Post by: Tilmar13 on August 20, 2018, 12:32:28 pm
You could argue that God does view us the same way and that he cares about us as much as we care about the dwarves. Not much.
You could also think I'm reading too much into this and that it's just a game.
But...
When you stop to think that we are the Creators of each of our worlds, it makes you wonder how similar the Creator of our world is to us. Does it have similar motivations? Does it eat and drink and sleep and age and die? The mortal cannot comprehend the eternal, but in the eyes of the dwarves we ARE eternal, and thus able to see the world through the eyes of God. Opens up new philosophical viewpoints.
Is our god the only god? Are there more like Him each with their own worlds and projects?
Is "divine inspiration" simply God hitting b-s?
This would mean Heaven is a separate dimension that we can't comprehend as existing, yet when our dwarves die, where do they go? Their bodies are left behind, and their "souls" get recycled back into the memory. Is that all that waits for us?
Are all the amazing things that happened throughout human history stored in the Creator's legend browser, never to be explored?
Does anything we do matter? Or are we just stupid little dwarves running around making foolish demands and mandates?
Just a thought :-\
Post by: Halnoth on August 20, 2018, 02:42:20 pm
Post by: KittyTac on August 21, 2018, 03:12:03 am
They're about as intelligent as bacteria, really. So slaughter without remorse. You kill millions of bacteria with each step.
Post by: GoblinCookie on August 22, 2018, 06:56:21 am
I looked at my little dwarven buddies' profiles, and it struck me. They are individuals. Unique creations with independent motivations and dreams and fears that are united by the common threads of drink and industry. And so are we. If supposedly we are Armok, creating and destroying worlds and lives for fun, then what if all of us have an Armok looking down on us? If we look at the dwarves as silly puppets designed for our entertainment, then how does God (or whatever you wanna call him/her/it) look at us?? Our dwarves could be fully sentient and we'd have no way of knowing because we see them as stupid randomly-generated toys...
The chair you are sitting on could also be sentient. There really isn't any means to detect sentience, since it is not something that exists as part of the observable material universe.
No. We have a way of knowing (source code). Analysis of the source shows that they are not actually sentient. They're the same dumb machines that they were before the rewrite. Also, I'm an atheist. We could be an extremely complex simulation, but said simulation would need to be literally trillions of times more complex than DF.
They're about as intelligent as bacteria, really. So slaughter without remorse. You kill millions of bacteria with each step.
The 'source code' needed to make sentience is actually not known. Bacteria could well be sentient and intelligence has nothing to do with sentience necessarily.
Post by: KittyTac on August 22, 2018, 07:30:25 am
We have no evidence of it. So there's no point in believing that claim if it would inconvenience you. :)I looked at my little dwarven buddies' profiles, and it struck me. They are individuals. Unique creations with independent motivations and dreams and fears that are united by the common threads of drink and industry. And so are we. If supposedly we are Armok, creating and destroying worlds and lives for fun, then what if all of us have an Armok looking down on us? If we look at the dwarves as silly puppets designed for our entertainment, then how does God (or whatever you wanna call him/her/it) look at us?? Our dwarves could be fully sentient and we'd have no way of knowing because we see them as stupid randomly-generated toys...
The chair you are sitting on could also be sentient. There really isn't any means to detect sentience, since it is not something that exists as part of the observable material universe.No. We have a way of knowing (source code). Analysis of the source shows that they are not actually sentient. They're the same dumb machines that they were before the rewrite. Also, I'm an atheist. We could be an extremely complex simulation, but said simulation would need to be literally trillions of times more complex than DF.
They're about as intelligent as bacteria, really. So slaughter without remorse. You kill millions of bacteria with each step.
The 'source code' needed to make sentience is actually not known. Bacteria could well be sentient and intelligence has nothing to do with sentience necessarily.
Dwarves are not alive. They're less intelligent than bacteria and can be killed freely. As a materialist, I define "sentience" as the ability to be creative with overall human or higher-level intelligence, nothing to do with free will. DF dwarves have neither.
Post by: Tilmar13 on August 22, 2018, 11:32:59 am
Post by: KittyTac on August 22, 2018, 11:34:44 am
The point I was trying to make was that compared to a higher power (if one exists), we could be simple programs. They could be saying of us "it's just a simulation game, look at the dumb humans" the same way we say that of the dwarves. The primary differences "in my mind" are just terms of scale. We have no way of knowing that we aren't just a simulation being run by a bunch of aliens.That's what I said. We could be a simulation, but that simulation would be billions or trillions of times more complex than DF. Dwarves can be abused without repercussions.
Post by: Fleeting Frames on August 22, 2018, 08:44:31 pm
Post by: KittyTac on August 23, 2018, 12:30:32 am
Well, some of them may go 'insane' or 'die', if you will. The repricussions are all contained in the savefile, but they are there.I meant IRL moral repercussions.
Post by: Fleeting Frames on August 23, 2018, 06:50:44 am
What, do you mean like self-conscience repricussions? Do you still have one of those?
Post by: KittyTac on August 23, 2018, 08:35:46 am
Well, some might be upset if you tell them what you've been doing with DF cats or children.Yes. Yes I do. Those who care about DF children are people who think that they are alive.
What, do you mean like self-conscience repricussions? Do you still have one of those?
Post by: Fleeting Frames on August 23, 2018, 08:47:10 am
More seriously, I follow the viewpoint of Tilmar13 - after all, our valuation depends on relative complexity. Dog is more valuable than a wasp, which is more valuable than a Ladybug, which is more valuable than a dwarf....
Wait, no, for me it's more like Dog>dwarf≃ladybug>wasp. Clearly I don't follow it.
Post by: KittyTac on August 23, 2018, 08:50:32 am
Post by: Tilmar13 on August 23, 2018, 11:57:37 am
I would argue a dwarf is more complex than a microorganism or insect. They eat, drink, sleep, develop, influence their world around them, reproduce etc. but that isn't the point.
We're sitting here saying the dwarves are unintelligent and that they don't matter, while it's entirely possible we are all inside a grand simulation and there are a bunch of aliens saying that we aren't sentient either. Like at the end of the Men in Black movies when they zoom out.
Post by: KittyTac on August 23, 2018, 12:06:16 pm
From our perspective they are less than insects. In the same way that the dwarves' intelligence is far beneath ours to the point that we do not consider them sentient, our intelligence would be far below the being(s) that may or may not be playing with us the way we play with the dwarves.Us being a simulation does not matter. It does NOT affect our world in any sense. Why should we care about that? It doesn't make sense to care.
I would argue a dwarf is more complex than a microorganism or insect. They eat, drink, sleep, develop, influence their world around them, reproduce etc. but that isn't the point.
We're sitting here saying the dwarves are unintelligent and that they don't matter, while it's entirely possible we are all inside a grand simulation and there are a bunch of aliens saying that we aren't sentient either. Like at the end of the Men in Black movies when they zoom out.
Their processes and functions are much less complex than even the simplest bacteria. Their mood is a few variables. Their hunger is a single variable. They cannot learn to do new things, they can only improve their ability to produce things quicker.
What are you even arguing for with your simulation hypothesis? That we should treat dwarves as living beings because higher powers might treat us as nonliving machines? They're definitely NOT alive by our definition of the word. Keyword: "our". That's the only thing that matters in our treatment of them.
Post by: Tilmar13 on August 23, 2018, 12:18:09 pm
I thought it was an interesting viewpoint to be able to experience that promotes a form of existential nihilism
Post by: KittyTac on August 23, 2018, 12:19:32 pm
If you read the original post, you would know that I am merely making an observation and it serves to give us the perspective of a god. Or like a Lovecraftian Great Old One.Oh. So you're not arguing that they're alive? Then I'll back out. Now lock the thread before GoblinCookie starts spouting nonsense like a garden sprinkler.
I thought it was an interesting viewpoint to be able to experience that promotes a form of existential nihilism
Post by: Fleeting Frames on August 23, 2018, 05:53:03 pm
I see it elsewhere, too; a legendary armorsmith is no more complex than a peasant, but a typically a player tries to save first over second.
I'm not a pure selfish utilitarian, but I do have an ego and potential for corruption. As such, I recognize any moral-based decision that actually affects me - even if only through what I think i.e. moral repricussions - is going to be bent at an angle towards whether it benefits me and mine.
PS: One probably shouldn't snipe at other posters not present in thread, or ask the thread of the person you're quoting to be locked. Might produce ill will, those.
@Tilmar13: I do consider myself a creator of (DF) worlds, yes.
Leaving aside the technical difficulties, it does present a certain kind of chaos god perspective:
I aim to produce life and unlife - so that I may then order it snuffed out. (Snuff fortress?)
I aim to shepherd dwarves through life, better faster stronger smarter - into danger, and a preplanned tomb of rememberance.
I draw to estabilish calm and prosperity - then throw down player fort in a splash that evokes chaos and decimation.
The greater the variety, the greater the mounds of bone.
Overall, the mightier the high, the deeper the fall.
At the end, pull a lever (and cavein it all).
Thus is my benevolence.
Post by: KittyTac on August 23, 2018, 08:59:52 pm
Post by: IndigoFenix on August 24, 2018, 12:54:03 am
By that account, in order to have an experience of pain, the organism (or program) in question must take measures to avoid the same experiences in the future. It is not especially difficult to write a simple neural network to respond to noxious stimuli in a way that encourages avoidance of those stimuli in the future (although it would be rather CPU-intensive to run thousands of them in a single simulation). Our own experience of pain is essentially the same concept, just more complex - we remember pain in order to avoid it in the future.
DF creatures do not have this quality though. Every event has completely hard-coded responses and there is no true memory involved that stores the pattern of its occurrence, so no effort is made to avoid the same stimuli in the future.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with whether it is right or wrong to abuse virtual dwarves, or neural network AIs for that matter. To answer this we would need to answer the question of why (or if) it is wrong to abuse humans, or dogs, or cows, or insects, or plants - a question rarely addressed in these topics. I think a lot of people just assume certain things are right and wrong and rarely give thought to the why, because questioning these assumptions can be dangerous (although, depending on one's environment, perhaps not as dangerous as not questioning them).
Post by: GoblinCookie on August 24, 2018, 07:19:38 am
We have no evidence of it. So there's no point in believing that claim if it would inconvenience you. :)
Dwarves are not alive. They're less intelligent than bacteria and can be killed freely. As a materialist, I define "sentience" as the ability to be creative with overall human or higher-level intelligence, nothing to do with free will. DF dwarves have neither.
You are defining sentience as simply a set of behaviors. But actual consciousness is not needed to explain any of those behaviors, so according to Occam's Razor you are eliminated as a redundant entity, since everything you do can be explained simply a result of chance and contingency. We don't need the mind, we don't need 'awareness', we don't need 'choice', we don't need to *ever* ascribe consciousness to anything, since everything that anything does is explainable as a result of cause-and-effect and if that does not work we can use chance.
If you read the original post, you would know that I am merely making an observation and it serves to give us the perspective of a god. Or like a Lovecraftian Great Old One.Oh. So you're not arguing that they're alive? Then I'll back out. Now lock the thread before GoblinCookie starts spouting nonsense like a garden sprinkler.
I thought it was an interesting viewpoint to be able to experience that promotes a form of existential nihilism
Well your the one arguing against your own existence while not realizing that is what you are doing.
Post by: KittyTac on August 24, 2018, 07:45:37 am
Post by: Fleeting Frames on August 24, 2018, 08:07:36 am
@GoblinCookie: Only if you presume you are consiciousness could you thus be theoretically eliminated in that premise. From outside perspective, I'm no different than Chinese room which outputs into this textbox here - but if this output is me, doing the switcheroo doesn't get rid of me at all.
That said, good demonstration of failure to account for drug-fueled artists of the imagination: Ability to be creative, no ability to verify they're being creative.
Post by: KittyTac on August 24, 2018, 08:10:39 am
@IndigoFenix: Hm. Actually, you've got me wondering: If a dwarf goes through traumatizing events and changes from brave, reckless and angry dorf to fearful and anxious one, will they start running away from combat in fear where they used to engage with vengeance?That's hardcoded, though.
Post by: Fleeting Frames on August 24, 2018, 08:14:26 am
In addition, I know I've read smart cavern critters can have their own population behaviour depend on their experiences in worldgen as well as in-fort history - there's the tactic of killing some troglodytes, then having rest escape off-map to have them fearful (or if they kill yours, aggressive).
Haven't tested, though, so not certain of its veracity.
Post by: KittyTac on August 24, 2018, 08:24:44 am
Yes, but some still run while others engage.The learning and personality change itself is hardcoded.
In addition, I know I've read smart cavern critters can have their own population behaviour depend on their experiences in worldgen as well as in-fort history - there's the tactic of killing some troglodytes, then having rest escape off-map to have them fearful (or if they kill yours, aggressive).
Haven't tested, though, so not certain of its veracity.
Post by: Fleeting Frames on August 24, 2018, 08:31:24 am
Post by: KittyTac on August 24, 2018, 08:38:02 am
I think it being hardcoded only matters if I want to mod it?They can't actually learn anything.
Post by: Tilmar13 on August 24, 2018, 12:26:48 pm
Post by: Schmaven on August 24, 2018, 11:01:32 pm
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
That is an interesting perspective on it. I've gotten some philosophical insights about life through my experiences playing Dwarf Fortress. It seems like you have too! Though it is possible to look at everything as like a book to learn from - some experiences seem more rich in potential than others. But that potential also depends of what each person does not know, more so than the experience itself. The relative randomness and vast array of challenges to try keep Dwarf Fortress really interesting for me.
I have on some level compared my worth to society as a single Dwarf in the Fortress, and that put things into a more realistic perspective. My own personal wishes really aren't that important in the grand scheme of things, so I can relax about them.
Given the previous posts, I plead the 5th on matters concerning consciousness and creation.
Post by: KittyTac on August 24, 2018, 11:14:27 pm
Post by: KittyTac on August 24, 2018, 11:26:02 pm
You know the enchanting end of the previous thread. Don't make a reenactment.
Post by: Putnam on August 25, 2018, 01:00:42 am
My definition of sentience is the ability to be creative with >~ human-level intelligence.
that's not a definition of sentience i've ever heard and, indeed, doesn't jive with everything i know about sentience, e.g. that most mammals are sentient as well as a lot of birds
Post by: KittyTac on August 25, 2018, 01:04:53 am
Well, that's how I define it.My definition of sentience is the ability to be creative with >~ human-level intelligence.
that's not a definition of sentience i've ever heard and, indeed, doesn't jive with everything i know about sentience, e.g. that most mammals are sentient as well as a lot of birds
Post by: Shonai_Dweller on August 25, 2018, 01:14:36 am
I see we're having our usual "what is sentience" discussion, with all the lessons from previous threads on the same topic already forgotten.Including the way we mix up the words sapient and sentient freely (well, I think I've seen Toady do that too...).
Post by: KittyTac on August 25, 2018, 01:35:58 am
Post by: Dozebôm Lolumzalìs on August 25, 2018, 02:27:58 am
You are coming into this with the assumption that consciousness is nonphysical. If consciousness is physical, then your responses are meaningless. At the very least, try understand the point of view of physicalists, even if you think it is incorrect.We have no evidence of it. So there's no point in believing that claim if it would inconvenience you. :)
Dwarves are not alive. They're less intelligent than bacteria and can be killed freely. As a materialist, I define "sentience" as the ability to be creative with overall human or higher-level intelligence, nothing to do with free will. DF dwarves have neither.
You are defining sentience as simply a set of behaviors. But actual consciousness is not needed to explain any of those behaviors, so according to Occam's Razor you are eliminated as a redundant entity, since everything you do can be explained simply a result of chance and contingency. We don't need the mind, we don't need 'awareness', we don't need 'choice', we don't need to *ever* ascribe consciousness to anything, since everything that anything does is explainable as a result of cause-and-effect and if that does not work we can use chance.If you read the original post, you would know that I am merely making an observation and it serves to give us the perspective of a god. Or like a Lovecraftian Great Old One.Oh. So you're not arguing that they're alive? Then I'll back out. Now lock the thread before GoblinCookie starts spouting nonsense like a garden sprinkler.
I thought it was an interesting viewpoint to be able to experience that promotes a form of existential nihilism
Well your the one arguing against your own existence while not realizing that is what you are doing.
To a physicalist, consciousness is a higher-order description of a physical process. It does not exist separately from the physical process, but can abstracted and generalized. The fact that the process can be described without reference to consciousness does not mean that the consciousness does not exist, only that it does not separately exist.
Post by: Putnam on August 25, 2018, 02:30:03 am
Post by: KittyTac on August 25, 2018, 03:06:44 am
Post by: GoblinCookie on August 26, 2018, 07:02:02 am
You sound like you do not believe in free will. I also don't.
Free will is a problematic concept yes. As a dualist the non-existance of free will basically means that consciousness is operating like a projection, the projector (physical body) creates a non-physical projection that passively reflects the material reality. Free will is simply the conscious awareness of the randomness of the physical systems of the body/brain.
This creates fewer problems for me (not that I am not still sitting on the fence) than a free will universe. In that case the dualistic mind is acting more like a user-interface, that is it is a projection that allows the will to make controlled alterations to the state of the physical body/brain rather than simply passively reflecting it's state. The problem is that it requires the non-physical to influence the physical universe and since we cannot detect the non-physical within the physical universe that means the causality is going to invisible to us.
