Option 1 leaves open a whole bunch of other possibilities, most unconceived of as-yet. Therefore you don't know whether "the three options have the same probability a priori of being true." For all you know, some of those unknown, or even unknowable possibilities have a higher probability than the simulation possibility.

Similar to the problem with Pascal's wager: there's an infinity of grisly options possible, you can't just make the calculation wrt the few possibilities you happen to have thought of, or that your culture accidentally threw up in the course of history.

I think it's always useful as a grounding maneuver to think of the development of thought as something that was opened up by the possibility of lying.

IOW, signalling of internal states (emotion) initially evolved as a co-ordination mechanism for social creatures, but at some point the neat trick of lying about internal states for some kind of advantage was discovered, and then the possibility of holding the falsehood (the counter-factual) and truth in mind at the same time, then we were off to the races.

So it's not just self-awareness as such (a machine can self-monitor) but it's more to do with an interpersonal game (something Turing was aware of with the Turing test - i.e. detecting intelligence would be closely connected to detecting cheating).

That's why I think that AI people, if they're really aiming at intelligence proper as we humans understand it, and not just at expert systems and machine learning systems, probably need to think more about intelligence as a function of sociality. Not "an AI" but a community of AIs. All the most intelligent animals (with the odd exception of the octopus) are social - corvids, parrots, wolves etc., humans.

(Another way of saying this might be that intelligence probably requires a limbic system analogue - there has to be some sense of something at stake, something mattering, to the AI. But then at that point, there's the danger of losing the crisp cleanliness that we associate with computers, and getting into the murky, shifty complexity that is genuine intelligence, so it hardly seems worth it to try and create a genuine artificial intelligence.)

Not all preferences are mere preferences, sometimes people can have preferences for the truth, either something that happens to be true, or something they've reasoned to be true. One can prefer what is true, as well as what is arbitrary.

Generally, with argument, the disputants try to establish a basis of agreed axioms and facts and then the game is to discover whether one side or the other has made a logical slip on the way to their conclusions.

But sometimes the argument will reveal a deeper disagreement at the axiomatic level - at that point, people usually just agree to disagree, though sometimes arguments about axioms can result in insights and changes of mind too.

Although sometimes both can be right or wrong, often (with informed debates) one person is wrong and the other person right - but it's not always easy to figure out how and in what way, and with the really deep questions it might take decades or even centuries to figure out what's what.

I don't think "consciousness," "awareness," etc., have any particular crisp definition that's THE definition.

There's always the temptation to think of consciousness per se as a kind of qualityless "spotlight" type of thing that "lights up" a separate, distinct content of consciousness - but that's question begging. It's just as possible that consciousness and content together is a particular type of existent (comprised of both external causal factors and internal brain processing) that comes into and goes out of existence, with consciousness and content being two abstractions that are merely notionally distinguishable and separable.

One of the most basic distinctions to be made in this area is the public sense of "consciousness", "awareness", etc., and the private. In the public sense, it's unproblematic - we can observe consciousness in action (in for example the avoiding and cleaving-to activities of animals, our fellow humans, in their responses to our questions, etc.). And in the public sense, the concept of degrees of consciousness is unproblematic too - for example, one thinks of the origin of the evolution of the eye in light sensitive patches that might have just given a vague impression of a something (some kind of predator) swooping down; or the experiments done with baby chimps where you give them a straw "mother" that they latch onto just as readily as they would have done to their biological chimp mother. It's unproblematic to think of consciousness in this sense as having levels of "grain" or levels of resolution.

It's the private sense that gives us all the difficulties, which are added to by the kinds of philosophical reflections engaged in by the moderns (Descartes onward). And to many it seems like having this private type of consciousness (the spotlight lighting up private content) is the precondition for the public type (it being a process hidden "inside" the body or the brain that somehow makes avoiding/cleaving behaviour possible in us and animals). It's the private sense (the spotlight sense) that seems like it has to be something that's either on or off.

Yes, I'd say there are degrees of consciousness. Waking up is a gradual process - at first awareness and thought are vague, cloudy, sluggish; the reverse for going to sleep (though not a pure mirror image, the phases seem to be a bit different). Waking up in the middle of the night can also be a quasi-conscious, vaguely hallucinatory state.

I wouldn't say that demonstrates the truth of Panpsychism, but it does allow one to conceive the possibility of it more easily.

Generally speaking, I think all the (relatively safe) psychoactive drugs can be valuable in giving insight and getting the ol' noggin' joggin', but they all have considerable downsides too - some have high tolerance, some have other adverse side-effects, etc. And often, at some point you notice that the insights get a bit samey after a while (at a meta level, the different drugs have their own "groove," induce particular types of thoughts).

On the whole, I think it would be better if they were folded into society in a more ritualized context (as with ayahuasca, etc.), rather than "wild" usage, but I'm not sure that's feasible in the current social context.

The continuity is thus:-

In his later years, Wittgenstein came to think of the Tractatus as an extended, somewhat more systematic example of an illustrative language-game, a bit like the simple language games with blocks and simple commands that the Philosophical Investigations starts with, only with much more detail, and at a higher level of abstraction.

That's why he wanted to have them side-by-side for comparison.

This is different from his view while he wrote the Tractatus, when he thought it was the final word in philosophy.

You often see people saying the later Wittgenstein was against systematization, and that that's the difference between his earlier and later philosophy. That's not true, he was fine with systematic philosophy, rather it's that he saw philosophers who did it as (usually) being mistaken about what it is they were actually doing.

The bridge between biology and culture is evolutionary psychology. So: simply due to the nature of the human animal and the nature of its lived context, some habit patterns are conducive to social co-operation and social flourishing, some aren't. Habit patterns that are helpful for social co-ordination and flourishing will tend to spread genetically through a population and then gradually get codified in religion and custom, which makes them open to conscious reflection, and the system of such habit-patterns becomes what we call "morality."

So there is an element of subjectivity and an element of objectivity in morality: whether a habit pattern is conducive to social co-ordination and flourishing or not is an objective fact; but the fact that most people in a given society or culture will tend to choose the habit patterns that are conducive to social co-ordination and flourishing (the fact that most people act morally) is partly an intersubjective confluence of individual preferences that evolved initially randomly and genetically to become a habit of the majority, and partly a result of the reinforcement of those habit patterns by the majority on the minority (those who genetically aren't so predisposed to those rules as the majority).

Fundamentally, the choice of the "human flourishing" perspective is "subjective" in the sense that it's arbitrary from a cosmic point of view (there's no cosmic reason to take the human side over the side of anything else, that's just how we grew, that's how we feel about it). But once that perspective is taken, all the conditionals ("if ... then you ought to") are objective and fall out of human nature and the nature of the world (though of course the implications may be difficult to figure out, given limited knowledge, fallibility, and just the sheer complexity of the problem).

