No, we don't, otherwise the word wouldn't mean anything. If any subjective experience counted as pain without any objective measures, then how would we ever learn what the word meant? — Isaac

Turn that around and you have the same problem. If there were no subjective experiences of pain how would we ever learn the word? We wouldn't, because it wouldn't be an experience for us.

Yes, pain and other sensations are accompanied by objective measures, which helps us know when people are in pain. But not always.

What good is that notion of subjective? — creativesoul

To denote that our experiences are not mirrors of reality, and thus when we create explanations of reality, we have to take that into account. A physicalist is going to miss out on something if they don't include our experiences, since we are part of the world.

Also, because it raises the possibility of skeptical scenarios we have to deal with in philosophical discussions. And along with that the possibility of some sort of idealism as a response to skepticism. But that can also be motivated by cognitive concerns as well as experiential ones.

No. — creativesoul

So you're a color realist. Alright, fine. But at least with pain we have something clearly subjective.

I know that there can be no hallucination, dream, and/or illusion of red if there is no red. — creativesoul

Would you say the same thing about pain?

No it doesn't. It demonstrates that red experiences require both, red things and the ability to see them as such. It also demonstrates that the internal/external and objective/subjective dichotomies are inadequate for taking proper account of experience. — creativesoul

So you think that the colors we experience are out there in the world? Are they attached to photons or molecules? How do they get into our brains?

Does this also apply to sound, taste, feels? Does 2 degrees celsius air molecules feel objectively cold? How do you reconcile different sensations among animals or even humans? Maybe I'm from a cold climate and find that warm.

But I am honestly amused - like it makes me smile irl - to think people look out at the world around them and honestly believe in their heart of hearts that what they see are 'properties'.
— StreetlightX

I mean, I'm mostly on board the embodied cognition train that says we see for the most part "affordances", opportunities for action, sites of relief and rest, goals to arrive at, hazards and safety, speed and rest, and so on.
— StreetlightX

! — bert1

Scratch a Wittgensteinian and you get a Humean.

I would say it is akin to visualization; when I imagine the house of my childhood, it is not as though I am looking at it, or at a photograph of it; it's not as if I can look at my visualization and count the bricks, compare their colours and so on; yet I call it visualization nonetheless. — Janus

Some people can visualize to that level of detail. I like you, have never been able to do that. But i do hear my thoughts as if they were spoken.

hat our sensory input does not reflect true reality is separate problem from ontology of the subjectiveness of experience. — Zelebg

Right, but noting this distinction is a rebuttal to the those who want to dissolve the issue by saying that being part of reality means the internal/external distinction is misguided. That our subjective experience of being in the world is different from the world is meaningful and raises an ontological question of subjectivity.

If there was no meaningful subjective/objective distinction to be made, then the problem of perception would have never been an issue, science would mostly back what our senses tell us, and movies like the Matrix and Inception would have never been made. Also, no p-zombies.

But that's not the case, and the issue of subjectivity keeps coming up in its various forms, because it's fundamental to our experience of the world.

Just the very fact that we can dream of interacting with the world without actually doing so is sufficient.

Are not properties just among the "things" that appear (if we allow that shapes, colours, textures and so on are even separable from shaped, coloured and textured objects)? — "Janus

If they weren’t separable, then physics would be very much like our naive perception, and the ancient skeptics would have had little material to start with. Bit that’s not the case.

So the colour quales and shape quales are distinguished in our experience by something which is not reflected in our experience. — fdrake

Basically. We don’t see photons or molecular surfaces. Rather we see chairs and apples.

so you’re basically a panpsychist? Everything has a little bit of consciousness.

so what is the functional account of seeing red when processing a particular wavelength of light. What would the code look look like?

What is it like for bits?

To avoid a semantic debate over the word seeing, we can distinguish a red perceptual experience from an internally generated one. This demonstrates that red experiences come from us and not into the eyes riding on light waves, as if the red somehow jumps onto electrons and enters the visual cortex.

Yeah. I would only be careful: we are of reality, and don't stand outside of it looking in. "If no people existed, objects would be...?" is still a strange question. "If there are no clouds, objects would be...?" - one has to wonder: what even is this question? How does the one relate to the other? It's loaded, but badly. — StreetlightX

The question is asking what the word is like instead of how we think and perceive the world to be, which has clearly undergone lots of revision over time, as we've discovered that world is not what we naively took it to be, and that we can be wrong. So yeah, we're part of reality. That doesn't mean we understand that reality exactly as it is. Turns out it's a lot of work to figure out and plenty of skeptical questions can be raised in the process.