In both cases randomness is crucial. In the free-will universe randomness serves in an interesting function, it acts a cloak to hide the non-physical causality or alternatively it is an illusion created by our inability to observe the external causal agent within the physical box. In effect it is pseudorandomness, sort of how dwarf fortress actually works, it seems the game is deciding things at random but really it is doing so entirely deterministically based upon a random seed.
If dwarf fortress beings were conscious, they would not have free will nor a concept of it. That is because dwarf fortress is deterministic, they would have no experience of their own randomness because they are entirely pre-determined and there is no randomness in a computer program for any actual pseudorandomness to hide.
@GoblinCookie: Only if you presume you are consiciousness could you thus be theoretically eliminated in that premise. From outside perspective, I'm no different than Chinese room which outputs into this textbox here - but if this output is me, doing the switcheroo doesn't get rid of me at all.
That said, good demonstration of failure to account for drug-fueled artists of the imagination: Ability to be creative, no ability to verify they're being creative.
That is probably true, except that there is no real point in unconsciously being something; that does not allow you go on the internet and discuss consciousness.
You are coming into this with the assumption that consciousness is nonphysical. If consciousness is physical, then your responses are meaningless. At the very least, try understand the point of view of physicalists, even if you think it is incorrect.
To a physicalist, consciousness is a higher-order description of a physical process. It does not exist separately from the physical process, but can abstracted and generalized. The fact that the process can be described without reference to consciousness does not mean that the consciousness does not exist, only that it does not separately exist.
I reject the physicality of consciousness for a reason, I don't just assume it.
My responses were based upon assuming for the sake of argument that consciousness is physical. Saying that consciousness is physical is to say that it is a material *thing*, however many fancy words you decide to use to describe the nature of the physical thing that it is. As a physical thing it is subject to Occam's Razor, if we don't need it then away it goes. Everything that you or I anybody else does or is can be explained by ordinary chance+contingency. There is no need to take into account a consciousness *thing* that materially exists in whatever sense you are proposing it exists as, since we can explain everything perfectly without it.
Post by: KittyTac on August 26, 2018, 07:48:40 am
Post by: Dozebôm Lolumzalìs on August 26, 2018, 07:55:59 pm
actual pseudorandomnesso_O
That is probably true, except that there is no real point in unconsciously being something; that does not allow you go on the internet and discuss consciousness.If consciousness is not epiphenomenal (and it seems you don't think it is, since you think that you need to be conscious to discuss consciousness), then either it is physical or there is an as-yet-undiscovered connection between quarks and the Realm of the Mind. Any theory which requires significant, unspecified changes to fundamental physics should receive a significant penalty.
1. Occam's razor does not apply to definitions and categories. "It is strictly simpler for blue to not actually exist, only objects that tend to reflect light of particular wavelengths..." Reductio ad absurdum.You are coming into this with the assumption that consciousness is nonphysical. If consciousness is physical, then your responses are meaningless. At the very least, try understand the point of view of physicalists, even if you think it is incorrect.
To a physicalist, consciousness is a higher-order description of a physical process. It does not exist separately from the physical process, but can abstracted and generalized. The fact that the process can be described without reference to consciousness does not mean that the consciousness does not exist, only that it does not separately exist.
I reject the physicality of consciousness for a reason, I don't just assume it.
My responses were based upon assuming for the sake of argument that consciousness is physical. Saying that consciousness is physical is to say that it is a material *thing*, however many fancy words you decide to use to describe the nature of the physical thing that it is. As a physical thing it is subject to Occam's Razor, if we don't need it then away it goes. Everything that you or I anybody else does or is can be explained by ordinary chance+contingency. There is no need to take into account a consciousness *thing* that materially exists in whatever sense you are proposing it exists as, since we can explain everything perfectly without it.
2. When you say "you, unaware of it, are arguing against your own existence," you are presupposing that if KittyTac were correct about consciousness being physical, they wouldn't exist. This is combining your beliefs and KittyTac's, and then claiming that the combination is an accurate reflection of KittyTac's beliefs.
Post by: KittyTac on August 26, 2018, 10:08:45 pm
You can clearly see why I have a grudge on GC.
Post by: Putnam on August 26, 2018, 10:22:41 pm
The possibilities are essentially that consciousness either comes from the brain or does not come from the brain and merely appears to come from the brain in every way all the way down to being profoundly affected by changes in the layout or chemical balance of the brain.
We can see why the former makes fewer assumptions.
Post by: GoblinCookie on August 28, 2018, 08:05:41 am
If consciousness is not epiphenomenal (and it seems you don't think it is, since you think that you need to be conscious to discuss consciousness), then either it is physical or there is an as-yet-undiscovered connection between quarks and the Realm of the Mind. Any theory which requires significant, unspecified changes to fundamental physics should receive a significant penalty.
You are getting it backwards. The physics follows the evidence, the evidence does not follow the physics, no penalty therefore for disagreeing with fundamental physics.
I don't think the connection need be between the actual quarks and the realm of the mind. The connection is probably between the unified object that is the body and it's mind, that is because all the neurons are identical and we are only aware of some of the brain's content. Free will, if it exists likely works because there is a physical law that requires that the physical reality conform to it's mental representation. This law works in reverse also, that is why you can move your arm freely but not engage in matrix-spoon bending.
Your arm moving is possible, that means that the reality will conform to the mind. You move your imaginary arm and since it corresponds to a possible state that the universe could logically assume your actual arm moves. You try and move the spoon however and the universe 'says no' because there is no logical way that such an outcome can occur and the principle hence works backwards, your mind is forced to conform to matter rather than the reverse.
Mind must conform to matter and the universe has two ways of accomplishing this. First it tries Mind-Over-Matter and then it tries Matter-Over-Mind.
1. Occam's razor does not apply to definitions and categories. "It is strictly simpler for blue to not actually exist, only objects that tend to reflect light of particular wavelengths..." Reductio ad absurdum.
2. When you say "you, unaware of it, are arguing against your own existence," you are presupposing that if KittyTac were correct about consciousness being physical, they wouldn't exist. This is combining your beliefs and KittyTac's, and then claiming that the combination is an accurate reflection of KittyTac's beliefs.
1. No, blue exists because it's existence is empirically verified by observation. Occam's Razor applies to theoretical (non-observable) explanations, not to observable things; or to put it another way, it applies to entities whose existence is indirectly proven by necessity. Consciousness (of other people) is not empirically observable, which puts it in the theoretical explanation camp and so it falls under Occam's Razor.
If I see two monkeys turning the wheel but only one monkey is needed, Occam's Razor does not establish that one of the monkeys does not exist. If I see blue, then blue exists as an entity; it is only wrong to invent something like blue when one colour would do as an explanation.
2. It is quite acceptable to assume somebody else's position in order to reveal it's internal contradictions. The irony here is that KittyTac is only disproving his own existence from MY perspective. From his perspective he is actually disproving MY existence, in both cases Occam's Razor swiftly eliminates everyone but the observer, whose consciousness stands on empiricism.
Occam's razor is, in fact, an excellent argument for physicalism, since clearly what most would call "consciousness" does exist and personality changes from brain damage etc. point toward it coming from the brain.
The possibilities are essentially that consciousness either comes from the brain or does not come from the brain and merely appears to come from the brain in every way all the way down to being profoundly affected by changes in the layout or chemical balance of the brain.
We can see why the former makes fewer assumptions.
The only existence whose existence is empirical is your own. All other consciousness are non-empirical objects, which means we don't need more of them that are necessary. If the material object that is the brain can explain everything the body does without the need of a physical consciousness 'thing' inside the brain, therefore Occam's Razor eliminates not just non-physical consciousness but conscious itself if we make consciousness physical.
Or rather it eliminates all consciousnesses *other* than the observer. Occam's Razor does not work against empirically observable things.
I definitely exist.
You can clearly see why I have a grudge on GC.
You exist because you are wrong. :P
Post by: Maximum Spin on August 28, 2018, 08:36:52 am
To start on classical 'cogito ergo sum' terms, suppose that thought can happen on its own without requiring a substrate to think — that is, what if the verb "to think" doesn't require a subject, but perception and observation can happen in vacuo? Then "you" may think that "I think, therefore I am", but, in fact, this assumes the consequent: all that is really confirmed is "thinking", not that you exist to do the thinking. All "your" perceptions, including that of being a separable identifiable existence in the first place, could merely be taking place in a general way in an environment without time, space, or things; and since this requires fewer assumptions (none at all, in point of fact), Occam's razor demands it.
Broadly speaking, all that can be confirmed by observation is observation, not the ostensible observer or observed.
ETA: This is extremely basic 'philosophy 101' stuff, by the way, so, don't worry, if you pursue philosophy when you get to college, you'll understand it eventually.
Post by: Putnam on August 28, 2018, 08:39:39 am
The only existence whose existence is empirical is your own. All other consciousness are non-empirical objects, which means we don't need more of them that are necessary. If the material object that is the brain can explain everything the body does without the need of a physical consciousness 'thing' inside the brain, therefore Occam's Razor eliminates not just non-physical consciousness but conscious itself if we make consciousness physical.
You straight up do not understand my argument in any respect.
Quote
The only existence whose existence is empirical is your own.Solipsism is a completely worthless philosophy that deserves no place in any reasonable epistemic discourse. It's like flipping the table: it's a gotcha which leads to nobody winning.
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All other consciousness are non-empirical objects, which means we don't need more of them that are necessary.See above. Other people appear to be conscious; it requires less assumptions to believe that what I see is real than that what I see is not.
Quote
If the material object that is the brain can explain everything the body does without the need of a physical consciousness 'thing' inside the brain, therefore Occam's Razor eliminates not just non-physical consciousness but conscious itself if we make consciousness physical.
This does not follow. I can make a near-identical statements as such which are clearly false:
If the material object that is an electron can explain everything in chemistry without the need of a combustion 'thing' inside the electron, Occam's Razor eliminates not just phlogiston but fire itself if we make combustion a consequence of chemistry.
You are treating consciousness as something that must be a single, unified object. This is not something that can be believed, given the extraordinary evidence we have that all perception is in the brain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain), yet one still perceives having one consciousness (http://www.uva.nl/en/content/news/press-releases/2017/01/split-brain-does-not-lead-to-split-consciousness.html), despite such things as an inability to name what is seen or independently acting limbs.
EDIT: It should be noted that I believe consciousness is basically an illusion. This does not mean I don't believe it exists. There's a difference!
Post by: Maximum Spin on August 28, 2018, 08:48:02 am
Solipsism is a completely worthless philosophy that deserves no place in any reasonable epistemic discourse. It's like flipping the table: it's a gotcha which leads to nobody winning.I notice a distinct lack of anything resembling an argument there. In a discourse about the best way to fly unicorns to the moon, gravity is a gotcha which leads to nobody winning, too, but it is nevertheless regrettably true. If the purpose of a philosophical discussion is to arrive at facts about the universe — and I'm certainly not saying it is — then your response is both pointless and irrelevant.
Here, let's try using words that have actual meaning: "Solipsism is totally unfalsifiable; while it might ultimately be true in some sense, or it may equally well not, discussing it is invariably unproductive because anything can ultimately be dismissed as a yet-more-complex illusion."
Of course, that standard would eliminate 99% of all other philosophy as well, which is why philosophers so rarely use it.
ETA: Unrelatedly, I've always wondered what would happen if I had a corpus callosotomy, because I have less than normal brain lateralisation. Not enough to go get a corpus callosotomy though.
Post by: KittyTac on August 28, 2018, 09:17:19 am
Is this the lowest level of GC's degradation? Just outright saying people are wrong with basically no argument.I definitely exist.
You can clearly see why I have a grudge on GC.
You exist because you are wrong. :P
Post by: Tilmar13 on August 28, 2018, 11:36:11 am
ETA: Unrelatedly, I've always wondered what would happen if I had a corpus callosotomy, because I have less than normal brain lateralisation. Not enough to go get a corpus callosotomy though.
Ooooo. Now here is an interesting thought. If someone with normal brain lateralization had their corpus callosum cut, there's plenty of research into split-brains. From what I would guess, because cutting a corpus callosum prevents any transhemispheric communication some very interesting things could happen depending on the extent of how "off" your brain is! Very fun for us to see, and very !FUN! for you, too! If however, everything is in the correct hemisphere with only minor variations in placement, I doubt anything would happen aside from the normal consequences of a corpus callosotomy
Of course, I'm not a psychology major; I just have a few credits. What surprises me (though it really shouldn't) is that this post turned into a forum for apparently enlightened students of philosophy to argue and debate their own viewpoints without considering that others might know more than them. I enjoy reading the debates, but the back and forth insults are just annoying. Play nice. :(
Post by: Dozebôm Lolumzalìs on August 28, 2018, 01:19:20 pm
Our current body of physical law represents our observed evidence. It would take an extremely large amount of evidence to overturn modern physics. That's not to say it can't be done - it's happened many times before - but it requires significantly more evidence than "I sat in my armchair and realized that the existence of something which can recognize its existence requires reality to include at least two fundamentally different kinds of monads, one of which comprises the universe as we know it and the other makes up a separate realm of the mind corresponding to my a priori intuitions about how cognition and sensation work."If consciousness is not epiphenomenal (and it seems you don't think it is, since you think that you need to be conscious to discuss consciousness), then either it is physical or there is an as-yet-undiscovered connection between quarks and the Realm of the Mind. Any theory which requires significant, unspecified changes to fundamental physics should receive a significant penalty.
You are getting it backwards. The physics follows the evidence, the evidence does not follow the physics, no penalty therefore for disagreeing with fundamental physics.
I don't think the connection need be between the actual quarks and the realm of the mind. The connection is probably between the unified object that is the body and it's mindIt appears I have implicitly assumed reductionism, even as I considered your non-physicalism. Okay. My argument still applies, with this addition: how can the body be noticeably different without the quarks that comprise the body being different? And if there is no noticeable difference between a body that's connected to an external mind and a body that doesn't, how can you determine which one you are? (I'm using Bayesian evidence here - knowing something is equivalent to a high probability of thinking X if and only if X is correct. For this to happen, there must be a causal interaction between X and the body - and not just a causal interaction, but one carrying a number of bits proportional to the complexity of X.)
that is because all the neurons are identicalWhat? I'm attempting to steelman this, and the best I can do is "neurons are all functionally identical and therefore theoretically interchangeable, although any particular neuron will have an internal state depending on its history." Even that isn't true (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/brainwaves/know-your-neurons-classifying-the-many-types-of-cells-in-the-neuron-forest/), and I don't see how the steelman would support your argument against reductionism.
and we are only aware of some of the brain's content.I don't understand how this connects to its context. Are you saying that the connection lies in the subconscious mind rather than the conscious mind?
Free will, if it exists likely works because there is a physical law that requires that the physical reality conform to it's mental representation. This law works in reverse also, that is why you can move your arm freely but not engage in matrix-spoon bending.As I see it, this theory generates a testable hypothesis: people will never be wrong (edit: if their beliefs could have been true, and them being true wouldn't violate physical law, only probability). And if it doesn't generate a testable hypothesis, then it's useless as a theory.
Your arm moving is possible, that means that the reality will conform to the mind. You move your imaginary arm and since it corresponds to a possible state that the universe could logically assume your actual arm moves. You try and move the spoon however and the universe 'says no' because there is no logical way that such an outcome can occur and the principle hence works backwards, your mind is forced to conform to matter rather than the reverse.This is an empty explanation. It doesn't explain how the arm actually moves, and once you've truly explained how the arm moves (brain sends signal through neurons to cells which release chemicals which provide signal and energy to the structures that reduce a cell's length), you don't need this anymore - there's nothing else to be explained.
Mind must conform to matter and the universe has two ways of accomplishing this. First it tries Mind-Over-Matter and then it tries Matter-Over-Mind.That's still simply false. The map can incorrectly describe the territory, and the map itself can't affect the territory except to the extent that it is part of the territory.
Consciousness isn't an explanation, it's a category or an observed process.1. Occam's razor does not apply to definitions and categories. "It is strictly simpler for blue to not actually exist, only objects that tend to reflect light of particular wavelengths..." Reductio ad absurdum.
2. When you say "you, unaware of it, are arguing against your own existence," you are presupposing that if KittyTac were correct about consciousness being physical, they wouldn't exist. This is combining your beliefs and KittyTac's, and then claiming that the combination is an accurate reflection of KittyTac's beliefs.
1. No, blue exists because it's existence is empirically verified by observation. Occam's Razor applies to theoretical (non-observable) explanations, not to observable things; or to put it another way, it applies to entities whose existence is indirectly proven by necessity. Consciousness (of other people) is not empirically observable, which puts it in the theoretical explanation camp and so it falls under Occam's Razor.
If I see two monkeys turning the wheel but only one monkey is needed, Occam's Razor does not establish that one of the monkeys does not exist. If I see blue, then blue exists as an entity; it is only wrong to invent something like blue when one colour would do as an explanation.Blue doesn't "exist as an entity". It's a category/process of things that reflect light of a particular wavelength. And colors don't really explain things, they only describe them. An actual explanation would be something like "the electrons in this atom, probably for quantum mechanical reasons, resonate more at this frequency than another. When they resonate strongly, they generate additional electromagnetic waves which can travel in a different direction than the original wave."