Then on top of that, there's philosophical and legal reflection, which refines the codification of morality, hearkening back to the objective basis of it (i.e. philosophical and legal reflection investigate which social rules, or clusters of social rules, are conducive to flourishing, and which aren't, and which are non-contradictory with others and can form a system, and which aren't). In a way it's just the acceleration and refinement of a process that started blindly, via natural selection.

Also, an added wrinkle is that when I say "conducive to social co-ordination or social flourishing", that's a placeholder for a whole basket of slightly different ultimate goals (which may be implicit in any given habit pattern as it is generalized) that are usually closely related, but may have some outliers. (e.g. the morality of some cultures is more focused on the individual and their happiness, the morality others is more focused on the group and its flourishing, but that's just one - albeit an important - dimension).

I just remembered another philosopher who might be useful for triangulation on this: Karl Popper. Towards the end of his life he developed the metaphysical-cum-physics notion of "a world of propensities", which was "a programme for a theory of change ... which would allow us to interpret any real state of the world as both an actualisation or realisation of some of the potentialities or propensities of its preceding states, and also as a field of dispositions or propensities to realise the next state."

I'm not sure how comfortably the idea can be transferred from biology to philosophy, maybe it's too specific to biology? (And wouldn't Hegel's philosophy be the most obvious example of a similar sort of idea in a philosophical context?)

In the classical (Artistotelian) conception, possibility is constantly being transformed into actuality (by other actualities), and the constant actualization of possibility is used to explain how, on the one hand, being can change, and on the one hand, how the essence/nature (of things) is circumscribed. Both possibility and actuality are real, they exist, and everything latently has its own possibilities (rather than them all being separately stuck in the "Platonic locker room," as you so felicitously put it).

So, any object is actual in one form (in the form we perceive it), but it also has a limited range of other possible forms (that limited range being its particular essence or nature), which can be actualized only by the causal impingement of something else that's actual.

IOW, in the Aristotelian conception, possibility is a third option inbetween being (actuality) and nothing, and being has the two modes of possibility and actuality, its actual way of being here and now, and the range of (possible) actualities it can transform into, which await actualization by other actualities.

This is a form of what's called "Panpsychism." There are many different versions of it. Usually a Panpsychist will respond to the, "are microchips conscious?" question with something like, "Yes, but at some sort of primitive level."

There's a bit of support for the idea from the fact that we experience gradations of consciousness - for example as we fall asleep, or when we wake up, consciousness is vague and diffuse. One can imagine that as being akin to the consciousness of one of the higher mammals perhaps, and one can extend that backwards to birth, and maybe life in the womb, and then maybe beyond (with ever more refined, less differentiated forms of consciousness).

In order for something to be a "fact", it must hold widespread agreement amongst contemporary theorists. — darthbarracuda

In order to be ACCEPTED as a fact, etc. Whether it is a fact or not depends on how reality is. The real facts could be buried somewhere else with everyone passing them over, or not even thought of yet.

How it is possible to prove logical properties in something that is not a logic (a formal language constructed by humans)? — Belter

Again, this just presupposes that logic is a property only of formal systems we construct. I can only repeat what I said above: if and when a logical schema or structure is in fact applicable to reality, then what are we to think other than that reality itself just happens to have that logical structure?

I'm well aware of Aristotle's theory of ethics, but there is nothing convincing about tying the mere act of sexual reproduction to enhancing one's moral character. — Maw

What does anything I said have to do with "enhancing one's moral character?" What does that even mean?

You state that human are "rational animals"; I would argue that our rationality enables us to be unbounded by the shackles of blind instinct, including the drive to reproduction. — Maw

Reproduction isn't a "blind instinct," if it were a blind instinct people would do it instinctively and automatically. As I said in my last post, reproduction is a function of conscious thought, a mass of unconscious calculation and a small measure of instinctive behaviour.

That an anti-natalist, one who chooses not to have children, or someone who is infertile, one who - regardless of choice - cannot have children, are less of a "person" or less moral - or outright immoral, than a person who does, is outright nonsense. — Maw

It's fortunate that I never said any such thing then, isn't it?

When you attempt to make factual claims about the world, but fail to provide any citations, why should I believe what you are saying? — Maw

You obviously wouldn't believe what I'm saying even if I provided the cites :)

And there it is! Blatant racism dressed up esoteric science and casual observation. — Maw

The science isn't "esoteric," nor is it "racist" to point out that it exists. I used "recondite" jokingly because it's complex biochemistry stuff that I don't understand myself. But the results are quite legitimate and widely accepted. You're ill-informed if you think otherwise.

Once again, try to let the science sink in: human beings are animals, and there is biodiversity in the human animal just as there is in any other animal. It is not "racist" to point that out, and it is not "racist" to take that fact into consideration when thinking about morality and social problems.

You can't just throw the word "racist" around randomly as if it were some sort of ideological garlic, you know. You've seen what happens when you do that, right? You get Trump. :)

As I pointed out in my previous post, monogamy is very much the norm in today's society, and alternatives, e.g. polygamy, are widely disproved of by the general population. — Maw

And yet for some time now we have seen increases in single parenthood, a decline in marriage and in reproduction, and increasing divorce rates.

So what precisely does "enforced" mean here when it's overwhelmingly approved of? You don't actually outline details in your previous post, but when you say things like "women are a protected class" within the realm of sexuality, then that hints at something more nefarious than simple "social disapproval". — Maw

As I said, the situation would look like a partial return of traditionalism. For example, even 50 years ago, having a divorcee as the lead character in a tv show was understood as borderline unacceptable - is that what you think of as "nefarious?"

I can't even bother to respond to the remainder of your sexist, racist, and alt-right garbage post. No point in wasting my time with a bigot. — Maw

The bigot takes an average as a stereotype, and then pre-judges every member of the group as possessed of that stereotypical set of traits. Can you point to where I've done that?

No I think @gurugeorge, who has fervently — Maw

"fervently" lol

claimed that there are "7 to 9 sub-species" of humans in addition to "three main races" — Maw

Not "in addition to," they're just alternative classifications, one very broad, the other more refined and detailed.

in which Asians are the "most well-behaved" and "less promiscuous", while Blacks are "the least well-behaved" and "most sexually promiscuous"; — Maw

TEND TO BE. Again, we're talking about AVERAGES ACROSS POPULATIONS. There are lots of Asians who are promiscuous and lots of Blacks who aren't. There are plenty stupid Asians and smart Blacks. Etc., etc., et multae ceterae. THAT IS IMPLICIT IN THE VERY FACT THAT WE ARE TALKING ABOUT AVERAGES.

has stated that the increase of (non-Caucasian, non-Asian) immigration and decrease of the white population leads to the increase of crime; — Maw

That's just what happens when you import groups that are on average more violent than Whites, who outbreed Whites.

and who additionally believes that women are essentially reducible to their "reproductive function" — Maw

Wrong again, that's not what I said.

You jump to conclusions and you seem to be incapable of parsing nuanced distinctions, you are gratuitously insulting, and you would ban someone who says things you don't agree with. In short, you seem to be an exemplary product of our current education system. Good job!

