One of the greatest neuroscientists of our time, Antonio Damasio, holds the view that consciousness is an emergent state. The following article from MIT gives a quick rundown of his theories.

The Importance of Feelings

I think variations of these views are now widely accepted in neuroscience. In another debate on this forum I cited several books by prominent neuroscientists saying that it's basically impossible to maintain dualism while pretending to care about reality. Materialism has already won. Now it's matter of filling in some (very important) details.

To truly understand how the brain produces conscious experience, it will take a whole new theory and paradigm shift on the order of Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein.

Every single one of your examples happened within the context of naturalism, and in many ways helped produce the intellectual dominance of naturalism that you are now decrying. You keep arguing against yourself.

Materialism...bad...but mind and brain still connected somehow...paradigm shift to explain consciousness...but it's cool if that shift happens within materialism.

The humor of it all.

I'm not quite sure what point you're making here. That because we don't have a model for something physical, then it's not physical? Then take high-temperature superconductivity, of the kind found in cuprates and other exotic materials. This is a notoriously difficult problem in condensed matter theory and still has no general solution. This project in many ways mirrors the difficulties involved with the mind-body problem. Should physicists believe that high-temp superconductors are not physical because they don't yet have a 'model' for explaining such phenomena? Sounds like an absurd conclusion.

We don't yet have the physical mechanisms by which collective interactions among neural networks generate conscious states, but it's not a requirement to identify those mechanisms to simply know that conscious mental states do indeed emerge from collective interactions, just like high-temperature superconductivity (and every condensed matter system) requires collective interactions. The basis for this general knowledge is empirical, rooted in the results of modern neuroscience and modern physics. So the details still need to be finished, but the general idea is already there: consciousness is an emergent physical state.

I am one of the proud and irrational materialists that George is attacking. All I need to refute his pathetic attempt at evangelization is his own statement:

According to the new dualism, mind and brain are not completely independent substances, and yet they are still quite different and distinct. We have physical neurons and electrochemical activity as well as conscious mental experiences going on within our brains.

Nothing in this statement is inherently in contradiction with materialism, or at least certain versions of materialism. In fact, I agree with George here, even though I am very much a materialist. How can that be? Because a macroscopic physical state can indeed be extremely different from the microscopic units of matter that underlie its existence and behavior. This is one of the central results of condensed matter physics, encapsulated in principles like emergence and renormalization. A superfluid state can be very different from the helium atoms that collectively interact to produce the state, but we don't then conclude that superfluids are not real or physical. A conscious mental state can be completely different from the neurons and neuroglia that sustain it, and yet it is still physical.

When people make claims that reach a certain level of idiocy, scientific studies are not the appropriate response. Derision and humor work better.

Falsifying the laughable claim that "we eat animals because we genetically need meat to survive" does not require fancy studies. It literally just requires a single counterexample. I'll take Donald Watson, the pioneer of the word "vegan." He became a vegan at 32 and survived until 95.

Between this comment and the gems we're getting from xastopher, this thread continues on its epic journey of crazy.

Value is a complicated concept that would merit its own discussion. But under any sensible understanding of it, labor would surely play an important role, just not an exclusive one. That's how Marx can still make sense without the labor theory of value: labor can play a crucial role in the valorization process and capital can frequently marginalize labor for excessive profits. To me this is an easier position to defend rather than worrying about how to interpret a few dozen passages, often unclear ones at that, in the thousands of pages that Marx wrote. That's what Kilman and others are doing. They've given up on trying to establish any kind of mathematical equivalence between labor power and prices, so they're falling back on, "well if you interpret Marx this way or that way then it can make sense."

How do you overcome the transformation problem? How do you convert labor value into numerical prices and wages? Furthermore, what physical factors should represent labor value? Number of hours worked per day? Mechanical output of human muscles per unit time? Productivity? Efficiency? There are a lot of fundamental problems here. I am skeptical of all deterministic theories of value in economics (labor, utility, etc). It's easy to recognize that value is constrained by the fundamental physical conditions of the world, but once prices and wages emerge in energy-intensive economic systems, they become subject to highly critical, stochastic interactions. Hence they are extremely difficult to predict.

However, if you take the labor theory of value as a loose guide about how society organizes production, the way many Marxists do nowadays, then yeah I suppose it still has some merit.

