Unfortunately we’re looking for something more formal to explain this relationship. Can we translate what you say here into symbolic logic? — Michael

What does symbolic logic have to do with causality or laws of nature? It's interesting you want to use a syntactic formalism in a discussion on nominalism.

But okay, if you want to try it, go ahead.

Edit: I should add that maybe there's a deep relationship between reality, logic and math. I'm not a nominalist. I'm not sure what we can properly say exists beyond the varied world-stuff, but it seems like we need some abstractions to make existence claims.

he definition I provided above is Lewis’ counterfactual theory of causation. — Michael

Which doesn't help with the problem of induction. If causality is based on a law of nature, then the law of nature will ensure that B always follows A. Counterfactuals don't help us with the future, since we don't know yet that the counterfactuals will continue being so.

Causality can be defined is that which makes B follow A (in our simple abstract example).

There is no gap between how the world appears to us and how it “really” is for realists to overcome, — Joshs

That's demonstrably false, since there's tons of counterexamples where appearance didn't match reality. Arguably, philosophy got its start noting those differences. Ancient skeptics base many of their arguments on appearances varying. But certainly science has shown many times where appearance and reality differ.

How is this any different to saying “if A happens then B happens”? — Michael

You don't understand the notion of causality? If it could be shown that A causes B, then it will always be the case that B follows A. But if it's just A happens then B happens, it doesn't have to continue being that way, since nothing necessitates it. That's where the problem of induction comes from.

Quantum mechanics is incompatible with relativity and so assuming a quantum theory of gravity can be found then he need not worry about relativity. — Michael

Assuming it doesn’t involve relations. String theory was briefly mentioned on the podcast.

f he says that we carve this variance into objects then it seems that he’s being an anti-realist about these objects, even if he’s not being an anti-realist about the “fabric with features”. — Michael

True. Also known as mereoligical nihilism.

What does it mean for A to cause B? — Michael

A necessitates B, as opposed to B just happens to follow A, but it might not do so in the future.

Yeah, I was thinking something like that.

How does any of that show that colour actually is presented to experience? — Isaac

Maybe it’s not in yours, but color is certainly present in my experience of the world. You don’t have to believe iit if you wish to argue as p-zombie. But you might as well argue that I don’t exist. Makes no difference to my experience.

The kind of realism that can be called into question by quantum mechanics is that of counterfactual definiteness, which asserts that there are objects and that they have properties even before they are measured. — Michael

By the Copenhagen Interpretation. Different interpretations bite different bullets. The Many Worlds doesn't give up counterfactual definiteness realism, but it multiplies realities and makes probability problematic. Superdeterminism bites the bullet of the universe knowing in advance what measurements will be made (as I understand it). Bohmian mechanics gives up locality for a non-observable pilot-wave.

Since there's multiple interpretations and no experiment so far to decide between them, it's probably too soon to say QM undermines some form of reality. There's no quantum theory of gravity, no grand unified theory, no explanation for dark energy and so on. But this is a philosophy forum, so people are free to pick sides.

It's just if you use one particular interpretation, you can't truthfully say the science supports your philosophical conclusion, because there is non empirical confirmation or consensus.

'd formed the opinion that many worlds interpretation is favoured on Youtube videos but not by actual physicist. — Banno

The physicist Sean Carrol (Mindscape podcast) favors it. I've listened to a sampling from a few physics-related podcasts recently, and the Copenhagen Interpretation has been heavily criticized on all of them for the measurement problem (and the idea of probability waves interacting to form interference patterns), while MWI tends to get a lot of respect. I do know that the physicist Sabine Hossenfelder (popular YT channel), who works on the foundations of physics, criticizes both. But she's a fan of Superdeterminism, which isn't terribly popular. I don't see it in the poll above. It's a hidden variables realist version that doesn't violate locality, because experimental results are predetermined (or known) by the universe in advance, somehow.

People seem to have qualia. The authors identified the models associated with them seeming to have qualia, but they do not actually have qualia. — Isaac

Wait, do the authors actually state that? Because what Michael quoted seems to say the opposite:

Finally, associating consciousness with inference gets to the heart of the hard problem, in the sense that inferring that something is red is distinct from receiving selective visual sensations (visual data) with the appropriate wavelength composition. Furthermore, you can only see your own red that is an integral part of your virtual reality model. You cannot see someone else’s red or another red because they are entailed by another model or hypothesis. In short, you cannot see my red — you can only infer that I can see red. In one sense, tying consciousness to active inference tells one immediately that consciousness is quintessentially private. Indeed, it is so private that other people are just hypotheses in your virtual reality model.