Reality has a "real" structure (for example, elementary waves-particles and forces) like logic has a "logical" one. You are mixing the structure of the model with the structure of the modeled. In your rationalist view, it would be possible, for example, to demonstrate that reality is or not consistent, complete, etc., which in my view is a nonsense. — Belter

Reality's "real structure" can be consistent, complete, etc., reality itself just is what it is, whatever it happens to be, whatever we find it as. But it wouldn't be possible to demonstrate that consistency analytically without omniscience, or a "view from everywhere" as Janus recently neatly put it.

Nowhere do you connect why a teleological function of an organ is tethered to morality, or why disregarding said teleology is immoral, or why using the sexual organs for pleasure (e.g. masturbation, casual sex) isn't a valid alternative use. Last I checked, Mother Nature did not hand down Ten Commandments to mandating how we must to use our bodies, and our sexual organs in particular. — Maw

It's a more or less Aristotelian position. Morality (which has nothing to do with any sort of "commandments" of course) is a function of teleology in the following way: if you want to use a thing successfully, the use you make of it ought to conform to its nature and purpose, any other kind of use is misuse, and will likely backfire. Animals tend to instinctively use things properly (granted some genetic variation, and within the limits set by their genetics and by their lacking reason); humans are odd in that they operate much less on instinct than other animals, and have to choose to use things properly (and can choose not to do so). This is nested in the larger teleology of virtue ethics. Roughly speaking, what is moral is to be the best human being, and specifically the best you, that you can be, where "best" is defined as actualizing your - general and specific - potential. And that necessarily includes your potential to reproduce your kind, and requires some care and consideration for the support structure and genetic closeness of your kind - implying the necessity for both reciprocal altruism and kin altruism.

As is typical of you, there are no citations, studies, articles, etc. demonstrating a causal relationship between the sexual revolution and societal issues, or how "non-conformity with the telos of sexuality" directly results in "psychological dissatisfaction". — Maw

Glad to see you're a keen student of my posts, and I take your point re. lack of citations, but I'm not out to "demonstrate" anything, I just wanted to briefly outline a position and casually chat about it. I'll let you know when I'm doing a peer-reviewed scientific paper on the topic.

And how precisely did the Sexual Revolution "hit" Blacks first? The idea of Black hyper-sexuality is a racist idea that has stubbornly persisted since the 17th century as a cover for white promiscuity. — Maw

Even more stubborn and persistent are facts:- https://www.stdtestexpress.com/std-news/the-demographics-of-stds-race-8080172740/

Human beings are (rational) animals, and like other species, we are divisible into sub-species by means of both plain observation and more recondite scientific investigations (into relative genetic closeness or distance). For humans, there are 3 broad and about 7 or 9 more refined sub-species, or "races," which evolved as a result of relative geographic isolation, mostly in prehistory. Racial categories have fuzzy and somewhat arbitrary boundaries (arbitrary in the sense that there are always edge cases and undecidable cases), but the racial categories are in the main solid enough to provide useful information and be predictive, and there are clusters of average traits that hold across the races (skin colour is only one marker of race, of course - other markers that show consistent average differences between races are skeletal morphology, differences in the brain, proneness to various diseases, aggression, sociability, hair types and coverage, maturation rates - and among a zillion other things, mating patterns).

It turns out that of the three main races, Asians tend to be the least promiscuous, Blacks the most, with Whites inbetween. And while human culture and society certainly has an independent, standalone aspect that's not directly affected by biology (we might call that aspect memetic, ideational, or just plain cultural), which gives us some elbow room for experimentation; and while "human capital" is probably just as important for outcomes as human biology: nevertheless the structure of the body and brain as mandated by its DNA plays an important role even in culture. Culture is part of the extended phenotype. This isn't rocket science - but it is biology.

The breakdown of the Black family and the atomization of the Black middle class in the 1960s, and the connection of that breakdown to crime is well documented (cf. for example Thomas Sowell's several books on and around the topic), and in the US, those Blacks who have escaped the Democratic Party plantation are getting increasingly pissed off about it. Of course there's a lot more to it than the sexual revolution, but I'm talking about the specific contribution of the normalization of casual sex, promiscuity, etc., to social dysfunction.

Can we really ignore ... — Maw

No, and I wouldn't propose to do so in a more general context, but again, the topic is casual sex, and I'm sketching the particular impact of widespread, normalized casual sex as an important contributory cause of social dysfunction, awareness of which is repressed by today's received wisdom.

You state that we, as a society, should "actively discourage" casual sex and polyamory, but it's not clear what that would look like in practice, — Maw

It would look like a partial return to a more traditional society. The new isn't necessarily the good, and societies can change for the worse, as well as for the better. Some mistakes have been made in the 20th century, as well as some genuine progress. The mistakes should be reversed or fixed as much as possible, the progress retained.

and I think it's fair to say - based on historical precedent - that this would be overwhelmingly focused on women. Jordan Peterson recently entertained the idea of "enforced monogomy", an explosive phrase he typically lobs in order to garner shock and attention (but vague enough to walk back from the otherwise obvious meaning). — Maw

It's actually just a jargon term in the relevant sciences that he used quite innocently, but of course Leftists are always eager to smear and shut down anything that goes counter to their ideology.

Things can be "enforced" as social habits.

I covered the question of legality in my post, if that's what you're worried about. The relaxation of legal strictures on interpersonal interaction in the course of the 20th century in Western cultures I would consider an example of genunine progress (traditional human cultures have often been unnecessarily strict about policing sexuality). Fret not, nobody's talking about handmaidens and their tales ;)

The sexual behaviour of both males and females is "enforced" extra-legally in traditional societies, but in different ways (and in different ways in different cultures - again, this is the result of both biological and memetic evolution). The focus on females is just an artifact of the difference in the relative abundance of the two sexes' gametes, and the balance, or division of reproductive labour between the sexes in our markedly sexually dimorphic species. Females have to be much more careful about reproduction because they have less potential shots at it, so they bear more risk than males, and there's more pressure on them to get it right, e.g. to take care to choose a good mate, who'll both provide good genetic material and stick around to help them raise the child (especially during the period of greater vulnerability during pregnancy and their children's early development).

This means that women are effectively more precious to human society, and more a protected class, than men. This is reflected in: the fundamental gynocentrism of human society (under normal conditions, much of human society is built around protecting females and ensuring the safety and stability of their reproductive cycle); the lack of necessity for agency and responsibility in females (other than wrt childrearing - their "one job" so to speak, the only thing society pressures them to take responsibility for); the greater number of taboos around female sexuality; greater male disposability; greater burdens of agency and social responsibility on males (laughably construed by Feminists as men being mean and "in control"). The taboos around female sexuality aren't meant to spoil women's fun, but to ensure as much as possible that they can make the most of their biologically more constrained chance at reproduction. (I say "meant" - of course such habits evolved blindly initially, and religion and tradition have fitfully re-presented to consciousness, and further fostered, those evolved behaviours.)