I think Jackson proves is that there is such a first-person experience that we have, the likes of which philosophical zombies would not have. Which, again, is a complete trivialism because I think everything necessarily has that and it's incoherent to talk about not having it so saying something has it really doesn't communicate anything of greater interest than disagreement with such nonsense. — Pfhorrest

It's not a trivialism when we try to determine whether machines can be conscious, which is also the case for other animals. Does a pig or a cow experience pain, and if so, is it ethical to eat them? Should we medically test rats if they have subjective experiences of suffering?

Those are meaningful questions.

What would be the point in asking such a question? What knowledge would we be getting that we couldn't acquire by thinking about it differently? — Harry Hindu

We're asking if bats have kinds of experiences that we don't because there physiology differs, particularly with the use of sonar. Surely human experience does not encompass all possible experiences in the universe. And a good reason for thinking this isn't so is because sensory organs, brains and body plans differ across animals, and there are tons of things outside of human perception.

A simple one would be seeing in four primary colors, which some animals have the eyes for that and even more.

So is experiencing eating cake different from eating cake? — Banno

You can imagine or dream it. You can also do an activity while paying attention to something else, thus not experiencing it. An example would be driving down a highway on autopilot where you're thinking about something else or listening to the radio.

because there is no it, the whole concept of 'the experience of seeing red' as opposed to just 'seeing red' is incoherent. — Isaac

This is wrong, because we do have experiences of seeing red without seeing red. Dreams, memory, imagination and optical illusions do not count as seeing red. And as was noted earlier, the part of the brain that creates color experiences can sometimes be stimulated in blind people by other means.

The number of cows that the paddock can sustain is not an issue that can be settled by a poll. — Banno

Is the sustainability of the paddock fixed to a certain number of cows?

1. A Big Fat Dictator who shoots anyone who tries to put two cows on the commons.
2. Sell the commons, making it private so that folk take care of it. (We might call this the Selfish Git solution)
3. Develop a culture that treats the commons with respect. — Banno

4. Find an economic model that supports the commons.

I wonder what happens after the tragedy of the commons? Life goes on so the tragedy can't be the final word. Let's say the land gets ruined by overgrazing and now nobody can raise cows and make money. So now what happens? Does the land no longer have any use? Does nature never recover? Is there no technology that comes along and introduces grass that can support more cows?

Your thought experiment seems to treat the world as some steady-state entity. This used to be the way to estimate the carrying capacity of Earth. But then it was realized that humans alter that equation, creating higher yield crops, making deserts bloom, and so on. So now the carrying capacity is estimated to be around 10 billion. But some say we could increase that by building huge arcologies, genetic engineering and advanced nanotech and replicators.

I was curious about the global projections for CO2 emissions for the rest of the century and I found this article from last year: http://euanmearns.com/global-co2-emissions-forecast-to-2100/

There are several plots in there. Here is a projection based on the three UN population growth estimates where the red line is the highest population growth.



The threshold of 2 degrees or 1 trillion tons of additional cumulative CO2 would be exceeded somewhere in the 2050-2055 for all three population growth scenarios. This is while factoring in the increase of renewable energy from 6% to 15% since 1965.

The author concludes:

How might the world achieve such massive reductions? Well, there’s also a near-exact correlation (R2 = 0.98) between global CO2 emissions and world GDP, and history shows that the only way of cutting CO2 emissions by any meaningful amount is by crashing the economy (the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s cut CO2 emissions in the former East Bloc states by almost 40% while the 2009 recession alone cut Spain’s emissions by 15%). Enough said.

So unless crashing the economy long term is a solution people are willing to go along with, or there is some technological breakthrough reversing the trend, we're heading for the 2-3 degree warming, at least.

just think that stopping climate change before a lot of significant damage has already happened will require a social mobilization on that scale. — Echarmion

Okay, but what does that look like?

No-one wants that, obviously, but at this point it's necessary to prevent very serious damage to the biosphere, the consequences of which are hard to predict. — Echarmion

The problem is that if nobody wants their lifestyle drastically altered, then there won't be political will to implement those policies. Let's imagine the greenest democrat wins 2020 and tries to implement some serious CO2 and consumption reduction measures. How do you see that going?

