Because there's no way to turn a 0 into a 1, the only way to start with 0 and end up with 1 is if that 0 was not actually 0 but a 1 in disguise. — Roger

There's no known way to start with 1 either, so the whole "nothing is still something" point, doesn't close the explanatory gap at all.

You said that you are able to determine that something has subjective experiences by its behavior - by exclaiming, "Ouch!", yet now you are saying that the word or exclamation is completely irrelevant. If they exclaimed, "Yippee!", would you say that they are having a subjective experience of pain? — Harry Hindu

I think perhaps you're trolling now, as this post contains numerous errors:

1. I never said that exclaiming "ouch" would be evidence that anything was in pain. In fact it was the opposite. "Ouch" was mentioned in the context of an example of a program that I would not believe had displayed evidence of subjective experience.

2. "determine that something has subjective experiences by its behavior" -- behavior was your wording, not mine. I said that if there was an AI capable of expressing itself in natural language, and it claimed to be in pain, I would have grounds for believing it to be true.

3a. I said that the word itself was irrelevant, because you were making some point about us learning to say "ouch". It's unclear if this new post is even trying to defend that point.
3b. I said that the word itself was irrelevant, so now you're asking me What if the word is "Yippee"? :roll:

That's part of the problem - dualism. You're left with the impossible task of explaining how physical processes cause subjective processes. — Harry Hindu

I am not a dualist, I am a neuroscientist. I want to understand pain because there are people both with painful injuries and diseases, or indeed simply neurological issues that cause intense pain on their own (e.g. cluster headaches). Handwaving their subjective experiences as not existing, or merely "information" is completely unhelpful.

I will never understand why some people are happier to do a handwave than actually work on solving the problem.

No one has ever observed dark matter. Dark matter is just an idea to account for the observed behavior of real matter, just like how subjective experiences is an idea to account for the observed behavior of human beings. — Harry Hindu

How should science proceed in your view? Is it all-or-nothing where the only way we can talk about a phenomenon is at the point where we have completely solved every aspect of it, otherwise the very words are verboden?

"Dark matter" definitely refers to a real phenomenon, likely to be a form of matter because we can see things like gravitational lensing from it. No, it's not understood yet, but that's why we want to talk about it and talk about what to investigate next to tease out more data.

You were programmed (learned to) to say, "Ouch" from copying the actions of those around you. — Harry Hindu

The specific word or exclamation here is obviously completely irrelevant. We don't need to be taught to experience pain.

I'm done going back and forth with you. — Harry Hindu

You won't be missed. I would have preferred if you responded to the original point I put to you though.

So what you seem to be defining pain as is a unpleasant subjective experience, and then go on to say that you don't know what a subjective experience is. If pain is a subjective experience and you don't know what a subjective experience is, then you don't know what pain is. — Harry Hindu

I said no such thing -- you were asking me about the mechanism by which physical neurology causes subjective experience. That's what we don't know.

It's like I am saying we don't know exactly what dark matter is, and you're repeatedly saying "If you don't know what dark matter is, how can you use the word?". The word still has meaning in referring to a specific phenomenon, even if we have no concrete scientific model yet.

What do you mean, "not explicitly part of its programming"? — Harry Hindu

Well the program PRINT "Ouch!" has an exclamation of pain as part of its programming, so does not fulfill the requirements.
Beyond that, in very complex programs, sure it may be much harder to say. I didn't claim we would be able to make such a judgement immediately.

Where did I say that? — Harry Hindu

Here:

You assume that other humans have [subjective experience] because they claim it, and don't assume it if a pzombie or computer claims it. — Harry Hindu

Note that this single quote from you has two issues: firstly chastizing me for assuming that p-zombies don't have subjective experience, when this is true by definition. But also secondly, saying I would not believe a computer that claimed to have subjective experience, when the post you are quoting actually says the precise opposite.

If you can't tell me what pain is then how do you expect to tell me how it works? Can you use a word when you don't know it's meaning? — Harry Hindu

:roll: This is beyond infantile at this point.
I defined pain. I've answered all your questions about pain. I've told you I can elaborate on the mechanisms of pain as much as you like, because it's a topic I've studied at postgrad level.
The only one of your questions I couldn't answer, was how physical mechanisms within the brain give rise to subjective experience because no-one can.

So drop this nonsense about me not knowing what pain is, unless you also mention that you're defining "knowing pain" in such a way that no living human knows what pain is.

You haven't provided a consistent method of determining what type of system is conscious and which type of system isnt. — Harry Hindu

That's still not responding to the point. We're probably at around 8-9 posts at this point with your only response to my original objection being "no", with zero elaboration, and these various dodges.

