Well this is a shame as we seemed to be in agreement on the comment thread above. I didn’t even pick you up of the fact that none of the papers you linked were evidence for panpsychism, just exploring where consciousness is located in the brain and potential mathematical frameworks for it.
bsit wasn’t making coherent arguments, they were putting out unfalsifiable theories and then linking things like the Hard Problem of Consciousness which doesn’t support their point, it’s just an ongoing problem yet to be explained by science. You mentioned yourself that one possible way to do this would be via further research into IIT.
I see no paths to evidence for idealism myself and asked for some but received none. So yes, I’m afraid I will dismiss a theory which doesn’t make any predictions and can’t be proved/disproved. Doubly so if the advocate starts comparing my scientific understanding to the Bible then starts abusing logical fallacies.
To address your extremely charitable interpretation… What does matter being an interpretation of consciousness even mean to you? To me it would mean that we are some kind of Boltzmann brain imagining the universe into existence. If that’s the the case then it’s basically solipsism which bsit flat out rejected multiple times.
I didn’t use the word anti-intellectual but if we can’t agree on definitions and the fundamental axioms of a shared reality then we really are in Cloud Cuckoo Land.
Well this is a shame as we seemed to be in agreement on the comment thread above.
Hey I’m still all for the good vibes here. We’re still on the same page, I shouldn’t have phrased it like that. I’m just saying that our understanding of what Bsit was saying differs. I would also like to add, for the sake of goodwill, that I’ve really enjoyed chatting with you here.
I didn’t even pick you up of the fact that none of the papers you linked were evidence for panpsychism, just exploring where consciousness is located in the brain and potential mathematical frameworks for it.
I know, I wasn’t trying to provide evidence for panpsychism, I was just trying to show that IIT makes predictions (something that the guy I was talking to was denying).
I see no paths to evidence for idealism myself and asked for some but received none. So yes, I’m afraid I will dismiss a theory which doesn’t make any predictions and can’t be proved/disproved.
This is I think where the fundamental disagreement lies. Bsit was making a philosophical claim, so the apparatus of science doesn’t really work here. We can’t really prove or disprove the idea using experiments, we can only discuss how coherent the idea is. In this sense philosophy is more like math than science.
To address your extremely charitable interpretation… What does matter being an interpretation of consciousness even mean to you? To me it would mean that we are some kind of Boltzmann brain imagining the universe into existence.
I think this is the fundamental issue. It’s easy to miss, but you’re framing of it is still implicitly putting matter first by assuming that, in order for there to be experience, there would need to be Boltzmann brains. But in idealism, everything, even Boltzmann brains, would be happening within consciousness. Consciousness comes first, brains come second (the two happen to be coupled, but even this experience of them being coupled is happening within consciousness). Consciousness is like a giant container that contains everything else within it. Consciousness is like a canvas, and the material world is like the paint on that canvas. We construct stories about how the changes in the brain cause changes in consciousness, and those stories are true (there are clear correlations here), but they themselves are happening on the canvas.
A good way to think of this is like 3D space, or extension. Except for a point, every shape is within space (ie it has length, width, height) and is within space. It doesn’t make sense to ask which of the shapes cause space (is it the spheres? the trapezoids?), or which shapes come before space (maybe its the cubes), because shapes by necessity cannot exist unless they are immersed in space. In the same way, under idealism it wouldn’t make sense to think about Boltzmann brains (or any kind of brains) causing experience; that would be like asking which shapes cause space. Instead, consciousness is just the dimension brains and all other physical objects exist within. They cannot exist without consciousness in the same way that shapes cannot exist without three-dimensional space.
This is I think where the fundamental disagreement lies. Bsit was making a philosophical claim, so the apparatus of science doesn’t really work here. We can’t really prove or disprove the idea using experiments, we can only discuss how coherent the idea is. In this sense philosophy is more like math than science.
And this is why I mentioned it feels like a waste of time. Anyone can claim anything which can’t be proved or disproved so what’s the point in discussing it? I could come up with any old nonsense about the origins of the universe as many religions have done in the past and we could argue for centuries about it getting nowhere.