That's kinda what moderates are trying to do, but even relatively modest, market based approaches like taxing green house gasses are mostly failing because the political will isn't there. — Echarmion

Then it won't be there for anything more extreme. Politicians will simply lose elections and fail to convince their colleagues.

Roasts are slow, so come and remind me again in three years. — Shamshir

The warming is about 0.05-0.07 degrees celsius every three years. So a slow roast indeed. Climate scientists would like for emissions to drop to zero by 2050, or have that amount removed from the atmosphere to stay under a 2 degree warming since pre-industrial times to avoid more severe weather and greater sea level rise. Plus it's harder on some species or biomes like coral reefs.

But realistically, we will probably have to contend with a 2-3 degree warming, unless we can offset it with lots of trees and carbon sequestering.

Also realistically, we will have to accept that a certain loss of biodiversity is inevitable. EO Wilson put it at up to 50% by the end of the century. He called it the bottleneck before population peaks and starts to decline, and technology becomes more sustainable.

On a positive note, NASA recently revealed that the Earth is on a greening trend. We actually have more plant cover than in the recent past.

The earth is roasting, the fire is fueled by man and that's a fact. — Shamshir

The Earth is not roasting, it's in the process of warming up a by a few degrees. The Earth has been warmer in the past, and colder. And warmer. Venus is roasting. Yes, the current trend is mainly because of human activity. No, that doesn't mean we will roast like Venus.

Hyperbole doesn't help. Life will adapt as it always has and so will humans. We just want to avoid the more difficult scenarios.

None. — frank

Right, climate models aren't civilization models, and the idea that the entire Earth will become uninhabitable for humans is absurd. Earth isn't Venus. As already mentioned in this thread, some places will probably fare better as more CO2 and warmer conditions benefit plant growth in northern latitudes. But anyway, we have geological history to know that Earth won't become uninhabitable. Fossils of prehistoric crocodiles and palm trees have been found in the arctic region. The question is what sort of difficulties civilization will have to deal with at different levels of warming, and what the time frame is.

It should also be noted that there are proposed solutions that don't require drastic changes to the economy, such as planting six trillion trees, large scale carbon sequestering, and Project Vesta.

It will just lead to the end of any habitable world. — StreetlightX

Really? When the dinosaurs evolved, the CO2 in the atmosphere was six times what it was now, and it didn't result in the planet being uninhabitable for animals or plants. Granted, this happened over millions of years, so lots of time to adapt (and no doubt plenty of species went extinct), but animals also didn't have technology. We humans inhabit every climate on Earth from the desert to the arctic. We can pump water form hundreds of miles of way, we can desalanitize ocean water, and we can create climate controlled enclosures. We can also make new hybrid crops. And we can relocate farmlands to Canada and Siberia as needed.

Is climate change really going to make the entire planet uninhabitable? Is there any sort of scientific consensus that we're facing extinction, or just that it's best to mitigate the worst effects?

Does anybody know how to trigger major simultaneous and coordinated behavior changes in several billion people -- within 10 years? Within 50? Never mind, 50 years will be too late to begin changing. — Bitter Crank

Nope. It won't happen. Also, we'll be adding a couple more billion while large parts of Asia and Africa finish catching up. Add to that the majority of the world's population who probably don't want to go along with making major sacrifices. It's nice and all if people who agree with Greta do that, but that will be offset by 7 billion people just living their lives. A few million protesting and riding their bicycles while going vegan is a drop in the bucket.

The only way is to adapt. But I also don't believe it will end civilization. Humans are very good generalists, and we have technology. We survived an ice age with stone-aged tools and migrated all over the planet thousands of years ago.

Where just fighting a human culture though, not our bodily existence at any time and place. — TheWillowOfDarkness

You mean all of human culture? I don't think abolishing gender roles is realistic. But they can be made more equal and diverse.

Massive social mobilization would probably be required. Because of the economic impact of the policies that are now required, we're looking at the equivalent of aglobal communist revolution. — Echarmion

See this language is what fuels skepticism about taking radical action to avert climate catastrophe. It comes off sounding like an excuse to implement a preferred system by certain leftists. If you read any of the comments on Reddit related to climate change, you will see all sorts of things about eating the rich, destroying capitalism, and forcing a one world government on everyone.

It will also sound potentially threatening to the mainstream. Who wants to be forced to drastically reduce their lifestyle? Do the developing countries want to be told they can't continue developing by the developed countries?

