I do not have to be certain in order to judge and act. And if my ethical system is not firmly connected to the real world, what is the point? I'm not interested in creating the appearance of good, I want to make actual good things happen. I can't be certain that I'm not in some Bizarro world where good is bad and vice versa, but at least I have a chance of success, since I am able to conceive of true ethical success within my ethical system.
Your doing things is at core just the appearance of doing things. You do not actually move about your physical body, you move about a projection that we think resembles our physical body. The mystery is that somehow changing the projection actually changes the real thing. Free will then is basically voodoo, I make the image of the thing change and then the actual thing changes in response to my doing so.
I think it is a good short essay that interacts with the fallacy of gray, so I recommend reading it. At the very least, it will help you understand my point of view.
Also, your argument was just that something was subjective and thus it was morally important, right?
My argument is that because material facts underlying appearances are always uncertain it does not work as an ethical system to ignore appearances and work on what you believe to *actually exist*. That is because you may be mistaken about the facts, or worse you may be deliberately misled by evildoers into believing in facts that aren't. It is better instead to only regard the appearances, so if it looks like I am doing wrong then I stop. I don't take into account the wider 'facts' that I think I know in making that decision, I take into account what it is that I appear to be doing at the moment.
Minds are more than the stream of consciousness, though, are they not? It's more than a snapshot of my current thoughts. Otherwise, you'd be dealing with the "never step in the same river twice" problem.
The continuity is a consistent part of the projection, in the 'you are the water not the glass' system, *you* are just another one of the ideas in the brain. As soon as you fall asleep then you cease to exist, as the continuity is now gone.
I do not think that research indicates what you think it does. There have never been nuggets of memory in our brains according to the materialists, never any physical objects to find. Instead, memory is an emergent property of the persistent traits of connected neurons.
The brain is messy, since it was made by evolution. It doesn't have neat little bins for each memory. But the memories are still stored inside the brain, just not in a formalized way.
Remember that you do not have to prove a negative. You have to prove that the mind and the brain are the same thing, I do not have to prove that they are different things. The best way to prove that the brain is the mind, is to establish that mechanically they are the same, such that you can say that both mind and brain are two difference appearances of the same thing as it were. The lack of evidence that the brain works as the mind does, fails to establish the sameness of the two objects; which means that dualism (the negative) is the case.
You can continue to go on assuming brain/mind unity, ignoring the fact you have no evidence for it and this is what presently going on. This is where non-dualism it takes a distinctly sinister turn, since you cannot reconcile the conflicting mechanics you simply ignore set of mechanics. That means in effect you explain away everything the mind does with the brain, though the only reason you are forced to do this is because the mechanics contradict (since you are wrong).
Well, in that case, my sense of persistent self would indicate that my idea of "mind" fits better with the box interpretation than the contents interpretation. However, I disagree that the contents interpretation is not reconcilable with a persistent self. I also do not see how the box interpretation results in an objective mind and the contents interpretation a subjective mind.
The sense of persistent self exists only for as long as you remain conscious.
But I haven't explained anything away! There are still bridges even when I understand atoms! There are still minds even when I understand neurons! Understanding the fundamental workings of a world does not make the higher-level arrangements unreal.
Indeed. You are not however understanding the fundamental workings of the mind through the brain, the mind breaks down into ideas while the brain breaks down into neurons. Neurons as we have already discussed are not individual ideas.
Taboo "mindless"? I think you might be using it as "universe with no entities possessing subjective experience," while I am using it as "universe with solely non-mental fundamental components."
They are the exact same thing.
This is not a pipe? Yes, but that's like saying that Microsoft Word extends beyond the material world. In other words, either all abstractions/concepts are non-material, or none are.
Ideas are not physical, but they must be stored/represented somehow. Having a consciousness without a brain is like having Microsoft Word running on thin air.
Zooming in doesn't have to be physical. What do you mean by "happy" or "sad"? If you want to describe it further than synonyms like "it feels good," you have to start talking biochemistry.
Bailey and motte. Saying that ideas are not physical objects does not get you to the statement that neurology cannot teach you about minds, or whatever else you're saying about minds.
