I tend to agree. We seem to demand everything have a causal explanation. But what if something just don't have any? For example:

That something can come from absolutely nothing. We cannot conceive of how this could be possible, but it may.

But this would move us from your OP.

Manchin is real piece of shit.

Who gives a fuck if your laughing all the way to the bank if your daughter and/or grandkids are totally fucked. Because, baring a massive change, they will be.

He did. But common sense is not easy to tease out.

I think believing in God at one time during our evolutionary history made sense and was even rational. It's an attempt at an explanation for existence. Now those arguments aren't nearly as persuasive or good.

So early belief is in some respects easier to think about than modern belief in terms of what one uses to explain certain phenomena.

And I forgot to add, why don't people ask about the devil?

I mean really. The opposite of an all good being.

Yes. I mean, part of the problem is that if you "what is God? And please, don't give me the All Wise, All Noble argument." What they usual say, in my experience, are very, very, very nebulous ideas, that verge on not being meaningful at all.

Like the people who say "I believe in a Higher Power." "Ok, but what is that?" "Something bigger than me and you." "Uh, yeah, many things are bigger than me, what do you have in mind?" "Something beyond us", etc.

So yeah, something very nebulous, very weird and very big may exist. It doesn't make sense.

Well, to the extent that God is made up we can proceed down the following path:

I'll not go over the "flying spaghetti monster" argument, but let's say that I believe there's a Goddess not a God. My neighbor believes that there is a cosmic turtle. My other neighbor thinks we are in the dreams of giant. My friend thinks that there is a supreme number, which rules over all numbers, etc.

But then, who is right? They all claim to believe as strongly as anyone in the planet, and all have had profound experiences that reveal such truths to them.

So we can postulate an infinite amount of God(s), with the same legitimacy as the God of the Christians. The thing is, we cannot disprove things, we can say at most that they're extremely unlikely. I can't disprove we aren't in The Matrix, nor that the whole world came into existence 5 seconds ago. Why? Because they could be the case.

But if the "original God" is as likely as anything else I've said, then I don't think you should assign a good likelihood such a being exists at all.

They take him to be saying that he denies consciousness. Dennett always says, he's not, and adds "Consciousness exists, obviously, but it's not what most people think it is." So Dennett and those I mentioned must be talking about two different things.

Yeah, red or sour or music is nothing more than things we perceive as red, things that taste sour and things that sound like music, but I find them to be very important.

Honestly, it doesn't matter much to me, in the sense that I find other people much more interesting than Dennett. I think you are interpreting him a bit too charitably, but that's fine. I could be misunderstanding him like others.

It looks to me like Dennett style approaches, shared to some extent by the Churchlands and even more radically by Rosenberg, try to step over "the hard problem". But there's plenty of hard problems in philosophy, not "only" experience.

As I said I take him to be denying that there are experiential entities, qualia, over and above the qualities that we find in things. I don't see how Dennett could seriously be thought to be denying that there are qualities that we routinely encounter and are aware of; tastes. colours, textures and so on. To deny that would be insane, and I don't believe Dennett is insane. — Janus

What is "over and above" the qualities we find in things? Is there anything like that? All we can say about the world is going to be related to whatever happens to interact with our cognitive capacitates and sensations.

Clearly Dennett is smart, speaks well, gives good examples. But he's leaving plenty of room for doubt when he says "there seems to be qualia".

I take him to be just saying that those quantiies are not what we might think they are due to our intuitive tendency to reify and create superfluous entities via language. — Janus

What is the colour experience red, aside from our experience of it? We can proceed to speak of wave-lengths, but that's not colour experience.

Oh, well. On to more wine.

Cheers.

Before you know it you are up to your neck in metaphysics — Tobias

Get me out of here!

:joke:

"I am denying that there are any such properties [qualia]. But… there seems to be qualia.”

