Yes, I understand that, but what is is about brains that makes them conscious? There must be something about brains that makes them necessary and sufficient conditions for consciousness. What makes brains so special? — RogueAI

Three things I think necessary for any information processing:

1 Nodes that perform some mathematical/logical function on inputs and produce an output.
2 Channelled transmission of outputs to the inputs of other nodes.
3 Amplification of signals.

Here is an example, see if you can recognize those three elements:



Then consider the neural networks in brains and the relative lack of neural networks in hearts.

Night all. It's been fun. :grin:

Here's the problem, because that looks like simple causation to me. — Banno

If it wasn't cases of complex causation that we are discussing, we wouldn't bother discussing supervenience and emergence. So I don't see the relevance of the word "simple" in your statement.

So if we drop the "simple", you are saying the problem is that it looks like causation?

I'm not seeing how the way it looks to you is supposed to be a problem for physicalism.

It's in framing what emergence is in a way that meshes with the overall ontology (which would generally be physicalism since the overwhelming amount of work on emergence is in that context). — Count Timothy von Icarus

How many words do you think it should take, to explain "what emergence is" for all cases of emergent properties? Are you sure this should be considered a serious question?

I understand what you're saying, but I don't agree with it. The point is, however, that we speak the same language and can convey ideas through text. That is what I say is not meaningfully reducible to the physical. — Wayfarer

Bringing in reducibility is shifting the goal posts, and I understand that you don't agree with it, but can you give me a reason to think that your disagreement is not simply a matter of biased intuitions on your part?

"How do you combine a bunch of building blocks and get something completely new that wasn't in the blocks to start with?" Intuitive answer is you simply don't. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Combine enough blocks and you get a black hole, which wasn't in the blocks to start with.

Note this thread Is 'Information' Physical where this idea was dragged over the coals discussed at length some time ago. — Wayfarer

Argument from authority. So what?

Of course. IN each transition, the physical constituents of the information change and also the underlying media. It's translated between electrical pulses, pixels on the screen, then you might even write it down. But the substance of the information stays the same. So how could that be physical? — Wayfarer

You are assuming the mental content in my mind as I read your post is identical to what? Do you think it was identical to the way you were mentally modelling me interpreting it when you wrote it?

I think what happened is you wrote based on your intuiton as to how I would interpret it. I read the pixel based form of the data and my intuitions generated the interpreted content that occurred for me. It is clearly naive however to assume identical content for both of us associated with the digital data. If such verbatim content transfer occurred, I wouldn't be so frustrated about people here not understanding emergence and supervenience. :rage: :razz:

I don’t believe the substance of this exchange can be explained in physical terms. — Wayfarer

Even if you really really really believe it, it doesn't falsify physicalism.

If I say something that affects you it might increase your blood pressure. Yet nothing physical would have passed between us, unlike if I had administered a medicine. That’s an example. — Wayfarer

I'm awfully confident that you physically used a computer input device to compose your post so that it was physically sent over the intenet to the TPF server. Then when I reopened the thread my Kindle was able to receive the data representing your post, as a result of that data having been physically transmitted from the TPF server to my Kindle.

You being unaware of the sequence of physical events in the causal chain, does not constitute evidence that nothing physical passed between us.

Then there's also the discovery of neuroplasticity. as highlighted in Norman Doidge's book "The Brain That Changes Itself," demonstrates the remarkable ability of the brain to change in response to various kinds of training and stimuli. Neuroplasticity refers to the brain's capacity to reorganize its structure, functions, and connections in response to experiences, learning, and environmental factors. — Wayfarer

Neuroplasticity is not problematic for physicalism.

However,there is also such a thing as top-down causation which mitigates against purely physicalist explanations of consciousness. This concept becomes evident in phenomena like the placebo effect and other instances of psychosomatic medicine. — Wayfarer

There certainly is the term "top-down causation". However simply assuming top-down causation occurs is begging the question against physicalism. Now if you can provide some empirical evidence demonstrating that top down causation occurs then you could falsify physicalism. However simply asserting that top-down causation occurs isn't good enough.

Do you have incontrovertible empirical evidence of top-down causation?

3.5

User
what is the best way to explain emergence and supervenience to philosopher

ChatGPT
To explain emergence and supervenience to a philosopher, you can describe emergence as the phenomenon where complex systems exhibit properties or behaviors that cannot be straightforwardly deduced from the properties of their individual components. Supervenience, on the other hand, is the idea that higher-level properties are dependent on, or supervene upon, lower-level properties.

