Marchesk

Why would any physical system or process be accompanied with experience? Why is my active brain/body having experiences? You can replace physical abov...

Sure, so it's not what a car is made of, it's what it does. Physical processes are part of the ontological commitment to everything being physical. Br...

No, but it's an ontological commitment to physical systems. So if anything can't be explained in terms of some physical system, process, or parts, the...

Because nobody so far has come up with a way to show how experience is constituted by physical parts or processes. Neuroscience falls into that catego...

How experience is made up of physical stuff. Saying that meat experiences color, while cars don't because meat, isn't an answer. An answer that would ...

Physicalism is an updated version of materialism, not the science of physics. It just says that everything is made up of whatever physics posits. Cars...

There's always idealism, where it's mind that matters, and not the other way around. Then there's dualism, panpsychism, and neutral monism. They have ...

Physicalism can't explain why some physical systems have experience and others don't. You might ask so what, but physicalism is supposed to present a ...

That conservative Christians have come to embrace Trump as much as they have makes me very cynical about their beliefs, at least when it comes to poli...

The robots are coming, so maybe the role of education will change.

I'm not blaming the teachers, I'm questioning whether the way the system is set up makes sense, if the goal really is education.

I'll confess to being caught up in working hard for grades at some point. It worked, but when all was said and done, I realized that really learning t...

In high school, the class that garnered the most enthusiasm was driver's education. That one had obvious real life benefit. I can't tell you how many ...

But maybe the approach to education is just wrong. Why do you need to pass tests and get grades? Why do we all need to be taught the same things? Is t...

If they won't take anything, because they rather be playing video games, doing drugs, or possibly earning money, then shouldn't that tell you somethin...

Yeah, I'm not sure that's really helping. Not in itself. I have enjoyed my share of lectures, and learned from quite a few homework assignments. It's ...

Sure, but at what age do you suppose that's learned?

If that's the case, seems like teachers wasted a lot of time lecturing, assigning homework, and testing on stuff most of us largely forgot that wasn't...

And so some physical systems have experiences, like my brain/body, and others don't, like my car (which could be smart and drive itself these days) or...

Lanier's argument was that any physical system is, if you squint at it just right. Meaning, we interpret (and build) our computing devices to be manip...

Or maybe over time humans figure out better ways of making things work. Conservatives seem to want to start with Ancient Greece or the 1950s, but huma...

Exactly! But there has been an attempt to do that. The project is called Cyc. It's an attempt to codify human common sense, providing a program with t...

I agree, and that was Jaron Lanier's point to the functionalists who think that the mind can be computed, which is why he came up with a bizarre scena...

What is an algorithm computed by a processor? It's just shuffling around 1s and 0s, right? Or to be more precise, it's just moving electricity around....

Is a sufficiently sophisticated simulation of a living organism alive? At that point it might be a matter of how we wish to use words, although it cou...

They think consciousness is explainable in term of abstractions that supervene on the physical, such as neuroscience. So if neuroscience can fully exp...

I'm under the impression that modern philosophers don't appeal to the soul when defending versions of consciousness which aren't explainable in physic...

We don't have to use those words. The sky looks blue to me on a clear, sunny day. But if I could see the rest of the EM spectrum in some range of colo...

Anecdotally, I heard otherwise on an episode of RadioLab, where a guy had to be fed from a device because of a hole in his intestines which the doctor...

I don't think this works, because the physics will not agree with that (it's the same wavelength in all cases, and nothing has changed on the object's...

I don't know, but quite a few people think the mind is computable, and don't like the idea of some important mental aspect being unique to human physi...

I like to blame some of my poorer choices on aliens, at any rate.

I never saw a good answer to that, only that idealism is not solipsism, and so has other minds built into it somehow.

Seemed to me that some of the idealists back on the old board did defend this, and that the Cyrenaics defended that position in ancient Greece.

If we consider some of the claims by transhumanists or AI enthusiasts, then the right sort of computation will result in experience. Consider the idea...

Right, but observation can also disconfirm. If GR had been contradicted, then the math wouldn't have mattered. So unless there is some deep reason for...

Physics isn't formal in that physics is derived from (or driven by) experimental results. The wave equation exists because of the double slit and othe...

I don't know whether non-reductionism is the case or not. Some physicalists ascribe to emergentism at different levels. I'm also not sure whether phys...

You're arguing that our self-awareness is necessarily decidable, otherwise, we wouldn't be able to know. So knowledge is decidable.

I'm not aware that physics requires universal computation to be the case, only that some have asserted that all physical processes can be computed. So...

I assumed you were making a Dennettian style argument, which is why you were asking how I knew for certain that I had experiences. Dennett has stated ...

By that, you mean it appeals to physics, which is empirically driven?

And why would anyone decide that some of our experiences are not actually being experienced? Because it doesn't fit well with their ontology. So Denne...

Interestingly enough, the idealists, at least some of them, might agree with this. Didn't Berkley argue against abstacta? But I don't agree, so I migh...

My world is my self? Yeah, I identify my own self as this body amongst other bodies and objects, but it's not the only way to think about the self. I ...

You're saying because of the other who has their own experiences, I know that mine are subjective, so it's the objective existence of other experience...

I'm not, because solipsism retains it's logical irrefutability under the right formulation, even if I don't find it compelling.

Alrighty then, to ask whether subjective experience exists entails that something which experiences subjectivity exists. It's not quite as straightfor...

I am not certain that you exist, I'm just confident beyond reasonable doubt. I am certain of my own existence, whatever that entails (brain in vat, Ne...

The arguments against physicalism qua qualia is that no physical theory has the structure needed to explain consciousness. David Chalmers, Colin McGin...