A bit later on Dennett states that, concerning colors and their subjective effects “colors…are: reflective properties of the surface of objects…” (Dennett, D. 1991 p.372)

Qualia, in contemporary analytic philosophy are instances of subjective experience. The subjective aspects of qualia are according to Dennett, due to evolution: “…there were various reflective properties of surfaces, reactive properties of photopigments, and so forth, and Mother Nature developed out of these raw materials efficient, mutually adjusted “color”-coding/”color”-vision systems, and among the properties that settled out of that design process are properties we normal human beings call colors.” (p.378)

Dennett says “…lovely qualities cannot be defined independent of proclivities, susceptibilities, or dispositions of a class of observers, so it really makes no sense to speak of the existence of lovely properties in complete independence of the existence of relevant observers.” (p.380)

So, sure, we can't say that qualia are independent of observers, true.

But then, aside from the things postulated by science, we can't postulate anything absent observers.

But he's denying qualia, clearly.

Yes, it's a big part. But the terminology is cleared so that the discussion becomes fruitful.

One thing is to be in similar terminological area, that is agreeing on what we are talking about, another thing is the phenomena meant by the use of the word. What matters to me is the issue at had: is experience what we have or is it illusory in some manner.

I think it should be evident that we have experience, as we think we have. Our intuitions are correct in this point.

Anyway, I'm off, it's kind of late here. We may continue talking this if you wish. Or not.

It's all good.

Given his broadly functionalist model of consciousness, he argues, we can see why the ‘putative contrast between zombies and conscious beings is illusory’ — Janus

It's true that experience covers many areas.

The one area in which it is not prone to doubt, for most people anyway, is that we have experience, we experience things: colours, sounds, smells, novels, movies, music, etc.

A zombie wouldn't have these capacities, it would just behave as if it experienced these things. But we can do that with AI, it's says nothing about experience, because behavior is only data, not a theory.

in other words to claim that he believes Zombies are really possible, and that we are all zombies — Janus

If he doesn't accept it, good. If he does and he says that we are indistinguishable from Zombies, then the single most important aspect of being a human being is rendered illusory.

to mean in the sense of being conscious that we intuitively ( and by implication, naively) believe in, and of course there is no problem accepting that is Dennett's view, since he explicitly endorses it.. — Janus

Correct. But I don't see how any theories offer a more accurate account that our intuitions, in this case.

It's true, but the fact that it's true won't make any difference to those who wish not to accept it. — Wayfarer

Which would be fine, if it made any sense.

We had a thread on Strawson's panpsychism a little while back, which I'm also highly sceptical of. — Wayfarer

This paper has nothing to do with panpsychism at all. I agree with you, I don't think it holds up.

My position is very simple - mind is real and immaterial. Therefore materialism is false. — Wayfarer

I agree that mind is real. And that "materialism" is false if it implies scientism.

We can put immaterialism aside for now.

I don't believe we have to justify the way we express ourselves. How does one go about doing that? — Wheatley

Not for every single word. That would take forever an be pointless. No, in philosophy we try to clarify or elucidate the phenomenon in question: free will, idealism, compatibilism, psychic continuity, etc.

That's why we have these topics being discussed, we want to understand them better.

There are also different ordinary definitions of consciousness. Do we also need justification for one definition over the other? — Wheatley

We not infrequently say what we mean by consciousness: we say we mean personal experience, of the fact that it allows us to see qualia, etc.

For the ordinary usage of a word, we usually don't introduce clarifications, that's why it's ordinary usage. It doesn't mean that we are using the word optimally. But in ordinary usage, we usually get what the other person is talking about. Not always, of course. But, often enough.

Depends on which philosopher you have in mind. But let's grant that.

By granting it, you are going to have to justify why you are using the (now) technical word "consciousness" to mean something else besides the usual meaning of the word.

This is what physicist do when they use terms like "energy", "mass", "velocity", etc.

If you can't do that, then I don't see why we should use a technical definition, because it doesn't modify on our usual way of using the word, so it doesn't really serve a purpose.

