Marchesk

Mammoths on Mars?

Yeah but what if Mammoths went extinct because of climate change from the end of the last ice age, and not because of humans? Then we'd be bringing ba...

In keeping with the theme of recent threads we've both been in, the fourth book has proto-Miller chapters in which it states that the protomolecule is...

The Expanse is new (in the last 6 years), and the series of books it's based on is just finishing up. It's quite different from Star Trek and Star War...

This thread is still going?

I mean that we come up with mental models of the world, and then tend to treat those models as the world itself, forgetting that they're our explanati...

I don't think Wittgenstein is of much help when it comes to consciousness. There is something it is to have experiences, and this is not easily accoun...

Sometimes I also wonder if we can ever step outside of explanation so as to explain the world. Meaning, there is an inherent idealism to our making se...

The comparison would be one of color for someone born blind from birth. "What it's like" is meant in the literature to denote there is a subjective se...

Isn't it rather obvious Nagel was saying bats may have a sonar sensation which is different from any of the sensations we experience, since sonar isn'...

We could in the future have f-zombies with mind-uploading. The science fiction book Permutation City explores the concept. Brain scanning and computin...

If we're not conscious in the way that philosophers like Chalmers claim we are, then qualia would count as such a word in our universe. Idealism would...

Indeed, if a sociopath asks why they should be moral other than consequences, there is no true answer. And if we're trying to decide which moral theor...

We already have words for sensations, dreams, imaginations, hallucinations, etc.

Are photons conscious?

That's just a way of saying that seeing red and feeling pain are subjective, to distinguish from the behavioral meanings of detecting reflectance or a...

My guess is that language isn't just tied to external behavior, but also things like mirror neurons in that we project our own experiences onto others...

And how would you classify that information?

I'm not sure that we do. Seems that sensation varies a bit. Some people report seeing different shades of color than I do. But I'm not an artist. I do...

Yeah, but is the same substance "physical"? It could be neutral monism or mental, or panpsychism could be the case. Chalmers has argued that conscious...

There are sensations unknowable to science. We only know the human ones because we have them. Otherwise, humans would be like bats, to an alien or AI ...

The mental part has always been a problem for reconciling the the material.

Strongly emergent properties are a problem for physicalism. It means something entirely new comes into existence. Something not logically entailed by ...

Isn't that a problem for physicalism?

Rocks don't have strongly emergent properties like color sensation.

We know what their eyes can detect, and something about what their brains can process visually. If they are conscious, we don't know what those sensat...

Because the description does not include them. I'm talking about physical descriptions. The reality is whatever it is such that brain activity can be ...

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/YgJ5ZEn67tk/hqdefault.jpg She just doesn't know she's wearing red, or that the Matrix code is green.

But bats may experience sonar in a way that's entirely different from any of our sensations. It's just an example. I'm sure one can find others in the...

Obviously because those changes are not color sensations.

Physical is a description of the world. It's saying the world is fundamentally made up of X and nothing else. So if the physical can't describe someth...

So you think learning bat language would give us sonar sensations? Doesn't that just move the problem from the brain to language?

So you're saying if a bat could talk sonar, we would understand it?

So is this one of those threads where someone starts a philosophical tall-tale and everyone else adds on to it? I can't wait to see what monstrous abe...

The controversy would be over color sensation, not the physics of EM radiation. Same problem we have when discussing bat sonar sensation, except bats ...

Since color and feeling angry are not properties in the explanation, I feel justified in saying that physical descriptions are incomplete. It's basica...

Right, but the problem for physicalism is that experience is not part of the explanation. If we say that we live in a physical world, but some aspect ...

Just curious, an electric field has no mass?

Yeah, but I'd be more interested in things like the ontology of computation, whether computers can be conscious, superiintelligence, the ethics of tur...

Because the neuroscience does not include the identity you are asserting. The red experience is not part of the explanation. It's only a correlation. ...

Not only that, but only some brain activity is correlated with consciousness. So if there's something special neurons are doing, it's not all of them....

So the brain is creating an experience that is not part of any scientific description of the world, including the neuroscientific one of the brain act...

That all depends on whether you think colors are physical. If colors are out there in the world on the surface of objects or light sources, then you c...

How would you fit color experience into physicalism?

Or we could say that morality is not a domain that applies to nature. It's a category error to apply morality to the universe. Sure, as long as we adm...

My issue is that if morality is entirely human-made, then there's no objective truth to it, except for sociological facts about this person's morals a...

Sure, but granting that something is a social construct makes it rather arbitrary. Different societies create different constructs. The Romans thought...

Yeah, you can see this if you challenge the morality of humans continuing to survive. They you can't use the argument that justice is good for society...

I can confirm that it's colorful in my visual field, and my dreams, and to a lesser extent, my imagination. I agree that it's rather mysterious, and a...

I think Banno means if we have a concept of justice, then we can make a truth-apt statement about slavery regarding it's lack of justice, based on whe...