However, contrary to yours and Peterson's concerns, monogamous relationships are overwhelmingly viewed positively, while, according to a Gallup Poll from 2013, shows that Americans strongly disprove of affairs (91%), and polygamy (83%). Divorce rates are also at 40 year low, as of 2015.

So yeah...I'm not quite sure how relevant the Sexual Revolution of the 60's has been in the last 50 years to our current "societal dysfunction", when "hookup culture" is more of fantasy played out in movies, TV shows, and in the imaginative minds of conservatives, than what exists in reality. — Maw

Actually it's a fantasy that up until the past 5 years or so was constantly pumped out by Leftists and fellow-travelling creatives in those fields, who encouraged sexual promiscuity, precisely because they hoped it would lead to the breakdown of the White nuclear family form (which Blacks had long copied), which they saw as the main bulwark and seedbed of "patriarchy," "authoritarianism" and "White oppression." Sex ought to be an individual choice, you understand, do what feels right ...

Conservatives, as the name suggests, are opposed to all that, and would prefer a return to traditionalism, with individuals' sexual behaviour somewhat shepherded by society at large. The belief is that the sexual revolution has led to a joyless narcissism, focused entirely on solipsistic pleasure, and on what can be received rather than what can be given and contributed to the ongoing life and continuity of a people through time. (As a side-light, both consumerism and casual sex are part of the larger syndrome of the Left's relentless destructive critique of traditional European/American - White - social mores, in turn a function of the "long march through the institutions" first proposed by Gramsci and accelerated by thinkers of the 60s like Marcuse.)

As you point out, even after 50 or so years of propaganda from the cybernetic industries encouraging loose morals, people are still uncomfortable with it. But of course in the trenches of everyday life, it's hard to muster the will to resist the temptation to easy sexual pleasure, especially when "society" tells you it's ok. So people are quite schizophrenic about it; on the one hand, they know they're doing wrong and still give lip-service to what's right, but because society encourages their wrongdoing, they continue to indulge in casual sex against their better judgement - and as the OP pointed out, no form of birth control is 100% effective.

Things are changing though; on the one hand the Left's position has become increasingly incoherent, inconsistent, incomprehensible and ideologically obsesssed; on the other hand, there is a shift to the Right going on everywhere, especially among the Gen Z young (who see the mess their parents and grandparents got into).

Finally, crime has also steadily decreased since the early 90's. It has not increased, as you said. — Maw

Crime rose from the 60s to the 90s, then decreased, it is now increasing again. We're living through the aftermath of an earthquake that happened in the 60s/70s, but as I've said and as you've pointed out yourself, there are many other factors involved.

All this is in the context of the centuries-long fall in crime in European and American societies, but that looks like it's reversing in those societies, with increasing immigration and the demographic decline of Whites (who are relatively well-behaved, though not as well-behaved as Asians).

I suppose it depends on the scope and "grain" of the investigation - and how honest people are about it.

And your idea of that women have a "sexual market value" is blatantly sexist. — Maw

As I pointed out, men have sexual market value too; mating is akin to an economic negotiation between the sexes based on guesses at prospective mate quality, likelihood of family stability, of faithfulness, etc. To some extent the negotation is conscious and calculating, but most of it is unconscious, and some smaller part of it is instinctive.

To encapsulate all of this in a trope: sex is not a toy, it is a nuclear weapon, and should be handled with care.

It's the abortionist who is the murderer, and "risking" isn't necessarily morally culpable if you've done your best to minimize the risk (it would be morally culpable in the "risk" terms you outline only if you didn't take any precautions).

However, casual sex is immoral, because the telos of the sexual organs is reproduction, and the continuity of human life through time, not pleasure - the fact that sex is pleasurable (in fact the most intense pleasure of which we're normally capable, second only to some kinds of mystical epiphany) is a byproduct of the telos, it cannot without societal dysfunction and disarray be an end in itself.

The "sexual revolution" seemed like a good idea at the time, to the (relative to previous generations) ridiculously privileged adolescents of the Boomer generation, but it has been absolutely disastrous for our societies (e.g. in the US, hitting Blacks first of all, and now latterly Whites,, HIspanics, etc., too) - it's led to a massive increase in single-parent families, which has resulted in increased crime, addiction, various kinds of societal dysfunction and a great deal of suffering, not just as a result of the crime and social dysfunction per se, but as a result of psychological dissatisfaction arising from non-conformity with the telos of sexuality. Increased female unhappiness, and increased male suicide are direct social consequences of the loosening of sexual mores. (Females riding the "cock carousel" while nubile and postponing reproduction till their sexual market value has declined, and lower-SMV males being unable to marry and reproduce because the former process shuts them out of the reproductive game and heaps even more mating privilege on already high-SMV males, are two important causes of the profound alienation and dissatisfaction in society today.)

People will have some casual sex anyway, and always have done, precisely because sexual pleasure is so powerful. And while of course it shouldn't be illegal (not everything that is immoral has to be illegal), you have to actively discourage it publicly by means of societal disapproval and (in the worst-case scenario) social shaming (and/or by means of social tropes like the "shotgun wedding"), in order it to bring its deleterious societal effects to a manageable level.

It seems to me that somethings appearance is a property of the visual system and not the object. — Andrew4Handel

Why can't it be a bit of both? That an object looks yellow to the jaundiced eye is as much a property of the object as of the jaundiced person. Again: bent-looking is just how sticks show up in water, in the same way that straight-looking is how sticks show up outside water. The "seeming as" is just as dependent on the object and on surrounding conditions as it is on the observer. Presenting-as-small while in the distance is a property of the object in interaction with the observer.

I think an illusion just shows the possibility of experience being deceptive. Because it casts doubt on the validity of a former experience. — Andrew4Handel

But it doesn't cast doubt on the validity of the experience that reveals that the former experience was an illusion, does it? If you accept that the former experience was an illusion, then you've implicitly accepted the validity of the perception that tells you the former experience was an illusion.

If you accept that there's such a thing as illusion at all, then you must accept that there's some valid perception somewhere, namely, at the very least, the perception that tells you the former experience was an illusion.

But then it makes no sense whatsoever to wonder whether all experience "could be illusory." You've already denied that possibility by accepting that you've had an illusion.

All the possibility of illusion shows is that any given experience could be illusory, not that the whole series of experiences could be illusory. To put that another way, all it shows is that testing for illusion is possible with any given experience. But how do we test for illusion?
We test for illusion on the basis of testing experiences we accept as validly revealing illusion.

At the very least we need an observer who is separate from an object to discuss it and I am trying to explore that location of the person having these perceptions of some kind of reality. — Andrew4Handel

The observer is the human animal who's observing and physically distinct from the observed object, as I said. What the observer is not, is a mysterious inner entity having experience as something metaphysically distinct from reality.