For example, consider the mind-brain relationship. Emergence suggests that mental phenomena, like consciousness, arise from the complexity of neural networks in the brain, but you can't predict consciousness just by examining individual neurons. Supervenience, in this context, emphasizes that mental states depend on the underlying neural states.

In essence, emergence highlights the unpredictability of higher-level phenomena, while supervenience emphasizes the dependency of these phenomena on their underlying components.

But can anyone set out clearly what emergence is? — Banno

Maybe Christoffer can articulate it in a way that I can't see how to at the moment, but I can point to examples. For instance, suppose I have designed a voltmeter. When an instance of such a voltmeter is powered, it has the emergent property of displaying a number corresponding to the voltage applied to the input terminals. That emergent property supervenes on the particular properties of components within that specific instance of the voltmeter design.

Another instance of the same voltmeter design might have a different emergent property due to having different specific components. For example, voltmeter A may be more accurate than voltmeter B. Because the emergent accuracy of voltmeter B supervenes on B's components, changing the emergent accuracy of voltmeter B would require a change in one or more of the specific components of B that the emergent property supervenes on.

It seems to me that the changing of paradigms could, at least in practice, if not sociological theory, be mapped onto falsification. — Janus

:up:

That's not good enough. Do you really think you can convince a bunch of authoritarians with this kind of liberal relativism?? — baker

Not in the short term. But with a longer term perspective, and via ongoing discussion I have had success pointing others to what a better informed perspective looks like.

Are you saying that you lack such experiences yourself?

The US populace badly needs education on the nature of narcissism.
— wonderer1
No, they "need" education on the authority and validity of psychology. — baker

Sure, better education in psychology in general would be good. But the authority? No.

Psychology should be seen as a bunch of what people at times found to be the inferences to the best explanation. However given the broader scientific perspective, it needs to be understood that psychology needs to be taken with a grain of salt. It's just the best we have for now.

Some things that give me, as a physicalist, a spiritual experience:



For me, best when listened to with closed eyes:

I'm familiar with that 'koan'. In reality Zen/Ch'an is highly regimented and disciplined and is generally conducted in an atmosphere of strict routine and observance of rules and hierarchy. Have a read of Harold Stewart's take on Westerner's interactions with Japanese Zen. (Stewart was an Australian poet and orientalist who lived the last half of his life in Kyoto.)

Acolytes are expected to develop indifference to the discomforts of heat and cold on a most frugal vegetarian diet and to abstain from self-indulgence in sleep and sex, intoxicating drinks and addictive drugs. Altogether Zen demands an ability to participate in a communal life as regimented and lacking in privacy as the army. — Wayfarer

This doesn't give me the impression that you really thought about that quote I posted. What does what you posted have to do, with Zen having rudimentary technology for dealing with human intuitions?

Have any thoughts on what that quote itself said?

"Consciousness" is as undefined as a physical object as an "ecosystem". And in similar fashion both systems produce problems for us to define their behavior by just studying its parts. Just like consciousness we have problems explaining the behavior of the whole of an ecosystem by trying to draw lines from its parts. It's like something "clicks into place", a cutoff point in which new behaviors emerge. It's this abstraction that produce a problem for scientists to just explain consciousness by the neurological parts alone. The interactions between all systems and individual neurons increase so quickly in mathematical complexity that we lose our computational capability to verify any meaningful causal links other than trivial ones that formed our knowledge of how different parts in the brain are linked to basic and trivial functions of our consciousness. But the holistic entity that is our consciousness shows functions that we don't understand by these trivial links we experiment with. And they disappear as through a cutoff point when we remove more and more interactions and interplays between functions in the brain, as I defined when writing about the near-death waking up-experiences. — Christoffer

:100: :up: to your whole post...

...and this paragraph especially is brilliantly said.

:100:

The US populace badly needs education on the nature of narcissism. What amazes me is how anyone who had worked in the White House for more than a month, didn't recognize Trump as a dangerous narcissist.

Yet, in favor of the point I intended to initially make regarding some form of idealism, we nevertheless require that physicality in total be intelligible via laws of thought in order to infer that laws of thought in any way develop from physicality. — javra

What sort of thing is this requirement, that physicality in total be intelligible via laws of thought?

