I was a whole lot more miserable until i joined that political party. — christian2017

So where does one find out more about this mysterious party? Google hasn't heard of it. Twitter hasn't heard of it. Duck Duck Go hasn't heard of it....

|>ouglas

I didn't even know that was a feature on any forum. — christian2017

It's all the rage on Reddit, which many people would consider to be the Internet these days. Well, that and Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

There are a lot of other forums that have upvoting and downvoting, but if you put them all together, they'd probably only add up to 100th of Reddit.

I assume you majored in computer science in college? — christian2017

That I did. And Philosophy.

but then some events happened and now im 1.50 over minimum wage. — christian2017

Wow, that sucks! I'm sorry to hear about that. :(

But thank your blessings that we live in the best of all possible worlds!

|>ouglas

I stubbed my toe yesterday and it really hurt.

How does one give upvotes and downvotes on this crazy forum? I want to upvote you but I can't. What is a forum these days if you can't create a hive-mind that will downvote all dissent into oblivion?

Well, just another reason to be bitter, I suppose.

|>ouglas

Thank you for sparing us the typical online bullshit trying to show virtue that many people like to spew out. — christian2017

In order to explain all the bad shit that happens in the world, Leibnitz's explanation was that this is the best of all possible worlds, even if it contains a lot of badness. I.e., it just can't get any better than this.

Well, if this is the best of all possible worlds, then it seems better not to exist at all!

Unless, of course, modal realism is true. Because if it is, then if you didn't exist, you'd just exist in an infinite number of even worse worlds.

Actually, if Leibnitz was right and modal realism is true, you do exist in an infinite number of even worse worlds. And this is just the best of all the infinite versions of your sorry existences, where all the other infinite versions of you are suffering even more.

|>ouglas

P.S. Have a pleasant day.

I personally am very bitter.

|>ouglas

nstead of creating the coronavirus why aren't we creating a solution to stop our DNA from dissolving. — Witchhaven87

What makes you think that people aren't studying this??? Here's an article about a Nature-published article on what happened when they made mice with telomeres that were twice as long:

https://www.sciencealert.com/researchers-have-made-long-lived-mice-with-extended-chromosomes-inside-all-of-their-cells

TLDR: They lived 24% longer, but not twice as long.

|>ouglas

P.S. I found this answer in 30 seconds with Google.

How do colours exist to the blind? No. — Leviosa

That makes as much sense as saying that California doesn't exist for anyone who's never been there and is never going to go.

|>ouglas

Also, the claim that art, music, and math provide no evolutionary advantage is absurd on the face of it.

Music and art allow for groups of people to bond, which helps their survival and math is a useful tool which helps with survival.

|>ouglas

Here's one explanation:

https://www.livescience.com/33129-total-energy-universe-zero.html

It's not nearly as good as Guth's though. I'll try to type up Guth's proof tomorrow if I have a chance. I couldn't find it online.

As for what negative energy is, it's just energy that has a negative value, rather than a positive value. I assume that means that it generates gravitational repulsion, rather than attraction, but that's beyond my realm of knowledge.

|>ouglas

Stephen Hawkings essentially stated that in "a brief history of time" in the early 1980s. I don't know what percentage of Physicists adhere to this or if he changed his opinion on this over the course of time. Are you a physicist? — christian2017

I am not a physicist, but I do have an S.B. from MIT. And I did write the software that was used to operate an X-ray space telescope called the Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer. Alan Guth himself told me (or rather a small room full of people) how to make universes out of nothing. He even proved that gravitational fields have negative energy. The proof is quite simple, should you be interested.

|>ouglas

Putting two and two together anomaly sounds almost toon, or contra-dimensional - for having what is anomaly power. — Qwex

But if you use that anomaly power to create a closed time-like curve, you can go back in time, kill your grandfather, causing a cascade of non-causality, which might cause the birth of untold past and future realities.

|>ouglas

What these guys don't seem to understand is while it is possible for matter and energy to appear out of nothing — christian2017

Yes, this is quite true because gravitational fields have negative energy. So even with conservation of mass/energy, it turns out that you can get something from nothing and it could turn out that the entire universe contains zero net mass/energy.

|>ouglas

A countable or uncountable number of universes? Would there be a difference? — jgill

Hmmm, that's an interesting question.

