Your assertion is not very convincing wonderer1. I've read a fair bit of material authored by Richard Feynman, much is available on the net. And, he is very explicit in saying that the flow of current is not in the body of the conducting material, because the electrons are freed from the atoms, and the flow is therefore in the field — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm not sure. Intuitively it might seem so, but this is a domain that is far far away from that where our intuitions were formed. God may or may not ultimately play dice with the universe, how can we say? — hypericin

Obviously it is of more interest than the foot, and people spend a great deal on it, but should that be the case? I’m not so sure. For instance, the question of where the brain ends and the rest of the body begins is in my mind insoluble. The carotid arteries, the spine, the endocrine system—all are intimately connected, and are therefor one thing. Removing the rest of the body from a theory of mind is a huge but fairly common mistake. — NOS4A2

Why then does electrical energy travel through the field around copper wires, instead of traveling through the copper wires, where the electron particles are supposedly located? Or do you think that particles of the wire, the electrons are actually outside the wire?

However, electrical energy does not travel though the wire as sound travels through air but instead always travels in the space outside of the wires. This is because electric energy is composed of electric and magnetic fields which are created by the moving electrons, but which exist in the space surrounding the wires.
— http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=3199 — Metaphysician Undercover

This commonsense notion doesn't happen at the micro scale, so that part is strictly speaking impossible. — hypericin

I think it is fair to say that human beings are more than brains, and that any brain is so interconnected to the rest of the body that to separate one from the other is to end the human being. — NOS4A2

The forum does not work well for manifestos. If you want things to work out, focusing on a relatively narrow subject is usually necessary. — T Clark

This is an excerpt of an interview of Robert Sapolski... — Truth Seeker

1. Intuitions (i.e., intellectual seemings): one ought to take as true what intellectual strikes them as being the case unless sufficient evidence has been prevented that demonstrates the invalidity of it.
— Bob Ross

Obviously your intuitions may be wrong but it also seems to be that I could apply the opposite rule and it wouldn't necessarily have an effect on how well I gather knowledge. — Apustimelogist

That said, arguments about selection on the basis of form, defined broadly as "developing echolocation," or "developing the ability to fly" do seem fairly controversial. At least part of the fear here is that it introduces too much teleology in to biology, making it seem like purposeful development. — Count Timothy von Icarus

In metaphysics, however, logical analysis allows us to produce a formal proof that all other philosophies and philosophical positions are logically absurd, — FrancisRay

My question is, has anyone come across ways this is explored as a fractal process? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Panpsychism has always been a problem for physicalism because it seems to be decidedly not what physicalists want to posit, but at the same time it is in no way ruled out by mainstream physicalism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Partly because no physicalism that precludes panpsychism has been developed that doesn't seem to spawn massive problems for the theorist. — Count Timothy von Icarus

To be honest, it's really weird to me how physicalism is the most popular ontology writ large, but in the context of metaphysics as a specialty it's like a battleship that's taken direct multiple direct torpedo hits, is listing to one side, its magazine blew, and it looks liable to break in half. — Count Timothy von Icarus

...Howell wrote in a 57-page opinion ruling.

“Donning a cloak of victimization may play well on a public stage to certain audiences, but in a court of law, , this performance has served only to subvert the normal process of discovery in a straightforward defamation case, with the concomitant necessity of repeated court intervention."

Physically we are all able to get access to any degree of wisdom, we are all humans. — Angelo Cannata

Actually, if there is strong emergence, it's counterproductive to try to define touch in terms of EM fields, but the question of emergence is an open one. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think the act of pointing has a place in the definition of "slab!", for the initiate. — Moliere

In order to pick out a screwdriver you need to know what it is, and in order to know what it is you need to have an internalized definition of it. That's what a definition is. An understanding or concept of what something is. If you claim to know what something is then you have at least a nominal definition of it, and if you have a definition then you claim to know what it is. — Leontiskos

Well, all I can say is I disagree then. I think the photograph metaphor seems a coherent analogy of the view and that I think it is consistent with someone being a physicalist. — Apustimelogist

Nor can we conclude that there is an real, external, physical world. — Metaphysician Undercover

External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism?
Accept or lean toward: non-skeptical realism 760 / 931 (81.6%)
Other 86 / 931 (9.2%)
Accept or lean toward: skepticism 45 / 931 (4.8%)
Accept or lean toward: idealism 40 / 931 (4.3%)

The sun is in the sky... physical.