So I think the significance of the 'synthetic a priori' is that it provides a kind of deductive certainty with respect to some actual state of affairs - so it applies to the empirical domain, rather than for example the domain of pure mathematics. — Wayfarer

Yes, but we're never at any point departing from a distinction between possibility (or in Kant's terms possible experience) and actuality. The apriori is simply the delineation of possible ways of being, possible existents, possible laws, etc., that's why it's not actually knowledge, even though it's cast in terms of what look like existential statements (it's the dictionary, not the encyclopedia). The actuality is what is found, discovered in experience aposteriori; experienced reality either conforms to the posited, punted, projected model or not (and if it does, it goes in the encyclopedia, not the dictionary).

Again, just think about a dictionary entry, and about all those puzzles about the existential status of things like characters in stories, etc. Unicorns are what's called "logically possible," but so far as we know no such thing exists. Yet we can talk about them in stories. What is the "thing" we're talking about? We're not talking about a thing, but just a possible thing. Likewise, a mathematical model per se is just a bunch of lego pieces that fit together; and it remains so even when it's interpreted. But the interpretation just means we've found something in reality that has that particular lego-fitting quality, that particular logic.

Perhaps we could put it this way: apriori and aposteriori are modes of discourse that can even use exactly the same words, but in the former case, we're not making an existential commitment, we're only tracing the outline of the possibility, its internal logic; whereas in the latter case we are making the existential commitment, we are saying that the world is in fact the way we were only positing as a possibility when we were in apriori mode.

But that's why the distinction analytic/synthetic, as it intersects with the apriori/aposteriori distinction, is a movable and somewhat arbitrary line that simply depends on depth of acquaintance. (As above, to someone deeply familiar with a topic, everything is analytic, because everything about the topic has been found to be interconnected in reality.)

A priori knowledge seems to be most clearly present in the conceptual models we create (math, logic) but it's debatable whether this form of implication by necessity of rules and definitions counts as real knowledge.

A posteriori knowledge seems not so clearly delineated as all knowledge requires mapping of concepts onto the world external and finding relations between them.

Also there seems to be some form of deep connection between our conceptual models, especially math, and the real world outside. Does this count for anything? — TheMadFool

As above, if we find that reality works in the way our mathematical model projected, then reality has that logical structure, we're not fooling ourselves.

It was a great mistake of modern philosophy (although it was probably necessary as a phase) to divorce logic from being fundamentally about reality, and making it only about the way the lego pieces of our language and models logically click together in vacuo. While we are still concerning ourselves with models of possible things (i.e. before we're making the existential commitment that we've found something in reality that conforms to the model), and so long as we're in the mode of conceiving the models as just possible ways reality could be, and we're just playing around with them in the abstract, then yes, all we're doing is shuffling symbols around in coherent ways according to a self-chosen game; but once something has been found in experience that conforms to the model, then it's reality itself that has that logical structure, and it just so happens that the "rules" or "laws" of how reality fits together is the same as the rules and laws of our self-chosen game.

The mere fact that our game was a game, that the rules of the game were invented from our side, never at any point meant that reality itself couldn't just happen to have those same rules. (I think this is the massive howler at the root of subjectivism and relativism.)

which are not themselves strictly entailed in their postulates — Wayfarer

But isn't mathematics paradigmatically a practice that draws out what's implicit in postulates? It's just that what's implicit in physics models often isn't obvious.

One way I sometimes think about the difference between apriori and aposteriori is to think about the difference between the dictionary and the encyclopedia. The nouns in the dictionary are words that represent concepts, ideas of possible things; the encyclopedia tells you that the possible thing exists, and how it exists, gives you more information about them.

For exampe, a dictionary definition of "tiger" - "a very large solitary cat with a yellow-brown coat striped with black, native to the forests of Asia but becoming increasingly rare."

Encyclopedia entry for tiger: https://www.encyclopedia.com/plants-and-animals/animals/vertebrate-zoology/tiger (a whole bunch of detailed info about tigers, that includes what the dictionary says, but expands on it tremendously).

Now when a biologist hears the word "tiger," what comes to their mind will be something more like the encyclopedia entry, they'll have a fairly complex, detailed sense of what a tiger is. If they were responsible for writing the dictionary entry, they might fill it out just as fully as the encyclopedia entry (and then someone would tell them KISS :) )

IOW, for the biologist, everything about the tiger as they understand it is "analytic." For the layman, the encyclopedia entry is "synthetic", because it goes beyond the mere initial identificatory concept that's in the dictionary.

It's the same, at a much higher level, for a physicist and their model of reality, except there's a lot more room for error there, because the properties being thought of are recondite, not normally experienced, and the kind of testing required to check whether the model or concept actually represents something in reality (equivalently: whether such a thing as a tiger exists) is much more complex and requires particular apparatus, etc.

The physicist's model of reality is more like the full idea of a tiger that the biologist has, but it's as if the biologist were to play around at a theoretical level with the fuller kind of dictionary entry for "tiger" that he (the biologist) would make.

Talk to people at the level they themselves talk. People vary in intelligence, but if you are yourself intelligent, you should be intelligent enough to talk to people at their level - if communication is your aim.

A coin can appear different from different angles but these are not part of the nature of the coin. — Andrew4Handel

This is our fundamental disagreement. They are very much part of the nature of the coin, in the sense that they are ways the coin exists under those conditions. IOW, the interposition of our body and brain at just that point in space and time affords the object an opportunity to exist in a way that it otherwise couldn't have.

It's all about existence, there's nothing at our end that "has" a "representation," objects are not causes of a doubled-up "inner" world; there's just solid, standing existence of a particular type, that couldn't exist without both us (the physical us) and the object, in just those positions.

It's the same with dreams, images, etc. - they're just jumbled, time-delayed perceptions. Or from a physical point of view, one might say they're re-circulating reverberations or echos of the perturbations in one's substance that the real objects produced; the re-stimulated our-half of a split boiled egg, with the fractal break having the precise "negative" contours of the of the other half of the egg.

I very much like your phrase "an unconscious object has no perspective," but to me that's a neat encapsulation of a false view :) The "unconscious object" has all sorts of perspectives with all the things it's interacting with other than us, when we're not interacting with it; and the sum total of those, plus those forms of existence it has when it is interacting with us, is the sum total of its existence.

What about 'synthetic a priori' statements? I think they're central to science. — Wayfarer

Yikes, this is really difficult! :) I don't agree with the a-s dichotomy. All truths are analytic, it just depends on how well acquainted we are with the things subsumed by the concept. For example, "Man" refers to all the men that are or ever will be, all the things we know about man, and also, implicitly, to all the things we don't yet know. (Concepts are so to speak algebraic, they allow for new discoveries.)

Now, until a discovery is confirmed, it has the logical status of being a necessary component of a template or a possible model - it's a projection, or a punt, as to how things are (i.e. it's apriori, not yet a discovery in and of itself, but a self-consistent projection of possibility). Within the model, the new feature is analytic, a logically necessary and explanatory aspect of the object; but even once it's confirmed, it's still analytic, because we're now accepting a new model - it's the total new model that's confirmed, not just the new feature as a dangling addition.

