It doesn't follow that I am most likely not a Boltzmann brain. It only follows that the probability that I am a Boltzmann brain gets smaller as the time increases. But due to the sheer number of Boltzmann brains, it is always the case that the probability that I am a Boltzmann brain is greater than the probability that I am not a Boltzmann brain. — Michael

It seems to me there is a problem with you being a Boltzmann brain and yet so predictable. Should we expect that if you are a BB? Where's the batty?

:100: :up:

In the context of Neuroscience this seems very poor curriculum. A historical perspective maybe? — Mark Nyquist

It's a philosophy course. Why think it is "in the context of neuroscience"?

How far along is your daughter in her study of neuroscience?

When we believe any thing of external existence, or suppose an object to exist a moment after it is no longer perceived, this belief is nothing but a sentiment
— David Hume

That quotation is from the “Abstract”, which is a summary of the Treatise. The argument itself is around 1.4.2 (that’s Book.Part.Section).

But there must be secondary sources that could make it more manageable. — Jamal

Bringing up the Hume quote is good, but can your daughter then make a case for it not being nothing but sentiment, but rather a matter of pattern recognition occurring in neural networks?

Perhaps the latter is the result of unreasonable expectations about the former. As if by asking a question there must then be an answer. The natural sense of awe and wonder is lost. Replaced by artifactual realms beyond and a desire for escape and transcendence. — Fooloso4

So it seems to me.

My experience off this forum has me tending toward thinking the poison is quite well contained here — AmadeusD

And yet here you argue that you don't know anything about the world around you. So I don't know why we should take you seriously when you talk about experience off the forum.

What is the light reflected/refracted by?
— wonderer1

No idea. My part in the process(and as such, the point at whcih I could say anything about it) comes after that, as best I can tell. I could say "the objects" but then im stuck with literally nothing else to say about it. — AmadeusD

Hopefully your philosophy poisoning isn't so deep that you can't recover.

Virtual particles pop out of a vacuum attached to a QM universe. Moreover, they have physical causes.
— ucarr

Have any of these mathematical conveniences ever been detected? — jgill

Casimir effect:

The typical example is of two uncharged conductive plates in a vacuum, placed a few nanometers apart. In a classical description, the lack of an external field means that there is no field between the plates, and no force would be measured between them.[13] When this field is instead studied using the quantum electrodynamic vacuum, it is seen that the plates do affect the virtual photons which constitute the field, and generate a net force[14] – either an attraction or a repulsion depending on the specific arrangement of the two plates. Although the Casimir effect can be expressed in terms of virtual particles interacting with the objects, it is best described and more easily calculated in terms of the zero-point energy of a quantized field in the intervening space between the objects. This force has been measured and is a striking example of an effect captured formally by second quantization.[15][16]

Every explanation attempting to do so just ignores entirely that we literally do not see objects, but reflected/refracted light which in turn causes us to 'see' a visual construct. — AmadeusD

What is the light reflected/refracted by?

I thought that too, except "Sherlock Holmes" refers to something that seems to go beyond something that's just "instantiated in a brain". — RogueAI

Well, there are lots of ideas of ideas of Sherlock Holmes instantiated in lots of people's brains. But what seems to go beyond something instantiated in a brain?

I mean, when you're reading Arthur Conan Doyle or Mary Shelly or Stephen King, are you thinking of brains? — RogueAI

No. Things can be represented with other things, such as ideas with written words. Typically we are thinking of things represented in our brains. Representations in our brains no more need to to resemble what is represented, than a string of letters on a page needs to resemble the landscape it describes.

You're talking about fictional things: ghosts, Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, God, etc. Fictional things exist as ideas, otherwise, we wouldn't be able to intelligently talk about them. — RogueAI

From ny physicalist perspective you are equivocating between an idea as instantiated in a brain, and what the idea refers to.

I can always count on you to go for the ad hominem. A lot of materialists here do. It's like they're emotionally invested in it or something. — RogueAI

And it is like you don't recognize that your ignorance makes your opinion on the matter uninteresting, and tedious to respond to.

I'm a scientific ignoramus. — RogueAI

At least we can agree on that.

What theory of consciousness do you like? — RogueAI

It is too soon for anyone to be justified in calling something a scientific theory of consciousness.