It's a part of it. But all he's saying is that Dennett is using the word "consciousness" in such a way that it excludes what most people take consciousness to be.

The difference between saying "I am seeing the blue sky" and saying "it seems like as if the sky you're looking at is blue, but in reality it's "bad theorizing" " is a huge difference.

Well, if you can tell me what Dennett says consciousness is, then there's no issue. Dennett takes Strawson to be his most vocal critic and said that Strawson would have been a good candidate to include in Consciousness Explained:

"I thank Galen Strawson for his passionate attack on my views, since it provides a large, clear target for my rebuttal. I would never have dared put Strawson’s words in the mouth of Otto (the fictional critic I invented as a sort of ombudsman for the skeptical reader of Consciousness Explained) for fear of being scolded for creating a strawman. A full-throated, table-thumping Strawson serves me much better. He clearly believes what he says, thinks it is very important, and is spectacularly wrong in useful ways."

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/04/03/magic-illusions-and-zombies-an-exchange/

Strawson clearly states what he thinks consciousness is: ."..experience that has a certain qualitative experiential character."

Dennett says this is not true.

You'll enjoy this, I'm certain. ;)

https://www.academia.edu/37649217/Dunking_Dennett

:up:

That is, the "always already conceptually shaped" is simply a misstatement not justified by any history of science or of thought, but rather itself an absolute presupposition of (apparently) McDowell's thinking. — tim wood

Hmmm. This is "the given".

I mean, would you say that sense-data or "qualia" aren't "already shaped"? I don't know if I'd call seeing blue or listening to a flute playing conceptual, but it seems to be a given.

Sunny Came Home - Shawn Colvin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S5iANxYIYQ

"Sunny came home to her favorite room
Sunny sat down in the kitchen
She opened a book and a box of tools
Sunny came home with a mission

She says "Days go by, I'm hypnotized
I'm walking on a wire
I close my eyes and fly out of my mind
Into the fire"

Sunny came home with a list of names
She didn't believe in transcendence
And it's time for a few small repairs, she said
Sunny came home with a vengeance

She says "Days go by, I don't know why
I'm walking on a wire
I close my eyes and fly out of my mind
Into the fire"

Get the kids and bring a sweater
Dry is good and wind is better
Count the years, you always knew it
Strike a match, go on and do it

"Oh, days go by, I'm hypnotized
I'm walking on a wire
I close my eyes and fly out of my mind
Into the fire"

Oh, light the sky and hold on tight
The world is burning down
She's out there on her own, and she's all right
Sunny came home
Sunny came home
Came home
Home"

It's hard to guess the future, though the problems you mention about Crypto contaminating a lot and that its value is subject to wild fluctuations are correct.

One thing is near certain about it, and that's that it's a fad. Most fads tend to die down considerably. You could dable in it if you wish, but I'd be extremely careful to get too enthusiastic about it. I have a strong feeling that these things will end up not working as intended: "democratic control of the money supply".

Someone eventually comes up on top and dictates rules others wouldn't agree with.

Indeed.

True the idea in a particular form is in Plato, the noumenal world of the Ideas as opposed to the phenomenal shadows of the Cave. — Janus

Whitehead had a point, philosophy consists of footnotes to Plato. Got to go back and reread some of his works sometime...

"carved at the joints" more or less isomorphically with the ways we perceive it. — Janus

Yes, something like that appears to be the case. With hard work, we are able to discern the structure of things, but what gives the thing it's structure we just don't know.

It's hard to imagine how a rich world of diversity, invariance and change could manifest out of an amorphous mass of whatever. — Janus

And most of it isn't even concrete, as in that you can touch it with your hands.

Hell, if dark matter and dark energy actually exist, we aren't even made of the stuff most of the Universe is made of. It's wild.

what could it be in itself? — Janus

That's my metaphysical bane.