2. It is quite acceptable to assume somebody else's position in order to reveal it's internal contradictions. The irony here is that KittyTac is only disproving his own existence from MY perspective. From his perspective he is actually disproving MY existence, in both cases Occam's Razor swiftly eliminates everyone but the observer, whose consciousness stands on empiricism.I would have to ask KittyTac, but I strongly doubt that they consider themselves to be disproving your existence. You are only projecting your views onto them. (Everyone does it - some amount of projection is necessary for social interaction unless you can explicitly model the neurons in someone's brain - but less is better.)
What do you mean by the existence of an existence?Occam's razor is, in fact, an excellent argument for physicalism, since clearly what most would call "consciousness" does exist and personality changes from brain damage etc. point toward it coming from the brain.
The possibilities are essentially that consciousness either comes from the brain or does not come from the brain and merely appears to come from the brain in every way all the way down to being profoundly affected by changes in the layout or chemical balance of the brain.
We can see why the former makes fewer assumptions.
The only existence whose existence is empirical is your own.
All other consciousness are non-empirical objects, which means we don't need more of them that are necessary.No, they aren't. That's only true in your model, in which consciousness is epiphenomenal. (I think - you're somewhat hard to understand, and you've never made it clear whether you think that consciousness causally/detectably interacts with the physical world.) If you don't consider consciousness to be epiphenomenal, then it's equivalent to blueness - it's just a more complicated physical process.
If the material object that is the brain can explain everything the body does without the need of a physical consciousness 'thing' inside the brain, therefore Occam's Razor eliminates not just non-physical consciousness but conscious itself if we make consciousness physical.I'm not sure you understand physicalists. We don't think that consciousness is an object. We think that it's a process. Occam's razor does apply somewhat to processes, but in a way that's precisely opposite from your use. It's simpler for A and B to both be explained by one thing than for A to be caused by one thing and B by another. This means that your model, in which your externally-observable consciousness is caused by a bidirectional revision of physical reality and your mind to bring the two into concordance, and my externally-observable consciousness is "merely" caused by the interaction of atoms, is at a significant disadvantage.
Or rather it eliminates all consciousnesses *other* than the observer. Occam's Razor does not work against empirically observable things.You cannot empirically observe the existence of your "consciousness" (by which I mean everything that you tack onto consciousness, including your non-physical existence) unless there is a causal and informational interaction between your consciousness and your brain. (Or maybe, in some epiphenomenal sense, you can - but not in a way that you could ever communicate, since communication is physical.)
That statement is false, even if interpreted charitably. It is not the case that KittyTac's philosophy bars conscious beings from existing. Instead, KittyTac has a different operational definition of consciousness.I definitely exist.
You can clearly see why I have a grudge on GC.
You exist because you are wrong. :P
Post by: KittyTac on August 28, 2018, 01:31:53 pm
Post by: Dozebôm Lolumzalìs on August 28, 2018, 01:53:09 pm
Actually, you can't empirically confirm your own existence either.There's also a similar thermodynamical argument, which is slightly less... outrageous? counterintuitive?... but is still rather philosophically concerning. It's the Boltzmann Brains argument. Suppose that, for a long period of time, the universe is in a state of chaos. This will probably happen in the far future, with the heat death of the universe. It is possible, although astronomically improbable, that the atoms in this state will collide in just the right way and produce a human brain, or in general, a conscious object. The object will cease to be capable of consciousness almost instantly, but it will survive long enough to have a random experience. Over the length of time that the state of chaos will exist, which is at least astronomically long, the astronomically-improbable events become likely. In fact, there are probably more Boltzmann experiences than non-Boltzmann experiences in our universe, and so you are probably a Boltzmann brain. You think you read the last paragraph, but in reality, you only have the memories of doing so. One minute ago, you weren't reading anything - you didn't exist yet! The memories you have probably don't even correspond to a real person.
To start on classical 'cogito ergo sum' terms, suppose that thought can happen on its own without requiring a substrate to think — that is, what if the verb "to think" doesn't require a subject, but perception and observation can happen in vacuo? Then "you" may think that "I think, therefore I am", but, in fact, this assumes the consequent: all that is really confirmed is "thinking", not that you exist to do the thinking. All "your" perceptions, including that of being a separable identifiable existence in the first place, could merely be taking place in a general way in an environment without time, space, or things; and since this requires fewer assumptions (none at all, in point of fact), Occam's razor demands it.
Broadly speaking, all that can be confirmed by observation is observation, not the ostensible observer or observed.
ETA: This is extremely basic 'philosophy 101' stuff, by the way, so, don't worry, if you pursue philosophy when you get to college, you'll understand it eventually.
Consciousness = Being able to think with any degree of clarity. That's how I define it.What is thinking? It can't just be computation, or else computers would already be conscious. It has to be a particular kind of computation, then.
Post by: Maximum Spin on August 28, 2018, 08:15:41 pm
There's also a similar thermodynamical argument, which is slightly less... outrageous? counterintuitive?... but is still rather philosophically concerning. It's the Boltzmann Brains argument.Yep, I'm familiar with it.
What I think is more interesting is how your familiarity with it clearly correlates with your use of "steelman" in your last post.
Post by: KittyTac on August 28, 2018, 09:52:06 pm
Post by: Dozebôm Lolumzalìs on August 29, 2018, 04:56:20 pm
I think I see what you're trying to say: "mentioning Boltzmann brains is correlated with using the word "steelman"." (The different is that you have to look at a population to notice this correlation, not just one person.)There's also a similar thermodynamical argument, which is slightly less... outrageous? counterintuitive?... but is still rather philosophically concerning. It's the Boltzmann Brains argument.Yep, I'm familiar with it.
What I think is more interesting is how your familiarity with it clearly correlates with your use of "steelman" in your last post.
Yes, I am indeed in a cluster of people who, among other things, tend talk about steelmen and Boltzmann brains, and the name for which is usually "rationalists" or "rationalist-adjacent". As it happens, I actually came across this cluster due to this link which somebody gave me in my long-gone, disastrous gender/sexuality thread (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=160244.msg7164605#msg7164605).
I cannot fully determine your tone in your post. Possible interpretations include:
1. Wow, a fellow rationalist! How interesting to find you here.
2. Hm. I see you're one of those people.
However, since you seem to be focusing more on my revealed traits than on what I said, I would guess that the second interpretation may be more accurate.
If there is an undercurrent of suspicion or derision, can I ask why? Was it because I said that your philosophical argument was outrageous and counterintuitive? I didn't mean that as an insult, merely as a description of the differences between our arguments. The suggestion that nothing exists at all is clearly more [something] than the suggestion that something exists, but that thing is in a constant state of chaos which generates only brief experiences over an astronomical period of time.
Perhaps "outrageous" was the wrong word. I just meant... not preposterous, but something that most people would say is preposterous. That reaction could be described as "outrage," couldn't it? And so something that causes outrage can be described as outrageous. But that word might be assumed to mean that your argument causes me outrage, which it does not.
Post by: Maximum Spin on August 29, 2018, 05:22:22 pm
If there is an undercurrent of suspicion or derision, can I ask why?In classical logic, yes. In intuitionistic logic, not necessarily.
You needn't spend so much time second-guessing yourself; I had no objection to your statement. I merely found the correlation (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/correlation) (not in the statistical sense) between your statements amusing because of how much information those two short phrases together imply. Don't you find it funny how much one's speech quirks can reveal about one's interests?
Post by: Putnam on August 29, 2018, 05:26:43 pm
also, I didn't know boltzmann brains were a rationalist-known thing, I learned about them completely independently, though I haven't much heard "steelman" outside that context
Post by: GoblinCookie on August 30, 2018, 08:17:21 am
Solipsism is a completely worthless philosophy that deserves no place in any reasonable epistemic discourse. It's like flipping the table: it's a gotcha which leads to nobody winning.
Indeed, it just so happens that consciousness being physical results in precisely that outcome.
See above. Other people appear to be conscious; it requires less assumptions to believe that what I see is real than that what I see is not.
No, other people do not *appear* to be conscious, they just do things. None of the things they do in themselves require consciousness as an explanation and an explanation not involving consciousness is a simpler explanation than one involving consciousness. Therefore if we take as our position that consciousness is a physical thing, then it follows that consciousness (except our own, see later) is eliminated by Occam's Razor.
This does not follow. I can make a near-identical statements as such which are clearly false:
If the material object that is an electron can explain everything in chemistry without the need of a combustion 'thing' inside the electron, Occam's Razor eliminates not just phlogiston but fire itself if we make combustion a consequence of chemistry.
You are treating consciousness as something that must be a single, unified object. This is not something that can be believed, given the extraordinary evidence we have that all perception is in the brain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain), yet one still perceives having one consciousness (http://www.uva.nl/en/content/news/press-releases/2017/01/split-brain-does-not-lead-to-split-consciousness.html), despite such things as an inability to name what is seen or independently acting limbs.
EDIT: It should be noted that I believe consciousness is basically an illusion. This does not mean I don't believe it exists. There's a difference!
Fire is an empirically observable thing, phlogiston is not. Empirical things are exempt from Occam's Razor, which applies only to things which are not observable. This is why I am saying that a physical consciousness results in Solipsism, something you evidently despise.
It is like you have 7 billion monkey wheels and none of them require a monkey to turn them. However you observe one particular monkey turning one particular monkey wheel anyway that monkey exists and is very much turning that wheel. It does not follow however that there are 7 billion monkeys turning the other 7 billion monkey wheels. That is why I said a physical consciousness results in Solipsism, the consciousnesses of all other people are like the unnecessary monkeys in the above scenario, while your consciousness is the one unnecessary monkey that was observed.
Our current body of physical law represents our observed evidence. It would take an extremely large amount of evidence to overturn modern physics. That's not to say it can't be done - it's happened many times before - but it requires significantly more evidence than "I sat in my armchair and realized that the existence of something which can recognize its existence requires reality to include at least two fundamentally different kinds of monads, one of which comprises the universe as we know it and the other makes up a separate realm of the mind corresponding to my a priori intuitions about how cognition and sensation work."
Evidence means what is empirical. If my empirical self-observation results in the conclusion of dualism, that is equal to all other evidence. The amusing additional element here is that evidence itself implies consciousness and if consciousness is physical then nobody else actually has consciousness, since I am the only unnecessary monkey, to refer to my previous example to Putnam.
It appears I have implicitly assumed reductionism, even as I considered your non-physicalism. Okay. My argument still applies, with this addition: how can the body be noticeably different without the quarks that comprise the body being different? And if there is no noticeable difference between a body that's connected to an external mind and a body that doesn't, how can you determine which one you are? (I'm using Bayesian evidence here - knowing something is equivalent to a high probability of thinking X if and only if X is correct. For this to happen, there must be a causal interaction between X and the body - and not just a causal interaction, but one carrying a number of bits proportional to the complexity of X.)
Because the body is headed towards a number of possible future states that are multiple. The state that actually happens is the state that corresponds to that of the mind. The mind is unable to choose (or perhaps even imagine) what is not within the range of possible future states of the body.
To the external observer the situation appears random. In reality it is pseudo-random, but because consciousness is non-physical, no study of the physical world will reveal the pseudo-randomness and doing so would disprove freewill if such an explanation itself ignored consciousness.
What? I'm attempting to steelman this, and the best I can do is "neurons are all functionally identical and therefore theoretically interchangeable, although any particular neuron will have an internal state depending on its history." Even that isn't true (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/brainwaves/know-your-neurons-classifying-the-many-types-of-cells-in-the-neuron-forest/), and I don't see how the steelman would support your argument against reductionism.
What I was drawing attention to is the fact that there are no neurons-of-consciousness that are observably different from regular neurons within the brain. So no empirical confirmation for a physical consciousness within the brain.
I don't understand how this connects to its context. Are you saying that the connection lies in the subconscious mind rather than the conscious mind?
The easiest way for the non-dualist to dodge the unnecessary monkey problem is to declare that the brain *is* the physical consciousness, that would in fact work if we were conscious of everything that the brain had in it, knowledge wise. Since the vast majority of things our brain knows were are unconscious of, we start needing a separate physical consciousness within the brain and no such thing empirically observable, so Occam's Razor strikes.
As I see it, this theory generates a testable hypothesis: people will never be wrong (edit: if their beliefs could have been true, and them being true wouldn't violate physical law, only probability). And if it doesn't generate a testable hypothesis, then it's useless as a theory.
The theory can be falsified in two ways. One is that you determine the material universe is entirely deterministic, the other is that you determine that the mind can do anything regardless of the physical laws. It's clockwork universe OR matrix-spoon-bending, either way I'm wrong.
Saying people can't be wrong because of this theory is like saying that people can't climb hills because of gravity. A person who is wrong is constantly having to strain *against* the principle itself, but only if his error is directed at a specific material state. A material thing can be in error about another material thing and so can a consciousness be in error about another consciousness.
That is an important detail of the science of wrongness. The brain is not actually separate from the body and the body is not actually separate from the rest-of-the-universe. However to recall back to the question about the colour blue, consciousness imposes onto the world a division, because that division is possible. It is possible for the light spectrum to be divided into colours, therefore divided they are.
Once we have divided the body from the universe, the body can respond in isolation to the consciousness and therefore can be forced to 'disagree' with other elements of the universe (the law does not apply within the mind or within the material world, only between them). Once we have accomplished this feat, we can exist in perpetual delusion since the elements that disagree with the consciousness have been 'eliminated'.
This is an empty explanation. It doesn't explain how the arm actually moves, and once you've truly explained how the arm moves (brain sends signal through neurons to cells which release chemicals which provide signal and energy to the structures that reduce a cell's length), you don't need this anymore - there's nothing else to be explained.
We were not talking about how the arm actually moves. We were talking about how free will, if it actually exists could move the arm.
That's still simply false. The map can incorrectly describe the territory, and the map itself can't affect the territory except to the extent that it is part of the territory.
Indeed, but not forever. The universe will always find a way to bring the two into agreement. The problem as already discussed is that information is also stored physically in *part* of the universe and consciousness has the power to divide up the universe into categories.
1. Occam's razor does not apply to definitions and categories. "It is strictly simpler for blue to not actually exist, only objects that tend to reflect light of particular wavelengths..." Reductio ad absurdum.
2. When you say "you, unaware of it, are arguing against your own existence," you are presupposing that if KittyTac were correct about consciousness being physical, they wouldn't exist. This is combining your beliefs and KittyTac's, and then claiming that the combination is an accurate reflection of KittyTac's beliefs.
1. Yes, because those things are part of consciousness.
2. Yes, it is common for people not to realise the consequences of their beliefs, it's other people's job to point that out. I am not however combining my own beliefs with that of KittyTac's, my beliefs are quite separate.
Consciousness isn't an explanation, it's a category or an observed process.
Consciousness creates categories. They are therefore related to consciousness, along with all empirically observable objects. Consciousness, not being physical is not subject to Occam's Razor and it eliminates Occam's Razor for all the things it 'touches'.
Blue doesn't "exist as an entity". It's a category/process of things that reflect light of a particular wavelength. And colors don't really explain things, they only describe them. An actual explanation would be something like "the electrons in this atom, probably for quantum mechanical reasons, resonate more at this frequency than another. When they resonate strongly, they generate additional electromagnetic waves which can travel in a different direction than the original wave."
It exists as an entity because it is empirical. The type of entity that it is, you have described correctly. It is a category, but remember that the body is *also* a category and consciousness clearly has a special relationship to it.
I would have to ask KittyTac, but I strongly doubt that they consider themselves to be disproving your existence. You are only projecting your views onto them. (Everyone does it - some amount of projection is necessary for social interaction unless you can explicitly model the neurons in someone's brain - but less is better.)
If KittyTac is right, then since I am the only unnecessary monkey (physical consciousness) KittyTac is just a mindless thing like the computer I am writing these words on. The same also applies to you.
What do you mean by the existence of an existence?
I simply mean the same thing in a different semantic context.
There is only one material consciousness if material consciousness happens to be true, Mine; you are just a complicated thing.
No, they aren't. That's only true in your model, in which consciousness is epiphenomenal. (I think - you're somewhat hard to understand, and you've never made it clear whether you think that consciousness causally/detectably interacts with the physical world.) If you don't consider consciousness to be epiphenomenal, then it's equivalent to blueness - it's just a more complicated physical process.
The question being addressed there is the existence or otherwise of free will. If consciousness is simply a product of the material universe, then there is no free will. Only if free will exists we have to come up with a mechanism for the non-physical consciousness to interact with the physical world without being part of it.
I'm not sure you understand physicalists. We don't think that consciousness is an object. We think that it's a process. Occam's razor does apply somewhat to processes, but in a way that's precisely opposite from your use. It's simpler for A and B to both be explained by one thing than for A to be caused by one thing and B by another. This means that your model, in which your externally-observable consciousness is caused by a bidirectional revision of physical reality and your mind to bring the two into concordance, and my externally-observable consciousness is "merely" caused by the interaction of atoms, is at a significant disadvantage.