I don't think you understand what software *is*. Software is nothing but a set of instructions given to a material object to produce a given effect, there is really no difference between you entering a set of words into a keyboard and you writing a program.
Is there a meaningful difference? After all, all beliefs require you to disbelieve in their negations. (bivalence)
There is very much a meaningful difference between the two and it is also a very important difference. You cannot prove a negative, this means that all a-priori assumptions foundational to an argument *must* be positive in nature. You may start on the assumption that the mind and brain are one thing, this leads to the secondary negative statement that there is no immaterial minds/souls. You cannot however start on the negative assumption that there are no immaterial souls/minds and then draw the secondary positive conclusion that brains and minds are the same thing; the reason is that unlike the first positive claim the latter claim can never be proven as it is a negative.
The material reality is not "unknowable." You might say these things, but if you want to know what time to arrive for an appointment, you won't sit around philosophizing about the fundamental enigmatic state of the universe, you'll check your physical calendar and look at the written symbols. And if you wrote it down correctly, you'll be on time.
Consciousness depends on experiences. Experiences build and correlate. If there was literally no connection between experiences, we'd be like Boltzmann brains. There must be a degree to which we can learn about the world around us. (Perhaps "the world around us" is not the True Reality, but I don't see how this refutes my point. kicks a rock)
The mind is what we call the thing that joins all the experiences together. Their status as experiences however is uncertain, it may be that they are simply projections of the mind itself but that creates the matrix spoon-bending problem. We need to create some kind of contrived explanation as to why we cannot seem to bend all the spoons in the universe when they are simply projections of our mind anyway.
The key thing here is probability. We live our lives not according to what is known, but what is the most probable set of explanations for our appearances. The problem here is that just because something happens to be highly probable it does not mean that it is not the case that the improbable thing is *not* the case. That is why I say the material world is unknowable, because anything probabilistic inherently is; the most probable outcome is not reliably what actually happens.
Yes, but they were more right than people who said that all was water. Quantum physics seems pretty accurate so far; I'd say there's a decent chance that there is no infinite recursion of ever-tinier subsub...atomic particles.
People could have said the same about atoms. There was a decent chance that atoms were actually the bottom, but then they were split resulting in our present subatomic particles that you now claim unaware of irony there is a decent chance are the bottom.
You're ignoring the entire field of neuropsychology.
As I ignore the whole field of tarot card reading. Or more appropriately phrenology.
A program breaks down into logical steps, not computer parts, and yet I could conceivably read off a Word document by going bit-by-bit over my computer's hard drive, if I so wished and if I had the right tools.
That is because programs are lists of instructions given to computer parts.
I feel like you missed my crucial point there. People's actions follow from their neurological activity.
As for your response, is the subconscious not part of the mind?
No, the subconcious is not part of the mind. The mind consists only of things of which we are consciously aware. The subconscious mind idea was based upon the false idea that the brain was the mind but the mind was only some specific part of the brain, which is discredited by the understanding of the decentralized nature of the brain. Okay actually there can still be a subconscious, it just is not part of the mind.
I do not assign consciousness to the means, but rather the function. What does it do? How does it respond if I say "hello"? How does it react if something sudden happens? Can it be fooled? Can it notice that it's being fooled? To me, everyone's specific brains are black boxes. All I care about is the output.
That is totally foolish. Something can be made to replicate the output of something else without actually being that thing. Surely you must know that if two things do the same thing that does not mean they are the same thing?
Explanations do not exist within a universe; they serve to explain parts and levels of a universe.
I can explain somebody's behavior by saying "they were mad" or "neurons 1, 9, 39, 20832, etc., fired and this particular neurochemical was released and this hormone is at X levels." The first is an abstraction, and a short word for a seemingly-simple output. It's like saying "my OS crashed", or "this piece of code caused a segfault." They're both true. One is more general, abstract, higher-level. That's all. The other does not invalidate the one.
All those explanations are invalid for beings that have minds. The only explanations that are valid are
he did this for reason or
he was unable to do this because of reason or
he was forced to do this because reason.
I see what you're saying. It sounds a bit like predictive processing, but maybe kind of not?
(Yes, Descartes.)
