I think it would be huge philosophically. — frank

What difference would it make to philosophy in your view?

Someday humans and bananas will be hybridized and will share 100 percent dna. — Merkwurdichliebe

I believe it has already happened in some enclaves.

In the land of the rigid designators where reigns the Great God Krapke there shall be no acknowledgement of the roles of description, definite or otherwise.

I think we mostly are in agreement, so I'll just address this:

By gaining coherence, we hope to also gain correspondence between our theory and its referent extramental states of affairs, but we can't check that directly. So coherence is our only yardstick for truth: to seriously doubt its reliability is the road to madness and damnation! A little fly in the ointment here is that at bottom, coherence relies on logic and any formal system suffers Gödelian incompleteness. But if anyone judges coherence to be unreliable, just try incoherence! — Christopher Burke

It seems to me that when it comes to simple empirical observations, the truth of statements is a matter of correspondence. 'it is raining' is true iff it is raining, 'that tree is taller than this tree' is true iff that tree is taller than this tree, 'my wife is having an affair' is true iff my wife is having an affair, and so on.

Of those examples the first two are perhaps much easier to check than the third; it obviously depends on how discreet my wife is. Basic science consists in just such ordinary empirical observations, and observations augmented by equipment such as the telescope and microscope.

When it comes to the explanatory phase, though, the theories that serve as explanations cannot be verified to be true, and even falsification has its issues, so I think we do assess the plausibility of such explanations according to how well they cohere with the whole body of such theoretical explanation.

I'm not sure about the applicability of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem to anything beyond Peano arithmetic, but in saying that I'm only parroting what I remember reading; I haven't looked into it much.

If correspondence is thought as applying to the world as it in itself, an absolute context-independent reality, and not merely to the world as it is experienced and understood by humans, a contingent, relational, contextual reality, then of course it is out of its depth.

It's what happens to the sense data immediately after the instant of interaction which differs. — Christopher Burke

I agree. With humans, as soon as the sense data reaches awareness it is always already imbued with meaning. With machines it simply never reaches awareness unless it is ours or some other animal's.

I actually think and write about philosophical issues because I desire that theoretical coherence. It feels more comfortable than cognitive dissonance ... for a philosopher anyway. (Generally, alas, people seem to have a very high tolerance of cognitive dissonance: cf politics and religion!) — Christopher Burke

Coherent theories can be wrong; most probably are. Or if not wrong then under-determined. For those who like thinking rationally consistency is important. I don't think those who think little experience cognitive dissonance, because consistency is not important to them, or they don't think enough to see that there are inconsistencies between their different thoughts or beliefs.

Yes, maybe I was a bit careless there. The trouble here is that we are paddling around at the bottom of the epistemic well. There are no sub-concepts to fall back on, so we end up swapping synonyms. So 'sentient', 'aware', 'conscious', 'what it's like to be' are interchangeable, although some philosophers discern subtle differences. — Christopher Burke

I think terms find their meanings, their senses, in relation to contexts, to associative networks of understanding. That's why any term will mean more or less differently to different people.

When we reach epistemic "bottom", so to speak, I think we confront our basic (rationally) groundless presuppositions. I don't see this as the place to find certainty, self-evidence, but rather the place that lets us see other possibilities. other basic presuppositions, other perspectives, and the basic groundlessness of all perspectives.

Of course, this won't satisfy those who are uncomfortable with uncertainty.

Rather, rules are post-hoc classifications and inferences we impose on our own behavior. — Apustimelogist

I don't think rules are imposed, they describe behaviors which are entrenched and replete with their own logic.

I think I'd respond by saying you're doing counting, which is neither addition nor quaddition. — Moliere

Addition, subtraction, multiplication and division are all, as far as i can see, basically counting, and counting is basically naming different quantities. Think about the abacus.

Draw 57 tally marks. Ask the skeptic how many there are. If the answer is "57", draw 68 more. Have the skeptic count them all. That should be a good enough answer for him. — RogueAI

See this comment I made in this thread 25 days ago:

You lay out 68 marbles and then you lay out 57 marbles in a separate row, then you ask the other "what are the names of the numbers of marbles in the two rows". Then you push them together and ask the other to count all the marbles and say what the name for that number of marbles is. — Janus

As far as I can see this solution dissolves the supposed problem. Much ado about nothing...

