t's just certain philosophies attempt to buy into the preteige of scientific association. — StreetlightX

Like Maxwell's demon or Schrödinger's cat?

Philosopher: I have a thought experiment where I'm just a brain in a jar. — fdrake

If you're going to straw man it, sure. But it's just expressing a modern version of age-old concerns about skepticism, because our heads are the jars. How do we know our senses are telling us the truth about the world?

A trolley operated by a p zombie is like a self-driving car, passengers or pedestrians? But the zombie has no morality by definition, we have to program it with our morals. — unenlightened

The p-zombie argument has little to do with ethics, but one might argue that torturing a p-zombie wouldn't be wrong since it doesn't feel pain.

However, what if it turns out we're all p-zombies? Does that mean we get to torture one another? Probably we would adjust our ethics instead. Although I don't know what exactly it would men to say that I don't really experience suffering.

Sure, what does white police officers kneeling on a black man's neck have to do with wage slavery? Police abusing their authority happens under any economic system.

Capitalists will be back because they are worms. — StreetlightX

God forbid people have a places to work and shop.

Suddenly I do not give a flying hoot about most burglary or "looting". — StreetlightX

Do you not care about local businesses? What about when the businesses (local or chain) relocate, leaving their area more destitute?

I think the human race will make it to the end of 2020 though, call it a hunch. — Chester

Oh yeah, I'm not pessimistic about the human race's survival. Even if Yellowstone were to blow or there was a squid uprising. Just saying we still have 7 months for current times to get more interesting.

What is it like to be a bat? Nagel. — unenlightened

Also, the p-zombie thought experiment is good for pointing out the difficulty with incorporating consciousness into a material framework. But also the difficulty when you don't, since p-zombie Chalmers is making the exact same argument!

Compare and contrast that to the p-zombie in which case, if a p-zombie is possible, behavior alone is insufficient to infer consciousness. — TheMadFool

The problem with p-zombies is that they can debate consciousness in just as nuanced a manner as a philosopher like Chalmers or any of us discussing our everyday subjectivity. I find that bordering on incoherent.

So my assumption would be that if an AI can pass a robust Turing Test on consciousness, then it's probably conscious like us. But it has to be robust, and not just clever programming techniques. Humans are easily fooled since we have a tendency to see agency in things.

And we're not even halfway through 2020.

Because Chistianity had Truth as one of its core values and ate its own tail... in short :-) — ChatteringMonkey

Also because the Christians lost their power over the state, so now they can't force everyone in society to be at least nominally Christian.

How can a language less creature believe that a proposition is true, unless - at the very least - that creature understands the proposition? — creativesoul

It would seem crows have neurons that can represent number of items, corresponding to evidence they can do simple counting.

An old story says that crows have the ability to count. Three hunters go into a blind situated near a field where watchful crows roam. They wait, but the crows refuse to move into shooting range. One hunter leaves the blind, but the crows won't appear. The second hunter leaves the blind, but the crows still won't budge. Only when the third hunter leaves, the crows realize that the coast is clear and resume their normal feeding activity.

Helen Ditz and Professor Andreas Nieder of the University of Tübingen found the neuronal basis of this numerical ability in crows. They trained crows to discriminate groups of dots. During performance, the team recorded the responses of individual neurons in an integrative area of the crow endbrain. This area also receives inputs from the visual system. The neurons ignore the dots' size, shape and arrangement and only extract their number. Each cell's response peaks at its respective preferred number. — https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/06/150608152002.htm

In the old story, it would seem the crows have a belief about how many hunters are behind the blind, suggesting that you don't need language to form the equivalent of propositional content. I don't know whether that old story is just a story, but their other documented cases where some animals could do simple arithmetic with a small number of items.

Another example would be the mirror test. Do animals act as if the reflect in the mirror is another animal? Do they come to believe it is themselves?

In the short BBC video below, they explain how dolphins behave differently toward a mirror than other dolphins or just in general. They behave as if they're using the mirror to look at part of their body they can't otherwise see.

Since water and fire are opposites of each other, everything else must lie between the two and because water is nothing but burnt Hydrogen, it seems that Hercaclitus wasn't too far from the truth if not right on the button about fire being the arche. — TheMadFool

The flaw in the reasoning is to suppose that because X and Y are opposites, the rest of A-Z must fall in between X and Y. But they don't. Water and fire don't get you gold, magnetism or radioactivity.

I don't know whether the ancient Greeks knew about magnets. They did know about precious metals and lightning, but not gravity or inert gases. The atomists came closest with their atoms swerving in the void. But that still didn't account for energy. Now we know all the fundamental particles and forces have fields, and spacetime is a manifestation of gravity.

You could have done otherwise in a parallel universe where random stray particle of radiation interacted with a microtuble in your brain.