It may be that having enough real monkeys at computer terminals is not actually a possible universe at all, depending on the rules via which universes are made. But certainly there are possible worlds in which there are such monkeys, since the possible world could just begin with the monkeys typing at the beginning of time, which was last Thursday, and the apparent age of the universe is only an illusion. In which case, there would only need to be a countably infinite number of possible worlds, since this forum is only of finite length.

Though at times it does seem to be filled with an infinite amount of nonsense, so I'm not completely convinced by my argument.

|>ouglas

If there are an infinite number of universes, there is one where the contents of this entire forum were created by monkeys randomly typing at keyboards.

Perhaps that's the universe that we're in.

|>ouglas

I've can't keep track of what the disagreement here is precisely anymore. Why don't we table the discussion on whether there are colors for a moment and address an easier question: Are there chairs?

Well, of course there are chairs. I'm sitting on one right now!

But providing necessary and sufficient conditions for what is and is not a chair is no easy feat. Certainly a chair is designed to be sat on. Except there are toy chairs which are not meant to be sat on. And maybe art chairs that are also not designed to be sat on, but which everyone would recognize as a chair. There are also artistic representations of chairs, that everyone might recognize as a representation of a chair. But in the case of a Picasso representation of a chair, it might be difficult to ascertain how people who might live in this represented world might sit in the chair.

Of course, representations of chairs are not chairs, so it doesn't directly address the issue of whether chairs exists, but it does address the issue of whether representations of chairs exists (they do!) and understanding this is, I believe, important to our understanding of what chairs are.

To make matters more complicated, not everything that is meant to be sat on is a chair. There are stools, sofas, benches, etc.

So how do we know what is and isn't a chair? Well most of us can tell just by looking at something whether or not it is a chair. How do we do this? There's a simple answer to this and a complex one. The simple answer is that we have complex brains and perceptual organs with sophisticated information processing abilities that allow us to classify things into chairs and non-chairs. The complex answer is a very detailed model of how this particular information processing works.

There are of course some complications. For some physical objects, we might not be able to decide whether something is a chair or not. For other objects, we might be sure that something is a chair, but we might be surprised to learn that other people completely disagree on the object's chairness. For such objects, there may be no fact of the matter on whether the object is a chair.

Now let us consider animals. Are there any animals that could be trained to identify chairs from non-chairs. E.g., we might try with dogs. E.g., we could train some dogs that it's okay for them to poop on chairs and only on chairs. We could then figure out what a dog's notion of a chair is from what it will and won't poop on.

I'm sure that we could successfully achieve this goal for chairs that sit squarely in the center of chairness. But I feel confident, that dogs would be thrown off of by more artsy chairs. And perhaps by things that are more like stools with arms than chairs, etc. Sure we might keep trying to train them using art chairs and chair-like stools, etc., but I feel pretty confident that they would ultimately not end up having the same conception of chairs that humans do. I believe that we would learn with enough effort that no real animal (other than the human animal) is ever going to be able to properly distinguish chairs from non-chairs, despite the fact that chairs exist.

Now let's suppose that some aliens visit the Earth, and they want to know all about us. In particular, they are really interested in our notion of chairs, because they are having a hard time fathoming that chairs really exist. To them, our classification seems completely arbitrary. Why is one thing a stool and not a chair, and another thing a chair, even though it's in a museum and is not something that any human could comfortably sit on at all? Maybe these aliens with enough effort will eventually be able to distinguish chairs from non-chairs almost as well as humans. Or maybe they won't because their senses and their brains just work too differently from ours to be able to do so.

If they are very clever aliens, they might reverse engineer our brains, figure out the software contained therein, and leave Earth happy knowing that they have solved the mystery of what a chair is and now convinced that they do exist. Even if they can't classify chairs from non-chairs themselves, they can now build machines to do this classification for them. Once they have done this, they return happily to their home planet and program their factories to churn out all sorts of different kinds of chairs so that they can give them to each other as cool novelty gifts during their celebrations of Zmas.