Both senses of the application of Occam's Razor eliminate everyone but me from existence. We don't need a consciousness process, just as we don't need a consciousness object.
You cannot empirically observe the existence of your "consciousness" (by which I mean everything that you tack onto consciousness, including your non-physical existence) unless there is a causal and informational interaction between your consciousness and your brain. (Or maybe, in some epiphenomenal sense, you can - but not in a way that you could ever communicate, since communication is physical.)
That makes no sense at all. You can always empirically observe your own consciousness because your consciousness is the sum of things you are percieving. That is like saying that you can't observe 10 things because you can observe 10 separate things.
That statement is false, even if interpreted charitably. It is not the case that KittyTac's philosophy bars conscious beings from existing. Instead, KittyTac has a different operational definition of consciousness.
From KittyTac's perspective he is the one that exists and not the rest of us. Unfortunately there is no KittyTac perspective, since I am the only consciousness if he is right.
Post by: Maximum Spin on August 30, 2018, 08:24:58 am
No, other people do not *appear* to be conscious, they just do things. None of the things they do in themselves require consciousness as an explanation and an explanation not involving consciousness is a simpler explanation than one involving consciousness. Therefore if we take as our position that consciousness is a physical thing, then it follows that consciousness (except our own, see later) is eliminated by Occam's Razor.This is a factual falsehood which you are only able to maintain because you don't know (because nobody yet knows) how consciousness works. If consciousness is physical, then it is necessarily the case that there are some things a conscious lifeform can do, at least on the microscopic level, which a nonsentient being simply cannot. You may not think that the things you observe require consciousness to explain — you may believe that you are perfectly capable of imagining a nonsentient being which can do those things — but if consciousness if physical, then you would simply be wrong.
Post by: GoblinCookie on August 30, 2018, 08:39:36 am
This is a factual falsehood which you are only able to maintain because you don't know (because nobody yet knows) how consciousness works. If consciousness is physical, then it is necessarily the case that there are some things a conscious lifeform can do, at least on the microscopic level, which a nonsentient being simply cannot. You may not think that the things you observe require consciousness to explain — you may believe that you are perfectly capable of imagining a nonsentient being which can do those things — but if consciousness if physical, then you would simply be wrong.
If consciousness is eliminated by it's redundancy then there is no need for anyone to determine how consciousness works. There is no consciousness to study.
Post by: KittyTac on August 30, 2018, 08:47:26 am
Wrong. Just plain wrong. Physical consciousness and the existence of other people are not mutually exclusive. It just means that their consciousness is also physical. And my definition of consciousness is different (clarity of thought), as a consequence of my disbelief in free will.That statement is false, even if interpreted charitably. It is not the case that KittyTac's philosophy bars conscious beings from existing. Instead, KittyTac has a different operational definition of consciousness.
From KittyTac's perspective he is the one that exists and not the rest of us. Unfortunately there is no KittyTac perspective, since I am the only consciousness if he is right.
Post by: Fleeting Frames on August 30, 2018, 09:15:57 am
If it is thinking, given that all things you think about are words or can be put into words, what distinguishes it from merely a logical machine?
In a conversation between you and someone else where both participants can follow the train of logic, what's the difference?
@Ispil:
I'm reminded of how one comes to a decisions second before actually acting on it.
I'm also reminded of how code doesn't necessarily include comments on why it is doing something.
Post by: KittyTac on August 30, 2018, 10:11:50 am
Post by: Maximum Spin on August 30, 2018, 12:04:38 pm
As for the Boltzman brain argument, that one fails by its own construction- these brains don't last long enough to have the physical processes necessary (under any hypothetical construction of consciousness or brains or anything) such that you could say that anything happened at all.Er, the amount of time they can last is unbounded. They can last as long as you need as long as you are prepared to jack up the rarity.
Post by: KittyTac on August 30, 2018, 12:24:39 pm
Then you could say that all matter could spontaneously form into another Big Bang, with the same argument. You have infinite time, after all.Well, yes.
Post by: Maximum Spin on August 30, 2018, 12:27:10 pm
Post by: Maximum Spin on August 30, 2018, 12:40:53 pm
I will admit, I am no physicist. The fact that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, at least as far as I can tell, would mean that there is a point at which the universe would be expanding so fast that even if a Boltzman brain did spontaneously appear, it would cease to be meaningful due to the expansion of the universe around it rendering what was originally a small distance between each component immensely vast (since the metric of distance between each component would be growing at an infinitely accelerating pace).Nope, or else the same thing would be happening to the Earth. Gravitationally bound systems don't expand, only the space between them — so the "components" of everything remain at the same distance from one another. Formally, it's possible to describe gravity as a process of space contracting between massive objects.
Post by: Putnam on August 30, 2018, 01:04:09 pm
This is all something like 101010120 years out, if I recall.
Post by: Maximum Spin on August 30, 2018, 01:06:49 pm
Right, but would there not be a point where the expansion overtakes the counter-force of gravity?Short answer, we can't tell, but it doesn't look like it.
That's actually the so-called "Big Rip" theory of the future of the universe, where expansion accelerates enough that gravity cannot compensate and everything comes apart at the level of fundamental particles. Broadly speaking, if a certain parameter of the universe is less than -1, a Big Rip happens; more than -1, and a Big Crunch happens where gravity overcorrects and everything does collapse back into a singularity eventually; and at exactly -1 things can pretty much just keep going. Current observations show that the parameter is close enough to -1 that we can't tell which of the three scenarios is the case, and, if it is greater or less than -1, it would take an incredibly long time for the corresponding destructive end to take place.
Post by: Tilmar13 on August 30, 2018, 03:16:10 pm
Post by: Putnam on August 30, 2018, 04:54:09 pm
Post by: Maximum Spin on August 30, 2018, 05:07:31 pm
Wait, I should note: Occam's razor implies that everybody else has consciousness because "I am perfectly unique" makes fewer assumptions than "most humans is the same as me in most regards".Instead, it's better to note that Occam's razor says different things to different people because different people have a different understanding of what a "qualifying" assumption is.
In a perfectly literal sense, all arguments require exactly the same number of assumptions: all of them.
Of course, in the original formulation, Occam's razor makes reference to entities, not assumptions, which may or may not be a whole different kettle of fish depending on your philosophical prejudices.
Post by: Dozebôm Lolumzalìs on August 30, 2018, 08:59:33 pm
And Law-Occam doesn't just not disallow an expanding known universe, it also predicts that seemingly unrelated phenomena will tend to be produced by the same fundamental laws, and that unification is generally possible. The former is definitely true (electricity and magnetism, heat and motion, etc.) and the latter... well, that's a true prediction, isn't it? All the other predictions were after the fact, but we haven't found a Grand Unified Theory yet.
So yes, Occam's razor can mean vastly different things to different people.
Post by: Putnam on August 30, 2018, 10:27:19 pm
Yudkowsky even argues that the metric that theories should be judged by with Occam's razor is the complexity of their laws, not the number of things.
Uh, if I recall from the book, I'm pretty sure he means proper information-theoretic complexity, i.e. how many bits of information are required to state the whole thing. It's a bit too concrete (or abstract, I guess?) to apply in any useful way to discussions, even with other people who have this knowledge, so I sort of forgot about it completely until you mentioned it just now.
Post by: Dorsidwarf on August 31, 2018, 06:44:47 am
Post by: KittyTac on August 31, 2018, 06:49:21 am
I still don’t understand how Occam’s razor was used to justify “if consciousness is a seperate spirit attatched to the brain then everything is okay but if consciousness is merely a description of a physical process than you poof out of existence”, but I feel that I lost track of what people were saying half a page agoExactly. I don't understand GC's argument very well.
Post by: GoblinCookie on September 01, 2018, 06:07:25 am
Wrong. Just plain wrong. Physical consciousness and the existence of other people are not mutually exclusive. It just means that their consciousness is also physical. And my definition of consciousness is different (clarity of thought), as a consequence of my disbelief in free will.
I have already explained why physical consciousness is mutually exclusive with the existence of the consciousness of other people. That reason in summary that the consciousness of other people is theoretical while your own is directly empirical. Empirical things are not subject to Occam's Razor, if you actually see how something explains something, you can have unnecessary elements but if you invent something to explain something else then it does apply.
The twist here I have not been clear is that the reason empirical things are immune to Occam's Razor is that they are part of consciousness through being observed. Consciousness then is actually immune to Occam's Razor, but to then argue that it is a physical entity at this point makes that immunity special pleading; only by being outside of the physical world can it not be subject to the same rules that material entities are.
Free will is a separate subject to this. Free will currently stands on empirical observation by itself and would fall if the functioning of the brain-body was found to be entirely deterministic, that is the empirical observation would be established as illusory. I don't have a theoretical problem with a dualistic consciousness that has no free will.
That's pretty long post, GoblinCookie, but I think it all rests on the assumption that you have evidence of your own consiciousness that you don't find in others.
If it is thinking, given that all things you think about are words or can be put into words, what distinguishes it from merely a logical machine?
In a conversation between you and someone else where both participants can follow the train of logic, what's the difference?
There is indeed little or no difference and the consciousness is only aware of a small amount of the total amount of thinking going on in it's creature. Thinking does not make you conscious and no means exists to determine through observation whether a thinking creature is consciously aware of it's own thoughts, aside from actually being that creature.
Presently the only way to empirically observe consciousness is to actually *be* the creature in question. Problem is that you can only *be* one creature at a time, so to be one creature is to render the consciousness of all other beings theoretical rather than empirical; at that point Occam's Razor strikes.
Wait, I should note: Occam's razor implies that everybody else has consciousness because "I am perfectly unique" makes fewer assumptions than "most humans is the same as me in most regards".
??? ??? The very argument you appear to have made is an argument for what I have been saying, I shall assume that is a typo.
I refer you back to an earlier analogy: there are 7 billion monkey wheels turning. None of those wheels require monkeys to turn them, but it is possible that a monkey *could* turn them. You observe one monkey turning one wheel, but see no other monkeys turning any other wheels. The fact you saw one visible monkey, turning one wheel does not mean that there are 7 billion other monkeys that are invisible to you turning the other wheels.
So yes, Occam's Razor supports the idea that you are unique, the only "unneccesery monkey", since 1 monkey is fewer monkeys than 7 billion monkeys.
I still don’t understand how Occam’s razor was used to justify “if consciousness is a seperate spirit attatched to the brain then everything is okay but if consciousness is merely a description of a physical process than you poof out of existence”, but I feel that I lost track of what people were saying half a page ago
It has to do with how a non-physical thing can be exempt from the normal principles without this being special pleading, but a physical thing very much cannot.
Post by: KittyTac on September 01, 2018, 06:15:22 am
Just thinking about it, your second paragraph makes no sense. Consciousness is immune to Occam's Razor and... then what? What is your point? Your argument is built on the non-physicality of consciousness, it just falls apart if we assume that it is physical. You are saying that material things are not subject to OR, but if we assume that consciousness is physical, it is not subject to OR and then the consciousness of other people exists. Maybe I have misunderstood you.Wrong. Just plain wrong. Physical consciousness and the existence of other people are not mutually exclusive. It just means that their consciousness is also physical. And my definition of consciousness is different (clarity of thought), as a consequence of my disbelief in free will.
I have already explained why physical consciousness is mutually exclusive with the existence of the consciousness of other people. That reason in summary that the consciousness of other people is theoretical while your own is directly empirical. Empirical things are not subject to Occam's Razor, if you actually see how something explains something, you can have unnecessary elements but if you invent something to explain something else then it does apply.
The twist here I have not been clear is that the reason empirical things are immune to Occam's Razor is that they are part of consciousness through being observed. Consciousness then is actually immune to Occam's Razor, but to then argue that it is a physical entity at this point makes that immunity special pleading; only by being outside of the physical world can it not be subject to the same rules that material entities are.
Free will is a separate subject to this. Free will currently stands on empirical observation by itself and would fall if the functioning of the brain-body was found to be entirely deterministic, that is the empirical observation would be established as illusory. I don't have a theoretical problem with a dualistic consciousness that has no free will.
Post by: GoblinCookie on September 01, 2018, 07:51:10 am
Just thinking about it, your second paragraph makes no sense. Consciousness is immune to Occam's Razor and... then what? What is your point? Your argument is built on the non-physicality of consciousness, it just falls apart if we assume that it is physical. You are saying that material things are not subject to OR, but if we assume that consciousness is physical, it is not subject to OR and then the consciousness of other people exists. Maybe I have misunderstood you.
No, because if we take consciousness to be a physical entity then everything that applies to the category in general also applies to consciousness, to say that consciousness is immune to Occam's Razor is called Special Pleading (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_pleading), if we have a physical consciousness that is.
If consciousness is non-physical then, I can now say that Occam's Razor does not apply to consciousness things only physical things. I can additionally support that argument by pointing out using the unnecessary monkey analogy, that an empirically observable cause cancels out Occam's Razor and I can justify it by how an empirical thing is part non-physical due to being part of consciousness.
If consciousness is physical, unobserved consciousnesses falls under the rules that apply to all physical objects that are unobserved, they exist only if they are neccesery. If consciousness is non-physical then other people's consciousnesses cannot be eliminated in this fashion because in being consciousnesses they are exempt from Occam's Razor, just as you are.
Post by: KittyTac on September 01, 2018, 08:52:02 am
Well, then the existence of other consciousnesses is indeterminable, rather than definitely "existent" or "non-existent". Anything else is armchair philosophizing.Just thinking about it, your second paragraph makes no sense. Consciousness is immune to Occam's Razor and... then what? What is your point? Your argument is built on the non-physicality of consciousness, it just falls apart if we assume that it is physical. You are saying that material things are not subject to OR, but if we assume that consciousness is physical, it is not subject to OR and then the consciousness of other people exists. Maybe I have misunderstood you.
No, because if we take consciousness to be a physical entity then everything that applies to the category in general also applies to consciousness, to say that consciousness is immune to Occam's Razor is called Special Pleading (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_pleading), if we have a physical consciousness that is.
If consciousness is non-physical then, I can now say that Occam's Razor does not apply to consciousness things only physical things. I can additionally support that argument by pointing out using the unnecessary monkey analogy, that an empirically observable cause cancels out Occam's Razor and I can justify it by how an empirical thing is part non-physical due to being part of consciousness.
If consciousness is physical, unobserved consciousnesses falls under the rules that apply to all physical objects that are unobserved, they exist only if they are neccesery. If consciousness is non-physical then other people's consciousnesses cannot be eliminated in this fashion because in being consciousnesses they are exempt from Occam's Razor, just as you are.
I don't think the thread is anywhere near its rails by now.
Post by: Dorsidwarf on September 01, 2018, 10:26:30 am
there are seven billion wheels that you cannot see inside, and one that you can. In the wheel that you can see, a monkey is doing something to turn the wheel. All of the closed wheels are also turning.
In this case, with no other knowledge, it seems like a reasonable assumption to assume that the other wheels also contain a monkey.
Post by: Demonic Gophers on September 01, 2018, 01:42:13 pm
No, because if we take consciousness to be a physical entity then everything that applies to the category in general also applies to consciousness, to say that consciousness is immune to Occam's Razor is called Special Pleading (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_pleading), if we have a physical consciousness that is.
If consciousness is non-physical then, I can now say that Occam's Razor does not apply to consciousness things only physical things. I can additionally support that argument by pointing out using the unnecessary monkey analogy, that an empirically observable cause cancels out Occam's Razor and I can justify it by how an empirical thing is part non-physical due to being part of consciousness.
If consciousness is physical, unobserved consciousnesses falls under the rules that apply to all physical objects that are unobserved, they exist only if they are neccesery. If consciousness is non-physical then other people's consciousnesses cannot be eliminated in this fashion because in being consciousnesses they are exempt from Occam's Razor, just as you are.
Occam's Razor isn't a law of physic, like gravity. It's a guideline for reasoning - the simplest explanation is likely to be correct. It doesn't just apply to physical objects; it applies to any assumption that makes the explanation more complex. (It's also a guideline, not a definitive guarantee. As you learn more about the situation, you may discover that the simplest explanation no longer covers all of the evidence, and needs to be modified or discarded.)
Imagine that you're walking on the beach, and the ground is made up of sand as far as you can see: an incalculable number of tiny grains. The sand could go down for a vast distance below you. Or perhaps it's just a thin layer, barely enough to conceal a single pad of some springy, flexible material that underlies the entire beach. The deep sand explanation requires an enormously greater number of objects, if you count each grain, but only one assumption: there's a lot of sand here. The springy pad explanation still requires quite a bit of sand, to hide the pad, but it also requires a pad that acts much like deep sand below the surface. Despite involving a smaller number of objects, it's a more complex explanation. And if you dig into the sand and find more sand below it, maintaining the pad explanation requires assuming that its substance turns into sand as you dig toward it. This makes it more complicated and less likely.
With your 7 billion monkey wheels, we can observe that all of the wheels are turning in roughly the same manner. Everything we can examine about the wheels indicates that they are built in the same way, out of the same materials, and operate according to the same basic principles. We can only see into one of the wheels, which has a monkey turning it. We can assume that the other wheels are roughly similar to the one we can observe, and probably also have monkeys turning them. Or we can assume that our observed wheel is completely unique - we know that monkeys exist, and can turn wheels, but the other wheels are probably being turned by some unknown factor that makes them rotate in exactly the same way as the one that has a monkey in it. Which of these explanations is actually simpler?