Along the lines of what Isaac may have been suggesting, the capitalist imperative of economic growth is baked into our culture, is baked into us, and it is simply unsustainable. Also, a cultural shift is possible whereby the meaning of ‘well-being’ is more eudaemonic than economic. — praxis

Claims of unsustainability have been made since Malthus, but so far technological progress has outstripped worries about carrying capacity, energy and resource shortages. And there's more to come with AI , nanotech, biotech, 3D printing, ubiquitous bandwidth and progress in fusion.

In the long run, we have a giant ball of nuclear energy in our sky, and the rest of the solar system for resources. We just need to make it through this century.

Here's a counter question. How do you know that tapping the brakes on economic growth doesn't halt progress in fields needed to address climate change, pollution or feeding 10 billion people by 2050?

But an underlying reality that we can't sense, that has no effect whatsoever our action or goals, that we have no way of knowing more about and that is not even a coherent notion to begin with... what's the point? — ChatteringMonkey

Just to give an example where it could matter, creationists could use that to dismiss evolution as merely an appearance. The underlying reality was created by God 6K years ago. Why God made it look like evolution occurred? Mysterious ways and testing the faithful. Or Satan did it. I don't know. They will think of something.

Cats draw correlations between the moving ground and it's effect/affect upon them. That effect/affect is completely involuntary. Cats draw connections between the uncertainty and fear and the wobbly ground. They test. Only when the ground stops moving under their feet, can they go on their way and no longer think about it. — creativesoul

And here is a good example (skip to 0:52 or when the treadmill is turned or 1:08 when the cat starts testing the moving surface with its paw). We see the cat adjust to the treadmill over several attempts. A DL network would require a huge training set.



And then around 3:55, the cat jumps onto the control panel and pulls the plug on the treadmill, after which it jumps down and lays on the treadmill while licking itself.

But the notion of finding out how things really are outside any perspective is unintelligible I think. — ChatteringMonkey

I understand the reasons for thinking that, but it does undermine evolution, cosmology, geology as explanations for how the world as it appears to us now came to be that way.

We can still do the science, but it becomes an appearance as well. It appears to us that we evolved, but the reality could be something else entirely. It would be like if God created the universe six thousands years ago to appear as though it was billions of years old, evolution occurred and what not. Or the simulation was programmed to make it appear that way. In that case, dinosaurs never existed. Their fossils are an appearance to us.

Scientific explanations become part of the appearance, but they don't say anything about the underlying reality. So we have no confidence that we actually evolved or that there was a Big Bang. It only looks like that empirically.

Yeah that is at least the conclusion that Nietzsche for example drew from it... that if the true world, or how things really are, is an incoherent notion, what you are left with is perspectives. — ChatteringMonkey

Problem is that if it's an incoherent notion, then science is undermined when it comes to things like evolution and our origins. How did we come to exist if there is no way the world is? It didn't begin with us.

You never eat the same soup twice. — jamalrob

But it reminds you of the ideal soup, which you can directly perceive if you just leave the cave of your manifold impressions for the unrefracted light of pure reason.

Well, for my taste you put too much weight on the synthesizing of the manifold, and not enough on the environment. — jamalrob

Do you know what the proper interpretation of Kant's view on this matter? Did he think the environment was structured in a way related to the manifold and how the perceiver categorizes it?

t's to do with what 'an object' is defined as. Imagine the world consists of just an heterogeneous soup. That's all there is, one object. — Isaac

So Parmenides, but a soup instead of a sphere. It's weird how philosophy eventually circles back around to its roots, in modern drab. Or maybe Thales? Soup is watery.

The idea that there is a real world out there, but the objects in it and their properties are dependent on our models of them. B — Isaac

I think Michael has also supported this version of realism in past discussions, but I'm not sure I understand. How are real objects dependent on our models of them without it being anti-realist?

Aye I think that's roughly where I stand. — jamalrob

I was too focused on arguing against naive realism to realize that before. Hmmm, I might be convinced by your approach.

I think jamalrob is arguing that how an object looks, tastes, feels only applies to perception. There's no such thing as what an object looks like without someone seeing it. The indirect realist goes wrong by assuming there is, and then proposing the additional mental intermediary. But there's no need for the intermediary if the act of seeing is what something looks like.

If that sort of argument works, then the debate is rendered moot. There's still a realist question of what objects are independent of perception, but they aren't like perceptions.

I think the article is quite clear on that. It's a way of thinking about things that does a horrible injustice to the way we perceive the world. — jamalrob

I mistook your critique of indirect realism as a defense of direct realism, even though you briefly mentioned some correlationist stuff at the end. So if I understand you correctly, within a correlationist understanding of the empirical world, we do have direct awareness. But it's a relational one, because that's how perception works.