The pre-reflective consciousness, or consciousness in the first degree, is essentially a non-positional self-consciousness, i.e., an immediate consciousness of the subject as a subject. — charles ferraro

For me this is no different than saying that consciousness is consciousness of the ego or self. I'm on board with the idea of generalized, diffuse pre-reflective consciousness, but I don't understand it as being "consciousness of the subject as a subject", because I see the latter as necessarily reflective and linguistically mediated.

Although I don't think I agree, let's just go with this. Is this not a coherent answer that distinguishes what it's like from merely seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, and smelling? — Patterner

I don't see the idea that there is an affective element to consciousness as distinguishing what it is like from merely sensing. I think sensing is always already affective and so I would not say that machines sense anything. Machines may have sensors that detect photons, sound waves, molecules and so on, but that is not what I would call sensing. I don't deny the term could be used other than the way I do, but if you want to use the term 'sensing' differently then we will just talk past one another.

Is it possible that electric devices (or anything) have subjective experience and awareness of things, but don't care about, desire, or want to avoid anything? — Patterner

I don't know, but I tend to think that out of all the raw sensory data that enters via the senses, only the tiny portion which is meaningful in some way, that is which is cared about, is attended to, and that that attention constitutes awareness or consciousness.

But all these indicative symbols point to something we all 'know' without recourse to any symbolic representation of that state of being ... simply by being it. — Christopher Burke

I agree with that. Experience I understand to be non-dual, while all our ways of talking about it are dualistic, which is inevitable given that we think in binaries: yes/ no, true/false, subject/object, on/off, good/evil. light/dark, pain/ pleasure etc., etc.

So, anything we say about it is going to be in some sense a distortion, a misrepresentation. And that's why, to get back to the OP, I say that the irreducibility of phenomenal experience does not refute physicalism any more or less than it refutes idealism. Both physicalism and idealism are under-determined, distortive characterizations of what is there for us.

Personally, I do like the 'like' in what-it-is-like-to-be (what's not to like?) for that very reason. — Christopher Burke

There is no accounting for taste as the saying goes. Personally, I just prefer to say there is an essential feeling or affective aspect to consciousness which we share with animals and which I imagine machines lack; that seem more parsimonious and less potentially misleading to me.

Perhaps we can work on this. Perhaps a starting point could be asking: Is there a difference between, say, an electronic device with a sensor that can distinguish different frequencies of the visible spectrum, and is programmed to initiate different actions when detecting different frequencies; and me performing the same actions when I perceived the same frequencies? Or is my experience the same as the electronic device's?

I believe this is the same idea as what Douglas Hofstadter said in
I Am a Strange Loop:
'having semantics' (which means the ability to genuinely think about things, as contrasted with the "mere" ability to juggle meaningless tokens in complicated patterns...) — Patterner

Electronic devices don't care about anything, desire anything or want to avoid anything; animals and humans do. That seems to me to be the most salient difference and that is what I think it means to experience: to feel, to care, to want, to avoid and so on. I don't believe machines do any of that.

Do machines merely "juggle meaningless tokens"? The tokens they juggle have meaning to us. Do they mean anything to machines? Is it not so that things are meaningful to us only insofar as we care about them, feel something about them, whether it be pleasure, displeasure, desire or aversion?

Yes, that's a good point. Although I doubt that question (what a quantum field really is?) makes any sense. I was trying to say that there comes a point in any epistemic hierarchy where you can't reduce or describe any further. Quantum fields (currently) get to that baseline physically and what-it's-like-to-be gets to that phenomenally. — Christopher Burke

I would prefer to say "what it is to be conscious" than 'what it is like to be conscious". It is definitely something to be conscious as opposed to not being conscious; to be an animal or human being as opposed to being a rock or even a tree. That is certainly how it seems to us.

Isn't (phenomenal) consciousness what-it's-like-to-be sensing, perceiving, conceptualising, theorising, with attendant affect at each cognitive level? — Christopher Burke

I'd say rather that phenomenal consciousness is to be sensing, perceiving and reflective linguistically mediated consciousness is to be conceptualizing, theorizing, although I also think there is a prelinguistic mode of conceptualizing and theorizing.

The issue I see is the tendency to draw ontological conclusions based on our intuitive understanding of what it means to be conscious. I don't think there is any unequivocal way to talk about this. On the one hand we can say that conscious beings have a different kind of being than unconscious beings, and on the other hand we can say that they don't.

What do we mean by being? That's what it seems to come down to. And there are different usages, and no one usage can be shown to be privileged. I think what underlies peoples' obvious obsessions with these kinds of undecidable questions is the concern about death, about personal, or some other kind of, survival of death and the existence of "higher meaning".

