Could Mary discover what it's like to see red just by studying it? Or does she need to experience it? If the latter, then something like what is it like to be something that can echolocate? is only discoverable through experience.

Nagel's point is trivially true: there are other creatures, they have different ways of experiencing the world, and we can't know what that's like just by studying those creatures.

That's totally non-controversial (or should be).

Is there? How could you possibly know this?

Are you denying the existence of the subjective experiences of, say, dolphins? That's implausible.

External things won't make you happy.

You're expecting binary answers from a relativist about a noun named 'consciousness'

You should be able to articulate your points clearly, no matter what belief systems you have.

That materialism should explain consciousness.

I'm confused about whatever point you're trying to make. Are you saying materialism shouldn't explain consciousness?

If that's required then I have no particular problem with jettisoning consciousness.

Required for what?

Yeah, that was a good movie. Shades of things to come.

If I think the statement "there are no possible worlds where matter causes mind" is probably true, that means I think that theories that posit the existence of some mind-causing non-conscious stuff (i.e., materialism) are probably false. Ergo, I think materialism is probably false. Which I do!

It's easier to just talk about this in plain English. Materialism has not explained consciousness. I don't believe materialism ever will explain consciousness. Dualism might be true, but here I think there's an interaction problem between the physical and the non-physical, so I think idealism is probably true. Also, the building blocks of idealism (minds and thoughts/ideas, sensations, impressions, etc). are things we know for certain exist. That is not the case with dualism or materialism.

State the positive conclusion, please.

Some [consciousness/mind] is [exist]. a=x.

Some conscious mind *must* exist.

I would prefer modal logic: there is no possible world where there's no conscious mind. I would assign a high subjective probability to: there is no possible world where matter causes mind.

Like human beings. (Metzinger) Prohibitions against murder would either have to be based on something other than "defenseless killing of persons" since we would not be persons after all or we would have to radically update / redefine our folk psychological definition in the law of a "nature person"

I think when these Alexas and Siris can start passing the Turing Test and become companions to a lot of people there will be a sea change in what constitutes a "person". There's a story of a Colonel come to watch a mine-clearing robot at work. It gamely goes from mine to mine, losing pieces of itself until the Colonel can't stand to watch anymore. I think we're naturally sympathetic creatures, and that will extend to machines.

Wouldn't it be odd if a consensus emerges around IIT, and it's agreed that harming/deactivating systems with X amount of information integration is a crime, and then we discover such systems were never conscious? Of course, for practical reasons, we're going to carve out protections for advanced AI's. I think.

Are you an IIT proponent?

I read it a long time ago to win an argument.

I stumbled across this: "We examine the hypothesis that consciousness can be understood as a state of matter, "perceptronium", with distinctive information processing abilities."
https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219

The existence of a paper like this from a genius like Tegmark says a lot about how little progress science has made on the Hard Problem.

"Our approach generalizes Giulio Tononi's integrated information framework for neural-network-based consciousness to arbitrary quantum systems"

There's no evidence for IIT. It's impossible to verify if any external information-integrating system is conscious. And there are other problems with it.

Yes, I merely need a list of every object you think does, can, or must exist.

Pardon me for butting in, but I'm going to take a stab at this. At least one conscious mind must exist. Everything else conceivable *can* exist. A causal connection between matter and mind does not exist.

Tegmark is pretty out there. He thinks the universe is made of math. That's pretty idealistic.

We will continue merging with machines until we hit a technological wall or destroy ourselves.

Technological innovations are more shadows on the wall.

right around the time that humankind has reached epistemic and technological maturity.

We're in the same epistemic situation Plato's prisoners were in the Allegory of the Cave.

You should be able to articulate your position in your own words. I'm not reading 55 pages of Wittgenstein.

Your position is a lot like property dualism.

By physical phenomena, I mean the story I teach my 6th graders: light hits the back of the eye, a signal is sent to the brain, and the brain interprets the data as "seeing". And, of course, it's taken to understand that eyes, brains, photons, and nerves are things that are outside the mind.

If that's what you're proposing, then I'm going to demand proof that there exists anything outside the mind, and of course you won't be able to provide any, and I'll assert that the only thing we know for sure is that at least one conscious mind exists and the rest is speculation. But I'm curious: why are you so sure physicalism is true? Because that's the way the world appears? What do you think is physicalism's strongest argument? It's predictive accuracy?

What thread were you posting in?

Are you claiming that colors are physical phenomena? If so, what proof do you have?

The topic of "the physical" is very problematic. Why assume that mind is not a wholly physical phenomena? One would have to show why physical stuff leaves no room for mind.

I don't see good reasons to assume otherwise.

Aside from the various "how much does your mind weigh?" objections, let me give you my favorite argument:
If brains and minds are the same thing, then necessarily, if two people are talking about their minds, they're talking about their brains (and vice-versa). Ancient peoples were able to meaningfully talk about their minds and mental states, however, ancient peoples had no idea how the brain worked. The Greeks thought it cooled the blood. If brains and minds are the same thing, it follows that those ancient peoples who were meaningfully talking about their minds and mental states were also meaningfully talking about their brains and brain states, which is an absurdity.

If we tested two identical brains seeing red and the brain states were identical, we could infer the experience of seeing red is identical, but we could never verify it. A person could always say, "yeah, but brain A is occupying point X and brain B is occupying point Y, so maybe brain A's experience of red is different than brain B's." How would you prove or disprove that? That's the thing about consciousness: it's only measurable in ourselves. For all I know, you're a bunch of zombies or simulated people. No amount of brain scans or neural correlates can convince me other people are conscious. We just assume it's true because solipsism is kind of horrifying and depressing, at first.

No. By that logic one could do anything to someone without their consent on the grounds that if they don't like it they can always kill themselves.
Plus the option is far from always available.

Assuming suicide is available, the alternative to non-existence is available anytime the victim of consent feels the consent violation outweighs the benefits of existence. There's no analogue to other consent violations, like say rape. Suicide is uncreating yourself, which was the consent violation: creation without consent. The rape victim cannot un-rape herself. She can kill herself, but that doesn't remove the consent violation. It just terminates her existence. Suicide negates the consent violation (assuming the person's existence was, on balance, neither good nor bad).

Now, you can say that there is a harm in even putting someone into a situation where they have to go through the ordeal of suicide. And I would agree that that's a serious harm. However, how do you handle the fact the vast majority of people don't kill themselves and don't want to kill themselves? If you ask most people, they might not be happy with their existence, but they certainly don't want to end it. So how can you do harm to someone who continues to exist yet you brought them into existence without consent? Are you claiming that such people are addicted to existence?

There's another category of people that truly enjoy their life. I got lucky in that my son is one of these people. He's very computer science minded and I explained the argument to him, but he said even if I should have gotten his consent, he's glad I had him. Did I harm him in bringing him into existence without his consent? I think a utilitarian or consequentialist would say no.

Is it wrong to slip someone 5 dollars? Well, normally yes. I mean imagine you wake up and find five dollars on your bedside table. I sneaked in at night and left it there for you. Was that ok? No.

Discovering money on the table would lead to psychology distress, which is a harm. Suppose I add $5 to your bank account, and then change your memory of your account by $5. Was there a harm?

What if I've got a suitcase with 2 million dollars in it . It is heavy and I am on the top of a very tall building. Nevertheless I want to share my wealth and I am in a hurry, so I decide just to throw it off the building and onto the busy street below. I know that it'll injure - possibly very seriously - whomever it strikes. But what the hell - they'll be 2million dollars up on the deal, so they can't complain, right? No, they can complain and throwing the suitcase off was wrong.

There's a harm in that situation. I'm talking about situations where charity is given to someone without their consent and without any harm resulting. Are charitable violations of consent that don't result in harm immoral?

Is the lack of consent offset by the fact that whatever you bring into existence has the option of going back to non-existence (suicide)? Also, if I slip five dollars into someone's pocket without their consent, have I harmed them?

I remember one of my philo professors making that argument years ago. You might be right.

The point of the agony case was to show that it is more important to prevent suffering than it is to preserve a species.

Humans cause vast amounts of suffering. It is more important to prevent that suffering than it is to preserve the species.

And the point of the example of everyone voluntarily deciding not to procreate was to show that a) there is no positive obligation to preserve the species and b) that it is more important not to impose significant things on people without their consent than it is to preserve the species.

As it is more important not to impose significant things on people without their consent than it is to preserve the species, and as procreation clearly involves imposing something significant on someone without their consent, it is more important not to procreate than it is to preserve the species.

It is impossible to get the consent of something that does not exist to bring it into existence. That's an impossible burden to meet.

In those cases, the preservation of the species doesn't justify the means. But that's not what we're dealing with. People want to procreate, and kids don't live in agony. Some do, but percentage-wise, it's a very small amount.

good points.

Would any of the anti-having-kids people change their minds if it was discovered that we were the only technologically advanced species in the galaxy? The observable universe (I know that's impossible, but just go with it)?

It depends on whether space-faring creatures would evolve again. If not, all life on Earth will end when the sun gets too hot.

The consequences if everyone stopped having kids would be the death of the species. I'm assuming everyone (most? some?) here would agree that's something we should avoid. Therefore, not everyone should be childless.

Suppose you had a God's-eye view of the mental states of two people. One stationary and the other in an accelerating space ship. How would the two mental states change as the person accelerating gets closer to the speed of light? To an outside observer, would the mental state of the person accelerating start to slow down?

"Guth, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, resorts to freaks of nature to pose this “measure problem.” “In a single universe, cows born with two heads are rarer than cows born with one head,” he said. But in an infinitely branching multiverse, “there are an infinite number of one-headed cows and an infinite number of two-headed cows. What happens to the ratio?”

For years, the inability to calculate ratios of infinite quantities has prevented the multiverse hypothesis from making testable predictions about the properties of this universe. For the hypothesis to mature into a full-fledged theory of physics, the two-headed-cow question demands an answer."
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-multiverses-measure-problem-20141103/

Ok that's fair. But if we are speculating, isn't it fair for me to point out some things that need to be considered? If the universe instantiates actual infinity in any way: infinitely many sub-universes, infinitely many distinct times within a finite interval of time like 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, ... infinitely many planets, infinitely many anything ... then we must ask ourselves the question: Does the mathematical theory of infinity apply? If yes, then we must ask if things like the Continuum hypothesis and the axiom of choice have now become amenable to physical experiment; and if not, we must then develop a new physical theory of infinity.

My background isn't math, so I can't contribute too much along these lines. The other day, I was reading about proposals to take the infinitely large set of worlds and partition it in some non-arbitrary way so that probabilities can be assigned, but I can't find it now.

I know you weren't thinking of these things, but (in my opinion) the moment one says that there MIGHT be a physical infinity, these questions immediately come to mind. My mind, in any event.

Sure.

My point was about the ramifications if there are infinitely many universes with different physical constants. IF that is the case, the set of universes "everyone is a Boltzmann Brain" is infinite and the set "everyone is a real person" is infinite,
— RogueAI

This I disagree with. Am I allowed? As Jules played by Samuel L. Jackson says in Pulp Fiction: "Allow me to retort!" The set of positive integers exists. Are there as many numbers equal to 47 as not? No. Are there as many numbers that can be exponents in Fermat's equation? No, 2 is the only one, proven as recently as 1994. Are there infinitely many numbers that are part of a prime pair? Unknown. It is most definitely not the case that every possibility occurs infinitely many times. In the multiverse you have no idea what the actual rules are. Truth is you have no way of knowing that there are infinitely many universes that contain Boltzmann brains. Perhaps there's some as-yet-unknown physical constraint that only allows finitely many such. So your speculation is not fully thought out in my opinion.

I concede the point. There might be some fundamental aspect of things that makes a universe of nothing but Boltzmann Brains physically impossible. But that doesn't seem to be the case currently. There doesn't seem to be anything preventing, say, "casino worlds" in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (if you haven't read the book, it's a world where random erosion patterns just happened to have created glittering casinos everywhere).

Excessive pickiness on my part, maybe. Not snark. I'm making a point. I'm disagreeing with your reasoning.

Fair enough.

and they're both countably infinite sets,
— RogueAI

Ah! And you know this, how? This is one of my questions. Let us suppose, arguendo[/ii], that the number of sub-universes in the universe (or universes in the multiverse) is actually infinite. Is it countably infinite or uncountably infinite? Well, you just made an assumption. So if I got you to state one of your unstated assumptions, my objections have not been in vain. And why should the number be countably infinite? And if it's uncountable, what might its cardinality be? Set theorists have some mighty large cardinals these days. So IMO these are the kinds of questions that come immediately to mind whenever someone speculates on physical instantiations of infinity.

This is an assumption, but I think it a fair one. If there are infinite universes, why wouldn't they be countable? But maybe they're not.

After all, if there are even countably many of anything in the physical world, then we can in principle count its number of subsets; and depending on which cardinal number that happens to be, the Continuum hypothesis is therefore amenable to physical experiment. I take it as proof, or at least meta-proof, that physicists don't take infinite universes seriously; else postdocs would be applying for grants to determine the truth of the Continuum hypothesis.

Maybe. I don't know much about the Continuum hypothesis.

Why are you allowed to speculate about the consequences of physical infinity, but not me? Can you see that I am actually trying to join in your game, by making my own speculations about the implications of physical infinity.

That's fine. Your speculations are interesting. I'm going to have to read more about Continuum hypothesis. Infinity is interesting.

so how would you decide which set you're in if you don't know? It's a coin toss, in that situation.
— RogueAI

Without knowledge of the actual probability distribution, that's like guessing it's 50-50 to land alive after jumping off a tall building. Perhaps some configurations of the multiverse are far more likely than others. You're assuming all configurations are distributed uniformly. Isn't that an assumption?

No, I'm not assuming they're equally likely or distributed uniformly. That's not required to generate the dilemma of have to choose between two infinite sets to figure out which one you're in, but like you said, the true odds may be different. For example, if you're jumping off a tall building, there are two sets to consider: the set of universes where you survive and the set where you don't, and obviously your odds of surviving aren't 50/50, so there's something going on there, and yet, at a fundamental level, reality either is as it appears to be (actual laws of nature, not just fantastic coincidences over and over, we're not Boltzmann brains, etc.) or reality isn't as it appears to be. If there are an infinity of universes of each type, and you don't know what kind of universe you're in, how is it anything other than 50/50? You would have to assert some limiting principle where the multiverse just doesn't produce universes where fantastic coincidence isn't the norm, but what on Earth would that mechanism be?

If the multiverse isn't infinite, none of that applies, of course, but philosophy is about speculation, so I'm speculating here.
— RogueAI

So why can't I play too?

So what was the point of the lottery that comes up with the digits of pi? That example went right over my head.

After the first exchange, I thought you were making some errors, and I don't have much of a math background, so I asked a probability question about Pi. Do you know Bayes Theorem well?

Agreed.