You could even argue that it's kind of in Plato with his ideas. There's something about objects as they appear to us that seem incomplete, in some important respects.

I know, it's kind of life trying to think about the largest possible number, or something. But it's fascinating.

So it wasn't called a tree until some human named it such, but neither was it called a thing until some human named it as such. — Janus

Which is why "things-in-themselves", or the "thing in itself", or whatever specific variety of this idea one ends up using, can be helpful in thinking about this.

Or at least I find it very useful.

Gotcha.

Good stuff. :up:

That's a very sensible way of thinking formulating the problem, actually. :up:

We can’t know the thing represented by its phenomenon directly, that’s true, but it is nonetheless directly presented to us. — Mww

What do you mean by directly presented?

I see a tree, it's a representation. It's grounds are unknown to me, I follow this far.

What's directly presented here?



This makes more sense.

We do not postulate anything. If you can see and touch a thing you have to be far off to even think about the possibility that it might not "exist". — Heiko

We postulates things all the time, not only in science but in day to day life too.

I agree that something exists. I can't prove it. Human knowledge doesn't work with "final proofs". It's that I think there are better reasons for believing that something exists independently of me than there good reasons for thinking that nothing does.

My contention is only that there is no need to develop a distinction between mind and matter, because the absence of that distinction, is impossible, with respect to our human system of rational agency. It follows that without the development of a distinction, any illusory predicates assignable to it, disappear, which is where this whole dialogue began. — Mww

Ah, I see. The terminology can get really tricky, but I'll be willing to grant that there is some kind of natural inclination to distinguish mind or soul from everything else. It's the way we naturally view the world, "folk" psychologically, as it were, not that I'm enamored with that term.

But no substantive problem here, on my part.

Russell’s neutral monism, which says mind and matter are indistinguishable, re: “Analysis of Mind”, 1921, is invalid, for it reduces ultimately to the paradoxical conclusion that whenever one is conscious he is aware of his own brain — Mww

Correct on the part of him saying that we aware of our brains, through experience. But, as I understand it, Neutral Monism is not so much that mind and matter are indistinguishable. Neutral Monism is the idea that world is neither mental nor physical as we understand these terms.

As far as I am aware, Russell didn’t take that bait. But he did wrap, or rather, smother, himself in language, which is just as bad. — Mww

Sure, his use of words can be problematic. But his point about neurologists examining brains is correct, in my view. There is no view from nowhere.

I agree with you that there needs to be something which grounds the phenomena we are interpreting. It's just that we can't go directly to these grounds.

It's the vocabulary he chose to use, as do many other philosophers, accompanied by the usual connotations people tend to have when they use them.

The important distinction, the one which I think is intelligible is to associate matter with "non-mental" and mind with "mental". It is claimed that matter is not mind, I don't agree but, that's the vocabulary we are stuck with.

The idea would be that the physiologist studies (non-mental) matter, as seen in brains. This is the famed "third person perspective." Then the physiologist presents us an objective report on the observed phenomena, in this case the (non-mental) brain.

What Russell is saying using this contentious vocabulary, is that the physiologist is actually not studying (non-mental) matter, he is studying how his mind reacts to a supposedly "objective" thing. So it's a mental construct on the occasion of a stimulus.

We don't get to study (non-mental) matter anywhere, unless we could literally get out of our bodies. We just have to postulate its existence.

I thought you wanted to articulate an opposing view. :worry:

Oh well, I suppose I'll have to mostly agree with you in some other thread.

I am quite pessimistic regarding the chances of success in controlling (let alone reducing) climate warming. The major CO2 / methane / other GH gas producers have too much investment sunk in automobiles, coal-generated electricity, petroleum, meat-production agriculture, plastics, and so forth to make either any changes or rapid changes. It's too late for slow changes. — Bitter Crank

Well that's your problem: you are being reasonable and looking at the evidence.