Consciousness is like a giant container that contains everything else within it. Consciousness is like a canvas, and the material world is like the paint on that canvas. We construct stories about how the changes in the brain cause changes in consciousness, and those stories are true (there are clear correlations here), but they themselves are happening on the canvas.
So I addressed this in an admittedly rather tongue-in-cheek way with my universe-is-a-brain comment. You are stretching the definition consciousness to mean the universe itself, widening an already poorly defined concept in order to fit the idealist theory.
When most people say “consciousness,” they mean the subjective inner experience of a biological organism which simply doesn’t fit your definition.
If we replace the term “consciousness” with “the universe” in bsit’s very first sentence it makes a lot more sense, but it’s also not controversial in the slightest:
“The universe is fundamental to reality.”
And this is why I mentioned it feels like a waste of time. Anyone can claim anything which can’t be proved or disproved so what’s the point in discussing it? I could come up with any old nonsense about the origins of the universe as many religions have done in the past and we could argue for centuries about it getting nowhere.
This again comes back to the pattern matching I was talking about. You associate something not being science with it being some psudoscientific nonesense. But that’s not always the case. Think of math: math is not science. There are no experiments you can conduct to prove that 10 x 10 is 100, for example; that’s just something you have to reason through yourself. Does that mean math is a crock of shit? Clearly not.
Philosophy is also like this. It’s not science, but it’s more rigorous then some woowoo speculations. Because philosophy is not just coming up with random ideas and speculations; it is a practice in testing the logical coherence of ideas. When I said that it was more like math than science in that sense, I wasn’t joking. Professional philosophers often use a specific type of algebra to manipulate ideas symbolically, allowing them to formally tease out their logical implications. We don’t need to go that far, but you get the picture. There are a lot of constraints you have to work with in order for ideas to succeed in this domain.
Even if you don’t like doing philosophy, you’ll have to do it implicitly. This was one of the points Bsit was making. Assuming a materialist worldview is taking a philosophical stance on the nature of the world. It is a mistake to treat materialism is a scientific theory; it isn’t. Think of it: what’s an experiment you could do to decide between materialism and idealism? It sounds quite plausible that no such experiment exists.
So then why do many people associate materialism with scientific thinking? Because it is a background assumption of science. And background assumptions like this are the domain of philosophy. If you don’t want to question these background assumptions, then fine. But just know that unquestioned assumptions are often a dangerous thing, especially at the foundational level. We don’t want to be building up from a shaky foundation.
So I addressed this in an admittedly rather tongue-in-cheek way with my universe-is-a-brain comment. You are stretching the definition consciousness to mean the universe itself, widening an already poorly defined concept in order to fit the idealist theory.
I am not stretching the definition, and I’m not saying it’s the universe itself.
When most people say “consciousness,” they mean the subjective inner experience of a biological organism which simply doesn’t fit your definition.
Even in idealism it is still a subjective inner experience. Except when you have a subjective inner experience of a biological organism that is how the organism exists. It is not the organism that gives rise to the experience, but the experience that gives rise to the organism. In idealism, consciousness and all of your other definitions are left intact, except the order of operations is reversed like this.
It might be helpful to think of this in terms of perception. What comes first: your consciousness, or your perception of the colour red? Well, your consciousness comes first, because your perception is a state of consciousness. In idealism, it would be like this not just for your perception of a thing, but for the thing itself. So, say a crowd has the perception of a big rock. The rock would exist because the crowd is there to have that perception or the potential for that perception.
You might think this makes no sense because the organism, a physical object, comes first, before the perception. So clearly physical objects cause these perceptions? But idealism would reject that claim. Because it would reverse the order of operations, as discussed above: an organism, even your own body, is just another object that in perception, so that organism exists due to those perceptions.
Note that this is not the same thing as solipsism. Idealism is not saying your personal, individual perceptions are causing the world into existence. Assuming a nontheistic reading of idealism, it would instead be the collective perceptions of many agents working in unison that bring the world into existence.