(actually Descartes came to the conclusion that a good God would not allow the Cartesian demon to deceive him and so this joke fails but my esoteric historical-philosophical trivia wins)
Problem Descartes has is that gods have the same problem that other people have, with the extra element of being less like me. They may well be philosophical zombies with no minds as such at all and still go about creating universes and answering prayers.
Thinking is a function, of sorts. It's a process.
But is it conscious thinking (that is part of the mind).
That is like calling a routine. But not all software is calling routines.
Software is made of routines. That is what it reduces to.
This does sound like something that I've read somewhere, but keep in mind that this is conscious vs subconscious and not mental vs material. It's all mental-material. "I can identify words" and "I don't even have to consciously identify words, I just recognize their shapes and instantly move on" are both cognitive skills, done by the brain.
One is done by the brain without consciousness, meaning that there is no mind involved. You were arguing that minds were brain software, but that isn't true since the brain is executing programmed routines without the mind being involved. The mind I am arguing is basically a substitute for brain software, the brain calls upon the mind when it has no program installed to do a task and if the mind consciously does something repetitively enough then it programs the brain to do it automatically, resulting in effect it being booted out of the picture.
This is why the mind fears sameness and repetition, it knows that in a world where everything is totally predictable and routine then the brain will put it in a box, never to take it out again.
Gravity is not an explanation, it is an observation. (Except that "lifted things fall because F=GMm/r2" is sort of an explanation, but it's just one step of a chain of explanations.)
We think that spacetime is warped by gravity because we notice that time slows down around massive things. There is a neat mathematical way of representing all the various relativistic effects, and so we model it all with General Relativity.
To put my question differently, how do you know anything about the connection between the cause and effect, which would then mean that there is a cause?
Actually, what do you even mean by "causality"? I wouldn't say that gravity causes falling, but rather that there is a force exerted on bodies under certain conditions, which causes/is acceleration. This force's specifics can be predicted with an ever-more-accurate series of equations, from F=GMm/r2 onward. I have now sort-of Tabooed "causality" in gravity, except for the force-acceleration thing (which I think is just an axiom of physics, and not what you're talking about). Can you conceivably do the same for your dualistic theory of minds?
This is so stupid. Gravity is not an observation, a specific object falling *is* an observation; but if we do not care to explain why or how anything falls then what need have we of gravity? It is a made up explanation for why things fall (or planets orbit or whatever), it is sound as long as it continues to do it's job and if does not it gets revised as has happened before.
The funny thing here though is that actually all objects are themselves explanations. But there is a theoretical difference between explanations like the actual existance of regular objects and the existence of mechanisms with no specific location. Gravity may be an explanation but you can't exactly go to a particular place and smash gravity to little bits with a hammer.
That which does not go away when you stop believing in it, is how I have seen it put, but your mind does not go away when you stop believing in it.
It is a word, anyway. It can be defined however we like. Its use here is far more subtle and removed from everyday life that there are multiple valid ways of specifying reality. Can we stop quibbling over "real" vs "factual" and just discuss the actual concepts? My point was that I cannot explain away the mind, because the mind is a thing that is, and you can only explain away things that aren't.
The distinctions are very important to me. The inability to get rid of your mind just by not believing in it really just another version of the matrix-spoon bending problem, with the difference you have just proven that there is something else causing the mind itself rather than anything specific in the mind (not necessarily any difference).
You have defined personhood as having Metaphysical Qualia, or whatever, but - we could conceivably simulate this, yes? Since the metaphysical world follows certain rules, right? Then we can imagine a hypothetical Material Person with the same sort of mind-function as a Metaphysical Person.
They would still have thoughts, because thoughts are material things. There is a measurable difference between your brain-state as it thinks different things. If thoughts were not physical, they could not affect the physical world. If thoughts cannot affect the physical world, then why are you talking about them? Your physical hands are twitching and talking about thoughts. They clearly have to be affected by your thoughts, then.
Where did you get the idea that non-physical things could not affect the material world from? Physical things can effect the non-physical world, so why not the reverse.
If you simulate something that almost by definition means you created a fake thing that appears to do what the real thing does.
Do you think that all your philosophy about Metaphysical Minds follows directly from the fundamental fact of self?
Yes it does. Beings with no selves will not be able to 'comprehend' it.
