Ever read '-All You Zombies-' by any chance? A bit tangental, but I always wondered what the main character meant by that. I think he was talking about everyone else.

Sure, but whatever claims Paul makes, he is not an eyewitness and didn't write the gospels. — Tom Storm

He's an eyewitness to what the earliest Christians believed. I agree though that the gospels likely added narrative elements to make a compelling story for theological purposes. For all we know, Mark just had a bunch of sayings and a few miracle stories to go off of.

That's inaccurate. There are no known eyewitness accounts of Jesus. We know the gospels were written decades after the dates for Jesus (Mark being the earliest) by anonymous sources and were oral traditions copied, translated, copied and translated. It is only tradition that allocates names to the gospels. Many Bibles even acknowledge this in the notes section of the NT. — Tom Storm

Paul was the earliest NT writer in the 50s, and he did go to Jerusalem to meet with Peter and James the Just (Jesus's brother). Paul doesn't relay much of what is found in the gospels, but he does make a claim to having seen the resurrected Jesus, and he's aware of a chronological list of resurrection appearances beginning with Peter. Paul's conversion likely occurred in the mid to late 30s. So he was very close to the original sources, without being an original disciple or family member.

Josephus, the Jewish-Roman historian who did live in Palestine before the destruction of the temple, and led an army against Rome, does mention John the Baptist, Jesus and James the Just.

We do have Eusebius quoting the mostly lost writings of Papias that the author of Mark wrote down the teachings of Peter. But it's unclear whether this is the same gospel, since he also states that Matthew rewrote Mark in the correct order in Hebrew, however all of the NT writings were originally in Greek.

Paul doesn't mention an empty tomb, Judas, the trial by Pilate, and his list of resurrection appearances differ from the gospels, which notably leave out James the Just, appointed leader of the movement after Jesus died. But it does show that the first generation of Christians did believe in the resurrection and had expectations that Jesus would return soon. They were also missionaries, spreading the movement around the Roman empire. Probably first to Jewish communities and then gentiles as people like Paul joined and expanded the mission.

So the solution to too much energy in the global climate is a source of abundant cheap energy? Place getting too hot? let's make some tiny little suns to power our air-conditioning. That'll work. — unenlightened

Nuclear energy doesn't trap heat in the atmosphere. It's no more of a concern for climate change than putting up a shit ton of solar panels.

Too late for that. By the time this is effectively available, we will have breezed past the moment we could've avoided 1.5 degrees. — Benkei

But limited it to say 2 degrees is better than 2.7+ degrees. 1.5 isn't happening. At least not by 2050. Maybe with serious carbon capture and decarbonization by the end of the century.

They only look out about a century, right? — frank

Yeah, are you worried about next century?

Maybe there'll be a tech miracle that pulls our chestnuts out of the fire, or maybe it won't be as bad as we think it will be. — RogueAI

The tech miracle would be commercial fusion. With cheap, abundant energy you can do a lot. Such as large-scale carbon capture and desalinization.

As for how bad it will be, the latest IPCC report has us likely averting the worst case emission scenarios, being on pace for somewhere between 2.7 to 4 degrees warming. That's down from previous estimates, so we can likely expect the range to keep falling somewhat as renewables and battery tech continue to improve. The climate scientists I've seen debate online don't think that sort of range is likely to be an existential threat. It will be a serious challenge for global civilization and far from ideal, but not one that will bring it down, unless there are tipping points in those temperature ranges that put us on a hot earth trajectory. Or we have WW3. Which we could still have before then for other reasons. No doubt climate change will strain certain relations.

Would you say those nested forebrains are good at organizing sensory impressions into meaningful categories of things?

What is the or a main argument in favor of phenomenology? — Gregory

That the world we experience is an appearance provided by our mental faculties. You can trace the arguments for this back to Kant. And Kant was responding to Hume's skepticism, which was based on his empiricism. The meaningful world we experience is provided by reason, which makes sense of the sensory streams. That's why we believe in causality set inside a spatio-temporal world of material objects. So we could even go back to Plato or Heraclitus. What makes sense of the ever changing world? What gives it form? Why is our experience comprehensible? Why do we believe the future will remain intelligible?

