What is the difference from "being physical" and "existing"? Aren't those two ways of saying the same thing? — EricH

Only if everything is entirely physical. Why assume the conclusion? Are we to the point of just defining physicalism as true?

Isn't that what the theists tried to do with God?

Some of us, anyway.

But no Rob Zombie?

Perfect!

If you can't tell me what pain is then how do you expect to tell me how it works? — Harry Hindu

Don't you already know what pain is? Are you one of those rare individuals who can't feel pain? What's that like?

The whole idea of reducing all of reality to a single substance has been somewhat of a misguided quest in philosophy no doubt. — ChatteringMonkey

Part of the problem might be that we don't have the language to name a single substance that incorporates everything without issues. Or that language is inherently limited when it comes to that sort of thing.

So to use the word is to play their game. — Wayfarer

If you started a thread to debate consciousness (because we need yet another one of those), what word(s) would you use instead? I do agree qualia is a problematic term. That's why I try to talk about sensations instead.

But It seems everyone has their own criteria for what counts as being conscious.

You enjoy sucking on dreams
So I will fall asleep with a zombie other than you
I had a thought you would take me seriously
And keep posting on

Serpents in my mind
I am searching for your qualia
Everything changes
In time

What is pain?
Oh baby, don't hurt me
Don't hurt me
No more

Such recognition may not threaten anyone's intuition of purely phenomenal "sound" events, even if they begin to notice that shivering at some level always accompanies them. — bongo fury

Most people on the phenomenal side admit to the shivering accompaniment. The question is how/why it's not just shivering.

If we have a shivering ontology, then it's strange that our experiences are more than the shivering. Thus the weird emerging from bio-physics.

Yes, and I'm not sure whether Sara was arguing epistemology or ontology. It sounded like she wanted to expand physics to incorporate the emergent biological information.

All in one acid trip. — frank

A simulated brain in a vat dreaming it's a bat while on acid.

The set of all possible qualia.

All these arguments over consciousness might as well take place inside a simulation.

It's not all perceptual. A dream of a red apple isn't information about an apple in the external environment.

We agree? Damn.

So what do you think consciousness is? If it's physical, how so? In an emergent sort of way? A non-reductive kind of physical?

I never understood the binary choice between nature being exactly what science says it is and it being supernatural. Science is based on empiricism, and to the extent our empirical knowledge is limited, the world is more than science. It's just possible that we didn't evolve the capabilities to perfectly model the cosmos. Or that our modeling leaves something out since it's abstracting the patterns from empirical experience.

But somehow, physicalism has come to mean the same thing as naturalism.

Perhaps, but that doesn't explain (away) the duality of the experience. — Luke

Agreed. The experience of red is something more than the perceptual process leading up to it. Or at least our description of it.

There's not just the "practical contact" experience of light entering the eye, there's also the experience of seeing red. — Luke

Yes, and that experience happens inside the brain.

An analogy here might be with software that is designed to communicate with some other device on the network. The program could be enhanced to communicate with a virtual device that runs on the same computer as itself, or even as a module within the same program. — Andrew M

Software exists inside some computer system. It's not external to the computer or network. A simulation is a program running inside a computer. We don't interact with software, we interact with computers that run software.

Getting rid of internal/external distinctions doesn't work as long as there are things that have internal and external relationships. It's like saying we shouldn't talk about a movie playing inside a theater because the theater is part of the world!

Dreams are experienced inside brains and nowhere else, because you are asleep.

But the point of dreams and inner dialog is that it's happening inside your skull. A dream isn't of some event outside the head. An inner dialog is not hearing voices from other people.

Hmmm... and if the mind is in part, physical? — creativesoul

Checkmate, Qualiasts?

Me at times reading this thread:



In deciding the status of emotions, it might help to look at primate studies and see whether a similar range of emotions is seen there.

Social bonding clearly is not innate, — creativesoul

Nonsense, bonding is found in all sorts of animal species. From parents to mates to social groups.