Now rerun this argument mutatis mutandis for colors, and you will readily see that colors exist too, even though it might be very problematic for other creatures to distinguish colors as we do.

What aesthetics can you tell us about, reader, from art that speaks to you about atheism? — Gregory

I'm not sure what this question is asking, or why it would be considered interesting. I'm a devout atheist, but I don't look to music to reaffirm my atheism.

There are of course songs that do speak eloquently about atheism. E.g., John Lennon's "Imagine", and XTC's "Dear God". One might take a personal interpretation of atheism from REM's "Losing My Religion", though that's not really what it was intended to be about.

Most pop and rock music, etc., is neither religious nor atheistic, however. The music and/or lyrics speak to us with beauty, meaning, fun, sadness, and/or comfort, etc.. Typically religion or lack of it has nothing to do with most songs, or other forms of contemporary mainstream, indie, or "alternative" music.

|>ouglas

I can't believe that anyone is still arguing with you, when you are clearly completely correct.

I usually don't like to try to win arguments by pointing out that I have an MIT degree in Cognitive Science and consequently I'm well-educated on certain issues. But I will pull it out now to say that I'm well-educated enough to know that InPitzotl is correct, and anyone here who wants to actually understand what colors are, should read everything he says carefully.

That's if they want to actually learn something. Those who wish to remain ignorant should carry on as they are, I suppose.

|>ouglas

You're looking for meaning in all the wrong places. There is no meaning to life. Live with it.

If there's any meaning to life, it's the meaning that you yourself decide to assign to it.

|>ouglas

For the spooky action at a distance of Quantum entanglement to work it appears that something like causal set theory — CommonSense

In MWI, there is no spooky action at a distance. It is a completely local and deterministic interpretation of QM.

|>ouglas

But once you build or find your time machine/closed time-like curve, all you need and can do in order to complete your journey through time is what all of us do all of the time: wait, let the time pass. — SophistiCat

This argument makes no more sense to me than saying that traveling to San Francisco is just waiting. I get on a plane headed towards San Francisco and then I just wait.

And if the spacetime topology happens to have a certain exotic configuration, then your waiting may take you to places unexpected. — SophistiCat

It doesn't have to take me to some place unexpected. If I know enough about the closed timelike curve, I can use it to go to precisely the time I'd like to go to. Given that the time I want to go to is contained within the curve, and the CTC is of a sort that lets me do that. And where I want to go to is consistent with the past. I.e., I actually showed up in the past there in the past, etc., etc. But this is a thought experiment, and nothing I'm postulating in it is inconsistent with GR as we understand it, even if it only occurs in a relatively unlikely possible world.

But arguing about such things is a pointless detour wrt whether GR entails eternalism. I've presented a thought experiment where a million people use a closed timelike curve to all travel to different times. As far as I understand things, these types of thought experiments are generally taken by physicists to entail eternalism, assuming GR is true enough that closed timelike curves are actually possible.

Though even Special Relativity makes presentism difficult to defend. See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for more details.

I went to a Philosophy conference at MIT filled to the brim with professional philosophers. In one of the talks, the moving spotlight theory was given a quick refutation as part of the argument. Here's a longer discussion. Though this author actually defends the moving spotlight theory as not being incompatible with Special Relativity:

https://web.mit.edu/bskow/www/research/timeinrelativity.pdf

There was Q&A after the talk. Not a single philosopher spoke up to question the implicit eternalism that was presented, nor to support the moving spotlight theory. My natural conclusion is that eternalism is not hugely controversial. Or at least not amongst the philosophers who might come to MIT for a conference.

In any case, eternalism is a simple and natural explanation for what happens in the thought experiment. It is also in my experience how virtually all scientists who talk about GR, talk about GR.

I consider eternalism prima facie true, assuming the thought experiment is actually possible.

I think that anyone who wants to reject eternalism without rejecting the possibility of this thought experiment has a lot of work to do! And I find it highly improbable that whatever theory is presented as an alternative would be widely accepted as more likely.