You argue that philosophy is like maths because it is rigorous, uses logic, and isn’t empirical science. However, mathematics operates on universally agreed upon axioms. Because the axioms are agreed upon, the proofs are definitive. In philosophy, the axioms are exactly what is being debated so it isn’t as rigorous.
Formal logic only guarantees that if the premises are true, the conclusion logically follows, it doesn’t guarantee that the premises are actually true in reality.
I don’t know why you keep citing “pattern matching” here, it’s the wrong term to use. My complaint that “Anyone can claim anything which can’t be proved” is a complaint about soundness. You can use flawless first-order logic to mathematically manipulate absolute nonsense, but it doesn’t make the conclusion sound.
It is a mistake to treat materialism as a scientific theory… it is a background assumption of science.
I’m not doing that, I’m just citing more evidence for it being the case and employing Occam’s Razor.
If we look at the cosmological timeline, the universe existed for billions of years before biological organisms evolved. If reality requires the “collective perception of many agents” to exist, how did the universe exist before agents evolved to perceive it? You fail to explain how non-physical “agents” can exist prior to the physical organisms they supposedly conjure into reality.
The rock would exist because the crowd is there to have that perception or the potential for that perception.
If a rock exists in the dark on an uninhabited planet purely because it has the potential to be perceived if someone were there, then the rock possesses objective, independent existence outside of any actual observer’s mind. This directly contradicts your earlier premise that experience/perception must come first.
I am not stretching the definition… In idealism, consciousness and all of your other definitions are left intact, except the order of operations is reversed like this.
This is literally changing the definition. In biology and common parlance, consciousness is defined as an emergent property or function of a biological brain. By redefining it as an independent, pre-existing, reality-generating force that creates biology, you have entirely changed the ontological nature of the word.
I appreciate philosophy has value, helps us form hypotheses and that we all hold unquestioned background assumptions but I’m afraid you’re not going to be able to convince me of idealism without strong evidence. This argument has been going on for centuries with no resolution so we might as well agree to disagree. At the end of the day, it’s empirical science vs. untestable speculation.
In philosophy, the axioms are exactly what is being debated so it isn’t as rigorous.
That’s not true. There are rules of logical inference that can be taken as axioms. These axioms are the reason why, as you stated, if all the premises in a valid argument are true then the conclusion must also be true.
Formal logic only guarantees that if the premises are true, the conclusion logically follows, it doesn’t guarantee that the premises are actually true in reality.
Of course. But this still gives us a lot to talk about. If someone makes an argument, they must defend the premises. If you disagree with the conclusion of the argument, you must find a flaw with one of the premises, etc
This is literally changing the definition. In biology and common parlance, consciousness is defined as an emergent property or function of a biological brain
This is not the definition, so I’m no changing anything. In all my years of studying this topic in an academic setting, the definition I have always come across is something like “subjective inner experience; the feeling of what it’s like to be something.” What you are doing here is you are including your preferred ontology into the very definition of consciousness itself, so when someone disagrees you claim they are wrong by definition. Its a sneaky move but its not going to work here
but I’m afraid you’re not going to be able to convince me of idealism without strong evidence
Can you convince me of materialism with some strong evidence? You can’t. And don’t say that I’m reversing the burden of proof here, because that misses the point: namely, that these are not ideas that you necessarily can prove using evidence. They are primarily philosophical/metaphysical views, rather than scientific hypotheses, and so they must be evaluated using different tools.
If we look at the cosmological timeline, the universe existed for billions of years before biological organisms evolved. If reality requires the “collective perception of many agents” to exist, how did the universe exist before agents evolved to perceive it?
This is a good critique, because it addresses the logical coherence of the views being discussed here. It is, in other words, a philosophical critique.
Recall that in my first message about this that I wasn’t trying to defend idealism, I was just saying that Bsit and you were trying to talk past one another. That was because his defense was philosophical and your rebuttal was scientific. But now there has been a shift, and your rebuttals are philosophical in nature. So now everyone seems to be on the same page.
