But this is just a hypothesis based on "Let us suppose for a moment that these predictions are correct." — SpaceDweller

You are quite right. Enthusiasts are fascinated by the speculative possibilities and so forget the provisos. It's really quite annoying.

Is naturalism = physicalism? Or is there a further distinction? — fishfry

That's not exactly wrong. But let analytic philosophers loose on an -ism and in a few years you'll have dozens of them. In the first half of the last century, there wasn't a concept of computability, so that issue is undetermined.

The term “naturalism” has no very precise meaning in contemporary philosophy. Its current usage derives from debates in America in the first half of the last century. The self-proclaimed “naturalists” from that period included John Dewey, Ernest Nagel, Sidney Hook and Roy Wood Sellars. These philosophers aimed to ally philosophy more closely with science. They urged that reality is exhausted by nature, containing nothing “supernatural”, and that the scientific method should be used to investigate all areas of reality, including the “human spirit” — Stanford EP - Naturalism

In philosophy, naturalism is the idea that only natural laws and forces (as opposed to supernatural ones) operate in the universe.[1] In its primary sense,[2] it is also known as ontological naturalism, metaphysical naturalism, pure naturalism, philosophical naturalism and antisupernaturalism. — Wikipedia - Naturalism

I believe in that same lecture (or perhaps a different one) he did NOT advocate dualism. He advocated what I call "secret sauce," my phrase, not Searle's. That is, consciousness is physical, but not computational. That's the point I've been making to noAxioms. — fishfry

I'm clearly out of date. Apologies to Searle. However, I'm not much reassured. If Searle is positing consciousness as an unknown something-or-other in addition to what is currently recognized as physical, he is positing a consciousness of the gaps, which is at least close to dualism.
The mistake is to start with "Consciousness is....". We know what consciousness is; we don't know how to explain the physical basis of consciousness - yet. But it is clear that there are many disparate phenomena involved and it is possible that consciousness will not map neatly onto the physical world. (Consider the many complicated physical phenomena that are involved in the emotions, for example).

Mind-body problem is only relevant to dualism, and sim theory isn't dualism, so the there's no problem. I think the term is 'interactionism', how the dual aspects interact with each other. — noAxioms

I apologize. I should have referred more generally to "philosophical theories of the mind". Bostrom clearly has one, though he proceeds as if it was certainly correct. A serious error, in my book.

How does my decision to point a gun at the baddie cause Lara Croft to raise her arm? There has to be a causal connection between my decision and her arm, and there is. But under sim theory, there isn't two separate things that need to interact, so the problem doesn't arise. — noAxioms

If there is a causal connection between my decision to point a gun and Lara Croft raising her arm, there are two things that interact. That's what causality means. Whether you are dualist, monist, physicalist, idealist, epiphenomenonalist or panpsychist.

Not having free will does not mean you have no choice. — noAxioms

The pool balls can come to rest in a huge number of arrangements after being struck by the cue ball at the break. But I wouldn't say any arrangement is ever a choice. Aside from the greater numbers and complexity of the types of physical interactions, in what way are our choices different if we don't have free will?

Thee simulator implements physics. Physics implements your consciousness, regardless of whether the physics is simulated or not. Under supernaturalism, this isn't true. — noAxioms

Does naturalism state that we currently know of all things natural?

I can't believe you are defending such an indefensible proposition, that a computer program can be conscious, without having any inkling of how it's done. — fishfry

Do we have any inkling of how brains are conscious?

The pool balls can come to rest in a huge number of arrangements after being struck by the cue ball at the break. But I wouldn't say any arrangement is ever a choice. — Patterner

Pool balls don't seem to be an example of something enacting will, of something making choices.

A self-driving car makes choices, unless you're the type to forbid such language being applicable to something other than a human doing it. Yet most would agree it has no free will. Again, I see no benefit of free will (an action whose causal chain isn't rooted in physical state somewhere) to be preferable to actions whose causal chain is rooted in physical state. Crossing the street is my typical example of this.

in what way are our choices different if we don't have free will?

I suspect that they're better choices if they're not free. Being 'free' seems to imply being controlled by an external entity, which I consider equivalent to being possessed. One never knows if what possesses you has your best interests in mind, especially if its survival isn't dependent on the survival of that which it possesses.