As for who is better equipped to address such questions, I don't consider philosophers better equipped than scientists. Particle physicists used to consider virtual particles just a mathematical convenience, rather than virtual particles being real. Now virtual particles are universally accepted as real. I don't consider philosophers to be better equipped than particle physicists to determine the metaphysical status of virtual particles wrt existence, and in the unlikely case that philosophers come to a different conclusion than physicists on this issue, I would most likely side with the physicists.

|>ouglas

If Hawking and Smolin subscribe to eternalism, and I don't know if they do, that is on them and not on GR. GR has nothing to say on the question of existence, it is not a metaphysical theory. — SophistiCat

Something doesn't have to be a metaphysical theory for it to entail obvious metaphysical consequences.

This is a red herring. In any theory of spacetime you can travel to the future by the normal means, that is by waiting for it to actualize, but that doesn't imply that the future exists. — SophistiCat

That's not traveling; that's waiting.

Let me be more clear with a more specific example. Let's say that we build or find a closed timelike loop. And now let's say that we have a million people traverse this timelike loop, but traverse it differently so that they all end up in different times in the past. And at each of these times, let's say that each of these million people is causally connected to billions of other people.

So, we now have a million different people who were here earlier today but are now spread across the past. Did they cease to exist? Or do only the locations surrounding these million people exist in spacetime? What about all the billions of people that are causally connected to them?

I'm sure that someone could come up with some crazy explanation for this which doesn't entail eternalism, but it sure to be ad hoc and completely violate Ockham’s razor.

|>ouglas

There are many deep philosophical problems to be solved in GR and QM, not the least of which is whether or not space itself is emergent and not fundamental — CommonSense

That's not a philosophical problem. It's a scientific one.

And if turns out to be a question that science can't answer because there's no way to falsify certain theories that could be right, it doesn't really matter anyway.

This is not like the distinction between Bohm's Interpretation of QM and MWI, which are experimentally indistinguishable, but which posit worlds that would be extremely different in extremely important ways philosophically.

For me, the most important issue is whether we live in a block universe or a universe made up of a sequential series of events (causal set theory). — CommonSense

Again, this sounds like a scientific problem, not a philosophical one.

Though I suppose it would have consequences for philosophy should it turn out that eternalism is false.

The philosophical significance is that in Many Worlds some sort of permanent consciousness exists in an infinite number of "me's", in the causal set interpretation of GR/QM it appears that physical existence is false - true - false - I do not exist - I exist — CommonSense

Sounds like a distinction without a difference to me. E.g., maybe I die every time I go to sleep and then there's a new, different me every time I wake up? If you use the word "die" in that manner, then you've basically redefined the word "die", though.

Because whatever happens when I go to sleep and wake up, has been defined as a single, continuous life by virtually everyone since people have been using language.

Didn't Parfit write about these kinds of worries in his book?

Scientists agree that GR and QM in their current forms do not and cannot explain the non-locality required in quantum entanglement. — CommonSense

This is just wrong. In MWI, everything is local and deterministic.

The current theoretical uncertainty of whether time and space are fundamental or emergent is perhaps the greatest philosophical mystery of all. — CommonSense

I don't see this as being an important philosophical worry at all. It's like worrying that maybe I don't exist because I'm just a pattern of energy waves, and waves are emergent. E.g., a wave in the ocean is constantly made of different water as it travels.

But despite any of these worries, I exist. Waves exist. The wrinkles that I can't get out of my bedspread exist. I find none of this mysterious or worth fretting about after one has finished Philosophy 101.

|>ouglas

I couldn't have said it better myself!

|>ouglas

GR does not imply this. — SophistiCat

Yes it does. Or at least it does as interpreted by physicists who specialize in GR. E.g. Hawking and Smolin.

Also GR allows for "closed timelike loops" which let you travel into the past. You can't travel to something that doesn't exist.

Of course, GR could be wrong in some important way. Or its conventional interpretation could be wrong. Maybe closed timelike loops turn out to be impossible for reasons that we don't yet understand.

But the OP is making strong claims based on premises, some of which are claimed to be wrong by standard interpretations of GR. So the OP's premises are on very shaky ground. And even if GR is wrong, or the conventional interpretations are wrong, we still have no good reason to accept the premises of the OP's argument.