IOW, what makes a discovery of a new thing a discovery, is that it's the confirmation of a priorly projected self-consistent (but new) model that necessarily includes that new feature; the discovery is not a new predicate that's arbitrarily or contingently glued on to a previously established necessary truth.

Whew! Hope that makes some sense, it's horrifically abstract.

Great stuff, thanks. I really must get into Heidegger, I've been reading more and more odds and ends that make me think it's about time I made a deep dive. :)

objective means being independent of the perceptions — Andrew4Handel

It's not that I don't understand that idea, it's that I think it's incoherent, and that I understand objectivity to be simply scientific objectivity (sticking to the facts, freedom from biases, value-free). IOW, I think objectivity in that "independent of perception" sense was a way of trying to encapsulate a metaphysical distinction that was at one time thought to be the cause of the necessity for the practice of objectivity - but it isn't.

I don't think anything can be proven to be independent of the perception and the senses, because we are only aware of things through perception and the senses. — Andrew4Handel

And we can be objective or not about that - whereas if you're talking about something that can't be proven to be "independent of perception and the senses" then what are you talking about?

The objective is "independent of perception" in an unproblematic way - its existence is independent of the act (any given act) of perception. But that doesn't mean it can't be perceived, or is metaphysically independent of perception as a process.

Another examples is if I mistake bush for a cow in the darkness. The seeming like a cow must be happening in my mind. — Andrew4Handel

No, that's just how the bush looks under those conditions. The phenomenon that's objectively happening is that there's a causal chain from the bush to your brain, that includes both the bush and your brain, that results in the bush "looking like a cow" under those conditions. That doesn't need to happen "in" something, or "in" some kind of mysterious subjective realm.

To put it another way, the bush presents as a cow under those conditions. Your unique physiology and brain state at that moment (your "subjectivity" in that sense) certainly have something to do with it, but so does the bush itself, the ambient light, etc. The total phenomenon under consideration is not something that's just occurring in your brain, or in a subjective "mind," it's a total phenomenon that's spread out in space and time, part of which is external to your body. (What I'm touting is a kind of Externalism, btw.)

That's an excellent exposition, but on reading it, it occurred to me - wasn't that covered, and answered in advance by Kant, when he put the CI as, "Treat people not as means ONLY but ALSO as ends in themselves?"

IOW, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with instrumental rationality; the problems come when instrumental rationality becomes the only way of relating to the world, and squeezes out the more embedded, related, particularized way of living in the world.

I think that the "a priori" moves from language to reality, about stating the possibility of a fact; and the "a posterior" moves from reality to language. — Belter

I think that's sort of right, but I'm not sure what "moves from" means, and I'm not sure that "language" is the right term - "from concepts to reality" would be better. Language is a social habit pattern that we partake in, concepts are linguistic structures (I suppose that's what you might mean?)

I think it's simplest just to understand the apriori as "possible ways the world could be", IOW we dream up, think up, possibilities and then we test them. The possibilities have their own logic, but they're not really knowledge as such (that's the mistake). All knowledge is aposteriori only (IOW we've found that one of the possibilities we've dreamed up is - so far as we can tell - the way the world actually is).

That's the great philosophical confusion, and the real philosophical puzzle and it's really hard to fix in the mind: that the apriori looks like knowledge, but actually is just the description of a model or template that might represent the world or might not (and in ordinary language use, it's tried and tested models that are fairly settled).

The point is that the bent stick is not in the external "objective world" — Andrew4Handel

Who ever thought it was? "Bent" is just the way a stick in water appears. And we all know it, it's not in the least mysterious or "subjective."

Same for other visual illusions, they're just cute anomalies - the only importance they have is that they show that there might have been occasions (especially in our tiger-avoiding past) when glitches like that mattered, and there might be occasions like that now. But any contemporary illusion that we're subject to would still have to be capable of being demonstrated via perception itself.

You can't extrapolate from illusions to the idea that all perception is subjective, because if you accept that there are such things as illusions, then you must accept that some perceptions are objective (specifically, the ones that tell you the previous perception was an illusion).

Just because people can agree on some subjective states does not make them less subjective. — Andrew4Handel

But the fact that they are illusions doesn't mean they aren't objective states.

The distinction between appearance and reality is not a distinction between subjective and objective, both appearance and reality are phases of a process of perception, part of the continuum of objective experience. Subjectivity is just a practical matter of lack of access, not the result of an in-principle barrier.

I am not saying different subjective experiences cannot be accounted for by differing brain patterns but that there is an experiencer being subject to experiences that he/she is reporting. — Andrew4Handel

Yes, and the experiencer is the reporting human animal, not a mysterious ghost trapped inside, and animating, an inert fleshy hulk, or associated with it in some mysterious way.

Really, all the vaunted distinction means, is that I am physically not you, and you are physically not me - the perturbations my being undergoes when looking at a tree are not the same as the perturbations your being undergoes when looking at a tree. Big whoop. That doesn't stop us from both perceiving the same tree.

Racism is a mixture of two things: a high level of the psychological trait of "disgust", and a confusion between averages and stereotypes.

Disgust was actually quite important in the archaic past (people who look too different from one's own people bring different diseases that one's own tribe won't have the immunity to cope with), but it's less meaningful now with modern medicine, so in a sense it's a trait that for politeness' sake we ought to control (like other impulses that are out of place in a modern open society full of relative strangers, like being quick to anger).

The other problem was well illustrated in a diagram in James Damore's famous essay. Different racial/ethnic groups have different groupings of traits, and different averages with regard to given traits. A stereotype takes the average as representative of the race or ethnic group. As a quick and dirty guide, it's not inherently problematic, and in the past, stereotypes were treated more or less light-heartedly. In essence, a stereotype is a blend of statistical categorization and categorical categorization.

If you combine these two factors (high psychological disgust and stereotyping), that's when you get racism proper (I don't mean the modern Left's thing of calling anyone to the Right of Mao a "racist", that's just pure garbage and is bringing the Left into disrepute, and is of course, ironically, itself an example of stereotyping). When you have a person high in disgust who's also stereotyping and doesn't understand that a stereotype is just an average, then they tend to literally pre-judge everyone from the stereotyped group as if they're necessarily going to fit the stereotype.

Whereas the classical liberal position is to take cognizance of stereotypes and averages, certainly (they are important for public policy and for personal behaviour in relation to groups), but to await an individual's manifest behaviour before judging them as an individual. (IOW they may fit the stereotype or they may not, you have to wait and see.)

The stick is not bent in the water the Muller-Lyer lines are not unequal length but they appear that way to someone. — Andrew4Handel

They appear that way to everyone, and everyone also knows that the stick isn't bent and that the Muller-Lyer lines are not of unequal length. So how can illusions demonstrate that consciousness is subjective?