As I've said - Bayes. How easy is it for anybody to comprehend the Unobservable Metaphysics of Consciousness? And how is a non-conscious thing supposed to create consciousness? Evolution did that, but how will this Zombie Master select consciousness from unconsciousness in order to fool others into thinking that its Zombies are Actually Conscious?
The mindless zombie master starts with the observation of the behavior of conscious beings and then copies their external behavior. This creates an inherent flaw in the creation, the way to ferret out a perfect zombie of this kind out is to create a distinction between a real and fake consciousness, the zombie will completely fail to detect any difference between the two.
What do you mean by Actual Consciousness, though? Why is that a good way to split minds up into categories? Does it carve reality at its joints?
I mean subjective appearances, that is what is 100% certain (not of actually being real but of appearing).
Wait, so Fake Consciousnesses are actually empirically distinguishable from Actual Consciousnesses? Huh, that changes things.
Let me reiterate something that I think you are not getting. Everything you say about consciousness can be traced back through physico-causality to neurons firing. There is no point where a Zombie Master or a Metaphysical Consciousness reaches in there and makes somebody say "I'm conscious!" You would do that anyway.
That is not true for fake consciousness created by an *actual consciousnesses*. A zombie master with a mind will potentially manage to program a zombie that will always give the correct answer that implies it has some kind of mind. In this case the resulting zombie is indistinguishable from a conscious person, this is basically what we are aiming to create with our theoretical perfect Cleverbot. The troubling thing is what if the conscious zombie master were actually to accidentally use the right mechanics to create a real consciousness in the attempt to make a fake one?
How do you know that the fact that you experience things implies the existence of Metaphysical Consciousness Sources and Possible Philosophical Zombies and all that stuff?
Metaphysical consciousness is the starting point, but it needs to be explained because otherwise matrix spoon bending. This brings us to the second point, the existence of the material world. Everyone in the material world is a philosophical zombie unless I have reason to think otherwise. That reason is that what I believe to be the physical basis of their apparent consciousness, is essentially the same as what I believe to be the physical basis of my own consciousness.
They're not literally the same thing, no. I feel like you are lacking a certain concept of unimportant differences. You often say "ah, your analogy does not work, because the two things being compared are not the same thing!" That is not how comparisons work, and this is not how categories work.
Just because two things have some difference does not mean that they must be in different categories. If I categorize things based on their appearances, then whether or not two things are Actually Literally Fundamentally Identical, things that seem similar are grouped together.
As I said, the evidence for other beings being conscious is simply their similarly to me (not anyone else).
But unless you are omniscient you cannot claim to have complete knowledge of the entirety of anything you observe. That means that even if two things appear completely identical it does not mean they are the same thing.
You still haven't sufficiently defined consciousness, though. Can something be self-reflective and yet not Truly Conscious? Can something demonstrate self-awareness and yet lack True Awareness? I don't remember you clarifying these.
Easy, nothing can ever demonstrate self-awareness.
What do you mean by "connection"? Is this interneural or interplanar?
Intraneural.
Nothing, but many people would probably disagree with you that chatbots should be treated well. Also, if it comes at a cost to actual people, I would not help chatbots, because they're literally just tiny pieces of code that spit back prerecorded messages on certain triggers. It's like treating... literally any random piece of code well, except that it will say "thank you" if you say "you're cool!" and most things will just sit there.
It is appearances that matter ethically. Using your presumed knowledge of the real world to justify the appearance of the wrong you are doing is unethical.
Perceptions are not immaterial. You perceive something when your neurons get entangled with it through your sensory organs. This is a material process.
Also, if you want to know how to make a bridge that won't fall over, you'll start re-inventing the idea of evidence pretty quickly in order to get the science of statics, material science, etc. running again. In practice, material evidence is totally a thing. Look. hits a rock with toe I call that "material."
Not that nonsense again. If you hit a rock with a toe, you are simply bumping the appearance of your toe against the appearance of a rock; that any actual toes collide with any actual rocks is because non-physical things have power over physical things.
We are? Looking back, I don't think that's what's been happening... I don't know anything about this supposed scenario.
It is a different form of evidence for the existence of the material world.
Clarification: we are running on limited portions of our brain. We are not our entire brain, but we are nothing but our brain (and assorted other entangled things, extended mind, whatever, it's all physical).
