Some of it comes down to differentiating subjective and objective aspects of consciousness, such as Nagel's question of 'What is it like to be a bat?' We make assumptions and there is probably a lot of sense in common sense, especially in what it means to be alive. I know that Russell, my teddy bear, doesn't have consciousness other than what I project onto him. — Jack Cummins

Yes.

It has to do with how we access and interact with objects that allows us to reason about its nature. But in so far as someone is going to say a teddy bear or a particle has very very primitive consciousness, there is no evidence for the claim.

To be fair, there is no evidence against that claim, only common sense. But I think it is more reasonable to assume these things lack mind than have mind. It becomes a virtually meaningless semantic quibble.

I don't think we will agree in this one about the molecules, as we are talking in circle here.

We cannot conceive how non-mental mattter could give rise to mind, that's fine. As Russell pointed out we don't know enough about matter to say whether its intrinsic properties are like or unlike mind.

But it seems that other issues - free will, motion, life, etc.- are equally hard, but again we may agree to disagree I suppose.

No, I am not saying that completing a sentence is an idea. I am saying an idea emerges when you complete reading a sentence. — MoK

So, an idea to you is composed of words. That is, the entire content of an idea are the words we use in propositions?

Not being incredulous or anything like that, just want to clear up the issue. It's not entirely implausible.

I don't understand what you mean by particles have water in them! Water refers to a system of H2O molecules. We have a good intuition on why water changes its behavior in terms of the properties of its parts. We even have good intuition on why parts have these and those properties, such as speed, mass, spin, etc. These properties are the result of the string vibrating in different forms. — MoK

A system is composed of its parts. A single H20 molecule does not have the properties of water. And we don't understand how, by combining them together water could arise, because each individual molecule shows no "wetness".

You are correct that we have good theories on speed, mass, spin. I doubt they are intuitive. If they were, we would have figured out the chemistry behind them much earlier than we did. At least, that's how it looks like to me.

Consciousness, to me, is the ability of the mind, the ability to experience. — MoK

Yes. But does it float apart like a soul or a second substance, or is it grounded in something that is unlike it (a brain)? If you are a dualist then that's perfectly fine.

If you are a monist, then the issue is explaining how non-mental matter could give rise to experience. It seems hard to believe, but we have decent reasons for believing it is true.

Think of a meaningful sentence. The sentence is weak emergence. An idea, however, emerges once you complete reading the sentence. The emergence of the idea is strong since the idea is more than the sentence, and it is irreducible. — MoK

Is the sentence "Think of a meaningful sentence" meaningful? If it is, the meaning seems to be emergent on the order of the words.

Now you say an idea is something that emerges once you complete reading the sentence.

How is the idea more that the sentence, if you say that a completed sentence is an idea? I'm trying to understand.

This kind of emergence is fully explicable in terms of the physical properties of the components and the laws governing them. There is nothing mysterious left over once we understand the physics and chemistry. — Wayfarer

Correct, you can explain the phenomena in theoretical terms. But the phenomenal property of water is untouched even knowing the theory. The mystery is how could apparently liquidless molecules give rise to the phenomena liquidity?

Likewise, if what some assume is true that experience merges from a combination of non-mental physical stuff, we have no intuition as to how the mental could emerge from the non-mental.

But I know you don't believe this, just putting the thought out.

I don't see a fundamental difference in how puzzling these things are.

On this view, consciousness is not an inexplicable product of complex organization but a manifestation of properties already present in the fundamental building blocks of the world. — Wayfarer

And this may be true (or not, we don't know). But if it is, the claim is weak, because everything would be emergent on combination of physical stuff: solidity, stars, cells, bipedalism, apples, pain, etc.

We happen privilege experience in philosophy now. But before the problem was motion, then thought. That was clear to Locke and many others.

We have good intuition about what water is: Liquid is a state in which the material is almost incompressible, and it can take different shapes. We have a theory for it, too. — MoK

Do you have the intuition that prior to combination a particle contains water in it? I don't. We have a theory yes, but I don't know someone who says that it was evident all along that particles have water in them, you can't see it, touch it, etc. until the experiment comes about.

Or maybe there is a model, including the mind, that can explain the strong emergence. — MoK

Some emergence is more shocking to us that others, consciousness out of matter vs. liquidity in particles. But what do you gain by saying one is strong and the other is weak, if you lack intuitions (not theories) for both?

