in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the Cross. — Gus Lamarch

Except Jesus was a Jew, and he probably died because the Romans thought he was agitating revolution. Jesus likely believed God anointed him the messiah to help usher in the Kingdom of God and restore Israel, free of Roman rule.

That or Peter, James and Paul had visions of an angel they called Jesus who they thought was crucified by the devil in the firmament, and the next generation turned that into a historical narrative.

Could he be a worse leader and bigger asshole? — praxis

Yes, he could be a capable asshole like Putin. As it stands, Donnie's incompetence is somewhat of a blessing.

But why is it "bordering on incoherent"? — TheMadFool

Think about a p-zombie telling other p-zombies about a dream they had. Now what could the dream teller mean, and what would the listeners understand, given that they have no dream experiences?

Or take a movie like one of the Terminator ones where at some point you see the world from the first person perspective of the terminator. Now how would a p-zombie understand that?

What do you mean? — TheMadFool

"Siri, what's the temperature?"

"It's 20 degrees outside. Brrrr, cold."

For example, if one is unwilling to lie to protect someone from being murdered, because lying is always bad.

that the selection of particular 'facts' as being those which one evaluates as 'true' is itself an act of bias. — ernestm

So what do we do with statistics? (cue M. Twain)

One other example. Hyenas go for the tentacles to disable their prey or enemies. Here is a video of a male lion surrounded by hyenas who keeps sitting down when warding off their attacks.

That's hard to explain without positing that the lion believes the hyenas are wanting to go for it's balls.

Take the example of pack hunters like wolves or lions. They form strategies of working together to bring down prey, or chase off competition. How do they form plans on the fly without some sort of beliefs about each other, their prey and different competitors?

It's probably not even aware that it's acting in such a way. The cat just does what it does. — Sam26

I find this hard to believe. A cat has a relatively sophisticated brain. It needs to survive in a complex environment as an ambush predator. And cats learned to adapt to humans. Why wouldn't a cat have all sorts of beliefs about the world?

What even is your point? — StreetlightX

You stated that it would be better if "we" moved on from these dumb thought fantasies.

I don't think the dolphin believes it's seeing a reflection, reflection involves concepts that the dolphin doesn't have. It believes it's seeing another dolphin, or some such thing. — Sam26

Is that a scientific opinion? Because the dolphins in the video I posted do behave as if they are inspecting themselves using the mirror.

Also, there is the mirror test with a red dot on the forehead where some animals have demonstrated an awareness of the dot being on their own head.

The idea that only humans have concepts because we're the only language users is a bit anthropomorphic. It's placing too much emphasis on language, and not enough on animals studies.

Also, it's not known for sure that we're the only language users. Dolphins being an obvious possible exception. Birds another.

And? I don't care about physicalism. — StreetlightX

Unfortunately for you, some philosophers do.

In some ways this event can be seen as a dry run for greater dangers ahead...like the return of something like the Spanish flu. — Chester

I do wonder what the response would have been if Covid were a more deadly disease like Smallpox, but with an infection rate of Measles. Something that everyone would truly be afraid of.

Also if a dolphin inspects itself in the mirror, that shows the dolphin believes it's seeing a reflection. But if a tiger attacks a mirror, that shows it believes the reflection is another cat. And if a gorilla changes its mind about the reflection, then that shows animals update their beliefs as they gain more information, like from continuing to interact with the mirror.

Who knows with Banno's cat, though.

It's just certain philosophies attempt to buy into the preteige of scientific association. — StreetlightX

Wouldn't physicalism have the same criticism? Those thought experiments are pointing out the difficulty with explaining everything in physical terms.

it's just unlikely. — Chester

Agreed. I'm not into the doomsday predictions stuff. I think we'll survive climate change as well and civilization will go on in some form.

I pity the poor, innocent chunk of dead flesh lying in the morgue, conscious, but not aware of itself. — jgill

If one is going to go full idealist, then the chunk of dead flesh is just an idea, not a state of being, since the idea of mind-independent matter would be considered incoherent.

I'm not sure how idealists handle death, but I assume it would simply mean to end of experience, not one of decaying flesh. That's for others to experience.