'Marxism' is a catch-all word for many different concepts and theories bundled together, not all of which need the labor theory of value. For example, historical materialism is in many ways the foundational theory of Marxism, and it neither needs nor presupposes anything about the labor theory of value. As I mentioned before, historical materialism is widely used as a method of analysis among historians, even non-Marxist ones.

Second, these two things can be totally true, as objective empirical facts, at the same time:

1) The labor theory of value is false.

2) Capitalism is an economic system that very often exploits workers and the poor so the rich can accumulate more wealth.

Even though Marx bungled the first point, a lot of his critique about the second point still stands.

The claim that Marx was wrong on "everything" (your unfiltered and unqualified word) is objectively ridiculous.

The only comical thing here is you trolling the people on this thread who are trying to have a meaningful discussion.

Bravo!

Ok but why exactly are you regurgitating this to me like a broken record? I have already said the labor theory of value is "fictitious." What is the point of repeating this?

The source of our disagreement is that I maintain Marx's thought has a lot of merit beyond the labor theory of value. You obviously don't since you seem unaware of any other Marxist ideas.

There is still no successful theory in economics that can determine prices. Prices can vary based on supply, demand, speculation, wars, natural disasters, and dozens of other interacting phenomena.

Sanders:

To claim that Marx was wrong on everything that he predicted ignores his ideas on the global expansion of capital in search of cheap labor, his ideas on having a shorter workday from the 12 and 14-hour cycles workers experienced at the time, his ideas on ending child labor, and his ideas on establishing a national central bank to control finance. If you bother to actually read Marx, and not just some right-wing caricature of Marx, you would find that Marx got many profound things very right (as practical predictions and as normative ideals). Of course, he also made many mistakes and had some bad predictions, as I've already acknowledged with the labor theory of value and some of the issues related to it, like the transformation problem. No one here is defending every single feature of Marxism; we're just pointing out that Marx was an influential thinker who had some good ideas, and some bad ones. You're the only one who's distorting reality here.

Your blind quest to glorify Einstein because of what he got right also conveniently ignores all the things Einsten got wrong: his basic ideas on quantum physics have all been debunked experimentally, he spent the last 20 years of his career on a useless quest to unify gravity and electromagnetism. GR has been enormously successful theoretically and experimentally, but we know it's not the final word on gravity. We know solutions to the field equations yield non-sensical results in many different situations (beyond the Cauchy horizon in black holes, the moment of the Big Bang, etc). So in a strict ontological sense, even GR gets some things about gravity wrong.

This is what happens when you deal with vast intellects that did, said, and wrote a lot of important stuff. Some of that important stuff is bound to be wrong, and you hope at least some of it turns out to be useful for later generations.

I would say influence, creativity, and accuracy are some of the most important standards that should apply in judging the greatness of any intellectual.

No one is questioning the "norms of rationality," although that could be its own debate. The issue is to what extent does God's existence justify itself. Making being tied to God as an inherent property of God is simply a circular argument (God is equivalent to being because it's God, ships float on water because they're ships!).

According to you it doesn't mean anything. And yet you can't actually justify why, or at least you haven't so far. My verbal formula is no more or less meaningful than your theological propaganda that God is the nature of being. Also sounds nice, but means basically nothing.

I have acknowledged your previous comments on the merits of veganism and stated that I supported them. I am also very much on board with this:

growing meat using land that could be used for arable crops is stupid

And this:

All I have argued is that there is a way to include meat in a diet which cause as little (or less) harm as the equivalent vegetables and therefore eating meat is not 'wrong' as the OP suggests.

In fact in my very first post I wrote:

Is it wrong to eat animals? I would say it depends on a wide array of factors, and I don't think that this position commits me entirely to moral relativism. The reason why is because some of these factors are determined by biophysical and ecological realities, hence they do not depend on social preference. I am fully supportive of the San in the Kalahari hunting gazelles or the Inuit in Canada hunting seals. These are communities that live in very forbidding ecozones, making an exclusively plant-based diet quite difficult to achieve. The San still obtained most of their calories from fruits and vegetables gathered by women, but meat was clearly an indispensable part of their diet as well.

Take the unethical complaint up with the others. I have no opinion on the ethical nature of your life. You're just some random person on the Internet. For all I know you could be making everything up.