[

However, when it came to novels, I (sometimes) believed that he wrote solely to please his fans and the Western market. — javi2541997

Maybe, but if what he want to write is stuff like his last book, then I just find it very boring. I might try After Dark someday, looks interesting.

I think I remembered you saying you liked Los años de peregrinación del chico sin color (Colorless) and La muerte del comendador.(Commendatore)

But the peregrinación book looked to me to be much less "magical realist" than usual, and comendador sounded a lot like Cronica del Pajaro, which was my least favorite book of his - a minority stance.

I loved his Baila, baila, baila (Dance) , El fin del mundo y un despiadado país de las maravillas (Wonderland), Kafka en la orilla, La caza del carnero salvaje (Sheep).

Norwegian Wood was just...ok.

But after 1Q84 (which I though was one book too long - the 3rd volume) it's as if what made him fun for me just kind of vanished.

But I think this latest one is copied from el fin del mundo- it's the exact same town. Minus the extremely interesting connection he made with the other story.

It doesn’t get any better after 30% so you’re not missing anything. — praxis

That was the vibe I was getting too, thanks for confirming it. Too many books to read to finish one you are not enjoying.

:up:

Had to drop the newest Murakami after reading 30% of the book, his quality has dropped quite a bit since 1Q84, this meditative side is very boring to me.

Now nearly finished with Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez, very good.

The weak emergence vs strong emergence is a bit misleading. It suggests that we have an intuitive understanding of the resultant effects of a given process - say molecules giving rise to water. We may have a theory of liquidity, but we have no intuitions about it.

But if someone says I think all emergence is "strong", they think you are being a mystic. I think that's just what nature does.

I can see Strawson's argument because experience is the central to being alive. A chair or a rock doesn't experience the person sitting on it, even though the person may have an effect on the chair, such as scratching it. Ideas about objects having experiences are human projections. — Jack Cummins

Yes that's what we think and it's very likely true. Strawson's point is different, he's not claiming a tree is alive or thinks, but rather that our interaction with anything is experience-involving or experience-realizing. The chair at very bottom, is made of the same things our brains are made of at bottom.

I don't know of many panpsychists, who would say that a chair thinks or that a rock has consciousness. There may be outliers, but it is a very bizarre view.

Their motivation was to look at nature with fresh eyes, stripped of inherited authority. That turn is the beginning of modern science as we know it — but in rejecting the scholastic framework wholesale, something else was lost: the kind of critical self-awareness about the act of knowing itself that we see in Greek sources. — Wayfarer

How so? I mean Descartes was responded to the reigniting of Pyrrhonian skepticism, trying to find an objective foundation for knowledge, but Descartes was always clear that our ideas were constructions of sense data, not objects themselves.

Hume took Pyrrhonian skepticism to its limits. Both were very much critically self aware about the act of knowing.

Unless you have something more specific in mind, which you probably have, as I've said, it's not an area in which I have a lot of confidence yet.

Heidegger, who lectured extensively on Aristotle, re-engaged the question of Being from a different angle. — Wayfarer

He is very tricky though. I mean you can read him as being critical, but you can also read him as not being critical, because by being critical philosophy lost touch with being, or something like that.

thread began with the argument about the ‘history of ideas’ and the decline of classical metaphysics. I’m of the view that the Greek philosophers were critically self-aware in the sense described above, but of course this wasn’t (and couldn’t be) expressed in the modern idiom. It was expressed in terms appropriate to that (now very distant) cultural milieu. — Wayfarer

I am speaking outside an area in which I feel any confidence. My own feeling is that some were doing something close to "critical" philosophy - misleading because it suggest people like Descartes and Hume weren't "critical".

But the little I understand was not, for example Aristotle asking what is a house? That was posed as a serious question as to what kind of things are houses in the mind-independent world. He argued that it was a combination of matter and form.

Today, a house is just overwhelmingly complicated to define in anything remotely like metaphysics. We have trouble with atoms, never mind houses. So you'd say that Aristotle was critically self aware like say, Kant or Hume?

If that conscious periphery gave us enough information about the body — NOS4A2

That's a big if. It may the most any creature may be able to have.

That argument could go either way.

Here I can say a few things, as my dissertation was based in large part on Galen Strawson's panpsychism. Granted that's only one person and there are many types of panpsychism.