The brain is decentralized, so there is no way that setup can work.
You're asserting that, but I don't see how it follows. The brain is not quite the physical mind - it's not like I've thrown the Metaphysical Consciousness into the material world and shoved it into people's heads and called them "brains." It's more like... the mind is the process carried out by operations within the brain.
That is what the statement that brains are minds amounts to. You have of course retreated and in effect declared we are only part of our brain, all I must now do is reduce the portion to 0%.
That's more a rephrasing. What I mean is...
Do you mean "made up of subatomic particles"? In that case, everything is partially non-material - are symbols and ideas made up of particles? Not quite. But that doesn't mean that they're anywhere else besides here.
The US is an institution. It's not really made up of atoms. It's an abstraction, a group. It's not on the Metaphysical Plane of Nations. It's just here.
The US is really made up of atoms. That is because it is a collective (higher object) made up of the bodies of human beings which are made up of atoms. The problem is that unless the US itself has some kind of compound mind, it is only a material object in the sense that a bridge or a plane is; even though it is made up of parts which themselves are likely to have minds.
In the physical world, consciousness is a property/function of certain kinds of objects. It doesn't really explain behaviors. It's just "this is a thinking object". An object's Consciousness Boolean can be used to predict its action, yes, but that is not all.
I am trying to explain how the non-physical can effect the physical world. What I am in effect saying is that mechanics are non-physical (Gravity say) and that every conscious is basically operating in the material world in the same fashion. The difference being there is no 'mind of gravity' while the mind-mechanic is tied up with the mind-object which is somewhere outside of the material world altogether.
I don't get what you mean by "object" and "mechanic," or even "explain."
Also, what "non-physical world"? What do you even mean by that?? Is it a place where things are? Is it an idea? Is it a state of being?
The non-physical world is the mind to itself (the mind as object). Objects are type of mechanic, that is something invented to explain the non-physical appearance of said objects (something quite different) in the non-physical mind.
What is a "mechanic"? And gravity is a force, and any given instance of gravitational force has a location.
Force is the type of mechanic that gravity exists. Gravity for that matter along with all the other physical forces, were just something made up to explain things. The difference between them and ordinary objects is they have no definite location, the mind 'appears' in the physical world as a non-object mechanic, because it is doing something inside the physical world but is not *in* the physical world.
What is a consciousness act? How is its output a mechanic in the brain? Recall this - the brain is a physical, material object. It does not interface with metaphysics. It acts according to the strict laws of physics. (quantum mechanics is probabilistic, but strictly so - you cannot mess with probabilities any more than you can violate thermodynamics)
It does do any of things you say. Those are lies.
So in your dualistic model, there is a back-and-forth between mind and brain? How is this happening? How is the mind affecting the brain? How can it, when the brain is a physical object?
Think of the mind not as an object in a spatial relationship with the brain but as a mechanic underlying the functioning of the brain. By mechanic I mean something like gravity, it does something but does not have a spatial location within the system. The difference is that the mind is also an object, but that object is *not* within the material universe but *somewhere else*, or rather it *is* the somewhere else.
This doesn't make much sense, though, since "function" pretty much means "use" or "what-is-done". It's an act or happening, or the kind of act or happening that is intended/possible for a thing. Objects are not happenings, and mechanisms are (I'm guessing) means to a happening.
Objects are mechanisms to explain subjective experience. That is the only basis by which we conclude their existence. What is confusing here is that while all objects are mechanisms, all mechanisms are not objects.
But your existence doesn't require there to be two interfacing planes. That doesn't really follow.
It does if I reason correctly.
Nobody else, AFAIK, uses "knowable" to mean "can be known with certainty." Knowledge is probabilistic.
All knowledge except that of one's own appearances. That is the true knowledge (100% certain), everything else being material or other-consciousness is uncertain.
But appearances are not people. That's comparing apples and oranges.
The appearances of the people are what matters ethically, not the people.
So "material" just means "stuff that isn't you", then?
It is material if it is not me and neither is it anyone else. Only in zombie universe does material translate simply to stuff that is not me.
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Topic: Is playing dwarf fortress ethical? (Read 52265 times)