Still an appropriate response, no? — Isaac

We did all basically agree to Kantianism in that direct realism thread, did we not?

Yes, but what is it like to be a bat dreaming of being John Wick in the Matrix? — Isaac

Fucking bad ass, but I'm not sure the tortured, colorblind bat BIV would be able to see this:



And tasty wheat would still probably taste like chicken.

Would he learn anything new when he sees red? — Isaac

He'd learn he was a bat dreaming of being John Wick in the Matrix.

That's a a petitio principi. — fdrake

Like naive realism.

t's just certain philosophies attempt to buy into the preteige of scientific association. — StreetlightX

Like Maxwell's demon or Schrödinger's cat?

Philosopher: I have a thought experiment where I'm just a brain in a jar. — fdrake

If you're going to straw man it, sure. But it's just expressing a modern version of age-old concerns about skepticism, because our heads are the jars. How do we know our senses are telling us the truth about the world?

A trolley operated by a p zombie is like a self-driving car, passengers or pedestrians? But the zombie has no morality by definition, we have to program it with our morals. — unenlightened

The p-zombie argument has little to do with ethics, but one might argue that torturing a p-zombie wouldn't be wrong since it doesn't feel pain.

However, what if it turns out we're all p-zombies? Does that mean we get to torture one another? Probably we would adjust our ethics instead. Although I don't know what exactly it would men to say that I don't really experience suffering.

Sure, what does white police officers kneeling on a black man's neck have to do with wage slavery? Police abusing their authority happens under any economic system.

Capitalists will be back because they are worms. — StreetlightX

God forbid people have a places to work and shop.

Suddenly I do not give a flying hoot about most burglary or "looting". — StreetlightX

Do you not care about local businesses? What about when the businesses (local or chain) relocate, leaving their area more destitute?

I think the human race will make it to the end of 2020 though, call it a hunch. — Chester

Oh yeah, I'm not pessimistic about the human race's survival. Even if Yellowstone were to blow or there was a squid uprising. Just saying we still have 7 months for current times to get more interesting.

What is it like to be a bat? Nagel. — unenlightened

Also, the p-zombie thought experiment is good for pointing out the difficulty with incorporating consciousness into a material framework. But also the difficulty when you don't, since p-zombie Chalmers is making the exact same argument!

Compare and contrast that to the p-zombie in which case, if a p-zombie is possible, behavior alone is insufficient to infer consciousness. — TheMadFool

The problem with p-zombies is that they can debate consciousness in just as nuanced a manner as a philosopher like Chalmers or any of us discussing our everyday subjectivity. I find that bordering on incoherent.

So my assumption would be that if an AI can pass a robust Turing Test on consciousness, then it's probably conscious like us. But it has to be robust, and not just clever programming techniques. Humans are easily fooled since we have a tendency to see agency in things.

And we're not even halfway through 2020.

Because Chistianity had Truth as one of its core values and ate its own tail... in short :-) — ChatteringMonkey

Also because the Christians lost their power over the state, so now they can't force everyone in society to be at least nominally Christian.

How can a language less creature believe that a proposition is true, unless - at the very least - that creature understands the proposition? — creativesoul

It would seem crows have neurons that can represent number of items, corresponding to evidence they can do simple counting.

An old story says that crows have the ability to count. Three hunters go into a blind situated near a field where watchful crows roam. They wait, but the crows refuse to move into shooting range. One hunter leaves the blind, but the crows won't appear. The second hunter leaves the blind, but the crows still won't budge. Only when the third hunter leaves, the crows realize that the coast is clear and resume their normal feeding activity.

Helen Ditz and Professor Andreas Nieder of the University of Tübingen found the neuronal basis of this numerical ability in crows. They trained crows to discriminate groups of dots. During performance, the team recorded the responses of individual neurons in an integrative area of the crow endbrain. This area also receives inputs from the visual system. The neurons ignore the dots' size, shape and arrangement and only extract their number. Each cell's response peaks at its respective preferred number. — https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/06/150608152002.htm

In the old story, it would seem the crows have a belief about how many hunters are behind the blind, suggesting that you don't need language to form the equivalent of propositional content. I don't know whether that old story is just a story, but their other documented cases where some animals could do simple arithmetic with a small number of items.