When faced with this kind of a scenario, the next best thing we can do is look at the existing scientific literature. And that's what I've done, from the very first post. That scientific literature largely supports the position that a vegan diet is the superior choice if we wish to limit harmful environmental impacts.

Just to be sure, because you don't seem to be getting this, I will always trust that scientific consensus above the opinions of someone on a forum.

The fair comparison is normal meat-based diets with normal vegan or vegetarian diets. That's what these people call scientists actually look at. The rest is just a bunch of fantasies floating in your head.

Oh ok, so you're really asking: which one compares some random standard I decided to come up with versus this thing called reality?

The comical nature of this thread never fails to impress.

Enough with the deer in Scotland or some other random corner of Europe. Enough with one study here or there. I have just posted some of the most authoritative studies on the subject, and they all contradict you.

Valiant effort, but even that explanation does not escape the Trilemma. You just land on the foundational assumption that God and being are one and the same thing. One could always explore, and should, what constitutes being, illumination, etc. I'd like your thoughts on how, if at all, your position relates to pantheism and pandeism.

Pseudonym has little scientific ground to stand on here. Here are some of the major studies evaluating the impact of diet on the environment.

1) Lucas Reijnders and Sam Soret (2003). "Quantification of the environmental impact of different dietary protein choices" in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (Note: this paper became one of the classic studies on the subject and has been cited hundreds of times in the literature)

Their major conclusion:

Assessment suggests that on average the complete life cycle environmental impact of nonvegetarian meals may be roughly a factor 1.5–2 higher than the effect of vegetarian meals in which meat has been replaced by vegetable protein. Although on average vegetarian diets may well have an environmental advantage, exceptions may also occur. Long-distance air transport, deep-freezing, and some horticultural practices may lead to environmental burdens for vegetarian foods exceeding those for locally produced organic meat.

2) Baroni et al. (2006). "Evaluating the environmental impact of various dietary patterns combined with different food production systems" in European Journal of Clinical Nutrition (Note: this is also a landmark paper in the literature)

Their major conclusion:

As a consequence, independently from the perspective
selected, the ‘normal’ diet based on products from chemical–
conventional agriculture and conventional farming (NORMINT)
turns out to have the greatest environmental impact,
whereas the vegan diet based on organic products (VEGANBIO)
turns out to have the smallest environmental impact.

3) Rosi et al. (2017). "Environmental impact of omnivorous, ovo-lacto-vegetarian, and vegan diet" in Nature (Note: I personally think this is the most important study here for the simple reason that it actually uses the individual diets of real people in Italy, instead of fancy mathematical assumptions about what different diets should look like)

Their major conclusion:

The omnivorous choice generated worse carbon, water and ecological footprints than other diets. No differences were found for the environmental impacts of ovo-lacto-vegetarians and vegans, which also had diets more adherent to the Mediterranean pattern. A high inter-individual variability was observed through principal component analysis, showing that some vegetarians and vegans have higher environmental impacts than those of some omnivores. Thus, regardless of the environmental benefits of plant-based diets, there is a need for thinking in terms of individual dietary habits.

4) Robin White and Mary Hall (2017). "Nutritional and greenhouse gas impacts of removing animals from US agriculture" in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (Note: this paper was one of the more critical ones to look at a mass transition to veganism, but still found reductions in emissions)

Their major conclusion:

US agriculture was modeled to determine impacts of removing farmed animals on food supply adequacy and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The modeled system without animals increased total food production (23%), altered foods available for domestic consumption, and decreased agricultural US GHGs (28%), but only reduced total US GHG by 2.6 percentage units.

Obviously not all ethical and scientific conclusions are perfectly "cut and dried," as Pseudonym puts it. But at this point it's full-on pseudoscience to suggest that veganism is not a better choice for the environment than other diets. It may have some drawbacks in certain contexts, which I have detailed in this thread and which some of the papers above also mention, but on the whole it's the far superior dietary choice, if you care about the long-term viability of global civilization and if you can manage to make the transition (also if you care about improving, you know, this thing called your health).

I do, however, applaud Pseudonym for stating the following:

I'm not arguing against Veganism, I think it's a perfectly reasonable response to the situation we find ourselves in and a perfectly ethical position. What I'm arguing against (and I think I can say this for everyone who's contributed to this thread) is this overly simplistic notion that it is the only ethical position.

This is very much a sensible position, hardly much different than the one I hold as a vegan myself.