Many Worlds does not help with quantum entanglement — CommonSense

Of course it does. It tells us precisely what results from quantum entanglement.

As far as I'm aware, the probability problem is the only deep philosophical problem of QM left open by the Many Worlds Interpretation. And I've got more important things to worry about, personally, than that detail.

dark matter, etc — CommonSense

There's nothing philosophically problematic about dark matter. It's just a physics problem that we don't yet know the answer to.

|>ouglas

Well, I don't really know how to respond to all this. GR works fine for me as it is, and leaves me with no feeling of unresolved mysteries at all.

Except for how phenomenal consciousness arises. But I've already wasted years of my life on that debate.

|>ouglas

P.S. Okay, well there's also the mystery of how to unify GR with QM, but I consider that a completely scientific problem that likely doesn't really have any deep philosophical consequences. Except perhaps if we accept the Many Worlds Interpretation of QM, which I do.

I don't know if "codex" is too pretentious. It may be Latin, but it's also English. On the other hand, "quarentis" doesn't mean anything to me, but I can tell it's Latin, and hence it comes across to me as an attempt to appear more educated than I am.

|>ouglas

That said, I don’t think this discussion has any practical weight in my life, so I’m not that interested in it. I could be persuaded, but really in the end, who cares? — Noah Te Stroete

Well, I guess I care because I've gotten drawn into a debate again on Max Tegmark's MUH, and so it's on my mind lately what it means for something to be "real".

But YMMV!

|>ouglas

I don’t disagree with what you’re saying. Different wavelengths of electromagnetism exist without consciousness. But is this really what we think of as color? — Noah Te Stroete

Colors are far more complex than simple wavelengths of light. Most colors do not correspond to any wavelength. Rather they are a mixture of different wavelengths. But different mixtures will be perceived as the same color. And the same mixture of wavelengths will be perceived as different colors in different environments.

I understand that it is extremely difficult to define what our eyes and brains pick out as certain colors, because the properties that are being picked out are being done so by very complex systems. So maybe the goal of building robots or cameras that can pick out colors the same way that we do is somewhat farfetched practically speaking. But in theory it could be done.

Yes, this is what I think of as color.

If, on the other hand, we are talking about the phenomenal qualia of color perception, then, yes, they exist too. Even more surely. I'm not a physicalist and so I think that how this works is deeply mysterious. But since I can never be you and you can never be me, I can never know that what that what you feel when you see a ripe tomato is the same thing that I feel when I see a ripe tomato. Our qualia of seeing a ripe tomato may not be the same, and hence may not exist as something that can be accurately covered by a single term.

On the other hand, modulo issues of color blindness and everyone having somewhat different eyes and cognitive functioning, the physical property of redness is something that can be identified by most humans, and most certainly exists physically as a property of physical things.

|>ouglas

Colors exist as objects of cognition. Cognition is a function of conscious agents. — Noah Te Stroete

The agents don't have to be consciousness for colors to exist. Colors are properties of objects in the external world. Our minds can cognitively pick out objects that have the property of being of red or [insert your favorite color here].

We might also build non-conscious robots, or even just smart cameras that can accurately identify these same properties. Hence colors exist as properties of objects in the world, regardless of our conscious minds. They will exist when we are long dead and all that are left are the cameras we built to detect these properties. And these properties will still exist when those cameras have long been burned to ashes after our sun becomes a red giant.

|>ouglas

These two statements seem to be in contradiction. — Pfhorrest

The world "idealism" may have the word "ideal" in it, and I'm sure there's philosophical history as to why that's the case, but my statements do not contradict each other.

When I see the term "idealism" in the context of a discussion of consciousness, I infer that a Berkeleyesque subjective idealism is being referred to. This is the thesis that the fundamental building blocks of reality are minds. I.e., minds form reality, rather than reality forming minds. Or something along those lines. (I'm certainly no expert in this area of Philsophy.)

Platonic idealism, on the other hand, is the thesis that the world we live in is composed of imperfect instantiations of entities from another world where everything there is ideal (i.e., perfect).