Another example would be the mirror test. Do animals act as if the reflect in the mirror is another animal? Do they come to believe it is themselves?

In the short BBC video below, they explain how dolphins behave differently toward a mirror than other dolphins or just in general. They behave as if they're using the mirror to look at part of their body they can't otherwise see.

Since water and fire are opposites of each other, everything else must lie between the two and because water is nothing but burnt Hydrogen, it seems that Hercaclitus wasn't too far from the truth if not right on the button about fire being the arche. — TheMadFool

The flaw in the reasoning is to suppose that because X and Y are opposites, the rest of A-Z must fall in between X and Y. But they don't. Water and fire don't get you gold, magnetism or radioactivity.

I don't know whether the ancient Greeks knew about magnets. They did know about precious metals and lightning, but not gravity or inert gases. The atomists came closest with their atoms swerving in the void. But that still didn't account for energy. Now we know all the fundamental particles and forces have fields, and spacetime is a manifestation of gravity.

You could have done otherwise in a parallel universe where random stray particle of radiation interacted with a microtuble in your brain.

Along the lines of what Isaac may have been suggesting, the capitalist imperative of economic growth is baked into our culture, is baked into us, and it is simply unsustainable. Also, a cultural shift is possible whereby the meaning of ‘well-being’ is more eudaemonic than economic. — praxis

Claims of unsustainability have been made since Malthus, but so far technological progress has outstripped worries about carrying capacity, energy and resource shortages. And there's more to come with AI , nanotech, biotech, 3D printing, ubiquitous bandwidth and progress in fusion.

In the long run, we have a giant ball of nuclear energy in our sky, and the rest of the solar system for resources. We just need to make it through this century.

Here's a counter question. How do you know that tapping the brakes on economic growth doesn't halt progress in fields needed to address climate change, pollution or feeding 10 billion people by 2050?

But an underlying reality that we can't sense, that has no effect whatsoever our action or goals, that we have no way of knowing more about and that is not even a coherent notion to begin with... what's the point? — ChatteringMonkey

Just to give an example where it could matter, creationists could use that to dismiss evolution as merely an appearance. The underlying reality was created by God 6K years ago. Why God made it look like evolution occurred? Mysterious ways and testing the faithful. Or Satan did it. I don't know. They will think of something.

Cats draw correlations between the moving ground and it's effect/affect upon them. That effect/affect is completely involuntary. Cats draw connections between the uncertainty and fear and the wobbly ground. They test. Only when the ground stops moving under their feet, can they go on their way and no longer think about it. — creativesoul

And here is a good example (skip to 0:52 or when the treadmill is turned or 1:08 when the cat starts testing the moving surface with its paw). We see the cat adjust to the treadmill over several attempts. A DL network would require a huge training set.



And then around 3:55, the cat jumps onto the control panel and pulls the plug on the treadmill, after which it jumps down and lays on the treadmill while licking itself.

But the notion of finding out how things really are outside any perspective is unintelligible I think. — ChatteringMonkey

I understand the reasons for thinking that, but it does undermine evolution, cosmology, geology as explanations for how the world as it appears to us now came to be that way.

We can still do the science, but it becomes an appearance as well. It appears to us that we evolved, but the reality could be something else entirely. It would be like if God created the universe six thousands years ago to appear as though it was billions of years old, evolution occurred and what not. Or the simulation was programmed to make it appear that way. In that case, dinosaurs never existed. Their fossils are an appearance to us.

Scientific explanations become part of the appearance, but they don't say anything about the underlying reality. So we have no confidence that we actually evolved or that there was a Big Bang. It only looks like that empirically.

Yeah that is at least the conclusion that Nietzsche for example drew from it... that if the true world, or how things really are, is an incoherent notion, what you are left with is perspectives. — ChatteringMonkey

Problem is that if it's an incoherent notion, then science is undermined when it comes to things like evolution and our origins. How did we come to exist if there is no way the world is? It didn't begin with us.

You never eat the same soup twice. — jamalrob

But it reminds you of the ideal soup, which you can directly perceive if you just leave the cave of your manifold impressions for the unrefracted light of pure reason.