Good point but the nonphysicalist has to admit s/he can't explain qualia in nonphysical terms and now we're in neti neti territory, Where do we go from here, sir/madam? — Agent Smith

Take it as a given that we see colors, hear sounds, feel pains and see how to fit that with the rest of our understanding of the world.

As far as I know, the nonphysicalist claims that qualia can't be explained physically. Well then, can it be explained nonphysically? It's a simple question. — Agent Smith

You say everything is water. I say, what about fire? You retort that I need to explain fire non-waterly. Being that it's ancient times, I say I don't know how to explain fire, but it sure doesn't reduce to water.

What I don't see productive at all, is not so much quibbling over the word qualia, but denying that we experience the colour red (like blood) or blue (like the sky) or a beautiful piece of music (Mozart or the Beatles or whatever) and such things. — Manuel

I have a really hard time coming to terms with the idea that it only 'seems' like we're experience those things, but are actually performing biological functions instead. I don't know how many, if any, posters in this thread actually defend that 'seeming'. But some professional philosophers sure 'seem' to be making those arguments against qualia.

Seeming is in quotes because Dennett said to be suspicious when a philosopher uses that word.

Fairness? If the physicalist must explain qualia in physical terms, so too must the nonphysicalist in nonphysical terms. — Agent Smith

The physicalist is the one saying everything is X. So when someone points out a Y, it's on the physicalist to explain how Y is really X. So, how is my pain sensation physical?

It's easy enough to avoid this tricky metaphysical issue. Don't be a monist.

When people marvel at the colors of a sunset, it’s the sunset that is the source of their remarkable visual experience, even if that particular experience is only likely available to creatures who see like us. In short, it is remarkable things that cause remarkable sensory experiences (and pedestrian things that cause pedestrian experiences) and there’s something perverse about ignoring that, and elevating the importance of where (in our brains) and how (via our senses) we become aware of the unique things we find in the world, whether extraordinary or pedestrian. — Srap Tasmaner

But what sort of sunsets are we missing out on if we had different sorts of visual systems? We know that visible light is just a small part of the EM spectrum, and the sky is full of EM radiation we can't see.

In short, it is remarkable things that cause remarkable sensory experiences (and pedestrian things that cause pedestrian experiences) and there’s something perverse about ignoring that, and elevating the importance of where (in our brains) and how (via our senses) we become aware of the unique things we find in the world, whether extraordinary or pedestrian. — Srap Tasmaner

Wouldn't that be the result of adaptive evolutionary abilities? We find certain things remarkable because it's related to doing things which help us survive. In the future, we might be able to reengineer our nervous systems to find different things remarkable.

Did Dennett say that was why he posited that dreams are "coming-to-seem-to-remember"? We all know there is, for example, a visual field and that it is produced in the cerebral cortex.We all know we can visualize things and remember things, so why would the fact that we dream necessitate a "Cartesian theatre". type explanation? — Janus

Dennett didn't say that. But it's easy to infer from his attempts to debunk qualia and arguments against the Cartesian Theater. Dreams are a potential threat. I don't really understand why we focus almost exclusively on perception when it comes to consciousness. It's too easy to muddy the waters with other perception-related issues.

Dreaming is like watching myself participate in a play. Or playing a VR game, since I have a pair of VR goggles. But it's happening mostly without input from the external world. So it's clearly going on inside my head. I have visual, auditory and sometimes other experiences of sensations that are not coming from objects out there. I don't know how physicalists get around that difficulty. What exactly are dream sensations?

My reading/listening to Dennett's arguments are that he thinks we are the equivalent to Chalmers' p-zombies, except the real world is the p-zombie world, and the qualia conscious world is simply incoherent. So the qualia fans are making the mistake of Chalmers p-zombie twin, except of course there is no other world with a qualia Chalmers.