For Strawson, the argument goes something like this: there is experiential phenomena (consciousness) and there is non-experiential phenomena (phenomena that lack consciousness).

Either things at bottom are completely and utterly non-experiential, which would make the arising of experiential phenomena a miracle. Or, completely non-experiential stuff does not exist, meaning there is something about the "ultimates" (fundamental features of reality) that are either experience-involving or experience-realizing.

If there is something about matter that gives rise to experience, then matter cannot be completely and utterly non-experiential.

There are important nuances I won't get into now, because this will become too long. But the gist for him is that we have no good reason to believe completely non-experiential stuff to exist.

To be clear, I do not agree with him on important aspects. So this is not my view, just presenting it to others. Is this an illusion? I don't think so. We only have so many options we can appeal to that make some sense to us. This is one of those options.

Yes, I've noticed it's toned down it's endless flaterry quite a lot.

What's concerning is that some people want the old model back, as a "companion" or buddy.

But for out interests, this version is better.

I have found AI extremely useful in bouncing ideas off of. You have to aware of its sycophant leanings, phrasing issues so that it doesn't just agree or confirm, but I do find it helpful. It's also a very powerful search engine that directs you into where the mainstream areas of debate might lie and that allows for deeper research on other sites. — Hanover

Agreed. Especially with the sycophantic stuff- people have been and will continue to be extremely deluded. But they can be useful if used with care for some topics.

But yeah - people ought not confuse what it does - compute words on a probabilistic basis, with what it is not, which is intelligent or anything remotely sentient.

It's more that the way we access what we access is mentally mediated, and that is really a truism, even tautologous, If we say that perception is a mental process. — Janus

Sure - I entirely agree, it should be trivial. Some people might disagree, as with everything else in philosophy.

Now the only issue is if you are OK with saying some versions of idealism entail mental mediation or if you think idealism must entail something else.

There are many ranges to idealism, as you know. If you take idealism by the implication of the word, then the argument would be there is nothing in the world but ideas.

But there are restrained versions of it which argue is that what we access is necessarily mentally mediated - without making ontological commitments about what these objects are (non-mental, immaterial, mechanistic, etc.)

What you are critiquing here is the more extreme version. And then your criticisms here are quite apt.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami

In Ascension by Martin McInnes

The physical is things like photons* hitting retina, being converted into electrical signals that go to the brain, trigger a storage mechanism containing a similar pattern of photons* hitting the retina at some point in the past during which the body sustained damage, triggering ..., on and on, and the body moves a certain way that avoids taking damage again.

Is that a description of a mental event? — Patterner

So, it's physics? That's what the physical is? That seems to constrain things too much, there are too many phenomena that cannot be explained with physics.

As for photons hitting a retina being a description of a mental event. Absolutely. That's how we discover the photon hitting the eye - what else could we do? There's no alternative that I know of.

That's a description of mental event under specific, controlled circumstances, an act of abstraction to discover what is relevant to a theory of vision.

The issue here is not merely terminological but conceptual, what is mental and what is physical? It's not as if there is an intelligible distinction not made between arbitrary stipulations as in: the mental is what-it's-like subjective experience, whereas the physical is something to do with what physics says, or whatever is concrete, and the mind is not concrete.

Our view of matter now is far removed from the old "dead and stupid" matter idea of the 16th century. It's no longer that, in fact whatever the physical is, has almost nothing to do with our intuitive ideas of "concreteness".

So, I ask rhetorically for the nth time, why can't the mental be physical? Why can't the physical be mental?

These terms are thrown around without much clarity, in my opinion.

But we can ask, is consciousness fundamental? Fundamental to what? To the universe? Does the universe have mind? I don't see evidence for this view. But there is no evidence against it either.

If by consciousness one means "what-it's-likeness", then I don't recall feeling anything prior to being born. That's the only "subjective" (but re-interpreted) experience I have of the universe, after conceptualization.

I see no subjectivity here. Is the universe intelligible to us other than through minds? Not that we know of. So, unless these issues are clarified - not stipulated - intuitions aren't going to help, as evidenced by these endless conversations.

S'all good. :up:

Hey man, I'm just the mediator. Don't argue with the messenger but with the bot.

It will agree with you always.

As for how it gets its name, we give it to it, but it's meaningless.

It's not as if we can be logical all the time even if wanted to. And there's no clear distinction between "logical thinking" and "imagination". One could gesture at numbers and ask, "where are they?" You don't see a 1 or a 2 in the empirical world.