Maybe you prefer to call it "virtual red" instead of "red quale", but it plays the same intrinsic, immediate, private, ineffable role Dennett so wanted to quine. The only difference being that color is part of a virtual reality model instead of a Cartesian Theater.

So what do you think - is there something hidden in plain sight, so to speak? — Banno

The experiences we don't have, which isn't in plain sight. Thus the notion that subjectivity has a private aspect to it.

It is only that we can ask the question as to what that which appears to us is in itself that leads to the notion that there is anything hidden. — Janus

That's odd. Let's say you see the an image of the blue dress before hearing anyone else has seen it. You show it to someone. They see a gold dress, but don't say anything at first. You don't know that they've seen a different colored dress. So how do you account for that if it's not hidden?

I was just listening to Mindscape podcast episode on animal perception. The discussion was all about how animal perception differs from our own, and how that stretches the imagination to try and understand what it's like to have non-human experiences. The word used for some of the harder ones was ineffable.

If nothing is hidden, then what colors do tetrachromatic birds see which we don't?

By things, I believe Michael meant colors, such that there is a different visual experience of the same dress. Otherwise, what would be all the fuss?

You relate your recent memories using a narrative of 'experiencing' seeing colours and hearing sounds. — Isaac

It's going on as I type this. I also have recent memories of an external world. Should I doubt that narrative? If what we think we experience in the moment isn't what we experience, then why think science fares any better?

It means to classify the same things differently.

To see different things is to carve it all differently. — bongo fury

No, classifying is descriptive. It's part of the language game. We experience the dress differently. Part of the confusion over the hard problem is failing to understand the difference between describing the world and experiencing it.

Well, they'd have to be either qualia or some brain activity which no one, despite decades of research, has ever seen... Hence, qualia. — Isaac

Yes, because of the objective/subjective split with describing the world that Nagel's paper on "What it's like to be a Bat" laid out. Or Locke's primary and secondary colors. You're mistaking the map of neuroscience with the actual territory of whatever a conscious brain is.

So, as far as current knowledge of cognition goes, we do not 'see' a black and blue dress internally. — Isaac

Yet, we have one of those two visual experiences, whatever the brain activity is leading up to it the experience.

Where is this visual percept with properties such as colour and shape. Whereabouts in the brain is it stored? — Isaac

I don't know, but color and shape are part of the visual experience. The difficulty of squaring that with the correlating brain function is the well known hard problem.

Shall we go through https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Quining-Qualia-Dennett/b00cba53a3744402b5c52accea35bff6074a38a9 again? — Isaac

That's already been done, and no consensus was reached. Same with professional philosophers. Not everyone find's Dennett's arguments convincing. I think Keith Frankish has a better approach (illusionism), although the implication is that we are in fact p-zombies, which is an extremely difficult bullet to bite. Because after-all, I do experience seeing colors and hear sounds. Also dreaming, remembering and visualizing them.

If I am attempting to understand an ecosystem are the features of this system that I fail to model well ‘private’?
What makes something private? If we believe that brains make use of stored representations it would seem that we could call such entities private. They are protected from direct expose to an outside world as well as from other representations. But embodied enactivist accounts of cognition see the brain as part of an ecosystem which includes the body and the world. And even when world seems to be minimally involved in cognitive
activity ( deep thought) , we are still dealing with a total system that is in the business of making changes in itself.
That means that even my own thinking isn’t strictly ‘private’ , given that my mind is subtly reinventing itself and its past every moment of its functioning. It is already out in the world every moment , coming back to itself
from an outside. — Joshs

That's all true and I'm not arguing for radical privacy such that's in principle impossible to figure out what someone is thinking or dreaming. But practically speaking, we can't tell what someone is dreaming unless they tell us. We sometimes know what they're thinking from context, but sometimes we have no clue.

So the subjective/objective split can't be absolute. It's true we're part of the world. But to deny there is a subjective/objective split seems to me to go too far in the other direction. I'm currently listening a Sean Carrol/Mindscape podcast where's he's discussing a book on animal sensation with the author, and there are many examples of how animal senses differ enough from ours such that it's difficult to imagine what sort of experience those animals are having.

and as a result we directly perceive ( without simulation) a version of the other’s intentions , which subsequent experience with the other may validate or invalidate. — Joshs

How does this account for autism, or "mind-blindness"? Or how humans tend to anthropomorphize the world around us? How we find cartoon characters, puppets and animals to have beliefs and desires like us? Or the belief that natures if full of spirts and gods?