Does naturalism state that we currently know of all things natural?

Quite the opposite. It implies that it is far better to say "We don't know how X works yet" than to say "X? Oh, that's done by Gods, magic, woo, whatever. The latter attitude discourages research. The former methodology encourages it.
Hence the dark ages when methodological supernaturalism was prevalent, and the explosion of knowledge when methodological naturalism took over some 7 centuries ago give or take.

If your question is about a new kind of physics that implements mind, well, if it can be shown that such is how it really works, then it falls under naturalism, yes. But nobody is treating it as something that can be investigated. The whole point of woo is that it be based on faith in lieu of lack of evidence. So empirical research into any of it is discouraged.

If there is a causal connection between my decision to point a gun and Lara Croft raising her arm, there are two things that interact. That's what causality means. — Ludwig V

Quite right, and there very much is such a connection in that example.

Whether you are dualist, monist, physicalist, idealist, epiphenomenonalist or panpsychist.

There's a difference. With physicalism, there's a wire connecting the physical system where the will is implemented, to the system where the motor control (and eventually the arm) is implemented. Under dualism, that causal chain is seemingly broken/unknown, and it's a problem that needs to be solved, something that isn't a problem for the monist.
I don't know how Searle claims a solution to this problem, but I will lay odds it involves persuasion rather than empirical investigation.

Do we have any inkling of how brains are conscious? — RogueAI

You're asking somebody who claims brains are not. Heck, even I am one of them since I wouldn't consider a brain on its own to be conscious. it is beings/complete systems, not just brains, that are conscious or not, per a physicalist view.
No answer to this question will ever satisfy a dualist. Any progress towards such knowledge is waved off as correlation, not actual consciousness. I mean they have machines that know the choice you will make before you do yourself. "Oh, that's just correlation".
Anyway, the existence of such a device does not mean that we know how biological beings are conscious.

The pool balls can come to rest in a huge number of arrangements after being struck by the cue ball at the break. But I wouldn't say any arrangement is ever a choice.
— Patterner
Pool balls don't seem to be an example of something enacting will, of something making choices. — noAxioms

Right. But our will is the result of physical interactions. Regardless of their complexity, physical interactional are physical interactions.
-Physical interactions determine the final arrangement of the pool balls after the break.
-Physical interactions determine whether a bunch of particles will gather into a planet orbiting a star; become a loose gathering, such as the asteroid belt; or scatter to the various directions of space.
-Physical interactions determine if and when solid H2O will become liquid, and vice versa.
-Physical interactions cause the globe's weather patterns.
-Physical interactions determine what a person has for dinner, or how a person deals with a cheating spouse.

It is only when talking about what humans (some people include other animals) do that anyone calls the outcome choice. Why is that? The planet's weather is the result of more particles than are in our brains, and a huge number of different types of physical activity (gravity, tides, solar radiation, the many different ecosystems of all areas of the worlds, all states of matter, human activity, etc.) are involved. Yet, even there, we do not speak of choice or will. Why do we only when the physical activity within a human brain is involved?

But our will is the result of physical interactions. Regardless of their complexity, physical interactional are physical interactions.
-Physical interactions determine the final arrangement of the pool balls after the break.
-Physical interactions determine whether a bunch of particles will gather into a planet orbiting a star; become a loose gathering, such as the asteroid belt; or scatter to the various directions of space.
-Physical interactions determine if and when solid H2O will become liquid, and vice versa.
-Physical interactions cause the globe's weather patterns.
-Physical interactions determine what a person has for dinner, or how a person deals with a cheating spouse. — Patterner

I notice you seem to use the verbs 'cause' and 'determine' somewhat interchangeably there. I agree with all, but I want to highlight some distinctions, the main one being, 'under physical monism' (not dualism), all the above is true, since some (not just the last one) is not true under dualism.
All of them are examples of 'physical interactions cause this and that'. The word 'determines' implies determinism, that not only does state X cause state Y, but state X can only cause Y and not any different outcome Z. There are valid deterministic interpretations of physics and valid nondeterministic ones, so we don't know if physics is deterministic or not.
The second important point is: the lack of determinism does not imply free will, it only implies randomness, and randomness is not what makes free will possible. It isn't information (enaction of choice) from outside physical interactions of matter. Randomness conveys no information, hence cannot enact the external choice necessary for free will.

