bert1

I'm impressed you did it without a grid. I suppose there are other ways to record the information.

Might this help? https://i.pinimg.com/736x/2d/56/4b/2d564bd5e2862354b86a41e000b35ba0.jpg

How could you show, even to yourself, that your behaviour is caused by your feelings? Why can't both feelings and behaviour, in parallel, be caused by...

No, the behaviour is the same, no? Behaviour is public. EDIT: for the avoidance of doubt, I agree with you. I'm arguing the opposite, I forgot why.

There are more sophisticated, less crudely mechanistic accounts, like those involving top-down causation by emergent characteristics of whole systems....

For the same kind of reason that a ball rolls down an incline.

I agree with you, but others argue, somewhat plausibly, that all the actual causal stuff happens in the brain, and your feeling of such and such just ...

I've found an article by Goff which might be relevant. Haven't read it yet, but it seems to address the revelatory theses and mentions causation in re...

It would be helpful, yes. To be fair, some attempts have been made, and the most plausible are all functionalist reductions. But as functionalist redu...

@"Patterner" Yes, but electric charge is something out there that we come to know about. Consciousness is not like that, it's in here, not out there. ...

That's interesting. Isn't the situation almost the converse with consciousness? We know what it is, but we don't know what it does. Consider epiphenom...

There's a contradiction in my own post. I said I wasn't sure if it was uniquely causal or not, then I said understanding the concept of consciousness ...

Could it? I'm not sure matter can do anything at all without consciousness. It seems to me that consciousness might be uniquely causal. I think we are...

Consciousness is its own explanation. It's nothing other than itself. If we assume that consciousness is a natural phenomenon like, say, a whirlpool o...

Can you waste mine instead? I'm up for it.

Yes, 'how' is used less broadly than 'why'.

This looks interesting, but it is a zip file. Can someone unzip it?

I get what you mean I think (maybe not), but I'm not sure that's really how language is used. Consider the empirical, scientific enquiry: "Why does it...

This is a good question, as it illustrates, in my view, a mistaken way that philosophers and scientists often think about consciousness. And in a way ...

When i examine my experience, the only thing I can find that might qualify as remotely mystical is a relentless and brutal positivity that permits wea...

Are you asking about the emergence of the sentient from the insentient? I didn't see this at first but I think you likely are. If so it is a restateme...

I think you're right, I do presuppose a reason, and maybe that is just a bad habit. However if there is, in fact, an unknown reason, then we have a na...

Yes, I agree. If there were only one sentient being in the universe, it would go around gobbling at will. There would be no other to impede it. If the...

I only say that because it was the reason given in the setup. You were discussing why a person who is already religious would wonder why God exists, w...

Because it's stupid and pointless if there is no God. So you need to figure out if God is real, and if so it is the God of the bible, and if so is the...

If you keep asking 'Yes but why?' eventually even scientifically literate people like yourself, will say 'That's just how it is'. That's a mystery. I ...

Yes, but they are still used in explanations. And the regularities are describable but inexplicable.

If cosmopsychism is true (panpsychism with an emphasis on the macro rather than the micro), and at the moment I think it probably is, then we have a v...

I don't think that's entirely right. Reason does change people's views, but slowly, and very occasionally quickly. The rationale lodges in some deep r...

Naturalists offer explanationsi nterms of natural laws, but the laws themselves are taken to be brute and inexplicable, no? A mystery that answers que...

This topic was called the problem of 'natural kinds' when I was at university. Someone might have mentioned this already, I haven't read the whole thr...

I think @"unenlightened" is taking the only remotely promising approach, and that is to stipulate a God-idea and then check the world (in a broad sens...

I not sure if I would. I think I was replying to @"flannel jesus" who might expect it and did give an answer. See above.

Oh, I see. Didn't understand that when I wrote my previous answer. So where is the boundary between the layers?

We've crossed the language-level boundary when we say "My thoughts about consciousness caused my fingers to move the pen which wicks ink up from the i...

Sorry I don't understand. Writing things involves moving physical objects around, pens, keyboards etc. What am I missing?

Oh, OK. Can you give an example of consciousness causing something in a way that doesn't tread on the toes of any physics?

Interesting article. It's extremely dualistic, in a way, isn't it? It seems to suggest a fairly radical disconnection between the two 'levels'. Is he ...

Maybe. I think that would make a great topic for a thread. Does psychological causation compete with physical causation?

I heartily agree. EDIT: you may be interested in @"apokrisis" posts on the forum about complex systems and top-down causation. Is that the kind of thi...

It would. But it leaves no evolutionary role for consciousness to play, which was @"wonderer1"'s point. EDIT: my own tentative view is that only consc...

When philosophers like Chalmers ask questions like "Why doesn't all this information-processing go on "in the dark", free of any inner feel?" they don...

Because of the causal closure of the physical

What are you talking about?

What does 'rodeo clowning bulls' mean?

Sure, I agree. That's a good point, but one @"180 Proof" didn't make. There were a number of things that @"180 Proof" could have meant, I was just won...

Do you think there is something wrong with that?

That's exactly what someone who was teased by their sister as a child would say.

Sure, let's do that on the psychology forum.