However, speculation plays an important part in how scientific understanding develops.

So while in my opinion the IIT crew is being pretentious in calling IIT a theory, I wouldn't call it pseuoscience, so much as speculative hypothesizing that serves a useful role in science.

But you haven't responded to the issue of you making arguments from ignorance. Why do you consider yourself competent to judge what the state of science should be at present? Surely it is not a matter of you considering yourself scientifically well informed. Right?

If there was progress to be made explaining consciousness, science would have made it by now. — RogueAI

This just shows your ignorance of the technological challenges in the way of gaining detailed information about neurological processes. So it doesn't do anything to dispel my impression, that all you have is an argument from ignorance.

The one data point that I think defeats physicalism (or makes it very unlikely), is the fact that I'm conscious. Physicalism cannot explain that and probably never will. — RogueAI

Can you provide any reason to think that you aren't making an argument from ignorance?

Argument from ignorance (from Latin: argumentum ad ignorantiam), also known as appeal to ignorance (in which ignorance represents "a lack of contrary evidence"), is a fallacy in informal logic. It asserts that a proposition is true because it has not yet been proven false or a proposition is false because it has not yet been proven true. This represents a type of false dichotomy in that it excludes the possibility that there may have been an insufficient investigation to prove that the proposition is either true or false.[1] It also does not allow for the possibility that the answer is unknowable, only knowable in the future, or neither completely true nor completely false.[2] In debates, appealing to ignorance is sometimes an attempt to shift the burden of proof.

My pee pee is big enough to fit inside two women at the same time. — Brendan Golledge

But I don't bother about more refinement of definitions about physics versus chemistry — Ypan1944

Seems important to bother with, in serious consideration of emergence.

Yes, you are right, but the chemical features of "heavy water" are exactly the same as "normal" water. The features you mentioned are just physical, not chemical. These physical aspects are not emergent (they are the direct result of the fact that it is a heavier atomic nucleus). The chemical features are indeed emergent, depending on the specific electron configuration. — Ypan1944

No the chemical properties are not exactly the same. For example, the pH of heavy water is 7.44 instead of 7.0.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water

For reactions between atoms or molecules, only the "outside" of an atom (i.e. the outermost electrons of the atom) plays a role. — Ypan1944

It seems that you were taught a simplistic version of chemistry.

Deuterium oxide, also known as “heavy water” or “deuterium water”, is the compound of oxygen and the heavy isotope of hydrogen, namely deuterium. It is called heavy water because its density is greater than H₂O and its chemical formula is D₂O. Deuterium contains a neutron and proton in its nucleus, which makes it twice as heavy as protium (hydrogen), which contains only one proton. Deuterium oxide is colorless and odorless liquid in normal temperature and pressure. Compared to ordinary water, its chemical characteristic is relatively inactive with specific gravity of 1.10775 (25 ℃), melting/freezing point of 3.82 ℃, and boiling point of 101.42 ℃. The hydrogen bond strength and degree of association between heavy water molecules are both stronger than that of ordinary water molecules...

https://www.isowater.com/what-is-deuterium-oxide-heavy-water/

The supposed "heat death" is an interesting issue. The heat death is the result of entropy which is the natural effect of the passage of time. "Entropy" refers to energy which is unavailable to the system, but cannot be shown to have escaped the system. So by the rules of the conservation law, that energy must still be within the system somehow, only not available to the system.

This leaves us with the question of, "what form could this energy have?". It is not "energy" as we know "energy", because "energy" is defined as the capacity to do work, and this energy is denied of that capacity. It is only "energy" because the law of conservation dictates that it must be conserved as "energy". — Metaphysician Undercover

Typically the form of energy, which shows up as entropic losses of a system, is in the form of heat. There is nothing all that mysterious about such heat energy. It simply becomes difficult to make any use of heat energy when all parts of a system are at nearly the same temperature.

Because you're not getting the distinction between an empirical theory and a metaphysical stance. — Wayfarer

I'm afraid that a lot of time spent in these sorts of dicussions has taught me to interpret statements like that as you sticking your fingers in your ears and saying, "La, la, la, I can't hear you!"

Isn't that enough? The fact that thought can have similar effects to practical physical enaction is meaningful to me. — Pantagruel

You had said there were "unique" features, so I was curious as to support for this uniqueness.