There isn't a veil of perception hiding us from the world, there is just the empirical world we all live in. The transcendental stuff outside of humans is another matter, and we can't use perceptual talk to reference it.

So what exactly is the distinction the indirect realist is supposed to be making that the direct realist wants to deny? That's what I'm still not getting here? — Isaac

From what I recall of similar arguments in the past, the conversation always faltered over the meaning of "direct" and "realism". It would inevitably run aground on semantic disputes.

Maybe Harry was right and we should have tried to agree on the definition of terms first. My bad since I started this thread.

Why would you expect direct perception to produce faithful reflections? — jamalrob

That's the basic position of direct realism. And why are direct realists at pains to defend directness? Because of epistemological concerns that indirect realism raises.

Because

That's so far from my position I'm not sure how to address it. — jamalrob

Because you're not a direct realist. I don't know why you defend it.

I think you go wrong here. What exactly is modified? Taking you at your word, you mean the perception is modified. I don't know what this means. The perception is the result of, or is constituted by, modifications of light, electrical impulses, and so on, but that doesn't say anything about a modification of perception or experience as such. Is there a raw, unmodified perception? — jamalrob

It means the perception is not a faithful mirror of the object, and therefore can't be direct. If we're not aware of objects as they are, then we don't have direct awareness.

and...? — Banno

Let's take tool use. I know how to use some tool. But the tool doesn't solve my current problem. Upon thinking over the situation, I realize that if I combine use of this tool with another tool in the right way, my problem is solved. The combining of the two tools to fix the problem isn't something I learned. It's novel. And we see animals do things like this when they figure out how to get to get at some food for the first time.

The ability to solve problems, assuming it's not just trial and error, means having some conceptual understanding of the world that can be manipulated in novel ways.

and...? — Banno

There seems to be more going on in your cat's head than you allow yourself to believe.

It's a common misunderstanding. — Banno

A question is whether your approach to belief can explain all of your cat's behaviors. Animals need to problem solve and adapt to a changing environment. Deep learning has been very successful in limited domains involving lots of data to train on and fixed domains. But animals don't always have that luxury.

Returning to the matter of red and blue, red doesn't have a phenomenal quality even though we seem to describe it as such, it's actual property if you will is to codify (stand in for) the discriminatory properties of the brain when "triggered" by electromagnetic radiation of particular wavelengths and intensity. We cannot experience light, all we can experience is the way in which cells behave. — Graeme M

And it's here that an unbridgeable divide opens up between those who are convinced of the hard problem and those who think it isn't a hard problem.

Either one finds the kind of explanation in your post convincing for explaining consciousness, or one finds it lacking. And yet presumably we all have color experiences.

And what I proposed is not behaviourism. — Banno

Well, it walks like a behaviorist and talks like one. A more hip, modern one, but when you say:

In treating beliefs as what is taken to be the case, we stop treating belief as a thing and start seeing it as a way of behaving. — Banno

My behaviorist alarm is triggered. And then you wish to empty my head of all the mental furniture!

I don't agree with behaviorism, and I think there's a lot more going on in the brain than being able to move about.

That's my belief, right or wrong.

Maybe. — jamalrob

If the direct realist is committed to defending naive realism, then yes. On of my biggest difficulties with this debate over the years is the meaning of "direct realist". When I go read about it on SEP or watch a YT video discussing it, the understanding seems to be a defense of the naive view. But on here, it's very nuanced relational stuff, where I'm no longer sure what is direct or sometimes even real about it.

Isn't it? Isn't that precisely how a neural network does learn, by reinforcing specific outcomes? — Banno

I think animals do more than what the current neural networks are capable of. And that that would be form concepts about the world. For animals, this would be non-linguistic. It's conceptual in different way, maybe based on combining related images and smells and what not to make inferences about the world, particularly novel situations.

That's a sad story. — jamalrob

IMO, your argument works better if you jettison the indirect/direct distinction as mistaken by both camps, which I think you've been saying in a way.

If we must find a place in my cat's neural network for his taking the floor to be solid, it will be evident in such things as his capacity to make his legs work in such a way as to walk across the floor, to jump, run, and otherwise to engage with a solid floor. — Banno

Overall good post, but here I sense a problem. What gives your cat confidence the floor is solid so that it moves its legs confidently across it? It's not the ability to move legs confidently. There must be some other neural network that provides confidence in your kitchen floor, corresponding to past experiences from which the cat gained the belief in solidity of that surface or surfaces like it in general.

Compare that to when your cat is not confident in something, such as hiding when hearing a strange person.

Back when Banno would start one his famous 100 page discussion about apples or chairs on mountains.

That's a surprise. I seem to remember having pretty much the same debate with him since I joined the old forum. — jamalrob

At some point in the distant past, the idealists corrupted my mind, so as a compromise I started arguing for indirect perception.