An understanding of biological evolution gives reason to recognize that we wouldn't be here without some regularities to events in the universe. So from such a perspective it is fairly unsurprising that a combination of biological and cultural evolution resulted in truth conveying human language use having regularities which have a correspondence with regularities to events in the universe.

However what mandates a "total" intelligibility?

Furthermore, why think laws of thought are even sufficient to reach a total intelligibility? Suppose instead of laws of thought we consider digital computation? Digital computation is only up to the task, of simulating things to some level of complexity. Is there reason to think application of the laws of thought can do, what digital computation cannot?

Question: In what way can the basic laws of thought either rationally or empirically be evidenced to not in and of themselves be basic laws of nature writ large—such that that which is logically impossible is then deemed to be part and parcel of physical reality? — javra

Suppose we question taking as axiomatic that there are laws of thought?

Might there be no such things as laws of thought, and what we conceptualize as laws of thought are actually incorrigible intuitions about how language tends to relate to reality? Intuitions arising from pattern recognition applied to observation of the way language is used and relates to regularities in reality. Intutions that began developing in our minds at an age too young for us to even remember.

Is there a way we could distinguish between laws of thought being laws of nature, and 'laws of thought' being incorrigible intuitions related to language and regularities in nature, that have developed in us from a young age?

But I don't understand when an atheist say I don't believe in "God". Because it already presupposes there is only one singular definition to which they refer. Their own one. — Benj96

Do you see that you are presupposing that the atheist in this scenario is bringing his own concept of God to the discussion?

Conversations can be ongoing and allow for the concept of God under discussion to be fleshed out. At the same time in an ongoing conversation, I as someone who calls himself an atheist, can clarify nuances of my perspective. If I am in a discussion with a theist, the concept of God that makes sense to talk about is the concept of that particular theist. I'm well aware that the concepts of God that theists hold are all over the place.

I posted a reply in your thread, but I didn't think to tag anyone, so...

A thought problem along similar lines (or curves):

Those words staved me off the path of searching for a teacher. A path in which I’d assign my “enlightenment” to someone else and only through them would I become “free.” This is a path we all, at one point or another, can easily find ourselves caught up in. As the psychotherapist and author Sheldon Kopp once said, “If you have a hero, look again: you have diminished yourself in some way.” Kopp goes on to say, “The most important things that each man must learn, no one else can teach him. Once he accepts this disappointment, he will be able to stop depending on the therapist, the guru who turns out to be just another struggling human being.”

Rather than seeking a teacher to show me the way, I needed to become the way myself, through my own practice, through deep contemplation, through Shikantaza.

Idolizing a teacher is one side of the dilemma. The other lies in the teachings themself. Over the life of our spiritual practice, there may be times when we begin to conceptualize the nonconceptual. We begin to “know” rather than remain open to. When we cling strongly to what we have learned, it becomes easy for us to be convinced that we get it, and in fear of losing it, we begin to hold tightly to it. This fixation ends up becoming a crutch towards our growth. The teacher and teachings are both useful and to some degree, necessary, so they should be utilized, but both also must, ultimately, be allowed to drop away. For one to truly grow in spiritual practice we must let go. Let go of all concepts and remain in an attitude of openness, eagerness, and without preconceptions. A state known, among Zen practitioners, as “beginner’s mind.”

https://www.lionsroar.com/if-you-meet-the-buddha-on-the-road-kill-him/

You tell me how so. :grin:

They’re known as saṃskara or sankhara in Indian disciplines: — Wayfarer

Direct insight into saṃskara is obtainable through insight meditation (vipasyana) and other meditative disciplines. No brain scanner required! — Wayfarer

I recognize that around the world, and through much of recorded history, people have had a degree of insight into this aspect of how our minds work, but rather "through a glass darkly" I think, by comparison with having a practical understanding of the nature of Hebbian learning in neural networks.

I see Zen as containing the rudiments of an intuition readjustment 'technology', with the Zen master engaging in "direct transmission" that results in students experiencing a breakdown of their old intuitions and replacement of discarded intuitions with new more robust intuitions. In some cases it involves a sudden dramatic epiphany - satori.

Of course Zen too is seeing "through a glass darkly" but it gave us, "If you see the Buddha on the road kill him.", which is a plus.

But is the exercise really meaningful if it doesn't reveal some new, third type of analysis? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I know next to nothing about Hegel, so I don't have any thoughts about the sort of third type of analysis you are speculating about.

I do think there is are important things that we can do to improve the results of our thinking, based on understanding the neurological processes our thinking arises from. One thing of relevance is the deeply subconscious basis for our intuitions, and the fact that those aren't something that we can turn around overnight. Taking the long view is important.

Of course training our neural nets with a diverse training set is of great value. I.e. getting a well rounded education. But it's pretty clear you've got that covered. :cool:

The velocity of the patch in contact with the ground is zero with respect to the ground, unless you've lost traction.

Although only when looking at things kind of simplistically. Heisenberg's principle applies, whether you are looking close enough to notice or not.

Hence the tectonic shift in modern philosophy toward scepticism and relativism. — Wayfarer

LOL

You are one skeptical dude yourself Wayf. You just haven't developed the knack of turning your skepticism towards your own intuitions.

What's funny is that these is an inverse problem, the "Scandal of Deduction," where you can also show that deduction generates absolutely no new information. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'd say we should take the problems seriously and recognize that our intuition and logic both have weaknesses, but they can be used synergistically. One of the most epistemically valuable things we can use our deductive abilities for is to find flaws in our own intuitions, and in recognizing flaws in our intuitions, become open to new more robust intuitions.

Utilizing that synergy, along with paying attention to nature, seems to me, a key characteristic of scientific thought.

What's the purely deductive argument that secures the premise "documents we possess are a reliable record of past events?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

Why focus on whether there is a purely deductive argument? Logic is at best as good as its inputs, and the inputs to our logic are our intuitive deep learning. It is pattern recognition that has resulted in our recognition of the pattern of documents being reliable records of past events.

:up:

Quote from Hume: — Moliere

Very good quote. Of course Hume didn't have the opportunity to understand this, but the quote suggests at least intuitive recognition on Hume's part, of how deep learning is manifested in human thinking.

It's not that everything is reducible to some amorphous and expansive idea of "the physical" but rather that everything is reducible to physics. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This doesn't touch my physicalism, because I don't see everything as reducible to physics. I don't know of any physicalist, who if given the choice, would say that they believe everything reduces to physics, as against everything reduces to the physical. Now I could easily imagine a physicalist saying in a sloppy way that everything reduces to physics, but I would simply intepret that as a figure of speech that is commonly used to refer to the physical (at least in some crowds).

I see us as forces of nature. Something like godawfully complicated tornados that interact with the world they progress through, and most interestingly to social primates like us, interact with their fellow forces of nature in complex ways. I don't know of any good reason to think that consciousness can't be a characteristic of such complex forces of nature.

Personally, I see strong correlations between the way our minds work and the physical structures they supervene on, but that is not something one gets to recognize well, without a fair bit of study. I don't expect others to have the same recognition, because few have studied the diverse relevant fields with an eye towards developing such understanding for the last 37 years. It's not something I claim any particular credit for. It's just the way things turned out in my case.

I think the biggest impediment to accepting physicalism for most is incredulity. I simply don't have the incredulity that many people have. When I was younger I did, so I can understand being incredulous towards physicalism. But it just so happens I've had the weirdass life experience that I have had, resulting in me not sharing that incredulity.

I also recognize that many would find it emotionally challenging to consider physicalism in a charitably credulous way. I can understand that as well. I've had a long time to get emotionally adjusted to this view.

Still argument from incredulity and appeal to consequences are fallacious as bases for rejecting physicalism, so folks might want to take that into consideration.

The question of science re Hume as a whole is sort of interesting, as his attack on induction would seem to cut the legs out from underneath the entire scientific project. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I expect a transition from concern with induction, to greater recognition of pattern recognition as naturally occurring as a matter of our neurology. I.e. a more naturalized epistemology that more accurately capture what really occurs in our thinking than the idea of induction does.

Not that I think this will keep a lot of philosophers from allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good, but I think worrying about induction is barking up the wrong tree. People tying themselves in philosophical knots isn't going to stop scientists from making progress using the cognitive tools we have, so scientifically it's a pseudoproblem.

To me it seems like arguments that god does not exist are weak, and arguments that it does exist are even weaker. — mentos987

:up:

My WNA was a bit of a hoax, where I reworded the Kalam Cosmological Argument as presented by theologian/philosopher William Lane Craig, and presented the very slightly modified argument as an argument for atheism. The originator of that forum thread then proceeded to attack the WNA, using all the same logic he would reject if directed at the KCA.