Brain scans of Buddhist monks exhibit a variety of unique features, including enhanced neuroplasticity. — Pantagruel

Can you provide a reference?

The article Buddha's Brain: Neuroplasticity and Meditation says, "When the framework of neuroplasticity is applied to meditation, we suggest that the mental training of meditation is fundamentally no different than other forms of skill acquisition that can induce plastic changes in the brain."

If someone claims to have mathematical knowledge it can be demonstrated. Can the same be said of someone who claims to have mystical knowledge? — Fooloso4

This touches on my interest in intuition, understood as deep learning in neural networks. It seems to me that there are two seperate issues involved.

1. Having demonstrable knowledge.
2. Having an explanation for that knowledge.

Though I haven't done any meaningful degree of study of the history of explanations for intuition, my impression is that intuition has been mysterious and subject to being explained in supernatural or mystical terms until the 1980s, when the beginnings of a neuroscientific basis for understanding intuition were developed.*

Given that intuition has been (and probably still is for most) such a mystery, it seems understandable to me that people often have practically demonstrable knowledge while often being mistaken in their beliefs as to the basis of that knowledge.

* The second wave blossomed in the late 1980s, following the 1987 book about Parallel Distributed Processing by James L. McClelland, David E. Rumelhart et al., which introduced a couple of improvements to the simple perceptron idea, such as intermediate processors (known as "hidden layers" now) alongside input and output units and used sigmoid activation function instead of the old 'all-or-nothing' function. Their work has, in turn, built upon that of John Hopfield, who was a key figure investigating the mathematical characteristics of sigmoid activation functions.[2] From the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, connectionism took on an almost revolutionary tone when Schneider,[4] Terence Horgan and Tienson posed the question of whether connectionism represented a fundamental shift in psychology and GOFAI.[2] Some advantages of the second wave connectionist approach included its applicability to a broad array of functions, structural approximation to biological neurons, low requirements for innate structure, and capacity for graceful degradation.[5] Some disadvantages of the second wave connectionist approach included the difficulty in deciphering how ANNs process information, or account for the compositionality of mental representations, and a resultant difficulty explaining phenomena at a higher level.[6]

The current (third) wave has been marked by advances in Deep Learning allowing for Large language models.[2] The success of deep learning networks in the past decade has greatly increased the popularity of this approach, but the complexity and scale of such networks has brought with them increased interpretability problems.[7]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectionism

Go there! It's more interesting than most stuff on here currently. — creativesoul

I was hoping you would start the thread. :wink:

I'm better at riffing off things others have said. It's not clear to me how I would start such an OP without it becoming much too long and meandering.

I'm moving this discussion back to this thread where it is more appropriate.

...But they insist nevertheless that at the end of the day such items are physical, or at least bear an important relation to (or supervene on) the physical.
-SEP

That is what I'm disputing. But it doesn't mean that I believe that evolution or the Big Bang didn't occur, or that the Universe is not as science describes it, or other empirical facts. There's no need for me to do that. — Wayfarer

Again, I brought up young earth creationism as an example of science denialism, not to say that you have the same view as a YEC. There are all sorts of science denialism, such as AGW denialism.

It seems that you are avoiding looking at, whether the following statement of yours is indicative of science denialism.

There is no scientific evidence for physicalism. — Wayfarer

I fully accept the established facts of evolution and cosmology. — Wayfarer

Evolution and cosmology were examples pertinent to young earth creationism cases of science denial.

Do you still deny that there is scientific evidence for physicalism?

Moreover, were consciousness perceivable then the philosophical problem of other minds would not be a problem of any kind. — javra

"The philosophical problem of other minds", seem to me to be more a problem that some people have that is caused by philosophy rather than something to be taken very seriously.

Yes, we can't very reasonably say we perceive other minds, but I certainly have plenty of good reason to think that I recognize other minds. I.e. that minds have recognizable signatures. Don't you have good reasons to think so as well?

Isn't the performative contradiction rather obvious?

Yep. The autonomous workings of the mind are often neglected here in this forum, as are considerations/accounts of how simple thought begins and complex thought becomes autonomous. — creativesoul

Yes, a topic I am quite interested in. It would be a good thread topic I think.