Then there is the privacy or memory and pain. I have a lot of information only immediately accessible to me that I can choose to share via language and pain is not something we can share, it is our own and only our pain reactions are publicly observable. — Andrew4Handel

Privacy is only a relative matter. We're not far off being able to read thoughts by observing the brain (in fact I vaguely recall that it was recently done by a research team at a very crude level, as part of research into brain/computer interfacing); though it may not be possible practically (the processes involved may be too mathematically chaotic), that line of progress could in principle lead to being able to record and play back others' thoughts and experiences. But even without that, the experience of being able to "read" someone emotionally just by subtle but overt signs (e.g. flushing, slight twitches) is quite common. There's a continuum - the nervous system, the musculo-skeletal system - between the stuff chungling around in the darkness of the skull-case and the observable activity of the body.

Musical tastes differ as people have different reactions to and experiences of the same piece of music. — Andrew4Handel

Musical tastes cluster, and there is quite a lot of statistically-observable agreement on what's good and bad musically, both synchronically and diachronically. Taste has an element of subjectivity, certainly, but it is not completely subjective across the board. But anyway, that's really a different sense of "subjectivity" from the one we're concerned with here, I think.

How can you mispercieve the external world if you are are just having a brute direct experience of it. — Andrew4Handel

Because while experience is direct, perception involves categorization (partly automatic, worked out below the level of consciousness, partly conscious and deliberate), which can go wrong.

IOW "appearing bent even though not bent" is the direct experience, that's just how sticks in water directly turn up in experience. Consistently and for everybody.

None of any of this kind of thing means that we should believe that what we truly are is a mysterious somewhat looking out at the world from behind the eyes, trapped inside the body, that is the true bearer of consciousness. It's all perfectly consistent with the bearer of consciousness being simply the publicly-observable human animal.

There's a slight onomatopoeic irony here though: the illusion of the "inner self" may itself be an illusion of the standard kind (i.e. an illusion the publicly-observable human animal standardly has)! :)

Is there such a big difference in being confused and in having ignorance of the truth? — Marcus de Brun

I think so, confusion is a conceptual matter, ignorance is an empirical matter.

If we define therapy as a process of relieving pain, and if we describe 'awareness of ones own ignorance' as being somewhat 'painful' : Philosophy as a means of understanding the self and ones place in the Universe.... is the ultimate if not the only therapy. — Marcus de Brun

Oh I see what you mean now. That's definitely not the sense in which Wittgenstein thought philosophy was therapeutic. He didn't think philosophy was painful because the pain is a result of ignorance, he thought it was painful because we're confused by philosophical questions.

IOW, the therapeutic aspect for him was the resolution of confusion, not an accession of new knowledge that negates ignorance.

Of course Philosophy is 'therapeutic' .....if it was not, then no one would bother with it. It is only non- therapeutic in a Deterministic Universe. — Marcus de Brun

Sorry, I'm not seeing the connection here.

A sound philosophy particularly a sound moral philosophy is entirely predicated upon a proper understanding of the instincts and I think this is what Wittgenstein was ultimately driving at. — Marcus de Brun

I think they're related, but "predicated" is far too strong, IMHO.

It's really a bit deeper than that. The apriori is the deep underlying rules of the "grammar" of language and thought. Apriori statements look like they're saying something empirical (like they're a discovery about the world), but actually they aren't.

For example "a thing can't be red and green all over" looks like it's saying something empirical about the world, as if it's a fact - and then it seems really weird that something we think up in our heads can reach out from our minds and limit what's possible in the world out there (a discovery that's also a prescription, which seems contradictory). But actually all the statement is doing is tracing a finger around the way those concepts are used, reminding us of the basic stipulative rules of those concepts. What it's really saying is something more like, "If we find two surface properties that a thing has simultaneously, then they sure as hell ain't colours." Or perhaps, "Here's a possible property of things in the world, let's call it "colour"; one property of colour is that a thing can't have two colours at the same time."

The aposteriori, on the other hand, is existential statements (such-and-such is the case, exists, etc., or not).

The mind works, as vast swathes of Nature work (e.g. evolution, the immune system), by means of generate-and-test. We dream up possible-ways-the-world-could-be, and then we test the world to see which of those ways it actually is. The apriori is the "template" so to speak, the possible-way-the-world-could-be that we're considering, or the shape of the holes in the net we're casting over the world. We don't yet know whether the world is that way (and because of fallibility we may never be absolutely certain, no matter how much we test), but if it is that way, then it necessarily is that way.

(A further, Kantian refinement might be that it's not actually possible-ways-the-world-is that we're testing for, but possible experiences. But it's a moot point whether that really makes any difference, it depends on what earlier premises you accept, e.g. re. perception and reality, etc.)

It is not about fault of whom, it is about making the distribution of well-being (closer to being) being objective. — Atheer

But it's objective only according to your preferred pretty pattern. There's no intrinsic reason, in nature, to prefer equal distribution. So what if peoples' lot is different, provided we ensure a lower "floor" below which no one need fall? Looking at it from my own point of view, it doesn't matter to me in the least that some have more than me, what matters is that I have what is due to me. That is objective justice. Suum cuique tribuere.

The problem with your position is that you take a synoptic stance that you have no right to, you pompously (so to speak) arrogate to yourself the position of judge over all humanity and its doings. That is not justice either, it's tyranny, and it's just as objectionable that you enforce your equal distribution, as it would be for some greedy pig of a tyrant to gather 90% of goods to himself and 10% to the rest of the population. It's just another imposed distribution that rides roughshod over peoples' voluntary mutual accommodation, which is really the objective thing that has to be guarded.

Of what ideology? The USSR and Communist China were state capitalist. None of their economic or social ends were communist ( as Marx described it), nor were they by anyone's definitions. — yatagarasu

Look into "War Communism." Upon accession to power, the Communists immediately put into practice the full Communist manifesto, more or less by the book, including an attempt to implement a moneyless economy, using something like labour tokens (IIRC). They did this because they were high on their own supply and sincerely believed the new system would be immensely more successful than capitalism, and give them the wherewithal to fight the war. But of course it was a total disaster, and something called the "New Economic Policy" had to be put into place, which was the seed of what later came to be called "State Capitalism." IOW "State Capitalism" was the practically necessary climb-down from unworkable full Communism - and of course it was shit too, because it was a centrally planned economy, and central planners cannot plan centrally (note: economies of scale have diminishing returns beyond a certain point, partly for the same reason that Communism is unworkable - businesses found that out too in the course of the 20th century).

It would also most likely be in a world with huge amounts of surplus for all. — yatagarasu

This is another Communist illusion: that scarcity is caused by capitalism. Capitalism is actually just the best coping mechanism we have for a scarcity that falls out of the limited nature of the means of production in relation to clashing, and continually expanding human wants and needs. You can't magic a surplus into existence.

