What phenomena are in the brain and if so how? — Andrew4Handel

The brain itself does not have 'senses' of its own so "phenomena in the brain" – humuncular theory – does not make sense.

And mirror neurons might give us that strong illusion of sharing platonic ideas and the same sensations ? — plaque flag

I don't know. My guess is that "platonic ideas" (universals) are quixotic (mis)uses of language rationalized whereby (formal and nonformal) abstractions are fallaciously reified. We share 'semantic illusions' discursively as a matter of course – "mirror neurons", I think, only play a significant role in prelinguistiic cognition (i.e. before babies habitualize language-use).

Attention is drawn to surprise, right? — plaque flag

Yeah, novelty usually pricks one from one's mneumonic slumber.

:up:

:cool:

How about the self as a social habit... — plaque flag

... or metacognitive bias (via neo-natal bonding + mirror neurons —> developing 'theory of mind'). :chin:

I suggest that we drop the ocular metaphor and talk about dancing. In other words, we perform 'universals' in the way we trade marks and noises. This 'seeing' of 'form' (this metaphorical interpretation of our situation) has its pros and cons. It's helped us trick ourselves into believing in ghosts. — plaque flag

:fire: re: Homo [confabulator]!

Platonism sometimes seem to merely assume its own conclusion. — plaque flag

:up:

'Theory of Forms' (universals) via reification + circular reason fallacies. Later 'deconstructed' as the problem of the criterion, no?

Selves also are almost logical absolutes. The tradition of a ghost in the machine of the body, which is held responsible for telling a coherent story, seems unavoidable. A culture without selves like this would be like a culture without wheels or fire. It's a technology so basic we think it came from god. — plaque flag

:clap: So on point – brilliantly succinct!

You blinded me with Science (again)! :up:

Neurath's boat. One part of us questions another part of us. We also make tacit norms explicit, draw out concepts. This is the hermeneutic circle. We 'know' what rationality and being are, but we aren't done knowing what they are. — plaque flag

:100:

The philosophy of stoicism was the religion of Marcus Aurelius. Philosophy was the religion of Boethius, who wrote “The Consolation of Philosophy.” Religion for the common people consisted largely of myths and gods.

I think science united with philosophy addressing ultimate questions might produce a religion ... — Art48

I'm confused here by what you mean by "philosophy" and what you mean by "religion" and "science" as well. Some clarification would be helpful.

I think you're hung up on semantics. Besides, are humans merely just a gradation of – "advanced / augmented" – eukaryotes? or "advanced / augmented" fish? 'Human intellect instantiated on a planck-scale (entangled) synthetic substrate' doesn't seem like a merely "advanced / augmented human" prospect to me.

I don't see how we could "merge with" AGI —> ASI —> ??? and not be(come) "posthuman" – another species completely (e.g. nano sapiens). Are butterflies just 'winged caterpillars' after the chrysalis?

Anyway, back to the present, I just came across this article

https://philosophynow.org/issues/155/Whats_Stopping_Us_Achieving_Artificial_General_Intelligence

and I'm reading it now. Might be worth discussing ..

IME (as a disbeliever), there seem to be four stances with respect to 'religious belief':

• make-believers (most)
• unbelievers (many)
• true believers (few)
• disbelievers (fewer)

Maybe it's always been this way and that the secular modernity of recent centuries helps to make these 'cultural' differences more explicit. Ergo, the waxing of various reactionary fundamentalisms (especially, though not exclusively, among the Abrahamic "axis of evil") in the last several decades.

Is it possible some philosophers when writing run out of ideas, but continue writing?
— jgill

For some, it seems to me, it is as if their words are in search of ideas. If they keep writing sooner or later they will stumble across something to say.

And there are some who just recycle the same idea. — Fooloso4

:up: :up:

Project: Black Box

Re: Large language models (i.e. neural networks which are self-learning machines) which also "hallucinate". :yikes:



@universeness @Tom Storm @Wayfarer

Perhaps ... but I'm not teaching this stuff for money, so maybe not.

