hypericin

Not "A affects B". Rather, changes to A result in changes to B. When this relationship is observed, it provides evidence that either: * A is B or * B ...

This seems tautologically true: the notion of "first person perspective" is derived from the notion or experience of consciousness. Just that persons ...

I don't have a sophisticated understanding of what information is. That which can be encoded and transmitted, I suppose. Which rules out all the stuff...

My point is, if you treat consciousness as informational, then this problem dissolves: matter can manifestly serve as the substrate of information, an...

Information is not matter, it has no mass, no energy, no extent. Nonetheless every time you visit a web page, information is driving the physical outp...

Various countries have different estimates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#Estimates_of_the_value_of_life Reasonable people argue against...

So the Holocaust was ok so long as the Nazis felt nothing?

Humans are presumed to be equal in value. That being so, the basis of this mother's choice must come from personal preference. Mother or no (imagine y...

So might say an apologist for the worst tyrants of history.

Right If you think about it, many modern words which can stand alone as a sentence could have served as primitive vocalizations: hmm. wow! huh. huh? a...

everyone's life is bracketed by the permanent, omnipresent possibility of death. Does that make it trivial?

One necessary condition is that there be a sufficient richness of vocalizations already present for thinking to be able to do anything at all. Otherwi...

You can't subtract warmth from a fire and get something simpler.

Because it's not just playing sound, it's thinking! Proto-thinking, because it is prelinguistic, but thinking still. What more natural thing for an an...

Prior to language I would call these proto-thoughts. Strings of the noises that the animal makes in the world, noises which have innate, instictive me...

I'm surprised this part is puzzling, since it is such an intimate part of human experience. The connection enables us to "play sounds in our heads". T...

Poor @Brett is dazed and confused.

Now we all know, this is what fascism looks like in this country. It is so dangerously strong, even with the most dunderheaded leader known to history...

It must be obvious to even the stupidest now, who these Trumpies are. For all their America this and Flag that, they hate this country, hate democracy...

Any externally originating experience is both the experience of the world, and a phenomenal event generated by your brain. And, you can experience the...

At least NOS4A2's cognomen honestly represents his hero: a malignant, undead parasite, draining the lifeblood from his host. 2021 America is looking a...

No, there is no presupposition of dualism. There are two perspectives, first person, and third person. The brain, uniquely, is an object that can be e...

Really? We have President High Crimes and Misdemeanors himself. After two years of dismissing impeachment entirely, Pelosi finally consented to one of...

A question that has been fairly asked countless times this century, starting with W's outright theft of the election. (Just imagine if the roles had b...

For a machine to do work it must be in direct contact with reality. Otherwise it won't do anything. But the information processing component of machin...

You say there is nothing you can say about things as they are. I'm just making the obvious point that there is plenty you can say, even though things ...

Not true. It is what grounds perceptions and makes them possible. From that perspective you can say quite a lot. Science investigates and attempts to ...

You can say, tautologically, that the world as it is is non-perceptual, simply because as soon as you perceive it, it is a perception, and therefore n...

Damn, you got me. Checkmate. You don't understand. But looking at your many "contributions" over the years, that is an unreasonable expectation. Of co...

"see the world as it is" is inherently contradictory. "See" is a stand in for perceive. "Perceive" as we know it means to transform signals into a sym...

Conspiracy theories serve the believers. They permit them to believe what their reason would otherwise cause them to abandon, and avoid suffering the ...

LOL On the one side you have QAnon, the Orwellian "Stop the Steal", 1000 voter fraud conspiracies, Fake News (the conspiracy of the entire media again...

To summarize my op, it is not reasonable to hold right wing beliefs in America anymore. But instead of changing their beliefs, which for many amounts ...

With words there is a fine line between "common misconception" and "common usage". No one is going around thinking there is no such thing as conspirac...

The problems I mentioned are not features of individual conspiracy theorists, they are features, as I see it, of this genre of interpretation.

In other words, the problem is not the conspiracy so much as conspiracy theories.

I would argue that conspiracy theories are vastly worse than reading bones. Reading bones is basically guessing about the future. As long as the divin...

... just as there is nothing about predictions made by casting bones that renders them automatically wrong.

Right. Conspiracists are not skeptics, they are the exact opposite: True Believers. Doubting established wisdom is one thing. But then giving full cre...

In fact, any event can be explained by an infinite variety of mundane causes, and an infinite variety of supernatural ones. And if your criteria is no...

Sure they will cite evidence until the cows come home. They show infinite creativity here. But, the conclusion is what is all important. The "evidence...

True, I misspoke: Russian collision was a conspiracy, to assist a hostile power to illegally affect the election. One can theorize about such conspira...

It is probably true that declining quality of education increased the vulnerability of the population to conspiracies. A true conspiracy theory can on...

This is what we do when we "speak to ourselves". Typically we just borrow the existing language and speak to ourselves literally, but we can employ ot...

Books merely present information, they don't process it. You seemed to be making the argument that the Chinese room does not "push against the world",...

But he seems to have overlooked it. He presents a false dichotomy: * Consciousness cannot be emulated by a Turing machine * Therefore, it must be phys...

I don't think this is the right approach. There is nothing special going on with observer dependence. Yes, a bit, or an assembly instruction, has no m...

Thanks for the quote, this is precisely the point where I disagree with Searle. There is a middle ground between Turning Machine and physical process....

So then would Searle agree that it is possible to build a machine that thinks? Either via replicating nature (the thought experiment of replacing each...

Really? As soon as you attach inputs and outputs to the robot brain, it is no longer a simulation? So, if the Chinese room simulated a famous Chinese ...