Hence yes, determinism or no, under physicalism, an external entity cannot hold a physical entity responsible for how the physics works in this universe. Internal entities can, so justice is served if I go to jail for setting my cat on fire, but not if I go to hell for it, as if it is even meaningful to put a physically meaningful arrangement of matter into a non-physically meaningful state.

How is this relevant to the simulation hypothesis? Well, the runners of the simulation have no meaningful way to exert their ideas of a moral standard on the states of matter in their simulation. OK, the simulators could sprinkle a bunch of 'divine scripture' copies here and there as part of the initial state of the simulation, but the runners really have no way of doing anything about it if someone in the sim doesn't follow the rules spelled out in the scripture. Lightning strikes from above would render it into an interactive VR for the simulators, and no longer a pure sim. It would reduce the occupants of our world to NPCs, zombies in a world with only one or a few actual free willed VR players (the ones aiming the lightning strikes, or whatever method they choose to implement their interference).

It is only when talking about what humans (some people include other animals) do that anyone calls the outcome choice.

Speak for yourself. I picked the cars as an example since I consider it to be making choices, even if I don't think it is a very good example of AI. They're complicated, but still very much automatons, but they do make choices about which route, which lane to use, and so on. If that's not choice, then fundamentally, as a physicalist, what am I doing that is different?

The planet's weather is the result of more particles than are in our brains

My decision to not burn the cat is also the result of more particles than is in my brain. In fact, that choice is a function of pretty much everything else you listed. It is not a function of matter 50 billion light years away. That's how far I need to go.

Yet, even there, we do not speak of choice or will. Why do we only when the physical activity within a human brain is involved?

Because that's how language is used, and language usage, more than anything else, sets one's biases.

I believe in that same lecture (or perhaps a different one) he [Bostrom?] did NOT advocate dualism. ... That is, consciousness is physical, but not computational.
— fishfry
Wait, Bostrom said that mind is not computational, and yet pushes a view that our consciousness is the result of a computation? That seems to be a direct denial of his own paper. Got a link to where this is said? — noAxioms

You grabbed a statement I made to @Ludwig V about Searle, interpolated Bostrom, and snapped back me for a link to something you imagined I said?

I was a little put off by this latest post. You sniped at literally every sentence I wrote.

I was more interested in taking the discussion in the direction of my new understanding that Bostrom explicitly says that in the future they'll figure out how to implement consciousness on a computerer .

In my mind that renders the conversation moot. If that assumption is false, the paper is wrong. If it's true, then I'm a program running in a computer, and it doesn't matter if God or future people did it. So the paper doesn't say anything interesting.

That kind of wrapped it up for me. And it clarified a point I've been wondering about, which is what Bostrom says about computational consciousness. He assumes it. Hell of an assumption to casually slip in, rather that explicitly noting it.

Anyway I don't think I could add value by sniping back at every sentence-by-sentence dispute, so I think my best bet is to leave this as it is.

Is naturalism = physicalism? Or is there a further distinction?
— fishfry
That's not exactly wrong. But let analytic philosophers loose on an -ism and in a few years you'll have dozens of them. In the first half of the last century, there wasn't a concept of computability, so that issue is undetermined. — Ludwig V

People keep using the word naturalism and I'm trying to understand what it means. Is it the same or different than physicalism?

I'm clearly out of date. Apologies to Searle. However, I'm not much reassured. If Searle is positing consciousness as an unknown something-or-other in addition to what is currently recognized as physical, he is positing a consciousness of the gaps, which is at least close to dualism. — Ludwig V

He associates it with life. Something about living things. And surely we haven't got a computer science theory of when a program running on a digital computer becomes alive. Any more than we know when it becomes conscious. Or if, rather than when. What is the spark of life? Some call it the soul. The thing that's present when you're a live, absent when you're dead, and nobody knows what it is? Maybe consciousness is something that comes along with that.

That is my understanding of my own recollection of what Searle said in a video I watched a couple of years ago. No claim that Searle holds or ever held this position as I explained it. But it sounds reasonable. It's a coherent belief. Something about life is conducive to consciousness.

A computationalist would call that very human-centric, like geocentrism. Destined by analogy with history to look silly someday.