Apart from those concerns I can't see what significance the question could have for human life. Does it not really boil down to what ontological standpoint seems more consistent with a belief in
a transcendent possibility or higher purpose to life?

Not really, I just assume the experts have it all figured out and are selflessly working for our best interests. — Merkwurdichliebe

Do you really now?

Is there any meaning to asking 'what the "what it is like" really is'? Is it not like asking what a quantum field really is? — Christopher Burke

The question is asked as to what a quantum field really is. Is it merely a model or is it ontologically real? And the thing with 'what it is like' is that we intuitively seem to think we know what that is, and yet when asked about it a coherent answer that distinguishes it from merely seeing. hearing, feeling, tasting and smelling cannot be given.

The quantum field is different in that we don't really have an intuitive sense of what it could be, so the question there is not whether our linguistically mediated interpretations of what is a kind of after the fact intuition are indicating something ontologically substantive does not apply in that case. So, I don't think the analogy holds.

The latter seems to be more likely. But he may be going deeper to the absolute nature of dutifulness (which he has articulated rather vurgarly as to be confusing: viz. "duty"), and not to a moral imperative, if you get my meaning. [Add.: Not everyone is capable of dutifulness] And in that sense, there IS naery a thing that we can point to as a greater motis operandi. — Merkwurdichliebe

Right, but for Kant duty is not paramount, reason is. It is our duty, according to him, to follow what reason dictates, which is the categorical imperative. Duty does not define itself as this or that. Do we owe duty to our own well; being over society's or to society's over ours?

That said, duty is more usually defined as that which society expects of us, and what I said about duty and what we ought to do not being synonymous was in light of that fact.

The point was: two coal burning power plants per week. Holy crap. — frank

Yeah, holy crap, it's an unholy mess.

Could it be the case that western economies possess some attribute that can mitigate the potential economic fallout of green policies? — Merkwurdichliebe

No idea, do you have an opinion on that?

It seems obvious that animals feel, hear, see, smell, taste just as we do. So what, according to you, could the "what it is like" be over and above the obvious real phenomena of feeling, hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting? Is it not perhaps a self-reflective post hoc reification, an artifact of linguistically mediated thinking?

The salient problem is how to determine what the "what it is like" really is. It is not self-evident that it is a real phenomenon as its proponents like to claim, as opposed to being just a linguistic reification.

If the question as to the ontological status of the 'what it is like' is undecidable, as it seems to be, the question that seems to remain is as to what the importance of an answer one way or the other, if such were possible, would be to human life. Do you have an answer for that?

I'm not suggesting that we can know whether we are brains in vats, but merely that it might be physically impossible, even though we of course cannot know that. We can think that there might be physical impossibilities, and that would be entirely compatible with metaphysical realism, but we cannot know for sure what they are in any case.

So, we cannot know we are or are not brains in vats, but we can say that it seems way less plausible, and is a conjecture motivated only by it's being a logical possibility, which doesn't mean much. And in any case whether we are real physical beings or brains in vats, since the truth is unknowable, makes no difference to our lives as lived.

What if it is not merely not the case, but is also physically impossible that we could be brains in a vat? That would not be incompatible with metaphysical realism. Logical possibilities are not informative and they undetermine both belief and knowledge in that they don't tell us anything interesting about the world; since they merely consist in anything we can imagine which is not self-contradictory.

Why did you say we can't be brains in a vat rather than saying that if we were, we could not, even in principle, know that we were?

If the answer is impossible to determine, even in principle, in the brain in a vat scenario, or indeed even in our own presumed scenario of a real physical world, then the whole thought experiment would seem to be a pointless exercise. The "evil demon" can mean nothing to us unless he shows himself; otherwise he must remain an impossible figment.

if I didn't know any better, I'd be inclined to think China rejects the science of climate change
— Merkwurdichliebe

Either that or they just don't give a flying fuck — frank

Or else they understand that they have no choice but to do that, or else collapse or at least retrogress economically, which would be seen to be an economic, political and social disaster by them.

There is something of what it's like for a dog to sniff a scent, or hear a command, and what's it like for a bat to send and receive echo locations, etc. A "what it's like" is to have an experience of the world. You don't have to know you are having an experience. — schopenhauer1

I imagine that is so, too, but how do you know it is true?

