I'm just an idiot who knows nothing about maths, but I'm just wondering what dividing by 0 might mean in terms of pizzas.

If you divide a pizza by infinity, the pizza is annihilated, presumably, it becomes one with the quantum field.

If you divide a pizza by 1, it is unaltered. Is that right?

If you divide it by 0.5 you get two of them, bizarrely.

If you divide it by the 'opposite' (reciprocal?) of infinity, you get the whole universe, and then some, full up with pizza. Is that right?

So we've gone from absolutely nothing, to the totality of everything. What other options are there that dividing a pizza by 0 will get you? We need something more extreme than either nothing or everything.

Am I talking out of my arse?

EDIT: I've probably made this thread many times worse - delete away.

"A long way down" by Nick Hornby. Funny. I lol'd.

Proofreading is checking for grammar and spelling usually, not really content. It sounds like you are looking for feedback on your ideas. If so this forum might be useful. A certain thickness of skin helps here but it's not too bad. Most people are helpful. If you want someone to read your whole essay and offer detailed feedback you may have to pay someone. But you can get it for free if you post up interesting snippets to the forum and it grabs people's interest.

Well duh! The issue should not be whether animals have consciousness, but do we give a toss? But this is better than nothing i guess. Hasn't the scientific community got this far ages ago with fish? Jury is still out regarding Palestinians and Africans.

Because a capacity is a function? Or feeling is a verb, which means something has to be doing something, which is a function?

Okay, so then what is "consciousness"? — 180 Proof

The capacity to feel.

Ergo the implication is that subjects are not conscious (or impersonal)? — 180 Proof

Not by virtue of their structure and function, no. But they are conscious. Consciousness is not structure and function. But a person has both structure and function and is conscious.

So, do you agree that some concepts are absolutely simple, and thusly unanalyzable and incapable of non-circular definitions, but yet still valid; or do these so-called, alleged, primitive concepts need to be either (1) capable of non-circular definition or (2) thrown out? — Bob Ross

I think I probably agree with you. I think consciousness might be one of these - it gets defined by synonyms which suggests it may be unanalysable. Do you think there is a difference between a word and a concept?

Poor ol' Germans seem doomed to be on the wrong side of history again.

What's the difference between self and consciousness? — Truth Seeker

The self is what is referenced in such various views as Hume's bundle, Metzinger's Ego Tunnel, Tononi and Koch's system of integrated information, systems' theorists predictive modelling of reality (a la @apokrisis), these things are instantiated by brains in humans and constitute a loose functional identity. When this functioning ceases, say in sleep or under anaesthesia, the self ceases for that time.

Consciousness is, at minimum, what makes doing all these functions feel a certain way. Recently I've starting thinking that consciousness may be uniquely causal, so that nothing at all could happen without it.

So then "consciousness" is impersonal? For instance, my awareness of being self-aware isn't actually mine? — 180 Proof

It's a good question, if I understand it, which I'm not sure I do. I'll take an awake, functioning human as being a central case of a person, and it seems to me that both the functioning complex referred to above and the presence of consciousness are necessary for personhood (although there are other senses of 'person' I'm glossing over). So a person aware of their own consciousness is an aware functioning-complex aware of their awareness. So, if I've understood your question properly, consciousness abstracted from any functioning system is indeed impersonal, in that sense.

(But, inevitably, sometimes people (particularly the religious or spiritual) use 'person' simply to indicate the presence of consciousness in the abstract. Sometimes the distinction between 'self' and 'Self' is made, which I guess corresponds to the difference between the functional-complex and consciousness, but I'm no expert on that.)

It's also the same idea put forward by Donald Hoffman's User Interface Theory of Perception. — Malcolm Lett

Yes I think that's right, the two seems very similar in terms of the functional story. But their claims about consciousness seem very different (but I haven't studied either properly - these are just first impression). Contrasting panpsychism with conscious realism is interesting, and something I haven't thought about enough.

I went for the first option. However I think the (correct) intuition of unity is derived from consciousness, not from the self. I think there is a persistent confusion between self and consciousness which messes up a lot of the discourse.

Overwhelmingly, we agree about more than we disagree. — Banno

By way of unhelpful digression, I like to use this principle in reference to arguments by analogy for other minds - we are similar to frogs, trees, viruses, rocks and possibly even Palestinians in many more ways than we usually pay attention to. Not that I want to derail the thread.

I think you are quoting 180 rather than me. :)

??? — 180 Proof

A and D are the only ones charitably characterised.

strawman

Same with us, no? There also is "no empirical way of knowing" (yet / ever) whether any person is "conscious or faking". Which seems more reasonable, or likely, to you, Wayfarer (or anyone): (A) every human is a zombie with a(n involuntary) 'theory of mind'? or (B) every entity is a 'conscious' monad necessarily inaccessible / inexplicable to one another's 'subjectivity'? or (C) mind is a 'mystery' too intractable for science, even in principle, to explain? or (D) mind is a near-intractably complex phenomenon that science (or AGI) has yet to explain? :chin: — 180 Proof

What a rotten lot of choices! B is closest to the truth I reckon, but we can know other minds by inference, and identities change constantly.

I think Metzinger's views are very plausible. Indeed his views on the self as a transparent ego tunnel at once enabling and limiting our exposure to reality and creating a world model is no doubt basically true. But as the article mentions, it's unclear how this resolves the hard problem. There is offered a reason why (evolutionarily speaking) phenomenality emerged but not a how. The self can be functionally specified, but not consciousness. But if Metzger were to permit consciousness as an extra natural property, and not set of functions, I would likely find little to disagree with him on.