I think it's important to keep in mind that nothing's set in stone until it happens, and there is plenty of climate science activism. Quite a lot, actually. But it's not enough. This is so crazy that you have countries like Australia pledging neutrality by 2050 and Saudi Arabia by 2060. That's 20 and 30 years too late, respectively.

US, China and others too, everybody really, minus a few scattered countries. Nothing against Australians or Saudi's here, it's simply that governments and business as you point out, aren't taking this seriously enough. By the time they do, it's going to be too late to mitigate the worst of it.

It is the case that a world economy COULD BE ORGANIZED around renewable energy production, mass transit, sustainable food, fibre, housing production, and so forth, but anything resembling a fast transition (like, by 2035) would produce wrenching, social-shredding dislocations throughout the world. If it takes 50 years (a more manageable period for massive global change) we will end up far overshooting the deadline when helpful changes could be made. — Bitter Crank

Those things you mention could happen in a quick transition, sure. But if we don't do it quickly, it's just going to be brutal beyond words.

Still, we keep the pressure up, however we can and hope something big happens that changes the situation accordingly. There's nothing else I can see that can be done.

Will it be enough? It's an open question, which is quickly coming to a close.

Philosophy replaces religion inasmuch as you decide it does. If there is a philosophy which has a spiritual or mystical aspect which is appealing, then you could use than instead of religion.

Which begs the question....why does the necessarily given need to be developed? — Mww

Because if one isn't careful, they will begin to think that they are looking directly at a brain and believe that non-mental activity (neuronal and electrochemical activity) is mental activity.

But the physiologist hasn't touched the mind.

He has interpreted the data and is giving reports based on his own experiential activity, not on some activity outside his experience, which presumably would be non-mental.

The general orientation.

That what the physiologist sees is not the brain of the subject "neutrally", but instead that what he's actually seeing are the effects of his own experience (the physiologist, that is) reacting when looking at the behavior of another persons brain. But even here the physiologist is not "seeing" the experience of the patient.

I think that using "physical" and "mental" so frequently can be a bit confusing. I prefer to use Strawson's terms "non-experiential" for matter and "experiential" for mental.

Awesome. What a fantastic quote.

Many thanks! :)

Yes. Your last sentence sums it up nicely. It tends to happen with first principles: we can only get so far before we have to say "this is the way it is".

This God talk of omnipotence and omniscience is familiar enough. Perhaps it would be more fruitful to apply certain limits to such a hypothetical being. The reasoning is that, for a being to be a being, including a supreme one, it has to have a nature of some kind.

If the nature of this being is infinite, then it has infinite scope. But such boundlessness would not allow for any mechanism to develop. It's only within limits that existence is possible, otherwise the term existence loses meaning.

Not that I believe any of this, but we can substitute "Nature" for "God", and see if something comes out of it.

That's well put. :up:

But sometimes I wonder if we can ever step outside consciousness so as to explain it. — frank

I mean if you as yourself can step outside of your own experience to look at yourself. No. Me neither for myself.

We can try to trick ourselves into thinking than when another person is analyzing our experience via fMRI or some personal behavioral reports (I see a brown dog, I see a blue fish, etc.) that these reports are outside experience, as in a "objective view", or a view from nowhere.

But we don't do that, what the neuroscientist or psychologist is doing is analyzing how certain aspects of the other persons experience affects there own experience.

Russell has a nice quote about this somewhere.

EDIT:

Here, it's worth a look:

https://books.google.com.do/books?id=VEB9AgAAQBAJ&pg=PA152&lpg=PA152&dq=bertrand+russell+what+the+physiologist+sees+is+by+no+means+identical&source=bl&ots=ce7mXSFUS4&sig=ACfU3U3dvNp32LYUjSsMtsR_Jp3DVNvjfA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj5udGGlunzAhXxTDABHTKSC5wQ6AF6BAgfEAM#v=onepage&q&f=false

Last paragraph of pp.152 to halfway through pp.153, quite brief, but to the point.

I can't copy it and typing it would be too long.