Of course, it could still be the case that some of the wheels have badgers in them, and some have lizards, and one is full of water and being turned by a squid. Occam's Razor is just a guideline; the simplest explanation isn't always the right one.
Post by: GoblinCookie on September 01, 2018, 02:05:16 pm
Well, then the existence of other consciousnesses is indeterminable, rather than definitely "existent" or "non-existent". Anything else is armchair philosophizing.
I don't think the thread is anywhere near its rails by now.
It is determinable in the sense that if we know of something that has 999 elements and we know of something that has 1000 elements, 999 of which are the same as something else, we can surmise that the 1000th element is present also based upon them being the same thing.
Wouldn't the monkey analogy be more like
there are seven billion wheels that you cannot see inside, and one that you can. In the wheel that you can see, a monkey is doing something to turn the wheel. All of the closed wheels are also turning.
In this case, with no other knowledge, it seems like a reasonable assumption to assume that the other wheels also contain a monkey.
No, we can see inside *all* the monkey wheels (bodies). We know the monkey wheels do not require monkeys (consciousnesses) to explain their functioning and we also have seen one particular monkey (our own consciousness) but see no other monkeys inside any other wheels.
The key difference is that the other monkeys if they exist are invisible.
Here's a starting point, so this discussion stops being so... frankly, stupid: why doesn't GoblinCookie define what the hell he means by consciousness?
Because GoblinCookie finds it hard to define something that is non-material in material terms without confusing people. The question is in effect a trap. The best definition is that a consciousness is a group of ideas, in the sense that 10 is a group of 1s; neither the ideas nor the consciousness are physical.
Occam's Razor isn't a law of physic, like gravity. It's a guideline for reasoning - the simplest explanation is likely to be correct. It doesn't just apply to physical objects; it applies to any assumption that makes the explanation more complex. (It's also a guideline, not a definitive guarantee. As you learn more about the situation, you may discover that the simplest explanation no longer covers all of the evidence, and needs to be modified or discarded.)
Correct, the trouble is that this very concept hits everyone elses consciousnesses very, very hard if consciousness is physical. I don't need other people to be conscious to explain their behavior and I can't see their consciousnesses. Invisible physical things that exist solely because they explain something else are what that principle was made to get rid of.
"The car made the body dodge the car" is a simpler explanation than "He saw the car so he decided to avoid it and dodged the car as a result".
Imagine that you're walking on the beach, and the ground is made up of sand as far as you can see: an incalculable number of tiny grains. The sand could go down for a vast distance below you. Or perhaps it's just a thin layer, barely enough to conceal a single pad of some springy, flexible material that underlies the entire beach. The deep sand explanation requires an enormously greater number of objects, if you count each grain, but only one assumption: there's a lot of sand here. The springy pad explanation still requires quite a bit of sand, to hide the pad, but it also requires a pad that acts much like deep sand below the surface. Despite involving a smaller number of objects, it's a more complex explanation. And if you dig into the sand and find more sand below it, maintaining the pad explanation requires assuming that its substance turns into sand as you dig toward it. This makes it more complicated and less likely.
With your 7 billion monkey wheels, we can observe that all of the wheels are turning in roughly the same manner. Everything we can examine about the wheels indicates that they are built in the same way, out of the same materials, and operate according to the same basic principles. We can only see into one of the wheels, which has a monkey turning it. We can assume that the other wheels are roughly similar to the one we can observe, and probably also have monkeys turning them. Or we can assume that our observed wheel is completely unique - we know that monkeys exist, and can turn wheels, but the other wheels are probably being turned by some unknown factor that makes them rotate in exactly the same way as the one that has a monkey in it. Which of these explanations is actually simpler?
Of course, it could still be the case that some of the wheels have badgers in them, and some have lizards, and one is full of water and being turned by a squid. Occam's Razor is just a guideline; the simplest explanation isn't always the right one.
The problem is that our own monkey-wheel would also work just as well if we were not there. No creatures are ever needed to turn the wheels, whatever type of creature they may be. The only reason our own monkey exists at all is solely that we can see it.
Post by: Putnam on September 01, 2018, 04:37:36 pm
also, phineas gage basically proves you wrong anyway? personality is changed by brain damage, so obviously there's a physical cause to personality, in the brain.
No, we can see inside *all* the monkey wheels (bodies). We know the monkey wheels do not require monkeys (consciousnesses) to explain their functioning and we also have seen one particular monkey (our own consciousness) but see no other monkeys inside any other wheels.
The key difference is that the other monkeys if they exist are invisible.
Why are you completely ignoring all the wonderful science done on affecting perceptions, personality and other things we attribute to "consciousness" by stimulating areas of the brain, some of which have been linked in this very thread? We can totally see the other monkeys.
Post by: Dorsidwarf on September 01, 2018, 07:29:09 pm
What are you trying to say when you say “we can see into everyone else’s wheel and there are no monkies)? Because that sounds like you’re saying that we can detect/observe consciousness, despite as far as I’m aware there not even being a scientific consensus as to what the term actually means.
Post by: Demonic Gophers on September 01, 2018, 07:42:23 pm
It is determinable in the sense that if we know of something that has 999 elements and we know of something that has 1000 elements, 999 of which are the same as something else, we can surmise that the 1000th element is present also based upon them being the same thing.
So if we know that one monkey wheel has 1000 elements, and another monkey wheel has 999 identical elements, with the 1000th element being a monkey turning the first wheel...?
No, we can see inside *all* the monkey wheels (bodies). We know the monkey wheels do not require monkeys (consciousnesses) to explain their functioning and we also have seen one particular monkey (our own consciousness) but see no other monkeys inside any other wheels.
The key difference is that the other monkeys if they exist are invisible.
We can 'see' inside the first monkey wheel because we experience our own capacity for awareness. In order to see inside the other wheels to the same degree, we would have to somehow experience other people's absence of that capacity. Are you a telepath, reading everyone's mind and finding nothing there? If so, maybe your telepathy just doesn't work very well. How are you seeing into all the wheels? Not just coming to a conclusion about their contents, but SEEING them? Sure, there are people who don't seem to have much awareness of what's going on around them (or even what they, themselves, are saying), but noticing that is a long way short of directly experiencing a lack of consciousness on their part.
Because GoblinCookie finds it hard to define something that is non-material in material terms without confusing people. The question is in effect a trap. The best definition is that a consciousness is a group of ideas, in the sense that 10 is a group of 1s; neither the ideas nor the consciousness are physical.
Correct, the trouble is that this very concept hits everyone elses consciousnesses very, very hard if consciousness is physical. I don't need other people to be conscious to explain their behavior and I can't see their consciousnesses. Invisible physical things that exist solely because they explain something else are what that principle was made to get rid of.
"The car made the body dodge the car" is a simpler explanation than "He saw the car so he decided to avoid it and dodged the car as a result".
When you agreed with my description of Occam's Razor, did you somehow miss the part where it applies equally to physical and non-physical assumptions? And also that it is a general guideline, not an absolute rule?
Consider "There is some process that causes consciousness in me, and in entities similar to me." versus "There is some process that causes consciousness in me. A different process causes entities similar to me to act in similar ways to me without being conscious." The first requires one assumption. The second requires two. Why do you think the second is a simpler explanation? And not just simpler, but so much simpler that the other isn't even worth considering as a possibility!
"The car made the body dodge the car" uses fewer words, but doesn't explain anything or match observed evidence. If cars cause objects to dodge, why didn't the car make the box dodge the car? Or the body that was looking the other direction? What made the body dodge the soccer ball? We have a lot of evidence about how vision and muscles operate. We experience seeing oncoming objects and trying to avoid them. These aren't arbitrary assumptions thrown together to explain a single incident; they're based on a wide range of interconnecting evidence.
Of course, consciousness isn't required to dodge a car. People could build a robot that detected traffic with cameras or radar and was programmed to take evasive action. But this is still the evading object reacting to the car, by means that operate consistently in any similar context. I suppose the car could have cameras or radar, and send a signal telling the robot to get out of the way. To determine which of these happened, one would need to examine the car and the robot, and find out which has the capacity to detect a potential collision in advance and react to it. Occam's Razor isn't going to tell us that.
The problem is that our own monkey-wheel would also work just as well if we were not there. No creatures are ever needed to turn the wheels, whatever type of creature they may be. The only reason our own monkey exists at all is solely that we can see it.
Maybe our monkey wheel would work just fine without us, but that isn't what is happening. We are there. Why should every other monkey wheel be different from ours? Consciousness isn't an explanation. It's an observed fact to be explained. However we try to explain it, there's no reason to limit the explanation to ourselves when it applies just as easily to everyone else.
Our monkey exists because it exists. We know it exists because we can see it. If there's a glass jar full of marbles on your desk, and you drop a towel over it, do the marbles cease to exist as soon as you can't see them?
Since we know one monkey exists, and have a definite example of it, additional monkey in similar circumstances don't make the explanation drastically more complex. Two monkeys or 10 monkeys or 7 billion monkeys, it's all just a slight expansion of the 'monkey can turn wheel' assumption that's required for any explanation, because every explanation has to cover the wheel with the monkey that we can see. We don't have any examples of the same sort of wheel turning when it definitely lacks a monkey. We have other types of wheel that rotate with nowhere for a monkey to fit, but they aren't the same kind of wheel and they don't turn the same way. It is a bigger assumption that monkey wheels can turn without a monkey than that they can turn with a monkey, which we can directly observe.
(The point was not 'If you don't like monkeys, maybe there's a squid turning the wheel'. The point was that even an explanation that is clearly, unquestionably more complex, with creatures that haven't been demonstrated to exist at all in the analogy, still isn't ruled out completely by Occam's Razor because it is not an absolute rule.)
Post by: KittyTac on September 01, 2018, 10:35:44 pm
Post by: Bumber on September 02, 2018, 02:47:51 am
Q: How does the sun cross the sky?
A: Helios pulls it! Simplest explanation wins! You can't prove Earth is a planet! You can't prove planets are affected by gravity like everything else! Occam's Razor doesn't apply to gods, haha!
Post by: Fleeting Frames on September 02, 2018, 04:08:18 am
That doesn't actually answer the question of what is the difference. How do you know the creature in question (that you hypothetically are) has consciousness and not is merely a monkey wheel that has a thought process?That's pretty long post, GoblinCookie, but I think it all rests on the assumption that you have evidence of your own consiciousness that you don't find in others.
If it is thinking, given that all things you think about are words or can be put into words, what distinguishes it from merely a logical machine?
In a conversation between you and someone else where both participants can follow the train of logic, what's the difference?
There is indeed little or no difference and the consciousness is only aware of a small amount of the total amount of thinking going on in it's creature. Thinking does not make you conscious and no means exists to determine through observation whether a thinking creature is consciously aware of it's own thoughts, aside from actually being that creature.
Presently the only way to empirically observe consciousness is to actually *be* the creature in question. Problem is that you can only *be* one creature at a time, so to be one creature is to render the consciousness of all other beings theoretical rather than empirical; at that point Occam's Razor strikes.
Post by: Dozebôm Lolumzalìs on September 02, 2018, 04:32:47 am
I'm not sure you understand what solipsism is. Try checking Wikipedia. Your arguments heavily involve solipsism ("I have special knowledge about my own existence and everything else is suspect and likely illusory.").Solipsism is a completely worthless philosophy that deserves no place in any reasonable epistemic discourse. It's like flipping the table: it's a gotcha which leads to nobody winning.
Indeed, it just so happens that consciousness being physical results in precisely that outcome.
Reminder: we physicalists view consciousness to be physically and causally linked to behavior. This is like saying "Jim doesn't appear to be happy - he simply smiles and is energetic and says things about being happy." That's what appearing happy is! It's just a cluster of properties that we've given a name to.See above. Other people appear to be conscious; it requires less assumptions to believe that what I see is real than that what I see is not.
No, other people do not *appear* to be conscious, they just do things.
None of the things they do in themselves require consciousness as an explanationThis can only be true under epiphenomenalism, in which consciousness has no physical causal interaction with the physical world.
and an explanation not involving consciousness is a simpler explanation than one involving consciousness.Can you actually explain human behavior? If so, it's likely to involve abstractions such as "model" and "goal". To a physicalist, that's the stuff that consciousness is made of.
Therefore if we take as our position that consciousness is a physical thing, then it follows that consciousness (except our own, see later) is eliminated by Occam's Razor.Physicalists don't think that consciousness is a physical object. It is like a computer program - it's fundamentally an abstraction, and it's fully possible to predict the behavior of the computer without referencing anything like a "variable" or a "bit", but that doesn't mean that the program is non-physical except to the extent that it's a logical object. Which logical object the computer is said to run is fully dependent on the physical state of the computer, so it's distinct from an independent non-physical entity like the consciousness that you describe, but it's also not an added entity which can be added or removed from theories. A theory in which the computer is exactly the same but the program is gone is... incoherent. You cannot remove the program without changing the computer.
Fire isn't real. You're just seeing light and heat from a combustion reaction.This does not follow. I can make a near-identical statements as such which are clearly false:
If the material object that is an electron can explain everything in chemistry without the need of a combustion 'thing' inside the electron, Occam's Razor eliminates not just phlogiston but fire itself if we make combustion a consequence of chemistry.
You are treating consciousness as something that must be a single, unified object. This is not something that can be believed, given the extraordinary evidence we have that all perception is in the brain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain), yet one still perceives having one consciousness (http://www.uva.nl/en/content/news/press-releases/2017/01/split-brain-does-not-lead-to-split-consciousness.html), despite such things as an inability to name what is seen or independently acting limbs.
EDIT: It should be noted that I believe consciousness is basically an illusion. This does not mean I don't believe it exists. There's a difference!
Fire is an empirically observable thing, phlogiston is not.
Whatever counterargument you have to that argument applies to consciousness as well, assuming that consciousness plays a causal role in behavior. (If it doesn't, then your mind has to be sectioned off - whatever thoughts you can vocalize are in the physical section and cannot be conscious. This includes any thought that you've mentioned here. There are philosophical reasons to reject epiphenomenalism as well, including "what does it mean to 'have consciousness' if there's no connection on your end to the consciousness?" and "why are we postulating unobservable things? how could we know that they existed, even if they did?" and "can something with no causal connection to the rest of existence even be said to exist?")
Empirical things are exempt from Occam's Razor, which applies only to things which are not observable.What is an "empirical thing"? Things that you've seen? The experience of seeing?
(Somebody's already said what I was going to say about Occam's razor being more "simpler theories are more likely to be true" than "anything which could be something else is definitely that thing", so I won't repeat it, but I'll just gesture at Demonic Gopher and thank them.)
Do you mean "equal" or "equivalent"? If you really meant equal, that's ridiculous - just because something exists doesn't mean that it's equal in magnitude to the sum of everything else.Our current body of physical law represents our observed evidence. It would take an extremely large amount of evidence to overturn modern physics. That's not to say it can't be done - it's happened many times before - but it requires significantly more evidence than "I sat in my armchair and realized that the existence of something which can recognize its existence requires reality to include at least two fundamentally different kinds of monads, one of which comprises the universe as we know it and the other makes up a separate realm of the mind corresponding to my a priori intuitions about how cognition and sensation work."
Evidence means what is empirical. If my empirical self-observation results in the conclusion of dualism, that is equal to all other evidence.
If equivalent, then possibly. It depends on how your "empirical self-observation" works - does it result in an entanglement between your model of reality and reality itself? "Empirical" or "evidence" means that the state of your beliefs is correlated with the state of reality, through a process of finding observations that are more likely under one possible state than under another. So for your self-observation to truly be empirical, the state of your beliefs needs to be somehow causally entangled with the state of the subject of your beliefs. You shouldn't assume that your intuitions are necessarily true - and if you do make that assumption, that doesn't make your intuitions empirical.
The amusing additional element here is that evidence itself implies consciousness and if consciousness is physical then nobody else actually has consciousness, since I am the only unnecessary monkey, to refer to my previous example to Putnam.
A technical definition of evidence does not require a reference to consciousness-as-you-define-it. (Under my definition, anything that forms and uses a model in a self-interpretive way is conscious, so I do view evidence and consciousness as linked, but not evidence and non-physical epiphenomenal entities.)
It appears I have implicitly assumed reductionism, even as I considered your non-physicalism. Okay. My argument still applies, with this addition: how can the body be noticeably different without the quarks that comprise the body being different? And if there is no noticeable difference between a body that's connected to an external mind and a body that doesn't, how can you determine which one you are? (I'm using Bayesian evidence here - knowing something is equivalent to a high probability of thinking X if and only if X is correct. For this to happen, there must be a causal interaction between X and the body - and not just a causal interaction, but one carrying a number of bits proportional to the complexity of X.)
Because the body is headed towards a number of possible future states that are multiple. The state that actually happens is the state that corresponds to that of the mind. The mind is unable to choose (or perhaps even imagine) what is not within the range of possible future states of the body.
That's not how physics works. There are some apparently probabilistic laws (such as the 2nd law of thermodynamics, most quantum things), but that does not mean that the probabilities can be manipulated by an external mind.