Trying to understand the terminology. If full-on consciousness can be of not very much experience/very little content, is our consciousness also full-on, but with much more experience/greater content? — Patterner

Yes, that's my view. Experience is consciousness of something, whether that something is simple and uninteresting, or complex and interesting. In either case it's still experience. The content is different, but the consciousness is no different at all.

My thought is that there isn't any not having an experience. — Patterner

Yes, I pretty much agree with you. Just because I can form the idea of an object which doesn't experience anything, doesn't entail that I think there actually are any objects which don't experience anything.

Just that they have experiences. Just not of very much. Consciousness + very little content.

There doesn't seem to be any intermediate stage between having an experience and not having one.

Goff and Antony have written about it, and Eric Schwitzgebel I think. The non-vagueness of consciousness.

One way or another, the capacity for consciousness was always there in the first place. If the capacity wasn't always there, consciousness couldn't exist. — Patterner

We may have a conceptual disagreement, I'm not sure. I think you are suggesting some kind of phenomenality/proto-consciousness as a precursor to consciousness which isn't full-on consciousness, whereas I don't think such a thing is conceptually distinguishable from full-on consciousness.

How so? — 180 Proof

I take 'quale' to be another (somewhat unhelpful) word for an experience. An experience has two defining ingredients, consciousness and content. The content part is indeed explained (or perhaps better to say described) by physical/functional properties. The consciousness ingredient is not explicable (or describable) by physical and functional properties, and on that I know we disagree. Consciousness has no internal structure and function that is further explicable. It is its own explanation.

True. We just don't know how it comes about. — Patterner

Indeed. And the problems with trying to explain how it comes about leads to the idea that maybe it didn't come about at all, but was always there in the first place.

So what accounts for "qualia" other, or more efficacious, than "physical/functional properties"? — 180 Proof

Consciousness

Here's a link to the paper if anyone's interested:

https://www.academia.edu/40392630/Pansentient_Monism_Formulating_Panpsychism_as_a_Genuine_Psycho_Physical_Identity_Theory_PhD_thesis_Abstract_and_Contents_Pages_?email_work_card=title

There's a lot of panpsychism papers knocking around now.

For every (a implies b) it's always true that (not b implies not a), correct? Even if it's not always useful to bring it up, it's always true? — flannel jesus

It's always valid (if not true), and that's called modus tollens. You're right about that, but wrong about modus ponens.

EDIT: Sorry I seem to have misunderstood flannel jesus! I thought he was agreeing with Corvus, but after a PM exchange it's clear that he isn't.

What the Count said.

Do you want only Corvus to reply?

You say 'outre' but panpsychism is pretty fashionable now as far as I can tell. Back in the nineties it was very out there.

And yet the fact is that we don't know what consciousness is. — Malcolm Lett

We do know what it is. It is the capacity to experience.

And when does one call a living thing conscious? — Benj96

When you think it is capable of experience.

Part of the difficulty lies within developing a concrete definition of “life” or “living systems” in the first place. — Benj96

Yes. 'Life' is a example of redefining a concept so it becomes amenable to your preferred method of investigating it. Investigating consciousness empirically is problematic, so strike that from the definition of 'life' but retain things that are more amenable, such as reproduction.

I would take this to suggest that even if something like smallism is true, it will nonetheless require some sort of major paradigm shift that allows for some sort of "emergence-like" phenomena to occur to resolve this impasse. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Smallism I think is probably false for this reason, and others.

It was in the context of explaining the Advaita doctrine of manifestation or emanation, by which Brahman manifests as the sensible world. — Wayfarer

"All new things come from prophecy." Not exactly the same idea but similar.

I'm getting larger by the week.

As Plato's Euthyphro implies: morality and laws cannot follow from the decrees of "God or gods", javi — 180 Proof

We create our own values, therefore we are gods, although small.

On the one hand, given that the brain is itself, it should have no trouble knowing itself. In practice, there are a number of problems with that notion. — Malcolm Lett

If consciousness was a brain process, then I would agree with you, the brain knowing itself would be riddled with opportunities for mistakes, illusions etc. I'm just pretty sure consciousness is not a brain activity.

Our perception of consciousness is equally subject to the same perceptual hallucinations as all other perceptions. — Malcolm Lett

There is a difference, it seems to me. Perceptual hallucinations are complex, we construct a model which turns out to be contradicted by further data. Loads of stuff going on, plenty of room for error. But consciousness of consciousness is maximally simple, no? It doesn't specify any particular experience. We might be wrong in perceiving a lion in the grass, it might just be a patch of grass. But we can't be wrong that we have experienced something-or-other, i.e. a world. And to go one step further, when we turn consciousness on itself, in experience of experience, where the subject is the object, there is no gap for a mistake to exist in.

You can rely on wikipedia for information and I will keep on thinking through the presuppositions and implications of philosophical topics (e.g. 'panpsychism = animism'). — 180 Proof

This is insane. You provided the wikipedia link as part of your post! You invited people to read it!

EDIT: But never mind. We don't have to rely on wikipedia. Perhaps you could offer your own conceptions of animism and panpsychism so we can see if we we are talking about the same ideas. For example, you said that panpsychism is reductionist. I am interested in what you mean. What x does it assert is nothing other than what y?

Oh, I'm a panpsychist. There are several reasons for that, but the overall reason is that it's the least problematic option. The worst theory of consciousness apart from all the others. At the moment, I think the least problematic option is to suppose that every arbitrarily defined object whatever has its own unitary consciousness, but the vast majority of these entities are conscious of almost nothing at all. Humans (and brainy animals generally) are unusual, not because they are conscious at all, but because of the wide variety and complexity of what they are conscious of.

Oh, sorry, I just skimmed the conversation and missed context.