The reason for mentioning Einstein is not to compare him to Marx, but to show Marx's influence on other major intellectuals.

There are so many false and ridiculous statements here, one hardly knows where to start.

If you bother to look at this thing called evidence (much of which I cited earlier from reputable sources), you would know that workers are no longer making progress in Western capitalism. Half of Americans have not seen their real wages rise in over 4 decades. And even the progress they made back in the day, how did they do it? By organizing into unions and socialist parties, demanding higher wages from capital and putting pressure on governments to act. It was worker movements directly inspired by Marx that called for higher wages, better benefits, shorter work hours.

Another important point that was recently articulated by Piketty in his major book on modern capital and inequality: the huge progress that workers made in the middle of the 20th century in the West was largely a consequence of the worls wars, which destroyed a lot of capitalist wealth and left workers in a more powerful bargaining position. Once that process ended in the 70s, it was back to capitalism as usual: manipulative and exploitative. That's why capital wealth keeps soaring way beyond average economic growth while workers and the poor fight over the scraps.

The labor theory of value being false does not take much away from Marx because this was not his creation. It was widely assumed at the time. The utility theory of value is also false. I don't see you condemning modern economics for it.

So the capitalist food industry is suddenly a 3.5-billion year system? The rise of predation itself is about 600 million years old.

By the way we are already rearranging global ecosystems. That's capitalism for you: consuming natural resources at will for financial profit. The major reason why an extreme position like veganism is called for is precisely because the extremes of global capitalism have brought us here, with human civilization risking collapse in this millennium.

The general conclusion on the impact of veganism on the environment has been this: it would have some important benefits, in the sense that it would lower emissions, but there are pitfalls to think about as well. For example, poor countries that rely on animals for mechanical work in agricultural production, and as a source of food, could not handle the transition right away. I think veganism makes more sense for industrialized societies that can generate mechanical output through machines and vehicles. Likewise genetic engineering can play a role too; the soy protein in the Impossible Burger is not grown on land. It comes from specially engineered yeast.

This is why I cautioned chatterbears about coming up with a universal imperative on why people shouldn't eat meat. All this aside, I think every rational person would agree that we're all better off if people on average ate less meat, even if they don't go fully vegan.

My pomposity pales in comparison to your bravado.

Great answer. And I think it closely approximates my thinking on the issue as well: the Trilemma may have some validity, but we can still reach important practical and philosophical conclusions about the state of the world.

I don't know how much attention you were paying in your ecology classes, but it looks like you missed a few important things. Mouthing off about your degrees will impress no one.

You may have missed the fact that a substantial fraction of all agricultural land globally is devoted for grains to feed and fatten livestock, 60 billion of which are slaughtered every year. Ending factory farming would free up much of that land for human food production. 'Grass-reared' animals is a very funny joke, kind of like 'cage free' chickens. Factory animals are kept in confined spaces and fed whatever is necessary to put meat on those bones. Do you honestly think this capitalist system cares about providing them healthy or nutritious food?

Like I said, this thread went down the toilet a long time ago. I'm talking about beyond this thread, when this issue comes up again in your life. I think you will find the greatest success by emphasizing utilitarian thinking. Doesn't mean there is absolutely no room for Kantian ethics, of course. But just know that this latter route is littered with mines. You can try and cross it, but it will be very difficult.

There are two seaparate but related questions here.

1) Is the Trilemma meaningful or correct?

2) If it is meaningful or correct, then is that bad , good, neutral, or something else for philosophical reasoning?

But you can always question the discovery process behind the foundation. Why this or that decision? The foundation then needs to be reconsidered all over again. So again, it's arbitrary.

Do you accept that the Trilemma is meaningful in any way? And if so in what ways?

I don't actually understand how anything you've written in this post helps us move beyond the Trilemma. Your attitude here boils down to recognizing that the Trilemma is real, but ignoring its implications because...'appropriate meaning'...'something is different'...and other stuff that sounds nice and means nothing.

But people reject scientific evidence quite often when the rejection helps to justify their lifestyles. Exhibit A: climate change. Of course there will be people who insist that eating meat is healthier than being vegan. That's not a reason to stop pressing the scientific evidence. It's an opportunity to educate the ignorant.

Settling on a foundational assumption, with no further justification, is very arbitrary. That's the sense in which it's unsatisfying, or 'not final.'