When Dennett and others like Keith Frankish argue that we're mistaken about consciousness, they're saying there's nothing it's like to see red or feel pain in a way that could be problematic for physicalism or functionalism. Frankish endorses the experience of sensation being an illusion, when understand as something more than it's functional/physical explanation. That's what a p-zombie is. It's being fooled by a cognitive trick. It's just patterns of neurons firing in a way that makes some of those neural patterns think that introspection yields some weird conscious quality.

As such, there is no "redness of red", or "what it's like to see red". There is only the functional role of perceiving a certain wavelength of light or a linguistic label for that ability. Which to me sounds ridiculous, because I do have color sensations. The functional role is a descriptive model, not what I experience. And a color word is not an experience, it's a label for an experience. If you get rid of the weird qualia consciousness, the only thing left is the p-zombie consciousness, with some sort of cognitive distortion or linguistic confusion.

That's why when Dennett tries to explain consciousness, it sounds like he's explaining it away, while wishing to keep the term instead of just embracing eliminativism. When Dennett says of course he's not denying consciousness, he means the functional definition of it, and not conscious sensation.

That would it be to perceive “directly” rather than “indirectly”? — Srap Tasmaner

Perceive objects as they are would be one criteria. That means no secondary qualities of the perceiver added on to the perception. It also means a lack of perceptual relativity that indicates people undergo different experiences when perceiving the same objects.

Another would be lack of hallucinations, illusions and dreams, since those involve some mental apparition which is similar to perceived objects. And finally, when it comes to vision at least, that it would work like the ancient greeks thought, and not like what science has come to understand.

No, Dennett doesn't deny that we feel, for example, orgasms; he's not as stupid as you imagine. — Janus

He doesn't, nor does he deny that we're conscious. But what matters is the meaning of the words he uses. Consciousness and feeling for Dennett do no not mean the same thing as they do for Chalmers.

Did you know Dennett used to defend coming-to-seem-to-remember regarding dreaming? It's not a very tenable position considering dream research, particularly with lucid dreaming, but Dennett used to argue that dreams where created as a kind of fake memory as one was waking up.

And why was he drawn to such a position? Because dreams are a great example of a cartesian theater in the brain. You can't simply export the movie to the external world as Dennett likes to do with perception.

For good measure, here's a measure:

From the PhilPapers Surveys
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory?

Other 393 / 931 (42.2%)
Accept or lean toward: representationalism 293 / 931 (31.5%)
Accept or lean toward: qualia theory 114 / 931 (12.2%)
Accept or lean toward: disjunctivism 102 / 931 (11.0%)
Accept or lean toward: sense-datum theory 29 / 931 (3.1%) — Banno

So there's no consensus among professional philosophers regarding the nature of perceptual experience. I guess Dennett would fall under Other as he probably would consider the five listed choices to be some version of the mistaken Cartesian Theater. But that would put him in the minority.

Sure, but internal visual and auditory experiences, hallucinations, dreams and imaginings are not shareable except by report. — Janus

@Banno So I'll report a minor illusion I had yesterday after stepping outside a coffee shop, glancing at the clouds in the sky and then seeing the motorcycle parked in front of me. When I looked at the windshield, at first it seemed to be some kind of smoke or mist. I don't know why. I guess my brain wasn't expecting to see a windshield. Or maybe it was the way the light was reflected in the windshield. At any rate, I didn't perceive a windshield at first, but rather something that wasn't there.

Which brings up a point. If perception involves prediction, then are we seeing the object, or what our brains expect to be the object of perception?

I say "yes", you claim that direct realism is the belief that the perception and the flower are the same thing, I point out that this is not so, that direct realism holds that one's perception of a flower is of a flower, not of an unknown. — Banno

Sure, but since the act of perception is not the thing perceived, that raises the question of whether the result of perception differs at all from thing perceived. If it does, can we be directly aware of the thing itself?