We could always be wrong about physics, but be aware that breaking a probabilistic law is not 'lesser' than breaking, say, a deterministic law like conservation of momentum. It is still opposed by immense amounts of scientific evidence.
To the external observer the situation appears random. In reality it is pseudo-random, but because consciousness is non-physical, no study of the physical world will reveal the pseudo-randomness and doing so would disprove freewill if such an explanation itself ignored consciousness.
If it does not produce an effect on the world, then what does it even mean for this interaction to exist? If this mind-world concordance process affects the world in any way, then by definition it changes the probability of events coming to pass. If it only produces random effects, then the mind has no room to be influencing the world.
Physicalists do not think that consciousness lies in specific neurons. It's a collective property of the entire brain.What? I'm attempting to steelman this, and the best I can do is "neurons are all functionally identical and therefore theoretically interchangeable, although any particular neuron will have an internal state depending on its history." Even that isn't true (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/brainwaves/know-your-neurons-classifying-the-many-types-of-cells-in-the-neuron-forest/), and I don't see how the steelman would support your argument against reductionism.
What I was drawing attention to is the fact that there are no neurons-of-consciousness that are observably different from regular neurons within the brain. So no empirical confirmation for a physical consciousness within the brain.
I don't understand how this connects to its context. Are you saying that the connection lies in the subconscious mind rather than the conscious mind?
The easiest way for the non-dualist to dodge the unnecessary monkey problem is to declare that the brain *is* the physical consciousness, that would in fact work if we were conscious of everything that the brain had in it, knowledge wise. Since the vast majority of things our brain knows were are unconscious of, we start needing a separate physical consciousness within the brain and no such thing empirically observable, so Occam's Razor strikes.
If by "everything the brain has in it" means "all properties of the brain": My computer does not contain a representation of its own atomic structure. Does this mean that the programs are separate from the computer itself?
If you are talking about subconscious knowledge: physicalists do not think that the brain is only the conscious mind. Multiple programs can run on one computer.
As I see it, this theory generates a testable hypothesis: people will never be wrong (edit: if their beliefs could have been true, and them being true wouldn't violate physical law, only probability). And if it doesn't generate a testable hypothesis, then it's useless as a theory.
The theory can be falsified in two ways. One is that you determine the material universe is entirely deterministic, the other is that you determine that the mind can do anything regardless of the physical laws. It's clockwork universe OR matrix-spoon-bending, either way I'm wrong.
There are additional ways to test your theory. I will generate a truly random number to a thousand digits (non-deterministically). Any result from 0 to 1 is physically possible. I predict an arbitrary number (0.010010001..., say). If the random number matches my prediction, that is evidence toward your theory. If not, it is evidence against it.
If that's too much improbability for the mental concordance force to handle, I will make the RNG binary and repeat it several times. If there is a bias toward my predicted number, then it will show up over time.
Also, I can test the backforce as well. I will ask many friends to predict an RNG's output. I will run the RNG but will hide the results. I am uncertain how your theory says that the universe will change the mind's beliefs to bring them into concordance with reality, but if it happens, I will detect it.
Saying people can't be wrong because of this theory is like saying that people can't climb hills because of gravity. A person who is wrong is constantly having to strain *against* the principle itself, but only if his error is directed at a specific material state. A material thing can be in error about another material thing and so can a consciousness be in error about another consciousness.
So the mental concordance force has a particular strength? How unlikely of an event can it make happen? What counts as a belief?
That is an important detail of the science of wrongness. The brain is not actually separate from the body and the body is not actually separate from the rest-of-the-universe. However to recall back to the question about the colour blue, consciousness imposes onto the world a division, because that division is possible. It is possible for the light spectrum to be divided into colours, therefore divided they are.
Anything that can happen, will? That sounds deterministic to me.
Once we have divided the body from the universe, the body can respond in isolation to the consciousness and therefore can be forced to 'disagree' with other elements of the universe (the law does not apply within the mind or within the material world, only between them). Once we have accomplished this feat, we can exist in perpetual delusion since the elements that disagree with the consciousness have been 'eliminated'.
You can delude yourself about the universe by thinking that all of your beliefs pertain only to your body? That's the last straw. Where are you getting all this? How could you possibly know this, even if it was true?
This is an empty explanation. It doesn't explain how the arm actually moves, and once you've truly explained how the arm moves (brain sends signal through neurons to cells which release chemicals which provide signal and energy to the structures that reduce a cell's length), you don't need this anymore - there's nothing else to be explained.
We were not talking about how the arm actually moves. We were talking about how free will, if it actually exists could move the arm.
Free will is not something that reaches into the physical world and alters it. It's a feeling that you have when considering different actions to take, and you could take any of them. What does "could" mean in this context? Only that if I decide to do X, then I will do X. But in reality you only decide on one thing, so (barring Penrose-esque quantum mind hijinks) you couldn't really have done anything else. Free will is what you do when you consider future-counterfactuals with your decisions changed, and your intuitions around it don't correspond to reality.
That's still simply false. The map can incorrectly describe the territory, and the map itself can't affect the territory except to the extent that it is part of the territory.
Indeed, but not forever. The universe will always find a way to bring the two into agreement. The problem as already discussed is that information is also stored physically in *part* of the universe and consciousness has the power to divide up the universe into categories.
Categories aren't part of the basic functioning of the universe either. You are projecting your mind onto physics.
1. Occam's razor does not apply to definitions and categories. "It is strictly simpler for blue to not actually exist, only objects that tend to reflect light of particular wavelengths..." Reductio ad absurdum.
1. Yes, because those things are part of consciousness.
Okay. Consciousness, under physicalism, is a definition/category/cluster. It describes certain kinds of physical processes. It is no more ruled out by Occam's law than blueness is.
Under KittyTac's own beliefs, KittyTac is real. "Ah, but if consciousness is physical, then it doesn't exist!" That's your belief, not KittyTac's. Once you start using things in your argument which KittyTac disagrees with, you have ceased to describe KittyTac's beliefs. You are now describing a fusion of KittyTac's beliefs and your own.2. When you say "you, unaware of it, are arguing against your own existence," you are presupposing that if KittyTac were correct about consciousness being physical, they wouldn't exist. This is combining your beliefs and KittyTac's, and then claiming that the combination is an accurate reflection of KittyTac's beliefs.
2. Yes, it is common for people not to realise the consequences of their beliefs, it's other people's job to point that out. I am not however combining my own beliefs with that of KittyTac's, my beliefs are quite separate.
Consciousness isn't an explanation, it's a category or an observed process.
Consciousness creates categories. They are therefore related to consciousness, along with all empirically observable objects. Consciousness, not being physical is not subject to Occam's Razor and it eliminates Occam's Razor for all the things it 'touches'.
Contagion is intuitive to humans, but doesn't necessarily correspond to reality. And your version of Occam's razor is significantly different from every other version I've seen, so I simply reject your razor at this point.
Blue doesn't "exist as an entity". It's a category/process of things that reflect light of a particular wavelength. And colors don't really explain things, they only describe them. An actual explanation would be something like "the electrons in this atom, probably for quantum mechanical reasons, resonate more at this frequency than another. When they resonate strongly, they generate additional electromagnetic waves which can travel in a different direction than the original wave."
It exists as an entity because it is empirical.
I don't think we're using words in the same way. I can't interpret this sentence with a coherent meaning.
The type of entity that it is, you have described correctly. It is a category, but remember that the body is *also* a category and consciousness clearly has a special relationship to it.
No, I don't remember any sort of special relationship between GC-consciousness and the body, because I don't think GC-consciousness exists. That argument makes sense in your own head but fails to convince anybody else who doesn't already agree with you.
Also, what point are you making? "Categories can have special relationships with non-physical things"? That doesn't mean that blueness is fundamentally different from consciousness.
I would have to ask KittyTac, but I strongly doubt that they consider themselves to be disproving your existence. You are only projecting your views onto them. (Everyone does it - some amount of projection is necessary for social interaction unless you can explicitly model the neurons in someone's brain - but less is better.)
If KittyTac is right, then since I am the only unnecessary monkey (physical consciousness) KittyTac is just a mindless thing like the computer I am writing these words on. The same also applies to you.
You are still projecting your own beliefs. If KittyTac is right, then consciousness isn't an additional thing which may or may not be present without affecting behavior. You can tell it's there because if it weren't in my head, I wouldn't be typing these words. Your argument only works if you introduce your own beliefs, which we physicalists do not agree with. If you use those beliefs, you are no longer accurately representing my beliefs or those of KittyTac.
What do you mean by the existence of an existence?
I simply mean the same thing in a different semantic context.
The same thing as what? Different context from what? Or is this an unimportant aside and it doesn't matter if I understand it?
There is only one material consciousness if material consciousness happens to be true, Mine; you are just a complicated thing.
I believe that the consciousness is part of the complication, so I would still be conscious if I were true.
No, they aren't. That's only true in your model, in which consciousness is epiphenomenal. (I think - you're somewhat hard to understand, and you've never made it clear whether you think that consciousness causally/detectably interacts with the physical world.) If you don't consider consciousness to be epiphenomenal, then it's equivalent to blueness - it's just a more complicated physical process.
The question being addressed there is the existence or otherwise of free will. If consciousness is simply a product of the material universe, then there is no free will. Only if free will exists we have to come up with a mechanism for the non-physical consciousness to interact with the physical world without being part of it.
This is a complicated and unnecessary mechanism, justified only by your own intuitions about decisions. The world would look the same with or without the mechanism. Occam's razor applies fully.
I'm not sure you understand physicalists. We don't think that consciousness is an object. We think that it's a process. Occam's razor does apply somewhat to processes, but in a way that's precisely opposite from your use. It's simpler for A and B to both be explained by one thing than for A to be caused by one thing and B by another. This means that your model, in which your externally-observable consciousness is caused by a bidirectional revision of physical reality and your mind to bring the two into concordance, and my externally-observable consciousness is "merely" caused by the interaction of atoms, is at a significant disadvantage.
Both senses of the application of Occam's Razor eliminate everyone but me from existence. We don't need a consciousness process, just as we don't need a consciousness object.
If there's no consciousness process, then the person doesn't think or talk. You know that isn't the case because other people talk.
(We could all be robots programmed to say words, but then who programmed the words? A consciousness process is still required to generate the talking.)
You cannot empirically observe the existence of your "consciousness" (by which I mean everything that you tack onto consciousness, including your non-physical existence) unless there is a causal and informational interaction between your consciousness and your brain. (Or maybe, in some epiphenomenal sense, you can - but not in a way that you could ever communicate, since communication is physical.)
That makes no sense at all. You can always empirically observe your own consciousness because your consciousness is the sum of things you are percieving. That is like saying that you can't observe 10 things because you can observe 10 separate things.
I meant "observe that you are conscious", not the things which happen to be passing through your consciousness at a given point.
It's the difference between seeing your eyes and seeing your field of view.
That statement is false, even if interpreted charitably. It is not the case that KittyTac's philosophy bars conscious beings from existing. Instead, KittyTac has a different operational definition of consciousness.
From KittyTac's perspective he is the one that exists and not the rest of us. Unfortunately there is no KittyTac perspective, since I am the only consciousness if he is right.
No. From KittyTac's perspective, GoblinCookie exists. Stop putting words into people's mouths. What you see as an obvious conclusion, we see as incorrect. Therefore, the conclusion is not part of our perspective.
Post by: Dozebôm Lolumzalìs on September 02, 2018, 04:51:26 am
Ah, I see. I was a bit defensive/paranoid, sorry. I'm glad everything's friendly and civil.If there is an undercurrent of suspicion or derision, can I ask why?In classical logic, yes. In intuitionistic logic, not necessarily.
You needn't spend so much time second-guessing yourself; I had no objection to your statement. I merely found the correlation (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/correlation) (not in the statistical sense) between your statements amusing because of how much information those two short phrases together imply. Don't you find it funny how much one's speech quirks can reveal about one's interests?
I had no idea that correlation had a non-statistical meaning. It makes sense, though - "gravity" used to just mean importance (from the adjective "grave"), "derivative" can also mean "that which is produced by", and so on. Most jargon was probably borrowed from normal terminology at some point.
Hm. Yes, it is a bit funny that three words can say so much about a person. (It says about as much as "I'm a rationalist", and without directly or intentionally referencing the interest.)
Post by: Dozebôm Lolumzalìs on September 02, 2018, 04:58:14 am
When matter becomes diffuse enough, which might happen if all the dark matter gets sucked into black holes and all the black holes decay. If there's clumps of dark matter left after all black holes decay (quite unlikely), then gravity will prevail. If not, expansion will.Is dark matter inherently better at holding a universe together gravitationally? I doubt it - it's probably just very massive, right? So why is dark matter the only thing that might survive black holes? Is it that normal matter will go through star evolution until it's all in black holes, whereas dark matter doesn't seem to form stars?
This is all something like 101010120 years out, if I recall.
If dark matter is special and not like other matter, then might it violate the no-hair theorem? (If it were anything else, I'd think no, but the special properties of dark matter would be about gravity, so they might interact with the black hole in an unforeseen way. Probably still no, unless dark matter completely violates general relativity and forces a paradigm shift.)
Post by: KittyTac on September 02, 2018, 05:19:35 am
Post by: Dozebôm Lolumzalìs on September 02, 2018, 05:36:31 am
Post by: KittyTac on September 02, 2018, 06:13:49 am
...can we not do that? I know GC can get annoying at times, but that's needlessly cruel and hostile.It was mostly in jest.
Post by: GoblinCookie on September 03, 2018, 11:49:59 am
So if we know that one monkey wheel has 1000 elements, and another monkey wheel has 999 identical elements, with the 1000th element being a monkey turning the first wheel...?
The simpler explanation is that you are the only unnecessary monkey.
We can 'see' inside the first monkey wheel because we experience our own capacity for awareness. In order to see inside the other wheels to the same degree, we would have to somehow experience other people's absence of that capacity. Are you a telepath, reading everyone's mind and finding nothing there? If so, maybe your telepathy just doesn't work very well. How are you seeing into all the wheels? Not just coming to a conclusion about their contents, but SEEING them? Sure, there are people who don't seem to have much awareness of what's going on around them (or even what they, themselves, are saying), but noticing that is a long way short of directly experiencing a lack of consciousness on their part.
Sorry but I don't have to prove a negative. Other beings are mindless things until somebody can establish by proof (that does not mean evidence) that they are conscious.
When you agreed with my description of Occam's Razor, did you somehow miss the part where it applies equally to physical and non-physical assumptions? And also that it is a general guideline, not an absolute rule?
Consider "There is some process that causes consciousness in me, and in entities similar to me." versus "There is some process that causes consciousness in me. A different process causes entities similar to me to act in similar ways to me without being conscious." The first requires one assumption. The second requires two. Why do you think the second is a simpler explanation? And not just simpler, but so much simpler that the other isn't even worth considering as a possibility!
"The car made the body dodge the car" uses fewer words, but doesn't explain anything or match observed evidence. If cars cause objects to dodge, why didn't the car make the box dodge the car? Or the body that was looking the other direction? What made the body dodge the soccer ball? We have a lot of evidence about how vision and muscles operate. We experience seeing oncoming objects and trying to avoid them. These aren't arbitrary assumptions thrown together to explain a single incident; they're based on a wide range of interconnecting evidence.
Of course, consciousness isn't required to dodge a car. People could build a robot that detected traffic with cameras or radar and was programmed to take evasive action. But this is still the evading object reacting to the car, by means that operate consistently in any similar context. I suppose the car could have cameras or radar, and send a signal telling the robot to get out of the way. To determine which of these happened, one would need to examine the car and the robot, and find out which has the capacity to detect a potential collision in advance and react to it. Occam's Razor isn't going to tell us that.
A mindless explanation is simpler than a mindful explanation because of one fewer element, THE MIND.
Maybe our monkey wheel would work just fine without us, but that isn't what is happening. We are there. Why should every other monkey wheel be different from ours? Consciousness isn't an explanation. It's an observed fact to be explained. However we try to explain it, there's no reason to limit the explanation to ourselves when it applies just as easily to everyone else.
Our monkey exists because it exists. We know it exists because we can see it. If there's a glass jar full of marbles on your desk, and you drop a towel over it, do the marbles cease to exist as soon as you can't see them?
Since we know one monkey exists, and have a definite example of it, additional monkey in similar circumstances don't make the explanation drastically more complex. Two monkeys or 10 monkeys or 7 billion monkeys, it's all just a slight expansion of the 'monkey can turn wheel' assumption that's required for any explanation, because every explanation has to cover the wheel with the monkey that we can see. We don't have any examples of the same sort of wheel turning when it definitely lacks a monkey. We have other types of wheel that rotate with nowhere for a monkey to fit, but they aren't the same kind of wheel and they don't turn the same way. It is a bigger assumption that monkey wheels can turn without a monkey than that they can turn with a monkey, which we can directly observe.
(The point was not 'If you don't like monkeys, maybe there's a squid turning the wheel'. The point was that even an explanation that is clearly, unquestionably more complex, with creatures that haven't been demonstrated to exist at all in the analogy, still isn't ruled out completely by Occam's Razor because it is not an absolute rule.)