The question is whether we should
look at such experiences as imagination
and dreaming as merely a re-arrangement of what was already there, the accessing of inert memories in place of contact with fresh, external novelty. Why not look at such experiences as forms of self-transformation? To do this would be to re-think the meaning of internal vs external. — Joshs

Regardless of how you look at it, you're still experience an environment that is not in the external world and is not publically available to others. You may not wish to call it subjective or internal, but it sure has the same hallmarks of being subjective/internal.

Think of a number, any number. Where does that thought exist if not in the brain? How would anyone know what number you thought of without telling us?

“In most intersubjective situations, that is, in situations of social interaction, we have a direct perceptual understanding of another person's intentions because their intentions are explicitly expressed in their embodied actions and their expressive behaviors. This understanding does not require us to postulate or infer a belief or a desire hidden away in the other person's mind — Joshs

So how does this account for lying and manipulation? Or someone putting on a front to appear acceptable? How about all the times we wonder to ourselves what someone is really feeling or whether they're telling us the truth? If beliefs and desires are never hidden away in people's minds, then how come we have no accurate way to always tell when someone is lying or what they're feeling?

That is, they dispense with the internal-external, subjective-objective divide and argue that awareness is embodied , which means that it is an interaction , either with other persons or other aspects of one’s environment, which can include one’s bodily( affective) environment. — Joshs

I don't see how dreams fit with this approach. Your body is normally paralyzed during dreams, and your dream content is usually imaginary. You're not typically perceiving the world. How is that not internal to the brain? There's quite a lot to consciousness which is more than just perceiving or interacting with the world. Like imagination, memory and inner dialog. Even perception carries some anticipation of what one is going to perceive. And when we interact with others, we do a sort of simulation or estimation of their internal states. We guess at what they're thinking and feeling.

The problem any sort of behaviorism has had is that it simply can't capture everything that goes on inside people's heads. That's why there's no accurate lie detector test, and no mind reading device. Someone's behavior and their language clues us in, but it doesn't tell the full story.

No, as I said in the OP, appearances enjoy default justification. That is, if something appears to be the case, then that is default evidence that it 'is' the case. — Bartricks

So naive idealism? Ancient skepticism would have a field day with this approach.

One follows the evidence. That is, one follows the appearances. — Bartricks

The stick appears bent in water. The honey appears to taste bitter to the sick. The tower looks small form a distance. The sun appears to move around the Earth. Lightning and thunder appear to happen at the same time when the storm is near. An optical illusion appears to be colored a certain way.

If the universe had intention to create humans it sure took a long time. — Jackson

I'm thinking it was for aliens in the Andromeda galaxy 10 billion years ago.

So technically speaking, a p-zombie would have to be a sociopath, although they probably would behave normally, statistically speaking.

That possibility is moot as even in a world where p-zombies are ~◇, we would be mere stones, not even p-zombies, relative to divine consciousness. — Agent Smith

At least p-zombie Jesus wouldn't feel pain on the cross. In fact, there were Docetists who argued that Jesus didn't suffer.

Again the confusion between thought as the manipulation of information and awareness as presence in the world. — unenlightened

Alright, so a p-zombie would be the functional equivalent of the first since it lacks awareness.

If p-zombies exist, physicalism would be false. Quite a riddle, this! — Agent Smith

Well, what if the only universe that existed was the p-zombie one? Then physicalism would have to be true! I swear that sometimes Dennett and friends come awful close to arguing for that universe.

That said, speaking for myself, I would fall in love with a p-zombie despite the fact that in movies you shoot zombies in the head, even children shoot zombies without anyone batting an eyelid! — Agent Smith

He's the real question. Would Jesus die for p-zombies?

But I never experience red - I see red flowers and postboxes and swatches on paint charts. — unenlightened

You never imagine or dream red stuff? At any rate, I'm sure you've experienced pain.

It seems odd to say I am having or not having an experience. — unenlightened

You probably don't have experiences for some of the time you're asleep. I take it to mean it would seem odd to say you don't have experiences while you're aware of something. I agree that is odd for a human being, although there are some conditions like blind sightedness in which partial awareness is missing. But is it odd to say that my phone has no awareness of feeling cold when it tells me it's cold outside? I don't think so, because phones don't have sensations.

Ned Block wrote a paper on the harder problem of consciousness about the android Data, and how we would have difficulty deciding on what basis Data was conscious. Data, like my phone, could tell us that it is cold outside. But this doesn't mean Data would feel cold.

I can't make sense of quaila either. Never knowingly had one. Am I a zombie? — unenlightened

You've never experienced red or pain or love? Sorry to heart that!

Because if an event occurs at time t1, then it is present at t1, not t2. — Bartricks

That obviously happens in many situations, so it would seem to be a problem for idealism, not materialism. The materialist would just say our sensations are delayed because it takes time for an event to reach our senses and register in our brains as a sensation.