What do you think that "something else" could be? — Janus

Kantians would be talking about categories of the mind as they structure experience, and idealists would be talking about ideas. Physical for both is something mental.

It's also true that the physicalist thinks that physical reality (what we are modeling, but not our models though) is "mind-independent". Don't you? Don't you believe there were dinosaurs prior to humans? Or better, since dinosaurs presumably also were minded, don't you believe there were stars and nebulae prior to the dinosaurs? And that those stars and nebulae were physical? — Janus

Yes, but is a physical description exhaustive? We can say the world is physical, but what is meant by that? Does it mean it's only made of the stuff that physicists posit and nothing else?

I don't think physicalism claims that the physical is abstract. — Janus

It doesn't. But our saying the world is physical is reifying the abstract models (largely mathematical) we have and saying the world is that structure in some sense. For example, Sean Caroll says the wavefunction is a true description of reality, therefore the Many Worlds Interpretation is true. As opposed to it being a useful model.

OOO is a form of speculative realism where relations exist between all things, not just correlated to humans, and those relations always distort the objects being related. So the objects themselves are more than the relations.

You could fit that on top of physicalism, but it sounds like it's adding something more to things. Might be read as a form of essentialism.

Does it mean "spiritual" or "ghostly" or "transcendent"? — Janus

No, it means the natural world is more than the abstract stuff we model it with. Object Oriented Ontology would be another example. So would Aristotle's view of Platonism.

Something is physical if it, or its effects are detectable. We count something as physical if we can form a causal hypothesis as to its detectable effects. — Janus

That's empirical. A Kantian would agree, while not being a physicalist, for example. So would Berkeley, for that matter.

Physical means mind independent stuff supervening on the fundamental microstructure physicists posit, like particles, forces and fields in a spacetime topology.

What is property dualism, but merely an acknowledgement that we reify our linguistic concepts and think in dualistic categories. — Janus

You mean perceptual sensations?

If you want to say it's more than that, the next step seems to be metaphysical dualism. — Janus

Property dualism isn't substance dualism. It's just saying that are additional properties beyond the physical. Chalmers has defended a functional property dualism where integrated information has the extra properties of some conscious experience. Which I guess is a form of limited panpsychism.

But maybe neurons are more than physical. Physical being an abstract description of them.

Metaphysical dualism is plagued by the so-called interaction problem. Physicalism eliminates that problem. — Janus

Yes, but it's not the only thing it eliminates. Also, property dualism and panpsychism don't have an interaction problem.

I'm more in favor of a neutral monism. Nature is something other than merely physical (or mathematical, informational, functional) which includes whatever consciousness is. Something which both (or our understanding/mapping of both) emerges from.

And there's nothing that says nature must be physical. That's an assumption.

Why not both? NASA's budget in 2020 is $22.6 billion. The US Federal budget is $4.79 trillion. The European space budget is like $15.2 billion.

I'm not seeing a significant amount of funding going into space exploration. And it tends to pay off in technological advances and scientific discovery. Plus exploration is fundamental part of being human.

Do 'games' exist despite only having a family resemblance, or do we only commit to 'activities' with 'games' being a functional term, a speech act which achieves some task in context but doesn't refer? — Isaac

What about Dennett's quasi-realism with a focus on patterns underlying emotions or beliefs?

Assuming the physical exhausts the mental, which i don't believe anyone has successfully shown to be the case.

So to believe in the soul is to be creationist? — Wayfarer

Are there Hindu creationists?

It is in that colloquial sense that I mean that the person who can't experience fear doesn't know what fear is, I don't mean to say they can't forumalte sentences with the word. — khaled

Or like how a sociopath learns to fake emotion and lie to manipulate people. A sociopath can say they love you and empathize with your situation, while at the same time plotting to empty your bank account.

Here's an intereting Radio Lab podcast on deception. One segment discusses a a pathological liar and how they conned a bunch of people who cared for them.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/episodes/91612-deception