I don't know what the alternatives would be. I was asking the forum that very thing.

I'm going to violate my earlier self-imposed ban on this thread.

I wanted to make some general comments to chatterbears. As I said before, I'm also a dedicated vegan, so on a practical level we are on the same wavelength. Watching this debate unfold, I've noticed you have provided different kinds of justifications for veganism. You started out with a valiant Kantian attempt, a kind of categorical imperative that should be universally applied. You then shifted to some utilitarian reasons in the later stages of the debate. I think it's this bouncing around between deontological and utilitarian reasoning that has a lot of people confused, and rejecting some of your arguments. For me, it's much easier to defend veganism on utilitarian grounds: it's good for our health, it's good for the ecological basis of civilization, and it simply makes you feel good (whenever I think about meat, I remember how hard I wanted to punch myself 10 minutes after finishing at McDonald's). There are lots of great, positive, and utilitarian arguments in favor of veganism. I explained some of them in my first post in this thread. There may be some kind of categorical imperative for it too, but I think it's going to be extremely difficult to find a consistent moral standard for why you shouldn't eat meat. This thread has already gone down the toilet, so maybe you can consider this advice going forward, when you debate other people on the merits of veganism.

Having said all that, I can empathize with the routine nonsense you have encountered here, because obviously I've encountered it too in my life (Don't vegans need animal supplements? How can you eat plants, which are also living things?). The first time anyone finds out I'm a vegan, that person immediately becomes an expert nutrionist, economist, scientist, philosopher, and every other academic professional you can imagine. In reality, these people are just projecting the fears of the capitalist system, which needs people to eat and consume garbage so the profits can keep flowing to the meat and dairy industry. As I emphasized in my original post, this debate is no longer about normative ideals, but about the hard descriptive reality that people have power over animals and can treat those animals as waste and fodder for profit.

Anyway, I appreciate the valiant effort you have shown here in defending veganism.

I myself don't have a sense of that finality, no. I suppose if I did I would not have bothered asking about the Trilemma.

Having a foundational assumption that can no longer be questioned seems like just giving up. I suppose giving up is one way out of the whole thing.

I agree with your analysis. Humanity as a whole is facing many deep challenges and it's not entirely clear that we can solve all of them.

Yes we can call it an underlying instability, I agree.

I don't know if there's ever been this much agreement on a philosophy forum before. Should we pop open a champagne bottle to celebrate?

The global economy isn't presently in crisis, btw. Doesn't mean it won't be tomorrow.

I dispute this, probably because I have different standards for what can constitute a crisis than you do. The global economy is not in an immediate crisis of demand, sure. Global GDP will probably rise this year and will probably rise next year too. But it is experiencing a structural crisis, in which a set of converging factors acting over long periods of time are producing shifts in the balance of economic power.

The center of the capitalist system is stuck in economic stagnation. Japan, Western Europe, and the United States are all experiencing vastly lower growth rates than they had four decades ago. Meanwhile, China and India are still rapidly growing. China is already the world's largest economy in terms of purchasing power, India is third. Russia is not a major economic threat, but it is a global military power once again, conquering nearby territories, flying bombers from Indonesia and next to Alaska, sending its nuclear subs all over the world. These tectonic shifts in the global economic landscape imply that, for the first time in three or four centuries, the West will no longer control the global organization of labor and the distribution of surplus wealth. These changes will produce their own sets of military and political crises. Rarely has the fundamental structure of global power changed without wars and revolutions.

You may be interested to know that many "serious thinkers," like Einstein himself, were socialists who were very much influenced by Marx.

The labor theory of value was widely assumed in the 19th century. It was not invented by Marx. Capitalist economists later switched to utility theories of value, which are, to be sure, no less fictitious than the labor theory.

Marx got a lot of fundamental things right. He may have incorrectly predicted that capitalism would not be so resilient, but he did understand the basis on which capitalism would survive and function. He predicted that corporations would fight off tendencies in the declining rate of profit by slashing worker wages and benefits. That basically describes the US in the last 40 years. He predicted that capitalism would expand worldwide in search of new markets with cheaper labor. Sound familiar? I could go on and on, but you get the point. He made a lot of fundamental insights that have come true.

Theories and values aside, to deny that some level of exploitation happens within capitalism is equivalent to denying that we need oxygen to survive.