What is the idealist explanation for various time lags? We know these lags exist. We can measure them!

That basic awareness should be absent while memory and identification is fully functional simply makes no sense to me. — unenlightened

You mean qualia? Because "awareness" or "self reports" are not considered consciousness by philosophers like chalmers, since they can be defined in purely functional terms, and implemented in robots or code. It's the sensations of colors, pains, emotions that make up consciousness. And those aren't functional.

My view is that the present moment is when our sensations tell us it is.

So, if I sense that p is present, that is default evidence that p is present.

But if won't be present if materialism is true. It'll be past. — Bartricks

Someone yells across the canyon. You can hear the voice echoing off the walls. Do you think the experience of the echoes convinces you the sound was produces immediately?

Or, you see the lightning, then hear the thunder several seconds later?

I think if you had reason to believe someone was just acting as if they loved you, but didn't, and the relationship was based on the belief in mutual feeling of love, then you would leave them. I don't want to be with someone who's just going through the motions, even if it's because they're a p-zombie, and even if it's very convincing.

Imagine a really good actor was paid without your knowledge to pretend to fall in love with you and start a romantic relationship. The relationship goes well, but then you discover the truth. Do you go on with the lie? I suspect not.

There have been con artists and sociopaths who have fooled people into relationships, but of course their behavior eventually outs the truth. The p-zombie wouldn't.

Other kinds of relationships my have obligations and rewards that don't require a belief in someone's experience of love. Maybe you just enjoy being around that person enough that it doesn't matter? I think it would at least hurt to find out some relationships had no reciprocal feelings. But a romantic one is most likely a deal breaker, unless you're hopelessly in love. Or you've been married long enough, lol.

So you seriously think you should start with a worldview and then proceed to reject views that conflict with it? — Bartricks

I seriously think we should examine the world we experience and use that to guide our reasoning, instead of just reasoning from first principles. Science is empirical first and foremost.

But the failure here, for Hoffman anyhow, is due to my assuming that a "real threat to fitness/real selection pressure" = physicalism and all it entails, or that it at least entails all the entities of biology existing as they are currently put forth in the mainstream view. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The problem is evolution acts on biological entities. It's the reason we have the theory. To explain how there are different species of life forms over time. If you say there is no real snake, then why posit evolution as an explanation for whatever gives rise to the perception of snakes as a threat?

However, there is no logical reason that you can't have a selection pressure that is constructed by the mind as a "snake," and still have no snake. Sort of how the altimeter of a plane isn't its actual altitude and its hitting zero isn't the selection pressure of the plane crashing itself. The altimeter might be the only information a pilot has access to at night. The argument is that weare flying at night and mistake the altimeter for the ground itself. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But in this example, why suppose there is flying at all if the data from the altimeter is all we have to go on?

One should simply follow reason.
In practice what this means is that worldviews should turn up in the conclusions of arguments, not the premises. The premises should be self evident truths of reason (or apparent ones). — Bartricks

What if your reasoning is flawed? What if your premises are faulty? One should start with a scientific understanding of the world, since it's built on centuries of very careful investigation by many smart people. And then see what sort of philosophical view best fits that, and what gaps are left, etc.

So for example, earlier in this thread you gave Berkeley's reasoning for why objects extended in space can't exist, because of infinite divisibility. This ignores what modern physics has to say about subatomic particles and limits to length. It probably also ignores the resolution to Zeno's paradox in math.

The central lesson of quantum physics is clear: There are no public objects sitting out there in some preexisting space. As the physicist John Wheeler put it, “Useful as it is under ordinary circumstances to say that the world exists ‘out there’ independent of us, that view can no longer be upheld.”

That's one interpretation of QM. Decoherence, Many Worlds or Pilot Wave would probably say that macro-scale objects do exist out there independent of us. I'm not terribly worried that the double slit experiment says classical objects don't exist independent of us, since that experiment doesn't work for objects at our scale, unless it's some special supercooled liquid.

Hoffman: Snakes and trains, like the particles of physics, have no objective, observer-independent features. The snake I see is a description created by my sensory system to inform me of the fitness consequences of my actions. Evolution shapes acceptable solutions, not optimal ones. A snake is an acceptable solution to the problem of telling me how to act in a situation. My snakes and trains are my mental representations; your snakes and trains are your mental representations. — Wayfarer

So what is the fitness consequence of my actions if it's not a snake? What makes evolution the proper account if we can't say there are real snakes and trains? I think Hoffman undermines his use of evolution here as an account for our mental categories.