What were those conditions? — Harry Hindu

Here is what I said on that matter:

With regards to computers, yes, if an AI were able to freely converse in natural language, and it repeatedly made the claim that it felt pain, despite such sentiments not being explicitly part of its programming, and it having nothing immediate to gain by lying...then sure, I'd give it the benefit of the doubt. I wouldn't know that it felt pain, but I'd start to lean towards it being true. — Mijin

Your response to that post, was to then say I would not believe an AI could be conscious even if it claimed it was i.e. the exact opposite of what I said.

If a pzombie is defined as having no subjective experiences and you can't define subjective experiences, then You haven't properly defined P zombies much less subjective experiences. How can you use words when you don't know what they mean? — Harry Hindu

You were saying I was wrong to assume p-zombies don't have subjective experiences. This showed that it is you that do not understand what a word (p-zombie) means.

With regard to you point, in this context, there is absolutely no need to try to break down the mechanism of subjective experience. It's like if we were to have a term "Dalaxy" meaning a galaxy that contains no dark matter. That's would still be a meaningful term even if we don't know exactly what dark matter is yet.

You keep contradicting yourself. You go back and forth between knowing what pain is and not knowing what pain is. You call it a subjective experience and then claim to not know what a subjective experience is. You aren't being very helpful. — Harry Hindu

Not at all; those are different concepts. What pain is, how pain sensation works, what we mean by subjective experience and how much we (don't) know about how exactly subjective experience works.
And I note that you still haven't said why your argument is not a shift of the burden of proof. i.e. The whole reason you and I are in this exchange in the first place.

Then all I have to do is program a computer to produce some text on your screen, "I have subjective states" and you would assume that the computer has conscious states? — Harry Hindu

Again, try reading my posts.
I said that under certain conditions I could gain belief that a computer was experiencing pain, and I mentioned what those conditions were. Does the program PRINT "Ouch!" fulfill those conditions?
If you read what I wrote, you would know the answer to this.

You're suggesting that I am wrong to assume p-zombies don't have subjective experience? Their definition is that they do not have subjective experience — Mijin

Yet, you claim that no one knows what subjective experiences are. — Harry Hindu

This response is a complete non sequitur.

Haha, then why are you using a word that you don't know what it means. You literally don't know what you are talking about.
[...]
Then why do you use terms that you don't what they mean? That is ludicrous. — Harry Hindu

All this started from me suggesting that your argument was a subtle shift of the burden of proof.
Call me naive, but I honestly expected a simple response like "oh, you're right, let me rephrase that" or "I don't believe it is, because..."

But instead of that we get this bizarre freakout of you claiming I don't know what "pain" means.
Well I just gave a definition of pain, in the very post you are replying to.
But, since pain sensation was a core part of my postgraduate degree I can actually talk a lot about it. At the end of that, would you respond to the point?

What does it even mean for "an unpleasant subjective experience that follows activation of specific regions of the parietal lobe, usually (not always) preceded by stimulation of nociceptors of the nervous system"? How do subjective states follow from physical states? — Harry Hindu

Nobody knows. There is no scientific model (meaning: having explanatory and predictive power) for that part. If this is a "gotcha" consider yourself, and every other human, "got".

You assume that other humans have it because they claim it, and don't assume it if a pzombie or computer claims it. You assume IT exist in humans without even knowing what IT is. You're losing me. — Harry Hindu

Possibly I am losing you because you don't read my posts? I just said I could believe that a computer could experience subjective states if it were to claim it i.e. the exact opposite of the thing you're accusing me of saying.

But on p-zombies, think through what you're saying. You're suggesting that I am wrong to assume p-zombies don't have subjective experience? Their definition is that they do not have subjective experience.

You're missing the point. — TheMadFool

And you are still failing to reply to a single thing I write.
I would be quite interested to know how your "screenshot" notion of the brain would make sense of people failing to see the gorilla both in the moment and when thinking through their memories.
But I guess we'll never know because you don't respond to points.

My brother and I were looking for a place to eat when I saw this [pointing to a photograph] on the door of a restaurant. — TheMadFool

Sure there are a lot of words you can use colloquially that would need to be defined more concretely if they are being used as the basis of philosophical (and neurological) statements like "The image in our eyes is identical to the image in a camera".

Had the camera not been faithful to what the eyes see, neither would Jane have pointed to the photograph and nor would John have recalled being there — TheMadFool

Not necessarily, no. You can actually make numerous changes to a photograph that a human would be unlikely to notice. Indeed, if it's a digital camera, that's built into its design; it will ignore details that humans cannot notice.
And if it's a photo of the basketball game, Jane may well exclaim "What the hell is a gorilla doing there?!"

But, if we're purely talking about the camera sensor vs the sensitivity of the eye's rods and cones...yeah there's obviously some crossover there, by design. e.g. perhaps the sensor is better at detecting green than blue or red because so are our eyes.
Not the same by any means, but deliberately similar in some ways.

The image in our eyes is identical to the image in a camera. — TheMadFool

No I would disagree about a single image existing "in" our eye or that it is identical to the image in a camera. I have studied neuroscience (and indeed, computer graphics) and that's just not how it works.