The sun is not in the sky... non-physical.

Physical and non-physical are embedded in our mental realities. — Mark Nyquist

It is a mistake for a physicalist to excuse the non-physical. The ones that include it will get it right. — Mark Nyquist

Yes, that does help. Thank you for the clear explanation. — Agree to Disagree

I had read that climate scientists said that a certain amount of global warming was "locked in" even if we stopped emissions today. — Agree to Disagree

Sure, but in that case you are not "trusting AI," which is a central premise of my argument. If we fact-check AI every time it says something then the conundrum will never arise. I don't think we will do that. It would defeat the whole purpose of these technologies. — Leontiskos

Last week, OpenAI announced it had given ChatGPT users the option to turn off their chat history. ChatGPT is a "generative AI", a machine learning algorithm that can understand language and generate written responses. Users can interact with it by asking questions, and the conversations users have with it are in turn stored by OpenAI so they can be used to train its machine learning models. This new control feature allows users to choose which conversations to use to train OpenAI models.

The point is, that to be two beings there must be something which distinguishes them as one different from the other. If what distinguishes them one from the other, is "being in different possible words" then we cannot say that the difference between the two worlds is of negligible relevance, because we've already propositioned that this difference is what distinguishes them one from the other. Since being two distinct things rather than one and the same thing is fundamentally a significant difference, then it's necessarily of very significant relevance. — Metaphysician Undercover

Isn't it contrary to the law of identity to speak of "two" physical occurrences which are in every way alike. If they are in every way alike, they are necessarily one and the same, not "two". So the whole premise of this thought experiment, the assumption of two distinct physical occurrences which are exactly alike, is fundamentally flawed making that thought experiment pointless. — Metaphysician Undercover

Heh. You gotta read along with us! — Moliere

I'm not seeing it. — Banno

And fuck knows what is happening in chapter eleven, where moving out of a plane is equated with bending time... or something. — Banno

...but one of the problems often brought forth by the substance dualist is that there is not empirical proof that brain state X always causes behavior Y because fMRI results do not show that for every instance of behavior Y the exact areas of the brain show activity. — Hanover

As with a lot of jargon, philosophical or otherwise, is "supervenience" really needed? What's wrong with "dependence?" — T Clark

There isn't any one mainstream theory for this. Rather, there is a constellation of widely variant theories that focus on anything from "all complex enough computation results in experience," to "certain energy patterns = experience," to panpsychism, to brainwaves, to a quantum level explanations. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What is surprising is that, even if we could resolve individual synapses, we aren't sure this would give us an answer. That is, most theories are such that, even if we magically had that sort of resolution, they couldn't tell us "look for X and X will show you if a thing is conscious or not." — Count Timothy von Icarus

When a thing is exactly the same as a duck from all external appearances including
a blood test of DNA, then you can tell it is actually a space alien when it telepathically
invades your thoughts screaming that it <is> a space alien. — PL Olcott

And this then also neatly describes why consciousness is so impossible to find in all our myriad brain scans. This is puzzling because we think we should have the resolution of scans we need to be able to identify what it is that "causes," consciousness. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Non-biogenic methane is a different issue. — Agree to Disagree

I suspect that when I went back to university to do a 2nd degree you were probably still in nappies (or if you are American, still in diapers). — Agree to Disagree

Notice how close this is getting to the dictum of classical metaphysics - that ‘to be is to be intelligible’. — Wayfarer

Plus, paired with findings that give rise to the popularity of computational theory of mind, the view of computation as something that only occurs in sentient consciousness starts to get a little wonky. Presumably, I am computing if I am not a math wiz and have to consciously think about the steps involved in summing some list of figures. But then am I not computing if the entire process happens unconsciously and I just know the outcome by glancing at the symbols? Do I compute when I consciously try to read French, but acomputationally experience when the meanings of English words fly into my awareness with no conscious effort? If unconconcious computation is possible within a human, it seems harder to justify it not existing outside the mind. But then knowing the answer to 3+7, 2+2, etc. doesn't seem to require anything conscious or intentional on our part. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think it might be the case that experience is special.
— chiknsld

Do you mean "special" in the sense of special relativity? — Benj96

It’s the effect of propaganda…or pure stupidity. — Mikie