I could no longer resist. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes! Give in to the nerd side.

Congrats, I guess. But as the Kwisatz Haderach this doesn't seem that special to me. — Count Timothy von Icarus

:rofl:

Ha ha! The researcher is not a bad person. But the researcher is BEING a bad person currently. — Chet Hawkins

So perhaps the monkey's behavior arises from evolved instincts conducive to training conspecifics not to be bad persons?

Why do so many make moral propositional statements if they are not truth-apt? — Chet Hawkins

Could the answer to your question be, "Because we share instincts, to some degree, with our capuchin cousins?"

I've often considered this. Are we missing some sort of esoteric oral tradition that justifies Plato's claim that philosophers are not fully trained until age fifty, or is it all just obscurantism to add mystique to "philosopher king?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'd suggest something more like, "It tends to take a substantial amount of life experience for humans to recognize and weed out naive intuitions sufficiently to reach the point of being philosophically interesting." I.e. it's just an aspect of human nature.

You have demonstrated that you have no interest in discussing the judgement by which something is labeled as evidence, not even agreeing with me that a judgement is required to label something as evidence. Discussion is pointless. — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't know with any precision how you think of "judgement" in this context, but it seems unlikely to me that your view of what happens in such scenarios as seeing John approaching is a matter of consciously making judgements.

The discussion we had awhile back, about the ability to read text with scrambled letters, is of relevance. It seems more likely to me that you recognize John approaching as a matter of subconscious pattern recognition, rather than as a matter of conscious judgement. Just as the neural networks in our brains yield fault tolerant recognitions of words, other neural networks in our brains yield fault tolerant recognitions of people.

Why think, "judgement is required to label something as evidence", is true? (As opposed to, " We subconsciously categorize perceptions as evidence for seeing John approaching, when perceptions sufficient to trigger the relevant pattern recognition has occurred.)

A relevant anecdote... Early in my first semester at college, I came back to my dorm room and recognized my roommate 'Dan', said, "Hi.", (to which 'Dan' responded as he typically did) and sat down to read.

However, I had a nagging sense that something was off. I looked up at 'Dan' and he had an amused smile for no reason apparent to me, but I couldn't figure out why something seemed off, so I went back to reading. Still I was bothered and looked up again, at which point 'Dan' introduced himself as Dave, Dan's identical twin.

It seems to me that in that case I had intuitive recognition of evidence that it wasn't actually my roommate that was in my dorm room, even though I had no conscious recognition of what that evidence was. What role (if any) do you think "judgement" played? And why not think that we can have recognition of evidence without judgement?

I myself try to refrain from sarcastic or ad hominem criticisms. Although I did notice recently that I was compared to a young-earth creationist for questioning what I call 'common-sense physicalism' (i.e. the idea that the mind can be understood through neuroscience). — Wayfarer

That is self aggrandizement.

You were compared to a YEC for claiming there is no scientific evidence for the view you are opposed to. See your statement that directly lead to the comparison:

There is no scientific evidence for physicalism. — Wayfarer

'There is no scientific evidence for evolution.'

'There is no scientific evidence for the earth being billions of years old.'

See the science denialist pattern?

You flatter yourself by referring to yourself as "questioning".

Why do so many make moral propositional statements if they are not truth-apt? — Chet Hawkins

Why does the monkey throw the cucumber, if the researcher is not a bad person?

'Before' is a concept. — Wayfarer

A deepity?

What is your point?

The above Chat GPT examples concern logical behaviourism rather than physicalism. — sime

ChatGPT
I apologize for any confusion. The top ten list provided earlier predominantly focuses on neuroscientific findings that align with physicalism rather than logical behaviorism. These findings highlight the connections between mental processes and the physical structures or activities of the brain. Logical behaviorism, which emphasizes observable behaviors as the primary focus for understanding the mind, is not as directly tied to the neural and physiological evidence outlined in the list. If you have specific questions about logical behaviorism or if you'd like information more tailored to logical behaviorism, feel free to ask!

https://chat.openai.com/share/c5d5be26-4ed6-461b-9dcd-bf6771ec9008

cop out. — Wayfarer

Sure, and if I had written something along those lines myself, you would have said it is too long.

An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth.

— Max Planck, Scientific autobiography, 1950, p. 33, 97