I'm also no expert on ancient Philosophy, and it may be true that Plato believed that these perfect entities existed as ideas. But I'm pretty sure one could be a Platonist of a sort who believes that the world of perfect forms is not made up of ideas. And that reality is not formed by minds.

To me, ideas are things that exist in minds. Without minds there are no ideas. But the domain of perfect forms would exist, even if there were no minds to ponder on them.

Or at least that's how it seems to me.

|>ouglas

"Mathematicism" seems to be the usual term used in philosophy circles, so maybe that would get more people's comprehension. — Pfhorrest

Perhaps so. At the time I was trying to have these discussions, Tegmark only had a single published paper on the topic. Maybe it hadn't been even been published at the time. I'd never heard anyone talk about it back then. I think I just stumbled upon it on Tegmark's web page.

And IMO it's more Pythagorean than Platonic, though I've heard it described as "radical Platonism" too. — Pfhorrest

Tegmark referred to his position as "radical Platonism" in the paper I read.

But I don't like that: I'm strongly anti-Platonist, as he separates the ideal from the physical, and debases the physical as not living up to the ideal, while I don't see mathematicism (whether ancient Pythagorean or modern Tegmarkian) as doing that. — Pfhorrest

Well, I guess that's where the "radical" comes in. Tegmark reduces everything that exists to only the ideal. What can be more ideal than pure math?

It's much like how I'm strongly anti-dualist but partial to something like (a more Berkeleyan, not Platonic) idealism, because it doesn't say that the mental is something apart from the physical, but that the physical is subsumed within the mental; — Pfhorrest

Okay, well I can certainly see phenomenal consciousness existing in a world where idealism is true, but I personally can't reconcile idealism and mathematicalism. To me, math is real and it is not ideas. All of math would exist even if there were never any intelligent beings to discover it.

To be honest, idealism doesn't really make any sense to me. Not unless we were to stipulate a form where the fundamental building blocks of physical existence are phenomenal or proto-phenomenal, and everything that's "physical" arises directly from that.

But I just can't buy mathematics alone, all by itself, doing that. Math is formal, eternal, discovered, unchanging, beautiful, and even more dead than a rock.

|>ouglas

As I said, most philosophers would share your reservations about MUH, but not necessarily for that reason (the more common criticisms would be the same ones that are leveled against structural realism). — SophistiCat

I'm not sure that I understand structural realism, but wouldn't most philosophers be realists about numbers? And subsequently realists about mathematical entities in general?

Unfortunately, my background in general philosophy is not so strong. I have an S.B. in Philosophy, but it's in "Language and Mind", so other than Philosophy 101, I skipped over most of Philosophy that wasn't directly relevant to Philosophy of Mind. (Strangely, whether the term "water" means the same thing on Earth and Earth 2 was deemed a hugely important part of the debate on phenomenal consciousness back in the day. I wonder if it still is.)

Some, like Dennett, just don't accord "phenomenal consciousness" the kind of autonomous metaphysical status that philosophers like Searle, Nagel and Chalmers think it ought to have. — SophistiCat

Yes, that's for sure! But I still find it amazing when people seem to believe that phenomenal states could be purely mathematical. I'm no fan of physical identity theory for phenomenal states, for instance, but that makes more sense to me than phenomenal states being purely mathematical. I find that idea completely incredulous.

|>ouglas

I haven't had time yet to dive into your book, but I agree with those who say that you should remove any Latin from the title of your book. I think it would just annoy most potential readers rather than entice them.

I suppose the reason for this is that you seem to be implying, "Look! Look! I'm as smart and as important as Newton! Or at least Wittgenstein." And most people will just roll their eyes at that implicit statement.

|>ouglas

This assertion is false in General Relativity. In GR, all of space-time exists forever. The past still exists and the future already exists. In GR time is kind of like space. My father died when I was young, but in GR, he's still there, just at a different location in time than I am. It's kind of like he's in California, only in time there's less freedom of movement than there is in space. So, while my father is alive and well in California (or actually 1969), I just can't get to California from where I am currently located.