Are you saying that we all are predominately motivated by a sense of duty or do you just mean to say that we all introject some sense of duty and that ideally it should supersede all other motives if, on account of our social natures, we want to thrive? Or are you making a categorical Kantian-type claim that reason itself issues the imperative that duty be paramount?

Also, I think it needs to be pointed out that duty and what we ought to do are not at all synonymous.

3. and 4. are incoherent; if we were brains in vats then there could be no evidence since everything would then be an artificial construct. What is the brain in vat experience based upon? Must the vat and brain themselves be real in a real physical world? The brain in vat experienced modeled upon some real world experience?

If the current fashionable state of philosophy is to answer with a slogan like “it’s how it’s used,” I think we’re in real trouble. — Mikie

I agree. If people present their understandings of the meanings of the terms then they are presenting their own usages, That's what definitions are: descriptions of usages, or we could even say that they are usages. I didn't take the OP to be implying that there could be only one meaning of the terms it asks people to define; on the contrary I took the purpose to be the very opposite: to draw out some different usages. When I hear the simplistic slogan: "meaning is use" I always think "yeah, whose use?". Giving a definition of a term is one kind of use.

So:

Being: as a noun, 'what is', As verb": the act, state or process of existing.

Awareness: autonomously responding to some stimulus.

Consciousness: At a minimum, awareness, at a maximum, self-reflective awareness.

Thinking: imagining, remembering, conceiving, comparing, judging, believing.

Sensation bodily feeling arising from internal or external stimuli.

Perception: sensing as, sensation mediated by association, recognition, conception or judgement.

Mind: A fictive "location" where awareness, consciousness, perception and thinking go on or are "contained".

:up:

It would be nice if there were a thread where random tangents could be taken... — Leontiskos

I think tangents are fine if they are relevant and I think this one is. We come to understand what screwdrivers are used for by association I would say, that is by seeing them used and by using them. The use of a Phillip's head driver is associated with the recognition of the configuration of a Phillip's head screw, and likewise with the standard screw.

The scissors example, the understanding of which pair of scissors is the better, is determined by seeing which one cuts more quickly, straightly and cleanly; I think this is all empirically observable and has nothing to do with essences per se, although we can think about it in those terms on reflection.

I was also trying to show why knowing the limits of logically justified certainty is important. — PL Olcott

I agree it is important. Logical and mathematical certainty seem to be the only full-blown certainties we have, given that they do not seem to rely on the empirical context of the phenomenal world. I would say that direct observations of the empirical world, such as "it is raining, right here right now, can be all but absolutely certain, provided our thinking doesn't slip into radical skepticism, wherein we might think the rain we see is a simulation, illusion or elaborate hoax.

I tend to favour refraining from speaking in terms of belief in such cases but rather speaking in terms of simply seeing what the case is. So not per the old adage "seeing is believing" but rather "seeing is knowing". For example, I might have very good reason, I might even say I know, my wife is having an affair if I find used condoms under our bed, and we don't use condoms, but if I come home and see her with another man then I know, for all intents and purposes, that she is having an affair.

The Getter cases don't impress me: for example, think of the cardboard cutout sheep in the field. I see what looks like a sheep and form the purportedly justified true belief, on account of there being an actual sheep behind a bush that I cannot see, that there is a sheep in that field. But this belief is too indeterminate: my belief is really that what I see, the cardboard cutout, is an actual sheep. Can I say this belief is justified if I am at such a distance from the cutout that it is indistinguishable from a real sheep? I would say not.

The point was that dogs can recognize their food bowls and know what to do with them, just as we can recognize screwdrivers, once we are familiar with them. Of course, the dog cannot be reflectively aware of this recognition post hoc, as we can, because this would seem to require language.

So, your point relies on radical skepticism, and I think we can rule that out just by accepting the phenomenal world as it appears and making and thinking of the truth or falsity of knowledge claims only within that context.
— Janus

Only when one fully comprehends the actual limits of logically justified certainty is one's mind forced open enough to see reality for what it truly is as opposed to and contrast with the brainwashing of conditioning of the socialization process. (This is Eastern religion stuff). — PL Olcott

Was your response meant to address—that is agree or disagree—with what I had said, or is it more of an aside?

All that said, I'd be happy enough to stop talking about knowledge altogether and instead talk about more or less justified belief, while acknowledging that we have no absolutely precise measure of justification.
— Janus

I have been studying and pondering the mathematical foundation of the notion of analytical truth for many years. I just recently discovered that this is anchored in truthmaker theory. — PL Olcott

Same question here.