Direct perception works fine if naive realism is the case. It's a little more tricky if the world isn't quite as we perceive it. The indirect realists can then bring science to bear on the matter.

So in that sense it remains correct to say that we see things directly, else we cannot make justified claims about how things are. — Janus

You realize that argument only works for realists. Skeptics and idealists will remain unconvinced by it. They will just reply that we can't make justified claims about a mind-independent real world.

ndirect realism says that sense data is filtered through our optical, nervous and neural systems and that's why we only see things "indirectly". — Janus

I understand the indirect argument to mean there is something mental mediating perception of the real thing, as a result of all that neural activity. Thus why we have illusions, hallucinations and secondary qualities. Also why it's possible to have internal visual and auditory experiences, like with dreams and imagination.

However, is there any reason why would some super advanced space kind interfere into our technological advancement? — SpaceDweller

You can read The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin for a fictional account of a nearby alien race dong that.

That and they would probably have been observing us for some time before we observed them. So they would know quite a bit about us, if any such ascendant aliens are close enough for us to potentially see them.

It might be harder to see bio-signature light years away than a techno-signature. And even if the alien probes are in stealth mode, to hide their home system from us, they would have had to start being stealthy before giving off light that would be reaching us when we look.

A related question would be whether any alien civilizations have technologically ascended. That would clue us in to the possibility. Of course we would need to detect one, which raises the Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter solution as a possibility. No civilizations ascend.

Or maybe it's just very rare that one does, and so it's likely we wouldn't see one nearby. I'm pretty confident human civilization will survive this century and slowly spread out into the solar system. But whether we'll solve our long standing problems or just create new ones with new technology, I don't know.

I'm merely skeptical of this immaterial experiencer/possessor, or of the magic sauce, or however it's presented. Surely I'm not the first person on these forums skeptical of dualism. — noAxioms

User whatever terms you like, but your first person experiences of warmth, pain, color, etc. are not part of the physical descriptions of the world. Thus the motivation for p-zombies. I think it's a problem with the description of the world. As in it's leaving something out, not that p-zombies are actually possible.

I chose the thermostat since it is the ultimate in trivial data processing. A sensor and a single mercury switch is enough, the opposite end of the complexity spectrum compared to noAx, but fundamentally doing the same thing. — noAxioms

The mercury responds to thermal energy. Cold and warmth are relative to organisms that need to survive in a certain temperature range.

Not if a mechanical device is forbidden from using the word. If a thermostat doesn't feel warmth, then neither do I. I admit to pain being a rare one, with few devices having sensors to provide it. — noAxioms

Is the thermostat biologically equivalent to you? But this isn't about what words you can and can't use if you subscribe to this or that. It's about the fact that you do feel warmth. Whether you want to grant or deny that to thermostats is a different matter. I tend to think they're incapable of feeling warmth, although I wouldn't rule some form of panpsychism completely out.

I simply don't believe you when you claim skepticism about feeling warmth just because you can't say the same for thermostats in this discussion.

Pain' seems to be a word reserved to describe the experience of had by the experiencer of a human. It would be a lie to say that I feel pain, in the context of this topic, so lacking an experiencer, I cannot by definition feel pain any more than can a robot with damage sensors. Again, I may use the word in casual conversation (outside the context of this topic) not because I'm lying, but because I lack alternative vocabulary to describe what the pure physical automaton does, something which by your definition cannot feel pain since it lacks this experiencer of it. — noAxioms

I can't tell which position you're actually arguing for or against. I assume it's a reductio?

I any case, I'm confident you do feel pain, and trying to argue that you don't via some objective comparison or description doesn't change the fact that you do in fact feel pain.

To what? There isn't anything to which it is like something. That's the thing I deny. There's no 'I' (a thing with an identity say) that's being me. — noAxioms

So you don't feel pain?

Metaphysical' seems to be, in a certain sense at least, synonymous with 'supernatural'. — Janus

If 'natural' is taken to be synonymous with empirical. But there's always the question of what gives rise to the empirical. What is the nature of existence?