In GR, I am not located below my feet or above my head, and likewise, I am not located before I was born or after I die. But I exist always between the bottom of my feet and below the top of my head and for the time between when I was born and before I die.

|>ouglas

Well, yes, I actually have a degree in Philosophy, so I understand this. It's just that being very precise is very verbose. Things that I might try to state in two sentences here, I might devote 5 pages to if I were writing a Philosophy paper.

Modal realism, if you accept it, removes any mystery about why the contingent facts are what they are. Forget about modal realism for a moment and then ponder on how it would be much more elegant (or so it seems to me) if all facts were necessary and no facts were contingent. Modal realism accomplishes this goal. It removes the mystery of why things are they way they are and not some other way, and provides the same elegance as if all contingent facts were necessary. I.e., it's necessary that all possibly true facts that are contingently false in our world are true in some real world. The mystery of why the contingent facts are what they are reduces simply to which world we happen to be located in. And there's no mystery in that.

MUH accomplishes the same goal, of course, for similar reasons. I.e., they are somewhat similar theses. Modal realism is less constrained, however, because in modal realism there are worlds with things in them that can't be described by mathematics.

Well, I really should devote another five pages to the above, but I hope I'm being clear enough so that I don't have to.


We're just going to have to disagree on this. For me, it's a Moorean fact that real phenomenal consciousness cannot arise from nothing but pure math.

I understand that some people are going to disagree with this. E.g., Max Tegmark, my friend Greg, who's a professional mathematician at an Ivy League university, you, etc. On the other hand, I suspect that the vast majority of professional philosophers would agree with me on this. If they think about anything like MUH at all, that is. They certainly didn't the last time I chatted with any professional philosophers. But at the time Tegmark hadn't published an entire book on the subject.

I did once go to a lecture at MIT given by a philosophical logician, and I tried to explain MUH to him after the talk, I was having a hard time until I described it as "radical Platonism". Then he was very receptive. So maybe there's one professional philosopher who would endorse MUH. On the other hand, he seemed more of a logician than the kind of philosopher who would OCD on why there's anything like the feeling of redness in the universe.

Back before Tegmark's book, I also tried to explain MUH to a professional philosopher, and his only reaction was something along the lines of, "Well, he seems to be suffering from some profound misconceptions." But then he immediately wanted to extricate himself from the conversation without providing any more reasoning.

|>ouglas

Well, I have a degree in Philsophy, so I guess I have an interest and a bias.

|>ouglas

Where can I do that?

Btw, I didn't ask what people's opinions here are. I was trying to ask if anyone knows of any published debate amongst professional philosophers on the subject.

Well, professional philosophers actually work right across the street from where I work, and sometimes I have gone and bugged them. But since they're rather busy, they're often not so chatty. Unless I sit in on a class, which I could do were I feeling very motivated.

They don't actually charge, and I've yet to have one object to letting me sit in on a class for free. In fact, in one class, the professor was even willing to grade my papers, even though I wasn't paying. (Or rather assign the job to his graduate student.)

I suppose I might also write to David Chalmers to ask if he can point me at any literature. He might actually answer me, since I have a Philosophy degree from MIT and wrote a graduate-level term paper on a published critique of his 2Dism.

|>ouglas

That talk looks to be very interesting! But does it have anything at all to do with MUH?

I didn't mean to imply that MUH is incompatible with physicalism. Only that physicalists have typically assumed that there is more to the existence of the universe than just the fact that the math to describe it exists. E.g., it's usually considered that the existence of the universe and the particular way that it is, is contingent. While if MUH is true, then it is necessary instead. (Of course, if you buy into Lewis' Modal Realism, then everything is really necessary too. But in my journeys, I haven't noticed many philosophers who champion Modal Realism.)

As for why MUH would be incompatible with phenomenal consciousness, as I already stated, I believe it to be a category mistake to assert that phenomenal consciousness is purely mathematical. Clearly Tegmark disagrees with me. I suspect, however, that most philosophers would agree with me. Only I don't know for sure, since I've never seen a professional philosopher mention MUH. (Not that I'd really know where to look. I haven't studied philosophy seriously for quite some time now.)

|>ouglas