The most logical people in fact relied on imagination for proofs that logic finds quite iron-clad, to a certain degree of approximation.

To take two examples, Newton started wondering about the power of gravity as he saw an apple fall to the ground and wondered why do apples fall instead of going up? Working on the problem he discovered gravity.

Einstein said his "happiest thought" was imaging what a man falling from a building would feel like - this eventually led him to relativity.

So, the logical/imagination line is blurrier than what we may initially suppose it to be.

I wonder….but not very much….what these AI chatbots would say about that. — Mww

Something like a thermostat in-itslef would be what a thermostat could be like absent human experience. This has similarities to Kant's "things-in-themselves", albeit presented in a less critical manner.

Along those lines...

Sure. Otherwise, one cannot make sense of the evidence and practically all of cosmic history.

What if that is false somehow? Then we make everything up, literally. It's a fine line between knowing we are unique creatures in the natural order, but no to the point of saintliness, in which we become unhindered by nature.

I understand that. Need not turn out this way, in so far as that debate even makes any sense at all.

Yes. Thank you. — Patterner

Got you.

If you don't want to engage with arguments, why participate in a philosophy forum? There surely are other forums in which you can discuss this issue with people who would agree with you.

But being that you don't want that, then perhaps I can say that consciousness may be epistemically fundamental but not ontologically so. Unless you want to say something like the world is at bottom a kind of sensation, then maybe this distinction may be of some use.

It's your thread after all. :)

Yep, it could be a circular thing. But I think it's impossible to find evidence for it that may corroborate the theory - hence leaving us in the same place.

La invención de Morel by Adolofo Bioy Caseres

We don't know. Akin to the status of time "before" the Big Bang. May even be a meaningless question we try to provide an answer, but hit upon a cognitive wall. Then we realize we are not asking questions about the world, but are instead asking questions about our form of understanding.

Which is why his book is called "Consciousness Denied".

He has some fancy neuroscience; he does write well - but the people who agree with him are just tiny.

It's a useful tool to oppose, and for that we should be grateful. But outside of seminars, who believes it?

If a person breaks an arm, or gets shot or something horrible, would Dennett say "oh, that's just a broken machine, it's nervous system is sending pain signals to the brain, nothing to worry about".

Of course not, he would likely call for help, because what he is experiencing is reality, not illusions or dispositional behavior or a magic trick.

He has always been extremely cringe-inducing in this topic. The level of irrationality and utter disregard for the most evident, clear, best understood phenomena out of everything there is, is just beyond words.

I suppose it's a balancing act, if you (or anybody) are harsh to all these enlightened posters, then less people might be willing to engage. But it can help the odds of conversations retaining a high quality, but that's not guaranteed either.

It's annoying more than anything because of the "I know Something you will never see" attitude, but, whatever.

What is the point with debating a supporter of a paranoid, ethno-supremacist, racist, genocide enabling state?

Is it worth pointing out trivial facts? Or should we entertain supporters of a country which has utterly overwhelming global condemnation, quite often isolated with the US in the UN.

Of course, you do you.

Israel may laugh soon. Blowback will come and it will be brutal.

Agree with a good deal. Especially on the point of some newer members coming in with a ToE pretending great wisdom and exhaustive theoretical depth, which, when ever so slightly pushed, collapse.

This is not to say that I think it makes to delimit what a philosopher ought to do, but "taking things down" or "breaking them apart" is good mental hygiene.

Beyond that, when evidence is lacking to settle a case, the merits should be decided on the strength of given reasons. However, we should also be aware that in many respects, our own inclinations in philosophy could be off the mark.

Great post Wayf. I may be nerding out again, but I think there's a very interesting argument to be made against positivism, that is in my opinion devastating for positivism, which is Michael Polanyi's argument on tacit knowledge.

Granted, he's not super well-known in philosophy, sadly, but his arguments I think are more convincing than ever Popper's.

Just my brief two cents. :up:

Finished The Tacit Dimension by Michael Polanyi.

The first part of the book was quite impressive, it's been quite a while since I found something new in philosophy which is very interesting. The rest of the book was also quite good, but less so than the first third of it.

Currently reading The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector, very very good.

Well, a country is quite a complex idea. It's not something that is easily pointed to in the way a rock or a river can be pointed to.