The AI idea is sort of workable, and I can definitely see it being tried in the future with some dedicated space colonies. Iain M. Banks, a Commie himself, showed something like such a system in his s-f novels. But he still underestimated the task: the AI would very definitely need a feed from every individual's experience to match the local and tacit knowledge that every individual who faces prices in the market brings to the massively parallel computation of the economy under capitalism, so bang goes any concept of privacy. And that would only just match the present performance of capitalism (And of course at that point, the AI might as well simply teleoperate the humans anyway, or do away with them altogether, replace them with robotics and treat the economy as a "paperclip maximizing" exercise.)

But yeah, the AI idea (short of the intrusive feed) would be workable on condition that the society was resigned to still having a massive amount of economic inefficiency and waste compared to capitalism - it would be a poorer society, but if the people were ok with the trade-off, it might be quite attractive for those who prefer a simpler way of living.

Nothing, you'd have to genetically re-engineer people to work as drones.

There's nothing special about money, it's just a medium of exchange that facilitates division of labour, capitalization, etc., the point is that human beings have always in general (with notable exceptions like parents of children, very close friends, etc.) acted reciprocally (you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours). If that reciprocity, that exchange of one thing or deed for another isn't there, people won't do stuff.

Connected with this is the point that human beings do things with the expectation of improvement in some way - improvement in their personal lot, in their surroundings, their comfort, their entertainment, etc., etc. This is the real meaning of "profit" in the generalized economic sense. That doesn't mean that there was a cigar-chomping capitalist pig in every caveman, it just means that if we don't expect something to get better from our actions, we won't act, and in the context of reciprocity, that means we give up something (an action, an object) in the expectation of getting an action or object in return that makes our situation better than it was when we did the action or object that we gave up.

The only way Communism would work is with an AI that has a direct feed from everyone's consciousness (so it's aware of what individuals who would otherwise use prices to guide their making/doing decisions would be aware of) that's advanced enough to "solve" an economy continuously. Under those circumstances, if you could trust that your doing stuff will be rewarded by the fact of others doing stuff meshing in such a way that everyone gets what they want, when they want it, then and only then would Communism work. It's possible, but we're a long way off.

In general, one might say that Communism was a vague vision of a better, more rationally organized way of doing things, but the Commies underestimated the complexity of what would have to be done even to match a capitalist economy, far less surpass it (which was Communism's early promise to its dupes) by several orders of magnitude.

It is to say the least unfortunate that so many millions had to die to demonstrate the pants-on-head-retarded fatuousness of the ideology.

If consciousness is just "in the brain" how do you come to be the subject of that brains experiences? — Andrew4Handel

That's the trick though, consciousness isn't just "in the brain." The brain is at the end of a whole bunch of impinging causal chains, consciousness is all those causal chains, or rather, to be more precise, it's those causal chains plus the brain's internal processing (what it does with the impinging data).

The scam, the trick we all fall for, is thinking that we are a conscious thing trapped inside our body peeping out at the world from somewhere behind the eyes. It seems like this inexplicable nonesuch is the bearer of consciousness, the thing-that-is-conscious.

This is all illusory - as people who do meditation and other forms of practice that induce what's called a "non-dual" vision discover. There is no thing inside us that's conscious, there is no hidden subject (over and above, or "inside" the identifiable rational animal) that's the bearer or haver of consciousness; in reality, just plain existence is the same as consciousness; IOW the existence of a perceived tree, its actual existence, is the very "stuff" of consciousness, it's not that the tree has some sort of doubled representation inside a supposedly conscious ghost in the machine (think of the Magritte painting of the view outside the window).

The bit to get one's head around is that the way the tree exists for us is like a special gift it has just for us, the way it meshes with us causally in that moment, at that place, is a unique way it has of existing when causally interacting with our particular structure. Its manner of appearing with just that shade, that colour, that texture, is a manner of existing that it can only manifest at just that time and place, in interaction with us. Our presence affords it an opportunity to show a side of itself that never existed until that moment. (Rainbows are a good example to think about in this context.)

And when you extend the non-dual vision to its fullest, consciousness becomes really an impersonal, cosmic process that's merely anchored at one end in a limited, physical entity. One's thoughts are cosmic events quite on a par with a flight of geese across the sky, and all that jazz.

A quick and dirty way of thinking about it is to imagine a ball that extrudes eyestalks. The consciousness of the eyestalks is the ball's consciousness refracted in different locations. Every consciousness is God's consciousness, enjoying (and sometimes not enjoying, but still registering) a tiny portion of His infinite possibilities. (Or you can not use the God concept and cast it in a pantheistic, or Spinozistic, or panentheistic way - or even a purely materialistic way, as matter/energy - it doesn't actually matter, these are all just chew toys for the mind.)

I think you're looking at it in a weird way, nature is potential, your genetics is your potential, but that doesn't mean your nature is "determined" by genetics, it just means there's an area you can wander freely around in but it does have limits - like a tether.

For example, at a physical level there are limits like: you can't fly unaided, some things will kill you if you eat them, etc., a male can't make babies and a female can't impregnate a female so she can make babies; but you have a vast range of options within such boundaries where your choice reigns.

At a mental and moral level: you might have limits on your ability to do maths, to play a musical instrument, attract a top drawer mate, earn zillions of dollars, etc., but you still have a vast range of options within such boundaries where your choice reigns.

That said, yes, the only way to break those boundaries would be genetic engineering - but of course that's a pandora's box in two ways:

1) taking the aleatory element away from breeding might specialize us too much (IOW, the good thing about the random element is that the species thereby has more possible keys for hitherto-unforeseen environmental locks, if we design ourselves, our designed selves will be in a narrow range, the "spread" won't be wide enough to catch the unforeseen in the future).

2) Handing the design of our genetics over to computers for optimization would result in humans eventually becoming puppets of AI (IOW, the AI would incrementally design us more and more for its own ends, even if it started off designing us to our specifications).

Forget the theism/atheism debate here. I ask everyone, theists and atheists: does the concept of a being from before time creating everything make sense? If so, why? If not, why? — Starthrower

Yes, there's nothing apriori to suggest that all forms of being are necessarily time-and-space bound, and we already have examples of possible things that might not be (like numbers, qualia, etc.)

IOW, we usually construe "existence" as necessarily tied up with time and space - as taking up both. In fact we can't even conceive of a form of existence outside those conditions. But that doesn't mean there's no such thing. It's logically possible that time-and-space-bound existence is just one form of existence and that other forms have different parameters.

One way of looking at it is this: time and space are tied up with things existing together, being relative to each other, comparable to each other. IOW, time and space seem to be intimately connected to a world of duality, a world with separate things, that define their existence relative to each other. It may be the case though, that something that's truly alone, that has no other with which to compare it to, is outside of being compared with other things in time and space in that sense. There are also arguments for why this "thing" would have to be single, simple, etc. (i.e. if there is such a thing, then it automatically shoots up to the ranks of being God).

The long and the short of it is that we don't really know, and arguments can be made for both sides, and both points of view make sense in their own way.