Isaac

So then, if there are differences in the epiphenomena, those differences must have been caused by differences in the preceding physical cause, otherwi...

Do you believe epiphenomenon are caused entirely by physical factors?

What makes you think that? You agree our experiences are generated by our brains right? And identical brain activity cannot produce different experien...

We really don't. If absolutely every measure we can detect shows no difference, that is excellent grounds for assuming they are the same. It's the sam...

What I'm asking is why postulate that I'm having X and you Y, unless you've got some reason (my response or my subsequent words) to believe our experi...

Ah yes, I made a mistake there I should have written Y,Y and X for the second person. The point still stands though. Why not? They're different compon...

But your example of radically different experiences consisted of saying that experiences of red for one person might be constituted of X,X, and Y, yet...

So they're not private then. We talk about them and have words for them. You didn't say anything about being, you said 'knowing'.

Right. But we have a word for 'feeling of deciding something'. We call it a 'decision' and we talk about it to each other. there's something there to ...

Yes, I meant that we'd have to know them somehow, in order to implicate their existence. Like with epiphenomenalism. We have a word 'decision' because...

Why would we need to swap bodies? Surely Whatever these Xs and Ys are they have a physical effect (otherwise how are you distinguishing them?) So we c...

(I'm missing your notifications by the way - there's some software glitch which seems to make this happen occasionally, I only just spotted this post ...

Then it is neither sufficient, nor efficient, nor proximate is it?

Yep. That's the bit I saw as circular; because your definition of individual persons contained their ability to feel pain as one of the defining facto...

I'm not asking what is and isn't in accordance with ordinary use. I'm talking about the assumptions entailed by ordinary use. The point I'm making is....

I agree so far as object recognition is concerned, but this comes back to the point I made to Joshs about the features of perception being more fundam...

So the sentence "last week's heavy rains caused the landslide" makes no sense to you? Or "The cold summer caused a drop in ice-cream sales"? These are...

You're not fooling anyone. You know that, right? This is a good example of when words don't have an effect. When I disbelieve the person speaking them...

Yes, I think that makes sense, but 'knowledge' seems a much bolder claim than that. A new perspective can indeed show areas where the previous one is ...

I see. Doesn't that open you up a little to @"Banno"'s complaints that You've defined 'subjectivity' in terms that assume the existence of subjective ...

Yeah, bad example, too easily confused with property talk. Noses would be better. You can only have your nose, even if we swapped with some horrific p...

OK. Then I'm missing how this relates to subjectivity. I can only have my phone and you can only have your phone. That's there in the definition of 'm...

Wtf?

I don't understand how this becomes a difference of type (objective/subjective). If I have a pain and you have a pain, they're unlikely to be the same...

I think that's true, but, as you say, domain-specific. It causes problems in contexts which cross domains (were there's both a physical causal chain a...

'Meaning' is a slightly different matter. I hold a broadly Wittgensteinian view that the meaning of a word is found by looking to its use. This might ...

Yeah. Our models are changing all the time. Before neurons we would have had very different models.

I think that's true, but what I'm leading up to is the assumptions that the ordinary language use carries. I didn't want to prejudice any alternative ...

Epiphenomenalism of a sort. I think minds are a model we make of the processes in our brains. Models are (mostly public) constructs which act to minim...

Why is the only alternative to modernity "living in the past". What about an alternative modernity? It's literally the definition of criticising. Real...

Then what are the sounds, electrical signals, ink marks or whatever forms the substrate of your conversation? They don't. Not without breaking fundame...

I explained the difference between a necessary and a sufficient cause, did I not? Are you claiming that there are no such things as necessary but not ...

Yes. Without doubt. Since the discovery of how the memory forms traces of neural events the idea of someone directly interfering at any point, unnotic...

No problem. To the topic... I have to admit to using the term myself quite a bit, but I've found myself persuaded by your arguments here. I really can...

Why would you think that? What has physical detection of the origin of a signal got to do with it? Scenario 1 - some set of neurons fire which causes ...

Indeed. I'd cite the evidence, but I fear the publication dates may upset poor @"Mww". Like waking a sleepwalker, one must be careful with Kantians no...

It's not a frame. You literally presented a cliched and un-argued response. Wow. So now we've moved on to "anyone who doesn't reach the same conclusio...

Ah, then we have crossed-wires a little. I was referring to the slightly more general sense in which you claimed to 'understand' the arguments of Seth...

I'm just going to refer you to 's comment above which makes the case far more eruditely that I was doing. You do know there's a difference between 'Ph...

And where does the will to invent these new algorithms come from? Where does the sense that they're working (or not working) come from? Where does the...

Now you're just begging the question. "Killing is considered morally wrong because when we do sanction killing we're not being moral... because killin...

But we do. War is sanctioned killing, all property is theft (according to some) and many countries still sanction rape if it is within marriage, other...

Ah, the old "isn't it obvious", argument. Tell me, how is it, do you think, that it is both "obvious" and "a common mistake"? So leaves are not a caus...

Because a far greater proportion of communication is carried in body language and social status than we think and so what you think of as a nice warm,...

Doesn't this fall foul of my first hurdle? We've already dismissed commonality as a measure, Remember Thomspon's 4 citations compared to Seth's 86 did...

What resources do you expect to tap into other than those of our mental processes? Do you think perhaps we should use supercomputers? It just seems yo...

Why not aesthetics then? What's different about the statement "X is beautiful"? When I mentioned this before, I'm sure you said it was to do with what...

Really? How?

Then how do you suppose bread and beer are made? I've already said that human mixer is one of the necessary causes. Put all those necessary causes tog...

Well I admire your pluck, if nothing else! But now it's on me to respond, so were I to have the courage (I don't) how might I rise to the equivalent c...