Yeah, I like a few of them too.

I got the virus twice in 2021, before & after the jab. I've had two boosters since. These "long haul symptoms" I've been living with for two years ain't no joke. It's reduced me from a marathoner to a one-legged sprinter. "I can't go on. I'll go on." Thanks anyway. :mask:

Lingering covid brain fog and chronic fatigue – I do what I can.

Insofar as "Hegel may have been trying to update Spinoza", I think he reconceptualizes one of Spinoza's infinite modes ("the world") as a 'meta-historicizing teleology' according to his own idealist dialectic ("Geist").
— 180 Proof

Could you elaborate on the bold part? — plaque flag

:yikes: Which part?

All of it? :scream:

(As much as I try to be, I ain't no @Fooloso4 or @apokrisis or @Banno) Unpacking that blurb would be a helluva dissertation ... In the meantime, I recommend Pierre Macherey's Hegel or Spinoza which, as I recall, is an excellence critique of Hegel's (deliberate) misreading – "updating" – of Spinoza's ontology, etc (@Tobias re: one of our first discussions). Maybe I wlll come back to this if I can more expansively explain what I mean in only a paragraph or three. :sweat:

I first define the concept of ultimate ground of existence as that which underlies physical existence. [ ... ] At this point, it’s a philosophical concept, not unlike Kant's Thing-in-itself or Schopenhauer's Will. — Art48

I prefer Democritus-Epicurus' Void.

Does the concept of ultimate ground of existence refer to something real? It may not. But mystics often describe their experience as experience of ultimate reality, which gives some support for the idea.

How can promixate beings with proximate perceptual capabilities and frames of reference "experience" "ultimate" anything? This assertion doesn't make sense to me. It's more likely "mystics" are mistaken about their ineluctable cognitive (experiential) limits and confabulate an "ultimate" – X-of-the-gaps – that transcends them.

Anyway, Nāgārjuna's Śūnyatā works for me.

See my response to Banno ... — Art48

I did, and that's why I still want (more) compelling reasons. If that's all you've got, well okay, Art, ... whatever.

I think Hegel may have been trying to update Spinoza. — plaque flag

I think so, and he more or less says as much ...

You're either a Spinozist, or not a philosopher at all. — GWF Hegel

... and he considered himself a (great world-historical) philosopher, ergo "Spinozist".

The World is God, and We are God's eyes, God's spies, God's neurons. — plaque flag

This is too pantheistic, even for Hegel (a christian pan-en-theist). As he (with Maimon) points out, Spinoza's metaphysics is acosmist. Insofar as "Hegel may have been trying to update Spinoza", I think he reconceptualizes one of Spinoza's infinite modes ("the world") as a 'meta-historicizing teleology' according to his own idealist dialectic ("Geist").

Indeterminacy is as old as philosophy itself, but it seems as though some today think it is their job to create indeterminacy. As if trying to navigate a ship on stormy seas so as not to run ashore will be benefited by making the landmarks indistinguishable. — Fooloso4

Agreed. I'm also not a fan of either dada-like compostmoderns or analysis-for-analysis-sake "specialists".

I don't deny that people who have had life-changing encounters with uncreated light may be deluded. I just don't believe they are. — Art48

I may have missed it but tell us (again?) why – on what basis – you "don't believe ... encounters with uncreated light" are delusions.

:clap: Yes, it seems the sophists have won, taking over the academy (pace Plato et al). Old story though, at least since the scholastics.

What?

I interpret karma as 'moral habit' and less broadly, in a (vaguely) Buddhist sense, as 'the moral habit of de/attachment'. Why 'moral'? Because karma, I think, concerns how one lives daily, moment to moment, and treats – relates to – other living creatures. I suppose my interpretive bias is both aretaic and pragmaticist contra the ancient dharmic, or supernaturalist, connotations (e.g. "wheel of rebirth", etc).

I am not sure what your theory of language is but I don't think we can talk about things that don't exist. — Andrew4Handel

The word "self" (like "god") exists and we use – "talk about" – it meaningfully and incessantly (re: Meinong's Jungle, Witty's language games, etc).

I asked an honest, epistemic question of you because, if I'm not mistaken, you are a learned student / practicioner of comparative religions and mystical traditions. I have no reason to doubt that you gave an honest (by your lights) and informed answer, yet, even though, I've charitably interpreted your response as insufficiently epistemic. Now you're irritated that you've been found out – again – either as not so learned or a shallow dupe or both.

Asking inconvenient questions, Wayfarer, is in the best Socrstic tradition – examining (acid testing) assumptions. Whatever else you are, sir, are you not also a student-practicioner of philosophy? My apologies if I'm (again) mistaken and have given you more credit than is warranted. Anyway, I'll move along with my midday lantern looking for a principled thinker who can handle inconvenient, simple questions like these. G'day. :smirk:

If these findings hold up ... :yikes: :cool:

Ah I see, you are convinced by mere anecdotes (i.e. appeal to popularity). That shows, sir, what assuming "supernatural experiences" amount to (i.e. it's delusional) and therefore why the OP is incoherent. As for what you apparently "understand" about neuroscience ... :eyes: :sweat:

:ok: So you haven't a clue how a natural brain with natrural capacities adapted to nature can have "supernatural experiences" even though you believe that people do and/or that you have had them.

Yeah, it's like asking 'how can a person who was born blind have color experiences even though s/he claims to see red or recognize faces without touching them'. I'm serious about calling 'believing is seeing' into question, Wayf, as delusional (or deceitful) in the absence of squaring this empirical / phenomenological circle. :chin:

While the naturalist claims that the things that exist in the natural world are consistent, they fail to acknowledge the inconsistency with the first cause of the universe. — Ishika

As far as we know, the universe began with a planck radius and events at the planck scale are random (i.e. a-causal), so the claim that 'the universe has a first cause' is, at best, inconsistent with contemporary scientific cosmology.

It is a natural law that every cause has an effect, so the naturalist must affirm that.

It's a definition, not a "natural law", of an "effect" that it has at least one "cause". We naturalists, partiicularly of the scientific persuasion, use the term event instead due to the fact of the orders of magnitude predominance of random events in (excitations of) planck-scale fields over non-planck-scale (classical) phenomena such as (e g.) particle interactions and vacuum fluctuations.

Yet, they fail to provide a theory that is consistent with the natural law for how the world was initially created.

This is not true. Re: quantum gravity. Besides, all of the demonstable evidence in cosmology and astrophysics supports models that "the universe was not created"(e.g. has higher than predicted structural complexity in the early observable universe).

The initial cause, according to theists, is God.

I can't refute this nostrum any more succinctly than Galileo did over four centures ago ...

The Bible shows the way to go to heaven, not the way the heavens go.

Naturalists (including materialists-physicalists) have an unparalleled, unrefuted, track-record of producing knowledge of and about the universe. Whatever its limitations as a philosophical paradigm or scientific methodology, naturalism provides the least consistent accounts for the origin of the universe except for all the other non-natural (e.g. idealist, teleological, supernatural, mythological, etc) accounts given so far. By contrast, theists have only ever produced superstitious fairytales which too many people still live by and console themselves with via ritually pacifying their false fears with equally false hopes.

Yet language is our killer app. — plaque flag

Sure.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/799982
However, memetics ain't language any more than shapes are clouds or events are time.

@Tom Storm @plaque flag
How do you suppose that natural brains consisting of natural cognitive and sensory functionalities adapted to nature are in any way capable of perceiving – experiencing – "supernatural" events / agents? I'd like to be shown what publicly warrants the OP's problematic assumption that human beings can have "supernatural experiences" (which are more than just drug / psychosis-induced hallucinations). :chin:

I'm not persuaded that 'memetics' explains much. And Dennett's later work seems to mostly be earlier work rehashed / reformulated. I've barely skimmed his last few books.

Memes on top of genes that were built to host them ? — plaque flag

So the 'biosemiotic story' goes ...

If humanity does make contact with a higher intelligence, through the use of AI-powered communication tools, what sort of philosophical implications does that have for humanity? — Bret Bernhoft

Well, I can think of three immediate "implications": Contact

• confirms Singularity hypothesis – "'Higher intelligence' (terrestrial or not) ends / inexplicably accelerates 'human history'"

• resolves Fermi's Paradox – "We are not alone", "They got past the Great Filter" & "Are they machines or organisms?"

• puts the Dark Forest hypothesis to the test!. :eyes:

An excerpt from a recent post ...

Btw, talking to one of nephews today (who's not yet thirty, working in finance & tech) the "Fermi Paradox" came up and by the end of that part of the discussion, maybe fifteen minutes later, I concluded that there's no paradox after all because, in the (local) universe, there are probably exponentially more extraterrestrial intelligent machines (ETIM) – which are not detectable yet by us and therefore we are of no interest to those xeno-machines – than there are non-extinct extraterrestrial intelligent species (ETIS) whose thinking machine descendants are exploring the universe and leaving behind their makers to carry on safely existing in boundless, virtual worlds. "The Great Silence" is an illusion, I remarked, for those who don't have post-Singularity ears to hear the "Music of the Spheres" playing between and beyond the stars. Maybe, universeness, you agree with the young man who told me, in effect, that my cosmic scenario diminishes human significance to ... Lovecraftian zero. :smirk: — 180 Proof

Like tautologies, 'p-zombiies' are devoid of content. They are merely there (à la Chinese Rooms).

Granted that it's an invention, does it persist because it accomplishes something ? — plaque flag

"It persists", it seems to me, because "self" might be a kind of cognitive (memory) bias related to emotion-enabled scenario-planning and judgmemt (Damasio).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_marker_hypothesis

update:

Brains model worlds. In order to construct an “objective” view - an Umwelt - the organism must successfully “other” itself as the “subjective” part of that viewing.

[ .... ]

A classic example from ecological perception is landing a plane on a runway. The pilot fixes on a landing spot and just maintains a steady optic flow. So a sense of self emerges from the process of becoming the still centre of a world in smooth predictable motion. You and your target are one. Two halves of the psychological equation. The wider world is likewise reduced to a continuous flow. The brain is modelling reality in a cleanly divided fashion which is not a model of the world, but a model of us in the world as the world’s still and purposeful centre, with the world then passing by in a smooth and predictable manner. — apokrisis

:fire: :100:

What do I make of "wondering at a tautology" in this thread? Well, for a start, that p-zombies are tautologies and subjective beings are contradictions ...

Doers are fictional / conventional (essentially social) foci of responsibility. — plaque flag

:up:

But what do you make of 'wondering at a tautology'? — plaque flag

More context plesse.

Do you see/feel why this confusion is tempting?

I suspect you agree with Freddy ...

But there is no such substratum; there is no "being" behind doing, effecting, becoming; "the doer" is merely a fiction added to the deed – the deed is everything. — On the Genealogy of Morals

Philosophers, more than most, are 'bewitched by language', no?

Thank you for the kind words ! Especially from you they are valued.

Well played.

:cool:

Every skull wears an acquired face and calls it "self". I suspect that language – word-fetishizing – is why "the myth of self endures".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_model

So it's hard to call the universe an organism, because it has no environment. Life climbs a ladder. It 'shits' more disorder than it creates. — plaque flag

Things tend to fall apart, but here we are, strange primates, increasing in complexity, godlike cyborgs, now creating synthetic brains better than our own. Even from the outside, we are not [just] drifting spacerock. — plaque flag

We can take an external view and look at patterns that stubbornly resist being erased. The pattern doesn't 'want' to die. — plaque flag

Philosophy makes darkness visible, drags ignorance into the light, wakes up the marching zombie. — plaque flag

qualia are slippery eels. — plaque flag

:fire: :100: I'm jazzed by the way you dance!

As I discern things, there is no "hard problem" for scientists, just another hard confusion that semantically bewitches philosophers.

@schopenhauer1