The mistake is to start with "Consciousness is....". We know what consciousness is; we don't know how to explain the physical basis of consciousness - yet. But it is clear that there are many disparate phenomena involved and it is possible that consciousness will not map neatly onto the physical world. (Consider the many complicated physical phenomena that are involved in the emotions, for example). — Ludwig V

I'm sticking to physicalism without computationalism till I get some new input on the subject.

Emotions are another good example, thanks for that. They're squirts of hormones in the limbic system or some such. Nobody understands how it works. It doesn't seem very computer-like to me.

Do we have any inkling of how brains are conscious? — RogueAI

I don't. Science doesn't. But the computationalists, they are very sure of themselves. Consciousness is something that can be implemented by a computer program. And the arguments are specious. We process information, computers process information, therefore we're like computers. Weighted nodes in a graph are just like neurons. You can't argue with these people. They control TED, hence the popular "educated, sophisticated" mind. It's better to go along with what all the other cool kids say. Consciousness is computational, we're in a simulation, aren't we clever.

A lot of really smart people, too. Cognitive neuroscientists, rock star CEOs of AI companies. Who am I to argue?

Thanks for asking :-)

Emotions are another good example, thanks for that. They're squirts of hormones in the limbic system or some such. Nobody understands how it works. It doesn't seem very computer-like to me. — fishfry

No, they are not just hormones. The causes of the hormones in the brain and the effects of the hormones in the body, together with their psychological counterparts are all part of the package. Think about it.

No, they are not just hormones. The causes of the hormones in the brain and the effects of the hormones in the body, together with their psychological counterparts are all part of the package. Think about it. — Ludwig V

I could think about it a lot, without ever figuring out what you were trying to tell me here!

I thought I was agreeing with you, that emotions are an argument against computationalism. But perhaps I misunderstood.

He (sc. Searle) associates it (sc. "secret sauce") with life. Something about living things. — fishfry

But that's an issue that goes back millennia. A century ago, there was "elan vital" or "Life Force". Before that, it was the "mind", the "soul". Aristotle's "psyche",
Searle's mystery component can be seen in his Chinese Room. It is (from what you tell me and my memories) just a gesture towards something in the future.

I could think about it a lot, without ever figuring out what you were trying to tell me here!
I thought I was agreeing with you, that emotions are an argument against computationalism. But perhaps I misunderstood. — fishfry

I'm sorry. It was lazy of me to do that.
One point about it was indeed that the physical basis of the emotions is clearly not just a matter of processing information. The focus on the brain, together with the computer analogy, misleads us. Even the knowledge that we already have should prevent us from thinking that there is necessarily any simple correlation between mental and physical phenomena. People equate fear and anger with the circulation of specific hormones. But that is, surely, clearly not the sort of thing that our computers can do. It is one phenomenon in among others that are associated with the emotions. The brain, presumably, is involved in triggering the release and the whole of the rest of the body is affected. Compare the call of "action stations" in a ship or perhaps the fire alarm in a building. Everything is affected. There's no way of picking out the specifics, except by the general description "ready for action" or "falling in love".
Computers of the kind we are familiar with do not (so far as I can see) have any capacity to be afraid or fall in love, to value one outcome over another and one of the reasons for that, it seems to me, is that the way they "think" has no conceptual space for those things. (Though I'm sure that some people will respond to the challenge by developing simulations.)
I'm going to stop there. There's not much I'm sure of beyond this point, except that philosophers don't seem to be able to grapple sensibly with what's going on here.

You grabbed a statement I made to Ludwig V about Searle, interpolated Bostrom — fishfry

Ah, Searle said that, which makes sense. Of course Searle isn't going to accept a naturalist premise, but his unwillingness to set aside his opinion about it prevents his rendering any proper critique.

People keep using the word naturalism and I'm trying to understand what it means. Is it the same or different than physicalism? — fishfry

For purposes of this discussion, I've been using the two terms interchangeably.

The causes of the hormones in the brain and the effects of the hormones in the body, together with their psychological counterparts are all part of the package. — Ludwig V

If this world is part of a simulation, it is definitely going to have to simulate chemical/hormonal influences on our experience. Far more than that even.

Much of my skepticism of SH is that he proposes that the physics of a system changes depending on how much attention is being paid to it.