In order to pick out a screwdriver you need to know what it is, and in order to know what it is you need to have an internalized definition of it. — Leontiskos

Does a dog have an internalized definition of her food bowl when she "picks it out"?

Are you saying that truth can be unknown but that knowledge cannot be, in the sense that we cannot be said to know unless we know that we know?
— Janus

My example is that a space alien that is perfectly disguised as a duck (including Duck DNA)
would be mistaken for a duck thus provide fake knowledge that is not true.

The things that can be known with justified logical certainty are located in an axiomatic
system knowledge ontology verbal model of the actual world. — PL Olcott

I agree with you in a sense, but I think your example is so implausible, perhaps even physically impossible, that it does not constitute a refutation of the idea that, within the context of the phenomenal world as experienced, we have direct knowledge based on observation of the world. We cannot extend our knowledge beyond that ambit, and it is pointless to try, and also pointless to claim that our inability to do so constitutes any real threat to the knowledge based on observations, that we do have.

The only way I can imagination that your example might be possible would be if we lived in a simulation, but if that were so, nothing would be as it appears, and that would amount to things just being what they appear to be in our phenomenal world. Just like is a duck appears on a computer screen it is a duck regardless of how the image is realized.

So, your point relies on radical skepticism, and I think we can rule that out just by accepting the phenomenal world as it appears and making and thinking of the truth or falsity of knowledge claims only within that context.

All that said, I'd be happy enough to stop talking about knowledge altogether and instead talk about more or less justified belief, while acknowledging that we have no absolutely precise measure of justification.

In a society where govenments try to tell you what is true and raise you into believing what you believe, in a world that is ever more dividing, when we're looking at news or whatever is going on around us, how do we know what to believe in? — Hailey

Simple, reserve judgement on, don't believe in, anything you cannot personally confirm, then provisionally entertain what seems most plausible to you in any matter that interests you and demands that you take a position in order to move forward.

As I said, I'm not so confident as I once was regarding the implications for materialism. I'm not confident it constitutes a "slam dunk" refutation of materialism or even of eliminative materialism. Also, I am not involved in any moral crusade against philosophical materialism. although I do definitely see materialism in the sense of the aim of life being seen as accumulating wealth and "goods" as a massive problem.

I see such strictly non-deductive inferences as being abductive as consisting in imagining, based on past experience what would be thought to be the likely phenomena observed is such and such were the case. In the Einstein example it would be what would we think would be likely to be observed if mass warps spacetime.

I don't think there are any strict laws associated with this type of conjecture. With deductive logic the main law is consistency, that the conclusion(s) follow strictly from the premises. _

But notice, that is an argument I’ve put forward - there’s nothing directly corresponding to such a conjecture in Davidson’s paper or the articles on supervenience that we’ve been referencing. It may be completely off target for some reason that I haven’t understood yet. I have to allow that possibility. — Wayfarer

Sure, I've made that point myself more than 25 years ago in arguments with an eliminative materialist who used to attend the same classes in philosophy at Sydney University Centre for Continuing Education as I was at the time, but as I say I don't see it so much as an argument or conjecture, but rather as simply pointing out something that is unarguably true.

I don't think we need any special formal language to discover that a neural event cannot be considered to be true or false, valid or invalid, in any way analogous to how inferences can be. I don't see how this fact could even be arguable, whatever we might think the implications of it are.

But this is where I'm asking, what about the logical laws? Rules of valid inference? If you know that x is the case, then you can infer that y must be the case — Wayfarer

Can you give an example of such an inference which is not merely a matter of definition?

The notion seems to rest on a category mistake, a failure to understand that the network of rationally-cum-semantically interrelated mental states is no more susceptible of a smooth correlation with a particular network of causally interrelated physical states than the content of a book can be smoothly correlated with a certain kind of physical format (a modern printed book, say, as opposed to a scroll, wax tablet, or electronic book). As Wilfrid Sellars might put it, the “space of reasons” and the “space of causes” are simply incommensurable.') — Wayfarer

I'm not sure Wilfred Sellars thought they were incommensurable tout court; I think his project was at least partly concerned with attempting to find some way in which what seems incommensurable could be co-measured. I could be wrong about that, as I am only superficially familiar with Sellar's work.

The other point here is that even if we cannot find a "smooth correlation", which can be coherently understood, between particular causally interrelated states and particular rationally interrelated mental states, that does not entail that there are not strict correlations between the two but could be down to the limitations of our understanding.