Look, let's try to pull all this back. As I recall, your ultimate point is not that our brain's image is identical to the image in a camera; that was merely the premise for a bigger argument.
Premises should be uncontentious. How about you think of something else to be the premise for that argument?

Well I just said, I disagree with the notion that we should give up on a physical model of consciousness. There is no guarantee in this universe of solving any problem in any given time, and we're making faster progress now than ever.

I also disagree about choosing a philosophy by elimination. There's always the possibility that there is another framing that we haven't thought of yet.

No. The burden is upon you to explain what pain is. — Harry Hindu

Haha, what?
I didn't claim to know what pain is, why would I have a burden of proof on me?

What I know about pain is that it is an unpleasant subjective experience, following activation of specific regions of the parietal lobe, usually (not always) preceded by stimulation of nociceptors of the nervous system.
That's all I know about it. If you'd like me to break down what a subjective experience actually is, well I can't, and nor would any neuroscientist claim to be able to at this time. That's the hard problem that we'd like to solve.

You can only claim that others feel pain because of their behavior. If a computer behaved like they were in pain, would you say that they feel pain? You seem to be asserting that pain is a behavior. — Harry Hindu

I don't know where to begin with this. No, saying that X is evidence for Y is vastly different from saying X = Y.
If I say I think a murder happened because there are blood stains on the floor, that doesn't mean I am asserting that blood stains *are* murder.

I said that I assume (don't know) that other humans experience pain, because they freely claim that they do. P-zombies could of course claim to be in pain, but this would require the universe to be trying to fool me for some reason -- the simpler explanation for sentient beings claiming to have subjective experiences is that they actually do.

That's evidence and an argument for the existence of pain in other humans, not a claim that that is what pain *is*.

With regards to computers, yes, if an AI were able to freely converse in natural language, and it repeatedly made the claim that it felt pain, despite such sentiments not being explicitly part of its programming, and it having nothing immediate to gain by lying...then sure, I'd give it the benefit of the doubt. I wouldn't know that it felt pain, but I'd start to lean towards it being true.

First, look at your phone's or computer's screen. Then, if you're on a phone, take a screenshot or if you're on a computer, use the PrtScrn button. Is there any difference between what you saw and the screenshot and the image you get with the PrtScrn button? No! I rest my case. — TheMadFool

Oh brilliant, just throwing out another argument and ignoring the points being put to you, yet again.

The first answer to your rhetorical question is of course, yes, there is a difference because of the differences between my eyes and the camera's sensor, and my brain and the internals of the computer or camera.
Take the famous example of a gorilla walking across a basketball court that volunteers don't notice because they were given a task of counting the number of times the basketball was passed.
Did the volunteers see the gorilla?

---------------

But I think perhaps what your question means, is that if you were to ask me whether the screengrab matches what I saw, would I answer that they are the same?
If so, that's a question about memory. While it's true that I would say the screengrab is the same as my recollection, there are numerous ways we could nefariously change the screengrab and I would still identify it as the same. Even an image I'd seen a thousand times.
If you do figure out how this relates to "images" in the brain (including with things like the gorilla example), and can show your working, I would really love to see that. And you'd probably get the Nobel for Phys or Med.

C = image in camera, E = image in the eye — TheMadFool

C is misleading at best. There is no image per se, only data which may be meaningful for a human running a program that can parse a particular file format.

E doesn't point unambiguously to any single thing. As I've explained about three times already and you continue to ignore.

1. IF consciousness is real THEN (C is not consciousness AND E is consciousness) — TheMadFool

The notion of labelling representations or data as themselves "consciousness" seems absolutely absurd and of course I don't agree with the logical inference. So you argument falls immediately IMO.

Please do not simply post your assertions yet again, without actually trying to address what I am telling you about neurocognition.

What makes the hardware in your head special in that it feels, but computer hardware can't? What does it mean to feel?

If there is no perceivable difference between "simulated" intelligence and "real" intelligence, then any difference you perceive would be a difference of your own making stemming from your human biases. — Harry Hindu

That's a shift of the burden of proof.

I feel pain.
I assume other humans also feel pain for various practical reasons, but also because if other humans were p-zombies they would have no reason to say that they experience pain.

Any claim beyond that, needs supporting arguments and data. In the case of animals, there are lots of good arguments for why at least some animals feel pain, but of course that's a big topic in itself.

But if someone wished to claim that computers, or non-living systems experience pain, the burden is on that person to provide an argument and data for this claim.

Please read my reply to Wayfarer — TheMadFool

Your response is just to again assert your claim:

The physical processes/chemical reactions on an image sensor/film and the purported neural processes of vision, both, eventually become images that, if the same object is being photographed or looked at, are indistinguishable from each other. — TheMadFool

This claim is false, and I'm trying to explain to you, repeatedly, why.

Consider for example that the eye only has a narrow range of high-resolution vision within the fovea. However, there is a two-way communication between eye and brain that allows us both to interpret the low-resolution peripheral data in a specific way, while at the same time directing the post-processing in the eye in the best way to get a meaningful categorization of objects, edges etc.

There is likely no single merged image, but if there were, it wouldn't look like a camera image. It would be some kind of metadata image.

Awareness is the cornerstone of consciousness. If it weren't then there would be no difference between you and a stone - again the same difficulty of seeing a difference (consciousness) that, as per your own claim, isn't there rears its ugly head. — TheMadFool

I'm aware of the importance of awareness. I myself called it foundational.
The point is, if you had a good explanation of awareness (and I don't think you have), you would still have all the work of explaining the hard problem of consciousness still to do. And there would still be no justification for the thread claim of consciousness being an "illusion".

This doesn't make sense. I have asserted that it's highly improbable that science will produce an EXPLANATION of how non-conscious matter produces consciousness. — RogueAI

No, you went further than that:

I don't accept the brain produces consciousness. The existence of some non-conscious stuff is simply asserted to be the case without a shred of evidence to back it up. Mercifully, the era of materialism is fast approaching an end. — RogueAI

(emphasis added)

Regarding your point, I disagree.
I have no expected timeline for when any particular problem will have a scientific explanation.
Neurology is very new and rapidly advancing; we probably know more from the last 30 years than all of the rest of human history put together. It's a strange time to give up.

Since it appears you now want to gratefully tuck in (now that's it's on the table) to the temptations offered by calling consciousness an illusion — bongo fury

Have we been talking past each other all this time?
No, I don't want to call consciousness an illusion. In fact, to me I don't see the point: it's essentially saying that we don't have feelings, we just feel we do.

Thus avoiding unnecessary talk of either internal pain qualia or internal pain-illusion qualia or internal pain qualia-illusions. — bongo fury

I don't consider this "unnecessary"; I consider this the most fascinating and difficult issue within consciousness.

If one were to say "Let's put the hard problems of consciousness to one side, as they seem intractable, and focus instead on the more digestible parts" then sure, I'm game. My background is neurology and I'm familiar with the need to be pragmatic, and choose modest progress over none.
I'm just a bit touchy when it comes to consciousness, because Dennett and his adherents don't just put the hard problem to one side; they handwave it. Sadly, handwaving has zero predictive or inferential power. If everyone subscribed to this way of thinking, we'll never make real progress in understanding consciousness.

Worlds of difference. A camera image is either chemical emulsion if it's old-fashioned film, or patterns of pixels if it's digital photography. It's arguably not even 'an image' until it's recognised by an observer; cameras don't recognise images. — Wayfarer

Exactly.
In the case of digital cameras, data is stored in some file format that would likely be meaningless without knowing the format. There's no direct 1:1 correspondence between this data and the real world (especially if it's using lossy compression) because that's not its purpose; the purpose is to store data that when unpacked or whatever will allow us to display images at the required fidelity for the (human) users.

You have absoloutely no reason at all to say the image in your eyes is consciousness and that in the camera is not. — TheMadFool

Again, what image in your eye? As I mentioned upthread, there is lots of reason to doubt that a single image mapped to the world exists anywhere except on the retina*.
A hell of a lot of processing of image components happens within the neurons of the eye, long before it gets to the brain, and those pieces appear to be separately processed on different sections of the visual cortex. Meanwhile, a huge number of neurons feed back to the eye, because what we see is also in large part a function of what our prediction and categorization engines are expecting to see based on the past data.

* And even in the case of the surface of the retina, the cells do not fire synchronously, so even there there is no image corresponding to a single time slice of reality.

6. X becoming aware of Y = the image in the eye = the image on the camera's image sensor — TheMadFool

I always know that someone is about to handwave consciousness, because they focus on awareness.
Awareness is the low-hanging fruit. A good description of awareness, that makes testable predictions, would indeed be incredibly useful, but it would be a foundational step in understanding consciousness.

Instead the tendency with people like Dennett is to throw out some explanation for awareness that they find plausible, and imply that solves the much harder problems of consciousness because reasons.

@Metaphysician Undercover I'm confident at this point that there is nothing I could say, nothing any physicist could say to you, that could ever shake your conviction that our understanding of gravity is flawed.
Pointing out one misconception that you had about gravity or dark energy should have been enough to make you consider whether you need to study this topic further before you accuse others of being wrong. But we've gone through several at this point.

So I think I'll make this one the last, you can have the last word.

Right, our understanding of gravity is very clearly flawed, because all we have is a multitude of different ways of representing the effects of gravity on things, chiefly the movement of things. — Metaphysician Undercover

We were speaking about the mathematical convenience of finding the center of an object's gravity. That's not a different model, that's mathematics.
I could represent a person eating a sandwich to different levels of mathematical complexity. It doesn't mean we don't understand sandwich consumption.

until we separate out the effects of gravity from the effects of spatial expansion, at small scales, we cannot even say that the effects of spatial expansion are not observable at small scales. — Metaphysician Undercover

This isn't how science works.
The theory of gravity explains everything from cannonball motion to planetary orbits. This is brilliant because we can use that understanding to do many useful things on Earth, as well as launch interplanetary missions.

It is not invalidated by models that have yet to prove themselves. We don't know for sure yet whether dark energy exists. And if it exists, maybe it doesn't need any update to the model of gravity at all, since a uniform expansion of space would result in the kind of expansion that we're seeing alongside gravity.

Regardless, we don't throw away what we know for things we're just speculating about.

When gravity is modeled there is no cosmic expansion. When comic expansion is modeled there is no gravity. There is no model of the very real situation in which these two coexist and are active together. — Metaphysician Undercover

There's no specific scientific model of sandcastles and rainstorms either, but we can still run a simulation of what happens when the two combine.

I think you're confused here over two different meanings of the word "model".

We can of course do the calculations for applying the theory of gravity and various scientific models of dark energy expansion at the same time. Comparing such calculations to reality is the basis on which we lean towards certain models over others.

If spatial expansion is real, and occurs everywhere, then there must be a distribution of points everywhere, each being a center, with space expanding from each of those points. Since the points must be distributed everywhere, they would interfere with each other, as the expanding space from one point would bump into the expanding space from another point. — Metaphysician Undercover

Nope. Uniform expansion doesn't involve overlapping points.

Consider ordinary Hubble expansion.
I assume that you would not contest that we see galaxies as redshifted, and the further galaxies are away from us, the more redshifted they are?

If a galaxy 1 megaparsec away from us is travelling at speed N away from us, a galaxy 2 megaparsecs away is travelling at speed 2N and so on. From our perspective, we look like the center of the universe's expansion. But, when we do the maths, we find that it looks like that from the perspective of any galaxy.

You could image these velocities are being due to the fact that space cannot overlap itself.

For galaxies that are close to one another (like the Milky Way and Andromeda) the gravitational force between them is strong enough to pull them together even though new space is being created between them. There is no prohibition on moving through space, even newly minted space.

Actually it took about 3.8 billion years, which is about a third of the age of the universe, for intelligent life to appear here. — magritte

I don't think you need the word "actually" there. I did not suggest otherwise.

But even then, a super-aggressive extraterrestrial culture could have sent out self-replicating probes all over the galaxy just to say hello.

Agreed, and indeed, it doesn't even need a whole culture to be like that, just a small group or even an individual. For a species not much more advanced than us, the energy, materials and AI required to launch a self-replicating probe project may be completely trivial.

According to Fermi, we don't see them because that never happened.

No; Fermi doesn't assert anything. The point of the paradox is to point out what we don't know, and let us try to figure out through discussion and investigation why we don't see evidence of ETs.

I don't accept the brain produces consciousness. The existence of some non-conscious stuff is simply asserted to be the case without a shred of evidence to back it up. — RogueAI

You have this backwards. You are the one that have asserted that neurology cannot produce consciousness. Science OTOH does not need to assert the inverse; though it is a working premise at the moment, given that we can see a correspondence between activation or damage to specific locations in the brain having a predictable effect on consciousness.

How does consciously observing scribbles on a page provide knowledge of unconscious processes? — Harry Hindu

This is a straw man / shift of the goalposts. The point being debated was whether we are consciously aware of unconscious processes. And we are of course; I am aware that my vision performs a lot of processes that are not under my control. This is a very different thing than having an awareness of those specific processes.
It's like the difference between knowing someone took a cookie from the jar and knowing exactly who and what happened.

The temptation to believe in unicorn-illusions that are no less fanciful than unicorns. — bongo fury

You haven't given any argument to think such a thing though, just a pointless digression into the Chinese room.
Let's get back to brass tacks: I'm in agonizing pain. Is this pain an illusion, and if so, what's the difference if the illusion is also painful?

Sure but what's the relevance here? We're talking about whether an entity can itself be under the illusion of having sensations (a nonsensical notion in my view). I don't see the relevance of your point to that discussion.

These different kinds of awareness (of the external and the internal) come together to produce what is, at the end of the day, an image of the world and yourself in it.

How different is this image from that captured by your phone's camera of the world and itself through a mirror? — TheMadFool

I'll stop you there. We don't know.
We don't know to what extent images are formed in the brain; we know that sensory data from the eyes is broken down in several ways in the eye and the brain and there is a lot of ongoing research into whether, and to what extent, these elements are brought together.

The sensation of sight certainly *feels* like just seeing one discrete image, but there are reasons to doubt this.
For one thing, if the brain internally makes an image, what views that image? And does it also need to make an internal image, and so on?

For another, there are various optical illusions that cast doubt on this simple idea. The first that comes to mind are the "impossible colors", where it is possible to see a blue that's darker than black or an orange that's lighter than white. Good luck rendering those images.

The discussion here is about er conscious humans that are supposed to have illusions about their own consciousness. In the case of the Chinese Room (some) conscious humans are under the misconception that a computer is conscious. — Daemon

Agreed.
The Chinese room is about whether we can infer intentionality, let alone subjective states, in another entity based on its behaviour.
This is a very different thing from the idea that some entity can itself be under the illusion of having subjective states.

As I alluded, there's no distinction between being in pain and the illusion of pain if both hurt.

I think the op is right but actually think this is already implicit in how we currently divide politics.
"Conservatism" could be seen as a kind phrasing of regressivism or indeed pessimism.

So, is Human Consciousness a form of Matter? If so, what is the missing link? Whence the Illusion?
Or, is Human Awareness perhaps a form of immaterial, but knowable, Information? — Gnomon

What's the distinction between the illusion of consciousness and consciousness?

Physical pain is unpleasant, and explaining how matter can have unpleasant sensations is the hard part. The "illusion" of being in pain seems to also be unpleasant. So what exactly is calling it an illusion bringing to the table?

I don't think consciousness is immaterial, but I don't think dennett is right either. Explanatory power is the measure of any hypothesis.

We will never encounter or be discovered by another civilization given the short life expectancy of any intelligence and the incomprehensible vastness of space and time. — magritte

It would have to be rare to the point of basically being unique for this alone to work as the solution to the Fermi paradox.

As big as space is, when you crunch the numbers, you find that self replicating probes, generation starships etc could litter the Galaxy in a fraction of the Galaxy's age.
And humans are right on the cusp of achieving this technological level -- a few centuries or even millennia is nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Sure, we could wipe ourselves out totally between now and then.
But if so, we still got pretty close.

A primate species, more violent and tribal than most other primate species (or other near-sapient terrestrial species) got as far as launching crude probes out of its star system.
This suggests to me that if intelligent life is as common as, say, 1 in a billion star systems, distance and civilization lifespan is insufficient to explain the lack of evidence.

How do you know though, that it was really in your best interest to try? — Metaphysician Undercover

Because I know since pushing myself more, I get more opportunities in my career, relationships and general interests and hobbies.

My point is that, being introvert can become part of someone's identity, and be self limiting, the same way that, say, "I'm hopeless with computers" can be.

I like where I am in my life now. My personality is introverted and solitary and I'm not going to kid myself about that. But, just like a naturally chatty person might find advantage in being silent now and then, sometimes it's worth my while to play the social role.

I think there is a danger with these kinds of labels -- I think they can be self limiting.
I always thought of myself as an introvert, and I am, but the problem is it became an excuse to dodge socializing, even in situations where it was really in my best interest to try.

And frankly there can be a smugness to the introvert thing, at least in the west. You listen to conversations, and think to yourself you'd have something more profound to say, rather than all that jibber jabber. Damn this shyness! Rather than putting yourself out there.

It's true that a lot of the time we can be unaware of the full dangers of using a technology, like the ozone layer example.
But when we do know, the issue is human nature, not science.

If there's an issue with science it is the difficulty of advancing human knowledge now. Many experiments are greatly increasing in expense. And the results they reveal are understood by only people with a postgrad education in a close field.
So the general public often prefer to engage in fantasy; pseudoscience, conspiracy theories and misleading pop articles (e.g. eggs cure cancer or whatever)

The problem is, that the rate of expansion which you give is based in conclusions about the relation between gravity and spatial expansion derived from models which employ a center of gravity. — Metaphysician Undercover

You have said that our understanding of gravity is flawed.
The theory of gravity itself does not include the suggestion that we necessarily find the center of gravity.

However, finding the center of gravity is a useful mathematical simplification, and has been proven to result in accurate predictions.

Cosmologists really do not know the rate of expansion, or how it might vary from one place to another, or vary from small scale to large scale, or even the simple issue of how gravity effects it, or how expansion effects gravity.. — Metaphysician Undercover

You have this backwards.
Dark energy is a phenomenon we have discovered on the largest cosmological scales. At those scales it appears proportional to distance.
We assume this force operates on all scales, and when we do the calculations, we find that if the force is proportional to distance then it should be immeasurably small on earthly scales, and completely cancelled out by gravity within our galaxy.

So it's not that we need to prove that cosmic expansion does not have significant effects on smaller scales. It's that the null hypothesis is that there are no such effects until we see them.

The fact is that spatial expansion is very real, and if its effects at a small scale are just incorporated into the model of gravity as one representation, called gravity, then this model is flawed, in the sense of incorrect. It is incorrect because it does not separate out the effects of expansion from the effects of gravity. — Metaphysician Undercover

No model of gravity includes cosmic expansion. This is just flat out wrong.

I don't understand why you would describe something faster than the speed of light as "slowly pushed apart". — Metaphysician Undercover

Because I am speaking relative to the distances between the objects.
We're talking about galaxies millions or billions of light years apart.

I'll start with your last set of questions first, as it's the most concrete point. I'll get to the rest when I get time.

quote="Metaphysician Undercover;476559"]We're discussing the calculations you insisted would be the same.[/quote]

No, I'm not insisting they are the same. I am explaining the theory of dark energy / cosmic expansion since you have got basic details about the theory wrong even as you're rejecting it.

Why do the numbers which account for spatial expansion not show up in calculations concerning measured distances inside the galaxy, inside my body, and inside my body's nuclei (whatever that means), yet they do show up in calculations concerning measured distances external to galaxies? — Metaphysician Undercover

For two reasons.
Firstly, the expansion is approximately 6 km per megaparsec per second. Scaling that to the human body, say, we get an expansion rate of around one ten thousandth of the width of a proton... This doesn't make a huge difference when calculating eg the gravitational force on a human on Earth.

And secondly, on scales up to anything intra-galactic, the expansion is not enough to overcome gravity. The Stars in our galaxy are locked in a spiral due to the powerful gravity of Sagittarius A and the forces between the Stars. Spatial expansion is just too slow to put stars on an escape trajectory, so they stay locked in their orbits.
But, since gravity falls off with the square of distance, over vast scales, galaxies can be slowly pushed apart by this expansion.

I did that already, very clearly and concisely, the utilization of the concept of a center of gravity, or the center of mass. — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, please publish your data and receive your Nobel prize. If you're right and physicists are wrong, that's a big deal and you should reap those rewards.

OK, so you say that whether or not the understanding which science gives us is flawed, is determined by its ability to predict, but the capacity to predict is not a goal of science. That is a great example of inconsistency, the success or failure of science in relation to understanding, is determined by the capacity to predict, but this in not its goal. — Metaphysician Undercover

No inconsistency. We're simply talking about means versus ends here.
I might test whether my car's tires are inflated by kicking them. Is my goal to kick tires?

Flawed does not imply incorrect. It implies imperfect, and incomplete is a type of imperfection. "Incorrect" requires a judgement of right or wrong, and a judgement of imperfect has no such implication. — Metaphysician Undercover

We could argue over the semantics, but let's just say that within the context of scientific models, saying a model is "flawed" would absolutely be understood as meaning the model makes incorrect predictions or inferences in some context.
If flawed simply meant incomplete then, like I say, we could argue all of science is flawed because we can never know any model is complete. It would be, at best, a meaningless word, and at worst horribly misleading.

You'll know that the concept of "spatial expansion" only applies to space between objects, not the space within objects — Metaphysician Undercover

This is incorrect.
All of space appears to be expanding, according to our best model. Inside the galaxy, outside the galaxy, inside your body, inside your body's nuclei.

The reason we don't see this expansion is because it is small over these scales (even over the scale of the galaxy), and swamped by the gravitational force that is binding these various things together.

Are we done here? Was all of this based on this common misconception?

When did science relinquish logic from its tool box, opting to grandstand predictive power as the only principle for judgement? — Metaphysician Undercover

See my reply to jgill above.
Science hasn't relinquished anything; it's an incredibly useful methodology that we are choosing to continue to use.

When it became apparent that lightening strikes were not Zeus hurling thunderbolts from Olympus. — jgill

Quite.

It's not that science turned away from logic (whatever that would mean).

It's that science comes with a toolbox for gaining an understanding of our environment. This toolbox includes testing ideas, based on predictive or inferential power, and it has been incredibly successful. As evidenced by me being able to press buttons in front of me and milliseconds later anyone in the world can read and respond to my comments.

If anyone wishes to suggest science should be using a different methodology then step 1 is showing what this alternative method allows us to accomplish.

Black is the qualia that first made me realize that color is not "out there".
But some people still don't quite get it, so you might find a better example is certain composite colors like magenta. There is no single wavelength of EM radiation that will make a human see magenta; the right cone activation only happens from two different wavelengths hitting that patch of the retina. But, we know those photons don't actually "mix", or interact with each other. So how can magenta be "out there"?

No what I meant was your allusions to things like your definitions of action and living matter, for which we're supposed to go and find from other discussions.

I said it as a claim of philosophical understanding. Philosophers are allowed to judge scientific principles, in case you didn't know this. — Metaphysician Undercover

But you're making a specific claim about an area of physics. It's like if I claimed that in bowling 3 strikes in a row is called an Emu, and when someone corrects me I say "Ah but this is my philosophical understanding".
If you wish to claim that our understanding of gravity is flawed, it's on you to show how. And an explanation of the science underpinning our understanding of gravity is absolutely relevant.

And if you posit prediction as the highest goal for science — Metaphysician Undercover

...which of course I didn't. I said that prediction and inference is the measure (or test) of how much we understand something.
It's a critical part (the critical part) of the scientific method, but not a goal in itself.

I'm sure you respect the fact that our understanding of gravity is less than perfect, or as you imply, not "complete". Why are you incapable of proceeding logically form this premise, to conclude therefore that our understanding is "flawed". — Metaphysician Undercover

Because "flawed" and "incomplete" are not synoyms.
Our knowledge of essentially everything is incomplete. It's a bit of a running joke that all scientific papers include the line "more research is needed".

Flawed OTOH implies incorrect. If we say all our knowledge is incorrect, that would be worse than knowing nothing whatsoever. If that's the case, how come we can make jet planes and computers and cathedrals?

The principal flaw, which sticks out like a sore thumb to me, is the practice of modeling a physical object as having a center of gravity. — Metaphysician Undercover

If you prefer, we could model objects as being the composite effect of countless trillions of subatomic particles (and indeed, throw out the idea of objects larger than subatomic particles existing at all, and do the calculations on all particles independently). But we know that when we do calculations like that, the answer comes out essentially the same as if we had modelled it as objects with centers of gravity.
But sure, knock yourself out; do the calculations the slow way if you prefer. If you ever find your calculations are non-negligibly more accurate than physicists', then congratulations on your Nobel prize.

On what principles ought we base "better" and "worse" on, in relation to levels of understanding? I think that we ought base our levels of better and worse on principles of truth and falsity. — Metaphysician Undercover

We don't know whether a non-falsified model is true or not.
The closest we can get is to gain confidence in models based on their predictive power.

I would agree with you that truth would be better than predictive power, but sadly this universe does not feature a magic scorecard that tells us when we got something right. Predictive power is the best we have.

I actually like attempts to define free will, if only because they might end the nonsensical "Do we have free will?" debate, which, in my view, is 99% an issue with the definition itself.
That is to say, the popular idea of free will is self-inconsistent, and can't exist in any reality. Its non-existence tells us nothing about ourselves and our own reality. IMO

However I doubt that you will get many responses while the argument is like a wiki; not merely linking to definitions elsewhere, but linking to other threads where who knows how much needs to be read until a term is finally defined (is reading the OPs sufficient)?

Personally I would prefer a long essay if it is at least self-contained.

In philosophy we do not judge an understanding by the ability to make predictions. — Metaphysician Undercover

You said that our understanding of gravity is "flawed" and "primitive". This is a claim of scientific understanding, not philosophy.

Thales predicted a solar eclipse, when they did not even know back then, that the earth revolves around the sun. The capacity to predict is developed by applying mathematics to repetitive patterns which may have slight variations. — Metaphysician Undercover

Firstly, finding repetitive patterns is one way of making predictions. In science we more commonly make detailed models of systems in the environment.

But secondly, yes, if someone can predict the occurrence of an eclipse then they do have an understanding. Thales understanding was not as complete as ours...assuming the story is true (and it is disputed) he would not have been able to predict eclipses many years in the future, or on what area of the earth totality would be visible, how long it would last in different places etc etc.
But yes, the measure of understanding is correct predictions and inferences; if you can make crude predictions then you understand the phenomenon on at least one level.
It's not all-or-nothing in science, you can have levels of understanding.

That's what I'm arguing against, on the basis that physics itself is currently so open-ended that it can't be considered 'closed' in the sense that 'the causal closure' argument wants to appeal to. Sure, you can keep changing the definition of what constitutes 'the physical', but then, how is that 'closed'? It amounts to unending ad hoc extensions to your basic theory. — Wayfarer

Yeah, I could agree with this. Defining physicalism as "closed" might well be misleading and pointless (incidentally, I neither call myself a physicalist nor materialist as I think they make unnecessary claims).

But again let's be clear that these philosophies grew mostly out of a rejection of things like mysticism.

So, if it were the case that, say, we found that prayer works and then scientists and philosophers were to declare that prayer is now physics, then the distinction between these philosophies has been lost, and the concept of "physical" is open-ended enough as to be meaningless.

But that's very different from what's happening with dark matter. Dark matter is something predicted by our existing physical models and which appears to behave as a form of matter, nothing particularly magical about it.

The idea that our understanding of gravity is flawed ought to be taken as a given, rather than rejected and argued against. The commonly employed representation of a center of mass, or center of gravity is so ridiculously primitive, and cannot provide anything close to a real representation of the relationship between a massive object and its gravity. — Metaphysician Undercover

I can't emphasize enough, that the way we measure our level of understanding is in our power to make good predictions and inferences.

IMO Dennett's idea of consciousness is just a bunch of handwaves, and doesn't actually allow us to infer anything useful: it's not a real understanding.

But gravity OTOH, is clearly something humans understand very well. We can predict where the solar system planets will be in thousands of years time, or the return of a comet centuries from now. We can use slingshot effects to send our spaceships out on desired trajectories. We can create elaborate physical structures on earth, and calculate all the forces involved. And we can run models on things like galaxies merging and see that such events in the universe validate our models.

If this is not a "real representation", you'll have to explain to me what you mean by that concept.