Marchesk

I'm saying that your ability to make an identity claim of consciousness to brain states is based on ontological talk. But I'm criticizing that on the ...

I'm saying our making ontological arguments does. They're not conceptually the same sort of "things" at all. On the one hand you have abstracted, obje...

No, because both of those can be defined functionally and performed by a machine. It leaves out the subjective experiences. Subjectivity, qualia, what...

The problem is that identifying the mental with the physical is a category error, since they are are two different domains. And it doesn't explain why...

The alternative to this is to suppose there is a structure to reality that human beings come to know about imperfectly. First through everyday experie...

There is, but better mapping/measurements could lead us to clues and reduce the explanatory gap. Assuming this is impossible is assuming that our a pr...

That's true. But what if the big bangs generated Boltzman brains? Right, that would be a way to rule out being inside a simulation. But it's a questio...

It's vats all the way down. But yes, that's the skeptical worry. Nick Bostrom wrote that realism would be a casualty of future tech when simulations a...

So was Augustine puzzled by the meaning of the word, or what time was?

Nature adapts, which means the generalist species that do well alongside humans and can live in a range of climates have the advantage and are likely ...

Oh god! That gives me an idea for a horror story where aliens with a taste for human flesh recycle our brains into cloned bodies over and over.

We really don't know, but it's quite possible you could end up with a nightmarish, insane experience on the part of the subject. Maybe the brain exper...

Do we, though? We know the experience of time passing. But it took until Einstein before time was known as part of the four spacetime dimensions. And ...

I don't recall ever being afraid of boredom. I just dislike the tendency to reduce complex human behavior and emotions to a couple basic ones.

Yeah, compare the treatment of cats to raccoons. Raccoons are evil and should be shot, but god forbid if someone mentions killing off the stray cats b...

I strongly disagree with this in general. Often times, I just don't feel like doing whatever it is I should be doing or could be doing, not because I ...

There's a way pigs wish to be slaughtered? I'm all for happy pigs. Not sure what it is with horses and dogs getting the gold treatment, and pigs are c...

What other way would it be? Figurative pain? Metaphorical pleasure? Abstract taste? Well, maybe that one for some people. Non-literal feelings? I drea...

Is this a language can't express everything? More of a Witty what we can't speak of we must pass over in a silence, and the beetle in the box isn't a ...

The OP was referring to one neuroscientist's approach to explaining consciousness, or at least providing more detailed correlation. My question would ...

So if we replaced your brain with sawdust, you'd still be conscious?

It would be wild if you dreamed of someone arguing with you that solipsism is true and they were the only mind in the world. On a related note, I was ...

I just have them along with pains, sounds, tastes, thoughts, etc.

But we already knew this was the case, at the very least because our senses are limited, and many things we only learned about the world after we had ...

Right, but it's a question of why we need to have certain experiences. It's like saying that if we're inside a simulation, what's the point of all the...

But that raises the question of why there would be sensations of illusion if there are just experiences. We can give a good material explanation for t...

But how does that get turned into understanding? After-all, neither a [arrot nor current AI can make that transition. What is about human children tha...

The inferential part about perception where the brain is guessing at what the sensory inputs will be is different than what people arguing philosophy ...

Are you a philosophical zombie? Because you argue as if you have no conscious experiences. If I ask whether you experience pain, are you going to give...

Imagine though if atoms had a special property only under certain situations, and we couldn't give a scientific reason for that. Anyway, nobody has ju...

This would seem to put us into the same position as a brain in the vat. Meillassoux's anti-correlationist argument is similar to Putnam's argument tha...

That is something to take into account, but it's also because we can't say why any brain process would have a conscious correlate other than some just...

But that won't past muster with language as use version of meaning, since rule following for translating language is not the same thing as use of word...

The horse has been out of the barn since civilization started. Most of human history was groups of a couple hundred people in tribes. So you might arg...

Geology and cosmology even more so. The fact that science says we evolved and depend on mindless processes to be here is good reason for thinking corr...

Yeah, but there is a brain here and an object over there. Our perception of the object happens inside our skulls, while the object remains outside. Un...

That raises the question of whether the explanatory gap lies with the limitations of explanation. Does an explanation have to cause you to experience ...

Well, the primitive human view of time travel is such that they call it "ancestral", since you're from an alternate timeline, and therefore cannot be ...

Haha! That raises question of how does the Chinese Room manage to perform perfect translations. Can that be done by mere rule following? Then again, d...

That's a good point. I guess our great-great-great-great grandparents could have just abstained? But that would have increased their own suffering.

Actually, an even better version of the time machine argument is that you don't create a separate time line unless you do time travel and step on a pr...

Okay, but you take some back with you, or bring a doctor to sterilize. With their consent after you've convince them, naturally. No reason to not star...

That leads to a thought experiment. Say you stumbled across a time machine in your neighbor's garage, activated it and found yourself among the first ...

Because many of them like Chalmers want a science of consciousness where it's taken seriously, and they think there is a strong correlation between br...

But yet somehow we can come up with the wavefunction and talk about black holes and quarks.

Exactly. A mind-independent world makes sense of the variety of experiences we have, including having a body moving about in a world with many other t...

But people do guess at what it is. Thus the different interpretations of QM, and someday a clever experiment might provide evidence in favor of one of...

More on really's role in language. He seems like he cares. But does he really? Maybe he's just pretending and only cares about himself. The stick look...

So given all that, what is your response to the Wittgenstein approach that metaphysics is an abuse of language? That the Greeks used nouns for everyth...

@"Banno" @"Janus" "Really" Let's take three medieval monks discussing the Lucretius' poem on atomism. One defends the atomistic metaphysics, arguing t...