on. If that's what you mean by "mechanics", then, yes, the idealist and materialist will agree on what they're perceiving, but that's not interesting.

I have no problem with water appears to be H2O. I have a problem with water is (=) H2O. When you unpack "water is H2O" you immediately run into a problem: "water is H2O" means, among other things, that water is a combination of things. I don't agree that water is a combination of things.

Pretty much. You have exactly the same mechanics here as you do with materialism. The only difference is that you posit those things to be composed of ideas.

There's a difference between observed behavior and the true nature of things. An idealist and materialist aren't going to agree on the mechanics of things, because an idealist will always say, "the dreamer is the reason we're seeing what we're seeing" to the question "Why are we seeing this?". The materialist, of course, will not accept that as an answer. That's the mechanics of the issue (which I take you to mean "how things really are").

As an idealist, I'm not going to claim that water is an idea that is made up two distinct ideas joined together. For one, that's incoherent (again, there's the difference between how things appear to be and how things really are- water appears to be made of hydrogen and oxygen. Water is not actually made of hydrogen and oxygen), and for another, I don't have to claim that, because reality is a dream and the foundational substance of things is thought and ideas. Thought and idea can be literally anything, except a logical contradiction.

"I don't think this works in practice. We don't have idealists trying to fly by wishing they can fly. They still live in the same world self proclaimed materialists do, and still buy the same airplane tickets."

The fact that this is a dream doesn't entail that I think I'll be able to fly. I act just like materialists do, but at the foundational level, I don't agree with their claims, such as I don't believe water is made of anything. It appears to be that way, but it's not.

An idealist in a chemistry class will still note twice as much gas being collected at the negative probe as they would at the positive probe. Such consistent behaviors of the idea-of-water and the idea-of-DC-circuits, which seems independent of the wishes of the person performing the experiment, deserves names to call them for pragmatic reasons. "Hydrogen" is a perfectly good name for the gas that comes out at the negative end; that's what other English speakers call it. "Oxygen" is a fine name to call what comes out at the positive end. You could even go so far as to get a PhD in chemistry; even win Nobel prizes for it, and still be an idealist... all you're committing to is that somehow these descriptions are describing ideas.

An idealist in chemistry, when asked "why are you observing what you're observing", will ultimately claim, "I observe whatever the mind(s) creating this reality are projecting." The materialist chemistry teacher will not agree with that.

Much appreciated.

When you unpack what "H2O is water" means, you get a story of hydrogen and oxygen joining together by sharing electrons to form a molecule where the hydrogen and oxygen atoms still exist as distinct things. How on Earth would this work under idealism? The ideas of hydrogen and oxygen somehow combine to form a new idea (water) that is still composed of two distinct ideas (hydrogen and oxygen)? And this works only if they can share other ideas (electrons) that orbit around it?

As an idealist, I would say water is just part of the dream, and it will do whatever the dreamer wants it to do. It will look like a solid sometimes, or a liquid, or a gas. We've all had dreams of snow and rain and clouds. Why not dreams where water appears to be a collection of tiny particles? In idealism, there really isn't "water" just like there's no "water" in our dreams. There's just mind(s) experiencing the ever-changing dream they're (or it's) projecting.

Thanks.

Frank, Shawn, what is a good resource for a primer on this stuff? Is Kripke pretty accessible?

I lol'd, which in the end, is the mark of a good discussion.

Well, all you are saying is that the word "water" could be used to refer to other things besides water - sure, i could name my goldfish "water".

I'm not saying that. I'm saying water is consistent with two modes of reality: materialism and idealism. H2O is only consistent with materialism.

And this has nothing to do with naming goldfish. If we both are looking at a glass of water, and I say "that's a glass of water", that statement makes sense in an idealistic reality and a materialistic reality. If I say, "That's a glass of H2O", that only makes sense in a materialistic reality.

But water is physicals stuff.

It's ideas all the way down. Seriously, why torment yourself positing the existence of unprovable stuff? Materialism is not needed to solve anything. It creates endless problems.

Yes, H2O only refers to a physical thing. Water can refer to a physical and/or non-physical thing.

If I am a materialist and you are an immaterialist, we're still talking about the same person, Jennifer - the same object - even though we have radically different ideas about the nature of this object.

I would replace "Jennifer" with "house plant" because personhood issues muddy the water. Also, "object" implies a physical thing. So, if we're both referring to the same house plant, I would say we're both referring to a collection of shared perceptions we have (at least, we think they're shared) that we give the label "house plant" to: it's located over there (or seems to be over there, the idealist would say), it's green, has three leaves, etc. That, we agree on. What the ultimate nature of the house plant is, we might not agree on.

So, you and I have quite different ideas about Jennifer - I think she's an artist and you think she isn't - yet we're both talking about the same person.

The same person, yes. A shared sense of perceptions that we label "Jennifer", yes. The same thing, no. To get to "thing", I would have to unpack what you mean by "Jennifer", and there would eventually be a disagreement, I think.

This is why materialists and immaterialists can be said to be 'disagreeing' about the nature of water as opposed to talking about quite different things.

Agreed.

"Water" is consistent with two different versions of reality: idealism and materialism. H2O is only consistent with materialism. It makes no sense to say that hydrogen ideas combine with oxygen ideas to produce a water idea.

But H2O specifically refers to a physical thing. That's not true with water.

Well, a scientist who has examined water in a certain way and formed the belief that it is H2o is still talking about the same substance as I am, even though I am an immaterialist and belief that no material substances exist in reality.

The typical scientist is going to think that H2O is a physical substance that exists external to you. You, the idealist, would obviously not agree with that.

As far as Jennifer goes, we're talking about the same person, but not necessarily the same thing. You, the materialist, are referring to a collection of particles. Me, the idealist, am referring to...an aspect of the one-mind? But obviously the idealist is not going to see Jennifer as a physical thing. Personhood complicates things.

Also, I'm not assuming you're an idealist or materialist.

I don't think they refer to the same thing. "Water" can refer to a physical substance or an immaterial one (think of "water" in an idealistic universe- it refers to an immaterial thing, an idea). H2O only refers to a physical substance.

I bounced this off one of my favorite philosophers, and he directed me to 2d semantics, where I quickly got lost.

Yeah, I edited it to reflect the true odds.

It's a tricky case. I think the problem stems from the prisoner looking at Friday in isolation when he should be looking at a disjunction of possibly getting hanged on "Monday OR Tuesday OR...", which is captured by using a Bayesian model of surprise. It's a good paradox. I'm terrible at solving these sorts of things.

If you look at it in a Bayesian sense, then the probability of getting hanged on any particular day is mildly surprising, since absent any other information it's a 1/5 chance.