It is simpler to have only one monkey we don't need than to have 7 billion monkeys we don't need because of us seeing one monkey we don't need. It is simpler to have our monkey-wheel be special than to have 7 billion unnecessary monkeys just so they can all be the same.
cookie, you are aware that your argument is literally identical whether or not consciousness is physical, yes? the physicality of consciousness has absolutely nothing to do with whether everyone else is a philosophical zombie. I can just as easily say "consciousness is a super special fairy that lets me think. Since I can't see anyone else's fairy, they don't have it."
also, phineas gage basically proves you wrong anyway? personality is changed by brain damage, so obviously there's a physical cause to personality, in the brain.
Why are you completely ignoring all the wonderful science done on affecting perceptions, personality and other things we attribute to "consciousness" by stimulating areas of the brain, some of which have been linked in this very thread? We can totally see the other monkeys.
What an awful set of arguments. I was not talking about personality and neither was I claiming that the 'contents' of consciousness were not related to the physical body. I was only arguing that consciousness is not part of the physical body.
That’s total bullshit GC. The whole point of not being able to see what’s in the other wheels is that *you can’t detect the consciousness of of other people, because they aren’t you and therefore you don’t have any proof that they are conscious (A monkey is turning the wheel) or merely appearing to be conscious ( the wheel is turning because there is something else inside it. A motor would work fine in this analogy)
What are you trying to say when you say “we can see into everyone else’s wheel and there are no monkies)? Because that sounds like you’re saying that we can detect/observe consciousness, despite as far as I’m aware there not even being a scientific consensus as to what the term actually means.
You can't detect the consciousness of other people, that is totally a fact. That means that physical or not, consciousness is an theoretical inference.
You can't hide behind Occam's Razor when you're proposing the existence of non-physical "magic" conciousness.
Q: How does the sun cross the sky?
A: Helios pulls it! Simplest explanation wins! You can't prove Earth is a planet! You can't prove planets are affected by gravity like everything else! Occam's Razor doesn't apply to gods, haha!
You are Helios pulling the sun across across the sky, that is the problem. You are arguing for an invisible physical thing, I am arguing for an invisible non-physical thing.
I'm not sure you understand what solipsism is. Try checking Wikipedia. Your arguments heavily involve solipsism ("I have special knowledge about my own existence and everything else is suspect and likely illusory.").
That is the fundamental starting argument of Solipsism, fundamental arguments tend to be something that is pretty solid. It does not mean the conclusions actually follow, that tends to be the shaky part of any philosophy.
Reminder: we physicalists view consciousness to be physically and causally linked to behavior. This is like saying "Jim doesn't appear to be happy - he simply smiles and is energetic and says things about being happy." That's what appearing happy is! It's just a cluster of properties that we've given a name to.
He could be pretending to be happy and really be totally miserable. Appearances are deceiving and you forget that to your peril.
This can only be true under epiphenomenalism, in which consciousness has no physical causal interaction with the physical world.
I don't really care if this is the case or not.
Can you actually explain human behavior? If so, it's likely to involve abstractions such as "model" and "goal". To a physicalist, that's the stuff that consciousness is made of.
Does the rock have a goal to reach the bottom of the mountain? Talking about goals presupposes the existence of consciousness on account of the thing you are talking about, so it cannot be the stuff consciousness is made of.
Physicalists don't think that consciousness is a physical object. It is like a computer program - it's fundamentally an abstraction, and it's fully possible to predict the behavior of the computer without referencing anything like a "variable" or a "bit", but that doesn't mean that the program is non-physical except to the extent that it's a logical object. Which logical object the computer is said to run is fully dependent on the physical state of the computer, so it's distinct from an independent non-physical entity like the consciousness that you describe, but it's also not an added entity which can be added or removed from theories. A theory in which the computer is exactly the same but the program is gone is... incoherent. You cannot remove the program without changing the computer.
A physical consciousness is an invisible, undetectable computer program. We also don't need it to explain anything. It's like a conspiracy theory of neurons really.
Fire isn't real. You're just seeing light and heat from a combustion reaction.
Whatever counterargument you have to that argument applies to consciousness as well, assuming that consciousness plays a causal role in behavior. (If it doesn't, then your mind has to be sectioned off - whatever thoughts you can vocalize are in the physical section and cannot be conscious. This includes any thought that you've mentioned here. There are philosophical reasons to reject epiphenomenalism as well, including "what does it mean to 'have consciousness' if there's no connection on your end to the consciousness?" and "why are we postulating unobservable things? how could we know that they existed, even if they did?" and "can something with no causal connection to the rest of existence even be said to exist?")
By the same token blue isn't real either, because blue is just a particular section of the light spectrum.
What is an "empirical thing"? Things that you've seen? The experience of seeing?
Things that have been seen by consciousness(es).
Do you mean "equal" or "equivalent"? If you really meant equal, that's ridiculous - just because something exists doesn't mean that it's equal in magnitude to the sum of everything else.
If equivalent, then possibly. It depends on how your "empirical self-observation" works - does it result in an entanglement between your model of reality and reality itself? "Empirical" or "evidence" means that the state of your beliefs is correlated with the state of reality, through a process of finding observations that are more likely under one possible state than under another. So for your self-observation to truly be empirical, the state of your beliefs needs to be somehow causally entangled with the state of the subject of your beliefs. You shouldn't assume that your intuitions are necessarily true - and if you do make that assumption, that doesn't make your intuitions empirical.
Empirical things includes imaginary and illusory entities here, a rationalist I do not accept empiricism as the sole source of our understanding of the physical world. They need not have any relation to physical reality at all. It is not necessary that anything I see be real in order to prove the existence of consciousness, if I see anything at all I am consciousness. The computer, robot or camera can appear to see something, but it does not actually do so.
A technical definition of evidence does not require a reference to consciousness-as-you-define-it. (Under my definition, anything that forms and uses a model in a self-interpretive way is conscious, so I do view evidence and consciousness as linked, but not evidence and non-physical epiphenomenal entities.)
We cannot observe anything using a model in a self-interpretive way. That requires you to observe consciousness as opposed to inferring it's existence.
That's not how physics works. There are some apparently probabilistic laws (such as the 2nd law of thermodynamics, most quantum things), but that does not mean that the probabilities can be manipulated by an external mind.
We could always be wrong about physics, but be aware that breaking a probabilistic law is not 'lesser' than breaking, say, a deterministic law like conservation of momentum. It is still opposed by immense amounts of scientific evidence.
The physics is based upon ignoring the fundamental reality of consciousnesses, which means the physics is predictably and dangerously wrong about consciousness. You cannot tell if the probabilities are manipulated by the external mind, since probabilities are just statements as to how often something does something on average.
You cannot tell the difference between actual randomness and pseudorandomness, if you do not have the source code. What I am saying is that the randomness physics 'sees' is really pseudorandomness and that physics cannot see the source code of it because consciousness is non-physical.
If it does not produce an effect on the world, then what does it even mean for this interaction to exist? If this mind-world concordance process affects the world in any way, then by definition it changes the probability of events coming to pass. If it only produces random effects, then the mind has no room to be influencing the world.
The probability is an illusion. An external entity is determining the result entirely, one that cannot be observed since consciousness is non-physical. The randomness is simply apparent.
Physicalists do not think that consciousness lies in specific neurons. It's a collective property of the entire brain.
In which case they are really, really stupid. You are not conscious of anything but a tiny amount of the thinking going on in your brain. If consciousness is physical, then only some neurons are part of the party, collectively making up the consciousness that is invisible yet somehow physical.
If by "everything the brain has in it" means "all properties of the brain": My computer does not contain a representation of its own atomic structure. Does this mean that the programs are separate from the computer itself?
If you are talking about subconscious knowledge: physicalists do not think that the brain is only the conscious mind. Multiple programs can run on one computer.
Your computer does not have a representation of anything inside it, because it is a mindless, unconscious thing. It consists of mindless gibberish called binary code, which has to be translated into something readable.
There are additional ways to test your theory. I will generate a truly random number to a thousand digits (non-deterministically). Any result from 0 to 1 is physically possible. I predict an arbitrary number (0.010010001..., say). If the random number matches my prediction, that is evidence toward your theory. If not, it is evidence against it.
If that's too much improbability for the mental concordance force to handle, I will make the RNG binary and repeat it several times. If there is a bias toward my predicted number, then it will show up over time.
Also, I can test the backforce as well. I will ask many friends to predict an RNG's output. I will run the RNG but will hide the results. I am uncertain how your theory says that the universe will change the mind's beliefs to bring them into concordance with reality, but if it happens, I will detect it.
That would only work if your consciousness was that of the entire universe. If you don't know something, then there is no problem with it contradicting your consciousness.
So the mental concordance force has a particular strength? How unlikely of an event can it make happen? What counts as a belief?
Obviously I don't know the answer. You also are misunderstanding that the randomness is made illusory by the intervention of consciousness, by talking about how unlikely an event.
Anything that can happen, will? That sounds deterministic to me.
I am proposing that blue exists because the light spectrum is divided up by consciousness into different colours. Or to put it another way, the brain sees blue because consciousness sees blue, blue might well be an complete illusion. The information storing of the brain is forced into conformity with consciousness so it understands the rest of the universe in terms of the categories consciousness created.
You can delude yourself about the universe by thinking that all of your beliefs pertain only to your body? That's the last straw. Where are you getting all this? How could you possibly know this, even if it was true?
No, by default your beliefs only pertain to your own body. The difficulty here is that is possible for there to be consciousness that is 'bonded' to the actual physical realities being observed rather than to the information *about* those realities in the brain, we don't seem to be that consciousness, but one bonded onto the body. The problem is that the body is not actually physically separate from the rest of the universe, so nothing keeps you from 'reaching out' to annex not only the information *about* the consciousness but the thing that we have information about at the same time.
We can, but we don't seem too. A different 'type' of consciousness could do it, but we don't seem to be it.
Free will is not something that reaches into the physical world and alters it. It's a feeling that you have when considering different actions to take, and you could take any of them. What does "could" mean in this context? Only that if I decide to do X, then I will do X. But in reality you only decide on one thing, so (barring Penrose-esque quantum mind hijinks) you couldn't really have done anything else. Free will is what you do when you consider future-counterfactuals with your decisions changed, and your intuitions around it don't correspond to reality.
It is because consciousness is non-physical and free will is something that does not exist except in consciousness
Categories aren't part of the basic functioning of the universe either. You are projecting your mind onto physics.
In other words, free will.
Okay. Consciousness, under physicalism, is a definition/category/cluster. It describes certain kinds of physical processes. It is no more ruled out by Occam's law than blueness is.
I thought categories weren't part of the basic functioning of the universe.
Under KittyTac's own beliefs, KittyTac is real. "Ah, but if consciousness is physical, then it doesn't exist!" That's your belief, not KittyTac's. Once you start using things in your argument which KittyTac disagrees with, you have ceased to describe KittyTac's beliefs. You are now describing a fusion of KittyTac's beliefs and your own.
Yes, but I don't believe in the fusion I have created. My own beliefs are quite separate from the mix.
Contagion is intuitive to humans, but doesn't necessarily correspond to reality. And your version of Occam's razor is significantly different from every other version I've seen, so I simply reject your razor at this point.
So you think that empirical things *are* subject to Occam's Razor then? Or what?
I don't think we're using words in the same way. I can't interpret this sentence with a coherent meaning.
I saw it, it corresponds to an external reality and so it exists.
No, I don't remember any sort of special relationship between GC-consciousness and the body, because I don't think GC-consciousness exists. That argument makes sense in your own head but fails to convince anybody else who doesn't already agree with you.
Also, what point are you making? "Categories can have special relationships with non-physical things"? That doesn't mean that blueness is fundamentally different from consciousness.
I totally get nothing of what you are trying to say there.
You are still projecting your own beliefs. If KittyTac is right, then consciousness isn't an additional thing which may or may not be present without affecting behavior. You can tell it's there because if it weren't in my head, I wouldn't be typing these words. Your argument only works if you introduce your own beliefs, which we physicalists do not agree with. If you use those beliefs, you are no longer accurately representing my beliefs or those of KittyTac.
In reality only one of us is right. I don't need KittyTac to *also* be a non-physical consciousness, I simply eliminated KittyTac's proposed physical consciousness as violating Occam's Razor. It is simpler to explain KittyTac as a mindless argument bot (or if you prefer, a philosophical zombie) than to ascribe a consciousness to him.
I believe that the consciousness is part of the complication, so I would still be conscious if I were true.
The universe as a whole is far more complex than all of us, does that mean God exists as the consciousness of the complexity of the universe?
This is a complicated and unnecessary mechanism, justified only by your own intuitions about decisions. The world would look the same with or without the mechanism. Occam's razor applies fully.
Nope, it is an empirical thing and so Occam's Razor does not apply to it.
If there's no consciousness process, then the person doesn't think or talk. You know that isn't the case because other people talk.
(We could all be robots programmed to say words, but then who programmed the words? A consciousness process is still required to generate the talking.)
Evolution programmed the words. Or I did and forgot. Or God did. Three options really, or maybe two for the Atheist. ;)
I meant "observe that you are conscious", not the things which happen to be passing through your consciousness at a given point.
It's the difference between seeing your eyes and seeing your field of view.
The difference is the difference between observing 10 and observing 10 1s. The collective of all observed things *is* the consciousness, just as 10 is the collective of all 1s.
No. From KittyTac's perspective, GoblinCookie exists. Stop putting words into people's mouths. What you see as an obvious conclusion, we see as incorrect. Therefore, the conclusion is not part of our perspective.
There is no KittyTac's perspective without a KittyTac consciousness. Perspective is something only conscious beings have. I need neither either you nor KittyTac to actually exist as conscious beings in order for myself to exist.
Post by: KittyTac on September 03, 2018, 12:29:16 pm
Post by: Fleeting Frames on September 03, 2018, 12:41:59 pm
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A mindless explanation is simpler than a mindful explanation because of one fewer element, THE MIND.Only if everyone is mindless(which is simplest). If everyone has mind, that is more complex, but a situation where the population talked about is in-between the explanation has to be as complex as both combined.
Quote from: GoblinCookie
True, but irrelevant to whether Jim appears to be happy.Quote from: LolumzalisThis is like saying "Jim doesn't appear to be happy - he simply smiles and is energetic and says things about being happy." That's what appearing happy is! It's just a cluster of properties that we've given a name to.He could be pretending to be happy and really be totally miserable. Appearances are deceiving and you forget that to your peril.
Quote
A physical consciousness is an invisible, undetectable computer program. We also don't need it to explain anything. It's like a conspiracy theory of neurons really.
At first I was like "yay, a definition!" then I was like wait, I think I can detect whether I am concious extremely trivially, and whether that consiciousness is awake or dreaming.
I guess I may have eliminated that you detect somehow their own conciscious via actions they perform or thoughts they think, as well as whether you're awake/dreaming or not.
I have no idea how you find yourselves to be consicious, but I can miss (even obvious) things. How do you find yourself to be consicious?
....Wait, there was " The collective of all observed things *is* the consciousness, just as 10 is the collective of all 1s. "
See, the problem with that is that even relatively mindless robots can observe their surroundings (record it and do x or y based on current and previous observations). I don't think this is what you want to mean, unless you're now redefining observation to something robots can't do?
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Your computer does not have a representation of anything inside it, because it is a mindless, unconscious thing. It consists of mindless gibberish called binary code, which has to be translated into something readable.Oi! Maybe it is mindless gibberish for you, but to computer and anyone with assembly experience it has meaning without needing translation. You might as well call anything written in foreign languages mindless gibberish.
Also, if anything that is mindless and unconscious is incapable of representing, what do pictures, caricatures, line schemas do?
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The physics is based upon ignoring the fundamental reality of consciousnesses, which means the physics is predictably and dangerously wrong about consciousness. You cannot tell if the probabilities are manipulated by the external mind, since probabilities are just statements as to how often something does something on average.Only if the external mind has constant effect on the probabilities it affects that doesn't stop no matter who dies or is born, which is about as useful as positing that the formula we have for a given probability includes multiplication by 1 because of the mind (which can't be linked to any living beings on earth as we can observe the past having same probabilistic laws).
Post by: KittyTac on September 03, 2018, 12:48:00 pm
Post by: Fleeting Frames on September 03, 2018, 12:56:14 pm
Post by: KittyTac on September 03, 2018, 01:03:13 pm
This is different, for GoblinCookie appears different to themselves than everyone else appears to them in a way that directly involves detecting they're themselves consicious.No, I meant the "Jim appears happy" thing.
Post by: Putnam on September 03, 2018, 03:59:35 pm
Post by: Dorsidwarf on September 03, 2018, 06:59:37 pm
Post by: KittyTac on September 03, 2018, 11:03:18 pm
Seeing as goblincookie has started ignoring posts reminding him that Occam’s razor isn’t a fucking law of physics as well as providing weird non-sequiturs to posts he doesn’t seem to have an actual answer for, I’m of the opinion that he is no longer arguing in good faith; but merely wishes to avoid having to concede any form of defeat or incorrectness and is therefore dragging out the argument with obstinacy and repetition until the other participants get sick of him and leaveWe know what you are up to, GC. ;)
Post by: Demonic Gophers on September 04, 2018, 03:42:14 am
So if we know that one monkey wheel has 1000 elements, and another monkey wheel has 999 identical elements, with the 1000th element being a monkey turning the first wheel...?The simpler explanation is that you are the only unnecessary monkey.