The second part starting with "equivalently," is saying that the only way to have an exact duplicate of a musical production would be to exactly duplicate the actions of the orchestra playing it. That's a convoluted way to get the idea across, but it's true. That does describe the kind of relation we're specifying with supervenience. It's definitely an IFF kind of relation. — frank

Surely it must be acknowledged that there could not be two performances of a musical piece that were exactly the same, because not only the actions of the orchestra would need to be exactly the same, but the temperature, the humidity, the weight of every musician, the building, the state of the building, the exact location of all the players, exactly the same audience and their locations, and so on.

So, what could it mean to say that in order for a mental state (or better, process or event) to be the same, the neural state would have to be the same, when this would also entail the entire bodily and environmental states being the same, which would by extension entail the entire world and the solar system (at least) being the same?

Also, you didn't answer my previous question which was that if we accept that mental events could not be the same without neural events also being the same, does this not entail that neural events could not be the same without mental events being the same, leaving the question as to what direction we should understand the supervenience to follow?

I take supervenience as an ontological thesis involving the idea of dependence – a sense of dependence that justifies saying that a mental property is instantiated in a given organism at a time because, or in virtue of the fact that, one of its physical “base” properties is instantiated by the organism at that time. Supervenience, therefore, is not a mere claim of covariation between mental and physical properties; it includes a claim of existential dependence of the mental on the physical. — Edward Feser | Supervenience on the hands of an angry God

This is kinda what I'm getting at; it seems we must think that there is a causal direction at work, unless we want to claim that the mental and physical are codependent, or that mental phenomena are really epiphenomena, or that we have just one neutral thing under the two descriptions: mental and physical, and all of these conceptual scenarios would seem to render the very idea of supervenience moot.

I mean this argument parallels the OP of this discussion no? How can you refer to something that is inherently ineffable? I need to designate the concept, and one of the ways to do that is to say that something exists, but there is no epistemological viewer of said events (view from nowhere). — schopenhauer1

Apparently, you understand this quite differently than I do. The way I see it the indeterminate can be referred to even though it cannot be described. Designating the concept as I see it consists in saying that the indeterminate exists, but cannot be known or described, and that there is no imaginable possible (embodied) viewer. It still makes the most sense to me to say that if there were an infinite view (as opposed to our finite views) of anything it would be a view from everywhere, that is from all possible distances and directions all at once. That it could be said that this view is a view from nowhere in particular seems reasonable to me, but the idea of a view from nowhere, a view which is not a view at all, doesn't. But I acknowledge that's just me: I don't imagine that we must all see things the same way; individuals are unique, so why would their ways of seeing and understanding not also be unique?

In a less religious-sounding way, I think he thinks that identity of self is a delusion compounded by our ego's desires. — schopenhauer1

I think identity is merely formal, and becomes a delusion only when reified as a notion of a fixed transcendent being (substance); otherwise, it is simply useful, indeed indispensable, for finding our way in the world.

He thinks this sublime state is possible, and I am skeptical. — schopenhauer1

I see it as likely being a possibility, as an altered state in this life, but I am not convinced it can be achieved permanently or that my consciousness will survive the death of the body. That said I am not confident enough to deny an afterlife, but for me, since it can only be a distant possibility it cannot be a worthy life pursuit. There are too many other fascinating things to do and discover while alive, while I have this all to brief opportunity, and if there is anything that comes after this life, I'll worry about that if and when it arises, or if not, I obviously won't worry at all.

The quoted passage about Hartmann is interesting and I think somewhat along those lines. One of the most common pursuits of happiness is having children and becoming part of a family. As I've said I was never drawn to that, but I don't believe that anyone who longs for that will ever be convinced by anti-natalist arguments, so, even if I agreed with antinatalism as a universal ideal I would still see the mission of convincing people not to breed as a futile waste of time and energy.

If everyone stopped having children today society, civilization as we know it, would soon catastrophically collapse, and I don't think that could be dressed up to look like a desirable outcome for virtually anyone, other than perhaps a few who would like to return to hunter/ gatherer life. If I was twenty years old right now that might attract me, but I am almost seventy, and the idea has little appeal to me.

In any case, I say with utmost confidence that people will continue to have children, so unless catastrophic collapse is forced on us, people will continue to breed as usual. Even if society collapsed quite a few would probably survive and return to hunter/ gatherer or rudimentary agricultural life, and they would certainly breed, if only because they would have no further access to contraceptives.

Perhaps he means that non-physical things do not exist but may be real nonetheless. :wink: