True, but if it leads to infinite causal regress why not just admit that we have no clue what caused it and focus on attempting to understand what we know exists?

I don't think directed/managed panspermia leads to an infinite regress. An alien race could have taken a much different evolutionary path that avoids these issues entirely. No causal regress needed.

Simulation theory certainly doesn't lead to an infinite regress. It ends at some physical universe where the simulation creators exist. Their evolutionary path could be inconceivable to us, and so again, these issues wouldn't even apply. You would have to wonder why they programmed it in, but that's just a mystery, not an infinite regress.

And infinite regress-like problems certainly hasn't stopped inflation theory from taking off. An infinite ensemble of causally disconnected universes that's impossible to prove? That makes intelligent design look positively pedestrian.

As far as we can possibly tell, the universe has been doing what the universe does for about 14bn years or so - what is the basis for assuming that at some entirely arbitrary point something very extraordinary happened when as far as we can possibly tell, most things are reasonably adequately explained by nothing extraordinary happening (Copernican prinicple)?

Key phrase: "as far as we can possibly tell". As far as we can possibly tell, simulation theory is possible, maybe even plausible (see Nick Bostrom's argument). As far as we can tell, advanced aliens exist and mess around with habitable planets. We're certainly going to do it if we don't destroy ourselves and I don't see why we would be special in that regard.

I don't think they answer anything - there is absolutely zero evidence for intelligent aliens interfering in biological evolution

The chain of logic is fairly straight-forward: given all the planets in the galaxy, it's pretty likely some alien life exists. From that, it follows that advanced alien life possibly exists. The possibility has to be taken seriously, at least. From that you need only posit that advanced alien life might interfere in evolutionary processes. We would, and in another thousand years, we'll probably be doing it.

and how does it help anyway?

It's an explanation for irreducible complexity. Aliens did it.

If it were true then the big question becomes not where did we come from but where did they come from?

Yes, it does beg that question. That does not mean, however, that directed panspermia can't happen. Or didn't happen. Perhaps their evolutionary path was much different than ours.

Ditto, simulation 'theory'...who or what is the simulator?

Again, just because a hypothesis begs a question does not mean that that hypothesis isn't true. Physics and Cosmology posit theories that beg all sorts of interesting unanswered questions (possibly unanswerable).

And in any case, even if we are in a simulation, evolution would appear to be helping us to understand how the simulation unfolds - which, if that's what it is, is what we need to know. Whether it truly is a physical reality or a simulation, our goal is to find out how it unfolds and where we fit into the greater scheme. I don't find either of these ideas particularly useful in terms of elucidating how evolution unfolds, even if they were true.

It's an explanation for problems of irreducible complexity: the programmers did it.

Why don't you take those seriously?

What do you mean "off the hook"?

So should we also have a cancer-denying field of study to counter-balance mainstream cancer research?

No, but if we're going to take seriously the hypothesis that advanced aliens exist, we're going to have to take seriously the idea that ID might have taken place here. Ditto if we're serious about simulation theory.

Those are not hard questions to answer.

I take on board your interest in embodiment, and I admit that I was over generalizing with my comment 'all religions are nonsense' (I should have said deism). It was stylistically useful to take a devils advocate stance when presenting the thesis, but other than scepticism, I don't think there is much that 'philosophers' can say against 'advances' in neuroscience, and I'm a sceptic myself !

Correlation is not causation. Neuroscience is great at finding neural correlates. But as to the causal explanation of why/how brains are conscious, we're no closer than we've ever been.

The "most immediate primal thing we have" is the sensed world, especially other people and our bodily, emotional and linguistic interactions with them, of course including our own bodies and their sensations and feelings. What we might call "conscious experience" is only a tiny part of all that.

You're making some assumptions here. That there is a "sensed world" (I take it you mean "external world"?), that there are other people, and that we have bodies.

But even granting all that, to say conscious experience is "only a tiny part" A) isn't true (it's the most foundational thing we have. It permeates our every waking moment), and B) even a tiny bit of conscious experience has to be explained, and we're back to the same problem: how does interacting matter give rise to conscious experience?

Good post.

Conscious experience is the most immediate primal thing we have. There is nothing nebulous about stubbing your toe or an orgasm. The materialist explanation (or lack thereof) of how neurons give rise to conscious experience is what's nebulous. The explanations are all terrible.

Yes, the alleged corruption between Biden, then vice-president of the US, and his son was committed in and with Ukraine during the Obama administration. The alleged crimes occurred in Ukraine and with the Ukrainian government. I know you’re smart enough to see the problem here.

There IS a prima facia problem there. The NY Times and New Yorker have been covering it for about a year now.

But you seem to have missed the point: WE (America) are perfectly capable of investigating our own politicians. We have credible justice institutions that go back a long long time. Ukraine is barely a country. WHY would we EVER outsource an investigation to a country like Ukraine?

The answer is simple: we wouldn't. You don't have to defend everything this guy does. You realize that, right?

It seems to me prudent to want to investigate the possible corruption of the US government.

By Ukranians??? Uh, no. America is perfectly capable of investigating it's people. Trump wasn't asking for Ukranian help in an ongoing U.S. investigation. He was pressuring Ukraine to do an investigation. On someone who happens to be the son of his political opponent. I know you're smart enough to see the problem here.

And if there was a quid-pro-quo involving military funding, the Democrats will impeach. They might anyway, just if the WSJ reporting is accurate. And this isn't something that's hard to get to the bottom of, like the Mueller fiasco. The transcript of the call and the whistleblower's report will tell us everything.

Biden was the vice-president of the United States during when the alleged corruption occurred. The notion that he is doing it to “investigate a political opponent”, and not the corruption of which his political opponent and former vice-president might be guilty, is invented whole cloth without evidence.

That's why we have a DOJ. We don't outsource our investigations to countries like Ukraine. This Biden story has been around for years. You think a Republican DOJ wouldn't pounce on a chance to nail someone like Biden? Of course they would. If there was anything there, we would have heard about it by now.

Which is why I have trouble with this story. If Trump really did use military funding as a quid-pro-quo, we're just hearing about it now? Wouldn't that have been leaked to the press by a bunch of people?

You have more faith than me.

I don't know. Maybe they would be that craven. I have my doubts, though. I think a lot of these Republican Senators are at the end of their rope when it comes to Trump and are looking for a good reason to bail. This would be that reason.

The problem with this is, if Trump really did use military aid that way, wouldn't his whole administration have ground to a halt? I can't believe someone like James Mattis or Dan Coats would be silent about something like that. And yet we have this whistleblower, who, according to the IG, has a serious complaint. Fascinating.

It's being alleged by the the Wall Street Journal (and others) that Trump "pressured" (their word) Ukraine eight times to investigate Joe Biden's son. That alone, had it happened under any President's watch, would be a presidency-defining scandal.

IF it's the case that Trump dangled military-aid as a carrot or stick to get Ukraine to investigate a potential political opponent, Trump will be impeached and convicted in the Senate. This isn't some murky campaign finance violation nobody understands. This would be using tax-payer dollars to pressure another country to investigate a political opponent. That's easily understandable and also happens to be indefensible. There might be a few Senators who would go on record in an impeachment trial saying that that behavior is OK, but there aren't 30 of them.

Well, yes, as more and more the brain correlations to qualia are getting tracked.

But the story on causation hasn't move an inch. There is no coherent story. Materialism hits a brick wall when it tries to explain how interacting matter can give rise to conscious experience.

I'm not a materialist either, and I know enough about the ole "hard problem of consciousness" schtick to know we can't come to any agreement. And, yes, I really loved the comic you linked to.

Schtick?

You've already stipulated that an electronic device, a computer, can simulate mental processes. What is a computer? It is a device with many connections. If I may be allowed to drastically oversimplify, the action of the computer is to pass signals back and forth through those connections. Those signals transmit information. How is that different than passing notes, i.e. signals containing information, back and forth. I recognize that the computer will be much faster. For logistical reasons, there is no possibility that any but the simplest computer consisting of people passing notes can ever be implemented, but we are in the world of hypotheticals, so we can ignore practical considerations.

This chain of logic is one of the reasons I'm not a materialist. Materialism leads to absurdities like:
Pushing rocks around on an endless plain in some "special" way can simulate a universe of conscious beings.
https://xkcd.com/505/

He said with no justification. — T Clark

Well, let me put it this way: if you claim that people passing notes back and forth (in a certain way, I assume) will give rise to a conscious moment, you're going to have to have an explanation for it. I think you're also committed to panpsychism, because if people passing notes can instantiate consciousness, then other things can as well. A falling abacus, if it's large enough, and the air moves the beads in just the right way?

If you're claiming that people passing notes back and forth CAN give rise to a conscious moment, I need an explanation for why I should consider that a plausible possibility, instead of something that is near impossible.

Anyway, how is that different from pulleys and ropes?

It's not. I think a conscious system of pulleys and ropes is as absurd (and is based upon as much logic and evidence) as transubstantiation.

I remember reading about a hypothetical computer made with people passing notes back and forth. There's have to be a lot of people. I guess 100 billion, which is about the number of people who are living or have ever lived. It would also be very slow.

People passing notes back and forth aren't going to create an instantiation of consciousness.

I think any account of consciousness arising from severally non-conscious stuff is conceptually doomed.

Yes, I think you're right about that.

And we don't need such an account, there are other, more fruitful ways to think about consciousness, namely panpsychism. But by all means carry on and see if you can figure something out. I remain interested in the project.

Panpsychism has been en vogue lately. Max Tegmark thinks the universe might be made of math, and that sounds very idealistic. I think materialism's days are numbered.

I would think consciousness also requires a body. Much current AI research seems to be brain focused and disembodied, which really isn’t the case with human consciousness.

It certainly seems to require SOME kind of substrate, in the materialist model of reality. Although I remember reading some scientist postulate a consciousness field that permeates the universe.

I think the bigger problem is explaining how a brain can process sense-data and produce a sense of awareness of our surroundings, whereas that same brain, when put through a blender, can't produce a thing. This same problem pops up in simulation theory- a simulation is essentially a series of switching operations, and how is it that one sequence of switching operations can (supposedly) simulate consciousness, while a different sequence of switching operations doesn't produce anything? Is there something "special" about the combination of switches that produced the simulated consciousness? If so, what is it, and why is it special?

Replace "combination of switches" with "specific neural activity" and you have the same problem:

"I'm not exactly sure, are you wondering now?"

About every event having a cause? Yeah. If the event in question was the beginning of time and space...

"Clue: physical science theories' always use synthetic propositions because they make statements about the facts of nature that can be tested. In layman's terms, isn't that a sense of wonderment?"

I guess, but it's not a necessary condition for doing science. I can have no sense of wonder and still make statement about nature if my life depends on it.

Cosmology is going through a similar crisis. It seems that the universe might be unnatural, might be part of an infinite multiverse, and if that's the case, there's not a whole lot we can do with that. There are also worries about physics: if the energies required to advance particle physics can only be achieved in colliders the size of the solar system, we're not going to see anything new from that branch of science for a long time.

"Of course you are joking right (or maybe I misunderstood)? Here's an easy one for you: every event must have a cause."

Are you sure about that?

RA, I think you may be overlooking the obvious. Would you not agree that raising the ' scientific question' in itself is a necessary part of the evaluation process?

And if so, is that not called human wonderment? But if not, then why choose to evaluate at all?

You don't need a sense of wonderment to raise a scientific question. Military necessity does quite nicely.

Maybe. Maybe with more cognition, some of the stuff that stumps us may be answered. Although the problem would then be (from the point of view of the superior intellect) if you have the right answer, it may be impossible to explain it to simpletons like us. It may just be something like an A.I. telling us: "yes, you have free will, and no, we can't dumb it down that much. Just take our word for it. Also, the universe is conscious."

They would be smarter?

Good post.

" From what I can see the issue is foundational to everything and yet no one has a definitive answer."

I think because free will seems impossible in either a deterministic or indeterministic universe. Inwagen talks about this. But yet the intuition that we are freely making choices is one of the strongest we have. So there's tension between the idea that, in this type of universe, free will seems impossible and yet we all act like we have it.

I can see that choice is part of your argument and from what I've observed it's a key piece of the puzzle. Let's take a more general viewpoint and not just science. Are choices and the ability to make them really evidence of freewill.

I would say that freedom of choice is a necessary condition for free will, but not a sufficient one. If you can establish that we really are making free choices, it wouldn't establish free will, per se, but you would be very close to it.

That said one thing worth mentioning is awareness has a big role in freewill. We've all had the experience where we resist our urges which I take as weak evidence for freewill and a requirement for this ability is that we must be aware of the influences that compel us to act in a certain way. If for a moment we let our guards down we're back to behaving like an animal - instinct driven and machine-like.

Yes, the idea that we are biological robots run completely counter to the rich inner life we all have. That is the last thing you would expect a machine to have. The existence of consciousness is a huge problem for those who regard us as automatons. I think it's catastrophic.

I generally agree with this, most of the objections you've got stem from an interpretation of the word 'choice' different from yours (you're obviously referring to free choices here, which a deterministic machine isn't able to make).

Yes. The ability to choose is impossible in a deterministic universe (see Inwagen's argument).

However as someone mentioned, if people's actions were predetermined then it was also predetermined that what we call science would evolve the way it does, so science "moving forward" does not imply free will, however in order to believe in the absence of free will we have to leave plenty of coincidences unexplained.

I briefly talked about this. It's likely we evolved to be the kind of beings who mostly come to rational conclusions (even in a deterministic world); the irrational ones were selected against long ago. That has some merit, and I don't have a good counter to it yet.

We had a functioning democracy before Gettier. Maybe consciousness will finally be figured out. Although, if it was going to be, it probably would have already happened by now.

What is important is if philosophy is meaningful to people. Plato, Socrates and Aristotle are meaningful to a lot of people. We still quote them, thousands of years later. Gettier isn't. It doesn't matter except to a small group of people if knowledge is a true belief or justified true belief. It doesn't make a difference in their lives and it doesn't cause them to wonder about things.

That is not true!

For example, defining knowledge as a justified true belief is clearly unsustainable.

Edmund Gettier famously breached the stalemate in 1963 with his counterexample cases. The entanglement phenomenon also decisively breaches the classical JTB definition. The problem is now completely up in the air, even on the empirical side of things.

Furthermore, only empirical knowledge could possibly ever be correspondence-theory "true" and therefore JTB knowledge. Axiomatic fields such as mathematics, which are never correspondence-theory "true", are not knowledge in that approach. So, what are they then?

None of that is important. I think it is, because my degree's in it, but anyone else would be bored to tears. I've tried to explain the brilliance of Gettier's paper, and people get it, but the inevitable reaction is "so what?"

I think because people recognize what Gettier was getting at, clever as he was, was just a version of the old "how do we know what's real?" argument.

Oh, and whenever we philosopher undergrads would talk about Gettier, we would get so jealous!

Maybe. I don't think anyone's done anything really important since Turing, and he wasn't even a philosopher. I think you'll see computation was the last bit of progress doing philosophy the old-fashioned way could achieve.

I thought it was a rule that if infinite sets are countable, they're equal. No exceptions.

Informative post!

Yes, you can restate principles and there's value in that, but all the foundational level work has been done.

I think everyone should have to take a couple of intro-level philo courses. My son is going into Computer Science, and he could care less about philosophy, but they're making him take it. I told him, "it's good for you. It teaches you to be critical and think abstractly."

RA, just a thought, would it make better sense to ask …"Can you do science without a strong sense of wonder"?

No, because I don't think a sense of wonder is a necessary condition for doing science. The ability to weigh/evaluate evidence is.

In other words, if we were to use logic, one could argue that a 'synthetic a priori' proposition is essential in science for moving the thought forward, as well as realizing the resulting discovery and uncovery of such things... ?

Are there any scientific synthetic a priori propositions?

So I suppose the 'choice' to be curious or having a strong sense of wonder, along with being glass half-full to the spectrum of possibilities is some of what you are getting at...

No, I was trying to show that science is impossible without the ability to freely choose, and since science is clearly moving forward, we have the ability to freely choose. From there, it's a short hop to "we have free will".

Where's the part on consciousness?

I brought up Inwagen because the person I was responding to wasn't getting what I was saying (I was making a point about choice being impossible in a deterministic universe due to lack of options).

Inwagen said it much better than I could.

I don't understand what Van Inwagen's argument has to do with what you are presenting here. Van Inwagen's argument is about the necessity of moral responsibility, and the incompatibility of that with determinism. It makes (as far as I recall) no mention whatsoever of judgement of correspondence with reality, which is what are required to make scientific decisions.

3.1 No Forking Paths Argument
The No Forking Paths argument (van Inwagen 1983; Fischer 1994; Ekstrom 2000) begins by appealing to the idea that whenever we make a choice we are doing (or think we are doing) something like what a traveler does when faced with a choice between different roads. The only roads the traveler is able to choose are roads which are a continuation of the road she is already on. By analogy, the only choices we are able to make are choices which are a continuation of the actual past and consistent with the laws of nature. If determinism is false, then making choices really is like this: one “road” (the past) behind us, two or more different “roads” (future actions consistent with the laws) in front of us. But if determinism is true, then our journey through life is like traveling (in one direction only) on a road which has no branches. There are other roads, leading to other destinations; if we could get to one of these other roads, we could reach a different destination. But we can’t get to any of these other roads from the road we are actually on. So if determinism is true, our actual future is our only possible future; we are never able to choose or do anything other than what we actually do.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incompatibilism-arguments/#TwoReasForThinFreeWillIncoDete