And how do we know that such radical economic and political polices won't be the wrong action? Maybe the only way forward is to adapt with technological innovation and encourage the markets to transition, instead of trying to force everyone to consume less, which would likely cause a worldwide depression, which means less innovation.

The danger here is that the patriarchy can be justified on the grounds that humans evolved gender roles to be such. So then feminists who wish to abolish gender roles have to fight the grain of all of human history (and evolutionary psychology), and not just the past several thousand years.

It's one thing to say gender is like money, it's another thing to say it evolved with homo sapiens.

That would imply hunter-gatherer societies have no social constructs, even though they're already a "society". I don't think that works. — Echarmion

But the comparison to money, which was a social construct that came with civilization, doesn't work either. The context is generally patriarchal societies defining roles women are supposed to occupy, subjugating them to the patriarchy. But if gender roles have always existed in human society, then that can't be entirely true.

Maybe it's just the philosophy podcast I listened to recently on feminism in which the guest speaker was talking about the feminist ideal of a genderless society, which to me seems to run counter to all of human history.

Another question that comes up is whether a biological male who undergoes a sex change or even just identifies themselves as female should be allowed to compete in women's sports. You could even potentially have a gender fluid person compete in both male and female events, depending on which gender they wish to identify with for that event.

My question regarding whether gender is a social construct like money is to ask whether hunter-gatherer societies have gender roles and whether this is tied to the individual's biological sex, and if so what sort of exceptions exist. Money is a construct of civilization. But most of human history consisted of tribal groups. So I would take the hunter-gatherer experience as definitive on this matter, if there is a definitive conclusion to be reached.

The psychological question regarding whether someone feels male, female or both and how that relates to gender is trickier, but again I would defer to how most of human history was spent and not what recent civilization has specified.

A related topic is the feminist view that gender is a social construct created to subject women in favor of patriarchal societies. But this wouldn't apply to hunter-gatherers, so that should be what determines the nature of gender.

They're not free to do so under Kantian morals. But we are not responsible for making them into moral beings. — Echarmion

No, but we are responsible for preventing harm to others by said human beings if we can do so, even if it requires lying to them. This trumps any categorical imperative, because preventing harm is more important than holding to a principle.

It allows us to allow others to cause injury. Because it takes the freedom of others seriously. — Echarmion

Do we really want others to be free to cause injury? Is that sort of freedom moral?

Does Nick Bostrom have anything to say about Tipler's cosmology? Anyway, there are physical limits to potential future technologies, however advanced.

Looks like the difference between Platonism and Constructivism. If you think mathematical objects are real and have existence beyond humans calculating or proving them, then infinity is actual. If you don't, then it's only potential, because we'll never add all the way up to infinity.

Why was Adam and Eve punished for actually failing to understand good and evil? — TheMadFool

Depending on how you interpret the myth, it seems one or more of the following:

1. This is the Jewish version of Pandora's box, meant to explain why bad stuff exists and how it relates to knowledge and making choices. It's also an allegory for growing up.

2. They were punished for disobeying God, not trusting or believing what God said.
2b. They were punished for giving into temptation, listening to the snake instead.

3. It was a setup. God intended for the snake to deceive Adam & Eve. That way, the plan for redemption could be unfolded, and the possibility for evil choices could be worked through.

3b. God predestines everything, so it happened exactly as God wanted, because how else could it happen, given God's omni-abilities?

#2 has free will at the center, #3b is the Calvinistic view, while #3 is a mix between the two. The really interesting theological question here is the snake. Let's assume the Christian interpretation that it was Lucifer who rebelled and became Satan.

How did this happen, and wouldn't God have known about it before creating Lucifer? So why create him? How does a perfectly created being become proud? Isn't that a character defect? Wouldn't wanting to be God be a colossal misunderstanding on the part of a created being? Doesn't much sound like Lucifer was created perfectly.

Basically, if God is omni-everything, then God can choose what sort of world to create and who will populate it. God doesn't have to create anyone who will choose evil. So it's ultimate God's responsibility. The Calvinists have a more consistent theology.

Of course that means God can't be all-good in the way we humans understand good.

And if we are totally determined, then it still feels like free will -- so what difference does it make? — Bitter Crank

It might make a difference if it's the aliens making us feel like we have free will while they totally determine our actions. Like burning fossil fuels and rainforests to terraform the climate for their arrival.