So your position is that "we can surmise that the 1000th element is present also based upon them being the same thing" unless the 1000th element is consciousness, in which case we can be confident that the 1000th element is not present? And this doesn't strike you as even the slightest bit inconsistent?
Sorry but I don't have to prove a negative. Other beings are mindless things until somebody can establish by proof (that does not mean evidence) that they are conscious.
I'm not asking you to prove a negative. You didn't say that the default assumption, when we can't see into the monkey wheels, is that they are empty. You said we can see into all the wheels, and observe that only one of them has a monkey. This is an active claim on your part - you are saying that you have direct knowledge, equivalent to your personal experience of your own consciousness, that other beings are 'mindless things'. This is a very strong claim that you are making, and I'm asking you to provide some form of support or explanation for it. Or else to acknowledge that we can't see into any monkey wheel but our own, and have to form our conclusions about them without direct observation of their contents.
A mindless explanation is simpler than a mindful explanation because of one fewer element, THE MIND.
We know a mind is present. The mind is an observation. All explanations must include that element, because it is part of what needs to be explained. If there was no mind, you would not be aware of this discussion. The mind is not a new element. It is the beginning of both explanations. A mindless explanation is not simpler, because it cannot exist in this context. In the robot versus car question, both explanations are mindless. In a question that includes your own consciousness, no explanation is mindless. Why is an explanation that includes THE MIND and some other factor that arises from the same basis and causes the same results simpler than an explanation that only includes THE MIND? Also, "The car made the body dodge the car" still doesn't explain anything.
When you agreed with my description of Occam's Razor, did you somehow miss the part where it applies equally to physical and non-physical assumptions? And also that it is a general guideline, not an absolute rule? And did you somehow miss these questions the first time I asked them, which you just quoted?
It is simpler to have only one monkey we don't need than to have 7 billion monkeys we don't need because of us seeing one monkey we don't need. It is simpler to have our monkey-wheel be special than to have 7 billion unnecessary monkeys just so they can all be the same.
We need one monkey because the monkey is the entire point of the discussion. Our own consciousness is an observation, not an explanation. We know that we are conscious; the questions is why we are conscious. You seem to be insisting that if the explanation is based upon the physical structure and activity of the brain, then it applies only to you, not all the other beings with brains that are almost identical to yours. Why? Why do you think that two explanations is simpler than one explanation? Simply repeating over and over that "it is simpler" is not actually supporting or explaining that position.
We aren't postulating 7 billion monkeys "just so they can all be the same." We are concluding that there are 7 billion monkeys because everything we can actually observe about the wheels indicates that they are basically the same. The only major difference we know of is that we can only see into one of the wheels (unless we are telepaths or some such).
Replacing the monkeys with magic fairies doesn't make the explanation any simpler, either. And even if one explanation was more complicated than two, or monkeys were more complicated than fairies, that wouldn't tell us anything certain because the simplest explanations is not always the right one.
cookie, you are aware that your argument is literally identical whether or not consciousness is physical, yes? the physicality of consciousness has absolutely nothing to do with whether everyone else is a philosophical zombie. I can just as easily say "consciousness is a super special fairy that lets me think. Since I can't see anyone else's fairy, they don't have it."What an awful set of arguments. I was not talking about personality and neither was I claiming that the 'contents' of consciousness were not related to the physical body. I was only arguing that consciousness is not part of the physical body.
Your set of arguments is indeed awful. And even if you think that consciousness has no relation whatsoever to personality, your awful set of arguments still applies just as much to non-physical consciousness as it does to physical consciousness, unless there's some reason (you haven't even tried to explain) why it wouldn't.
That’s total bullshit GC. The whole point of not being able to see what’s in the other wheels is that *you can’t detect the consciousness of of other people, because they aren’t you and therefore you don’t have any proof that they are conscious (A monkey is turning the wheel) or merely appearing to be conscious ( the wheel is turning because there is something else inside it. A motor would work fine in this analogy)You can't detect the consciousness of other people, that is totally a fact. That means that physical or not, consciousness is an theoretical inference.
What are you trying to say when you say “we can see into everyone else’s wheel and there are no monkies)? Because that sounds like you’re saying that we can detect/observe consciousness, despite as far as I’m aware there not even being a scientific consensus as to what the term actually means.
...So are you acknowledging that we can't see into the other monkey wheels, and the other monkeys wouldn't have to be invisible? Have you been persuaded to change your position on one detail of the analogy?
You can't hide behind Occam's Razor when you're proposing the existence of non-physical "magic" conciousness.You are Helios pulling the sun across across the sky, that is the problem. You are arguing for an invisible physical thing, I am arguing for an invisible non-physical thing.
That doesn't explain why your... rather nonstandard version of Occam's Razor applies to physical things, but not to non-physical things.
I'm not sure you understand what solipsism is. Try checking Wikipedia. Your arguments heavily involve solipsism ("I have special knowledge about my own existence and everything else is suspect and likely illusory.").That is the fundamental starting argument of Solipsism, fundamental arguments tend to be something that is pretty solid. It does not mean the conclusions actually follow, that tends to be the shaky part of any philosophy.
Dozebôm Lolumzalìs isn't trying to convince you to embrace solipsism, just noting that your position seems to be based upon it.
Reminder: we physicalists view consciousness to be physically and causally linked to behavior. This is like saying "Jim doesn't appear to be happy - he simply smiles and is energetic and says things about being happy." That's what appearing happy is! It's just a cluster of properties that we've given a name to.He could be pretending to be happy and really be totally miserable. Appearances are deceiving and you forget that to your peril.
True, the simplest explanation is not always correct. But completely ignoring all evidence of your senses because appearances can be deceptive is a lot more perilous. And if someone is acting happy than they still appear to be conscious, even if he is actually miserable (which would also requite consciousness). Your claim that prompted this remark was that "other people do not *appear* to be conscious," not that this appearance might be an illusion.
Can you actually explain human behavior? If so, it's likely to involve abstractions such as "model" and "goal". To a physicalist, that's the stuff that consciousness is made of.Does the rock have a goal to reach the bottom of the mountain? Talking about goals presupposes the existence of consciousness on account of the thing you are talking about, so it cannot be the stuff consciousness is made of.
A rock shows no indication of awareness or decision making. We describe its behavior according to physical factors like gravity and friction. Its structure and composition have very little resemblance to a brain. Humans do not act like rocks, and do not have the same structure as rocks, so their behavior requires a somewhat different explanation than rock behavior. Rocks almost certainly do not have goals. Humans almost certainly do have goals.
And of course an attempt to describe what something is involves properties that require the thing in question. How do you describe something based on traits that aren't related to it?
Physicalists don't think that consciousness is a physical object. It is like a computer program....A physical consciousness is an invisible, undetectable computer program. We also don't need it to explain anything. It's like a conspiracy theory of neurons really.
Consciousness is not an explanation. It is an observation to be explained. Physicalists think that consciousness results from complex interactions between the components of the brain. Computer programs are an imperfect, but potentially useful comparison for people actually seeking to understand the physicalist position.
I'll spare everyone my rant about the phrase 'conspiracy theory', which would be an even more ridiculous sidetrack of this thread than its current state.
Do you mean "equal" or "equivalent"? If you really meant equal, that's ridiculous - just because something exists doesn't mean that it's equal in magnitude to the sum of everything else.Empirical things includes imaginary and illusory entities here, a rationalist I do not accept empiricism as the sole source of our understanding of the physical world. They need not have any relation to physical reality at all. It is not necessary that anything I see be real in order to prove the existence of consciousness, if I see anything at all I am consciousness. The computer, robot or camera can appear to see something, but it does not actually do so.
Proving the existence of consciousness does not prove dualism. How is it that your awareness "results in the conclusion of dualism" regardless of any evidence? And what source of understanding of the physical world do you consider superior to empirical evidence?
We can observe ourselves using models. And consciousness is observed - as you just said, "if I see anything at all I am consciousness".A technical definition of evidence does not require a reference to consciousness-as-you-define-it. (Under my definition, anything that forms and uses a model in a self-interpretive way is conscious, so I do view evidence and consciousness as linked, but not evidence and non-physical epiphenomenal entities.)We cannot observe anything using a model in a self-interpretive way. That requires you to observe consciousness as opposed to inferring it's existence.
That's not how physics works. There are some apparently probabilistic laws (such as the 2nd law of thermodynamics, most quantum things), but that does not mean that the probabilities can be manipulated by an external mind.The physics is based upon ignoring the fundamental reality of consciousnesses, which means the physics is predictably and dangerously wrong about consciousness. You cannot tell if the probabilities are manipulated by the external mind, since probabilities are just statements as to how often something does something on average.
You cannot tell the difference between actual randomness and pseudorandomness, if you do not have the source code. What I am saying is that the randomness physics 'sees' is really pseudorandomness and that physics cannot see the source code of it because consciousness is non-physical.
Physics disagrees with your model of consciousness, so you dismiss all of physics.
If consciousness alters probabilities, we should be able to see psuedorandom events being warped accordingly. Imagine I bought a set of weighted dice, just as a curiosity. I gather a bunch of friends and say "Check out these cool dice! They look perfectly normal, but they'll roll sixes half the time!" But the seller tricked me, and they're really just perfectly ordinary, fair dice. If I roll them a few times, what's going to happen?
If it does not produce an effect on the world, then what does it even mean for this interaction to exist? If this mind-world concordance process affects the world in any way, then by definition it changes the probability of events coming to pass. If it only produces random effects, then the mind has no room to be influencing the world.
The probability is an illusion. An external entity is determining the result entirely, one that cannot be observed since consciousness is non-physical. The randomness is simply apparent.
Do you have any support or argument for this very extreme claim?
Physicalists do not think that consciousness lies in specific neurons. It's a collective property of the entire brain.
In which case they are really, really stupid. You are not conscious of anything but a tiny amount of the thinking going on in your brain. If consciousness is physical, then only some neurons are part of the party, collectively making up the consciousness that is invisible yet somehow physical.
How civil of you. I don't think you are really, really stupid. I just think you work really, really hard to avoid actually considering any point that contradicts your position.
Consciousness does not include everything that happens in the brain. Consciousness is a result of everything, or a large portion, that happens in the brain. Just because something contributes to the process that gives rise to your consciousness doesn't mean you're aware of every detail of that process. (And as far as I know, even the scientists who most closely study consciousness don't fully understand how it arises. This does not mean it is magic, it just means we don't have a complete understanding of it yet.)
Do you believe in physical microorganisms? Physical wind? Physical magnetism? Lots of things cannot be perceived easily or directly, but still physically exist. 'Hard to see' does not conflict with 'physical'.
Your computer does not have a representation of anything inside it, because it is a mindless, unconscious thing. It consists of mindless gibberish called binary code, which has to be translated into something readable.
As Fleeting Frames noted, just because you can't read it doesn't mean it's mindless gibberish. And that 'gibberish' also contains a representation of the process needed to translate it into something you can read.
There are additional ways to test your theory. I will generate a truly random number to a thousand digits (non-deterministically). Any result from 0 to 1 is physically possible. I predict an arbitrary number (0.010010001..., say). If the random number matches my prediction, that is evidence toward your theory. If not, it is evidence against it.
That would only work if your consciousness was that of the entire universe. If you don't know something, then there is no problem with it contradicting your consciousness.
So is it truly random, then?
Anything that can happen, will? That sounds deterministic to me.
I am proposing that blue exists because the light spectrum is divided up by consciousness into different colours. Or to put it another way, the brain sees blue because consciousness sees blue, blue might well be an complete illusion. The information storing of the brain is forced into conformity with consciousness so it understands the rest of the universe in terms of the categories consciousness created.
We are proposing that consciousness sees blue because the brain sees blue because the eyes see blue. Which is why physical problems can cause colorblindness.
You can delude yourself about the universe by thinking that all of your beliefs pertain only to your body? That's the last straw. Where are you getting all this? How could you possibly know this, even if it was true?No, by default your beliefs only pertain to your own body. The difficulty here is that is possible for there to be consciousness that is 'bonded' to the actual physical realities being observed rather than to the information *about* those realities in the brain, we don't seem to be that consciousness, but one bonded onto the body. The problem is that the body is not actually physically separate from the rest of the universe, so nothing keeps you from 'reaching out' to annex not only the information *about* the consciousness but the thing that we have information about at the same time.
We can, but we don't seem too. A different 'type' of consciousness could do it, but we don't seem to be it.
Maybe the reason we don't seem to reach out and annex information about the rest of the universe is that consciousness isn't actually capable of doing that, because reality is what it is, without regard for what anyone thinks it is. You did not provide any sort of answer at all for how you would know all this.
Free will is not something that reaches into the physical world and alters it....It is because consciousness is non-physical and free will is something that does not exist except in consciousness
"We were talking about how free will, if it actually exists could move the arm." How can this hypothetical non-physical consciousness move the arm? What is the mechanism?
Categories aren't part of the basic functioning of the universe either. You are projecting your mind onto physics.
In other words, free will.
Doing this does not actually change physics. The categories we construct just exist within our minds. Things in reality may or may not fit those categories.
Okay. Consciousness, under physicalism, is a definition/category/cluster. It describes certain kinds of physical processes. It is no more ruled out by Occam's law than blueness is.
I thought categories weren't part of the basic functioning of the universe.
Physical processes are part of the basic functioning of the universe. We invent categories to describe them. The category exists within our mind; the process is outside of it.
Under KittyTac's own beliefs, KittyTac is real. "Ah, but if consciousness is physical, then it doesn't exist!" That's your belief, not KittyTac's. Once you start using things in your argument which KittyTac disagrees with, you have ceased to describe KittyTac's beliefs. You are now describing a fusion of KittyTac's beliefs and your own.Yes, but I don't believe in the fusion I have created. My own beliefs are quite separate from the mix.
NOBODY believes in the fusion you've created. Describing your fusion is not describing anyone's beliefs. You should not ascribe your fusion to KittyTac or anyone else.
Contagion is intuitive to humans, but doesn't necessarily correspond to reality. And your version of Occam's razor is significantly different from every other version I've seen, so I simply reject your razor at this point.So you think that empirical things *are* subject to Occam's Razor then? Or what?
...Maybe you could describe your version of oGCam's Razor, since it doesn't seem to correspond with, or even resemble, any version that anyone else has ever heard of? You agreed that my description was correct, but you certainly aren't using it.
I don't think we're using words in the same way. I can't interpret this sentence with a coherent meaning.I saw it, it corresponds to an external reality and so it exists.
Didn't you just say that the things we see can include "imaginary and illusory entities"?
You are still projecting your own beliefs. If KittyTac is right, then consciousness isn't an additional thing which may or may not be present without affecting behavior. You can tell it's there because if it weren't in my head, I wouldn't be typing these words. Your argument only works if you introduce your own beliefs, which we physicalists do not agree with. If you use those beliefs, you are no longer accurately representing my beliefs or those of KittyTac.In reality only one of us is right. I don't need KittyTac to *also* be a non-physical consciousness, I simply eliminated KittyTac's proposed physical consciousness as violating Occam's Razor. It is simpler to explain KittyTac as a mindless argument bot (or if you prefer, a philosophical zombie) than to ascribe a consciousness to him.
Wasn't your argument for non-physical consciousness that you refused to apply a physical explanation for consciousness to anyone but yourself? If you're going to assume everyone is a mindless argument bot either way, that seems to undercut your own position without having any impact on ours. And since we all experience our own consciousness, we know we aren't mindless bots and your position is clearly false.
I believe that the consciousness is part of the complication, so I would still be conscious if I were true.
The universe as a whole is far more complex than all of us, does that mean God exists as the consciousness of the complexity of the universe?
What does this have to do with anything in the discussion? And it isn't just the degree of complexity, but also the nature of it that gives rise to consciousness.
This is a complicated and unnecessary mechanism, justified only by your own intuitions about decisions. The world would look the same with or without the mechanism. Occam's razor applies fully.Nope, it is an empirical thing and so Occam's Razor does not apply to it.
How is it empirical? How have you observed non-physical consciousness?
No. From KittyTac's perspective, GoblinCookie exists. Stop putting words into people's mouths. What you see as an obvious conclusion, we see as incorrect. Therefore, the conclusion is not part of our perspective.
There is no KittyTac's perspective without a KittyTac consciousness. Perspective is something only conscious beings have. I need neither either you nor KittyTac to actually exist as conscious beings in order for myself to exist.
If KittyTac is right, then we are all conscious beings and all have perspectives. If your fusion were right, then only I would be a conscious being, but nobody thinks your fusion is right. I'm not sure if you're basing this on your fusion, or if you've ditched the position that non-physical consciousness means we are all conscious beings with perspectives. Even if your fusion were right, however, I could still describe things as being part of someone else's perspective because I can describe the perspective of a fictional character. "Your perspective doesn't exist!" seems like the weakest strawman imaginable.
Post by: Tilmar13 on September 04, 2018, 11:19:37 am
Thank you everyone for your input, and ... yeah. You can't change someone else's opinion, they must make that decision for themselves.