That's a bizarre comment. Existence is the very most commonplace. It is the attempt to answer the ill-formed question: "what is existence" that leads to all kinds of woo. — Janus

“It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists” ― Ludwig Wittgenstein

Is panpsychism woo? — frank

Existence is woo as far as I'm concerned.

No, I see colors, hear sounds, think thoughts, and dream dreams, but I do it the zombie way without help from the outside, — noAxioms

What's that like?

Doesn't coming up with words for mere possibilities require imagination? — RogueAI

So ... p-zombie Chalmers is imagining the redness of red and what it's not like for his zombie twin to lack that red sensation, and it's implications for metaphysical possibility.

When p-zombie Mary leaves the black and white room and sees a red object for the first time, she learns a new fact that isn't a fact, because p-zombie Mary is mistaken about seeing red. In fact, her entire world is colored in combinations of p-red, p-yellow and p-blue. She learns about the p-redness of p-red. We can call that a p-fact. But she already knows all the p-facts. So she learns nothing.

My brain hurts now. I'll admit to having difficulties with the p-zombie argument when it comes time for the zombies to talk about consciousness.

Isn't it the same world the? How can a material brain, body, and universe exist without the creature seeing, for example, colors, or the world around them? — GraveItty

They wouldn't see colors, they would just react to wavelengths of light in a certain range. We have this question with robots and various light detectors. Do they see color? Only in the sense that they detect a frequency of light we see as red. If that sounds weird, then ask yourself what colors a radio telescope sees.

The p-zombie argument is that all the neural and biological activity could take place in principle without there being experiences of color, sound, pain, etc. And that's because the neural, biological, chemical and physical descriptions don't make use of colors, sounds and pains. They're completely abstract descriptions, because that's how we do science. We abstract away from our creature-dependent sensations.

I claim to be the zombie car, not the driver/car system because i have no evidence to the contrary and it seems more plausible than the physics-defying system otherwise posited. — noAxioms

So you see zombie colors, hear zombie sounds, think zombie thoughts, dream zombie dreams?

I'm inclined to think it is...some form of globally coherent informational history maybe. And so, yes, theoretically translatable between mediums. — Pantagruel

I believe Chalmers would disagree, because he would say that consciousness is not reducible to information. It does not logically supervene. Rather, there's an additional law of nature that binds conscious experience (or causes it to emerge) whenever there is an informationally rich stream, or whatever the criteria is.

One might object to this new arbitrary law that adds something additional to nature, but I think the even deeper issue is the status of laws making nature be a certain way. If we can allow such laws on the microphysical level, then I don't see what stops them from happening elsewhere. Because laws of nature are deeply mysterious.

The "we" an inner homunculus? If not, why the restriction? — bongo fury

Information flows in from the environment. Or to be more precise, a bunch of sensations flow into the brain from ongoing contact with the environment, and the brain has to make sense of that. Some would argue this is done in a predictive or Bayesian manner.

We're not looking out at the world as it is, we're interfacing with it in a way we can makes sense of.

For instance, is there any subjective interpretation involved in calling a 1v1 tennis match? — Cidat

Yes, there is a head umpire and occasionally one of the players will disagree with a call the umpire makes. Usually having to do with enforcement of some rule like taking too long to serve or poor conduct such as cursing and smashing rackets.

The French Open still has lines people who call balls in and out, but most of the professional matches have changed over to the Hawk-Eye computer vision which is always right. For the courts which don't use it, players can usually challenge the call, which will bring up a replay. Sometimes there is controversy over when a player makes a challenge call during a point and what that means for replaying or losing/winning the point.

Neither party is lying. For it to be a lie, each being (the zombie using nothing but physics, and the 'human', as y'all put it) need to spend a moment in each other's shoes to compare. This is what the one is like, and this is the other. — noAxioms

There's nothing it's like to be a zombie. So for us humans switching places is the same thing experientially as being unconscious. It would be like losing time once you switch back.