This is exactly where I was trying to get things, so as far as I’m concerned my work is done here.
Well this is a shame as we seemed to be in agreement on the comment thread above. I didn’t even pick you up of the fact that none of the papers you linked were evidence for panpsychism, just exploring where consciousness is located in the brain and potential mathematical frameworks for it.
bsit wasn’t making coherent arguments, they were putting out unfalsifiable theories and then linking things like the Hard Problem of Consciousness which doesn’t support their point, it’s just an ongoing problem yet to be explained by science. You mentioned yourself that one possible way to do this would be via further research into IIT.
I see no paths to evidence for idealism myself and asked for some but received none. So yes, I’m afraid I will dismiss a theory which doesn’t make any predictions and can’t be proved/disproved. Doubly so if the advocate starts comparing my scientific understanding to the Bible then starts abusing logical fallacies.
To address your extremely charitable interpretation… What does matter being an interpretation of consciousness even mean to you? To me it would mean that we are some kind of Boltzmann brain imagining the universe into existence. If that’s the the case then it’s basically solipsism which bsit flat out rejected multiple times.
I didn’t use the word anti-intellectual but if we can’t agree on definitions and the fundamental axioms of a shared reality then we really are in Cloud Cuckoo Land.
Hey I’m still all for the good vibes here. We’re still on the same page, I shouldn’t have phrased it like that. I’m just saying that our understanding of what Bsit was saying differs. I would also like to add, for the sake of goodwill, that I’ve really enjoyed chatting with you here.
I know, I wasn’t trying to provide evidence for panpsychism, I was just trying to show that IIT makes predictions (something that the guy I was talking to was denying).
This is I think where the fundamental disagreement lies. Bsit was making a philosophical claim, so the apparatus of science doesn’t really work here. We can’t really prove or disprove the idea using experiments, we can only discuss how coherent the idea is. In this sense philosophy is more like math than science.
I think this is the fundamental issue. It’s easy to miss, but you’re framing of it is still implicitly putting matter first by assuming that, in order for there to be experience, there would need to be Boltzmann brains. But in idealism, everything, even Boltzmann brains, would be happening within consciousness. Consciousness comes first, brains come second (the two happen to be coupled, but even this experience of them being coupled is happening within consciousness). Consciousness is like a giant container that contains everything else within it. Consciousness is like a canvas, and the material world is like the paint on that canvas. We construct stories about how the changes in the brain cause changes in consciousness, and those stories are true (there are clear correlations here), but they themselves are happening on the canvas.
A good way to think of this is like 3D space, or extension. Except for a point, every shape is within space (ie it has length, width, height) and is within space. It doesn’t make sense to ask which of the shapes cause space (is it the spheres? the trapezoids?), or which shapes come before space (maybe its the cubes), because shapes by necessity cannot exist unless they are immersed in space. In the same way, under idealism it wouldn’t make sense to think about Boltzmann brains (or any kind of brains) causing experience; that would be like asking which shapes cause space. Instead, consciousness is just the dimension brains and all other physical objects exist within. They cannot exist without consciousness in the same way that shapes cannot exist without three-dimensional space.
And this is why I mentioned it feels like a waste of time. Anyone can claim anything which can’t be proved or disproved so what’s the point in discussing it? I could come up with any old nonsense about the origins of the universe as many religions have done in the past and we could argue for centuries about it getting nowhere.
So I addressed this in an admittedly rather tongue-in-cheek way with my universe-is-a-brain comment. You are stretching the definition consciousness to mean the universe itself, widening an already poorly defined concept in order to fit the idealist theory.
When most people say “consciousness,” they mean the subjective inner experience of a biological organism which simply doesn’t fit your definition.
If we replace the term “consciousness” with “the universe” in bsit’s very first sentence it makes a lot more sense, but it’s also not controversial in the slightest: “The universe is fundamental to reality.”
This again comes back to the pattern matching I was talking about. You associate something not being science with it being some psudoscientific nonesense. But that’s not always the case. Think of math: math is not science. There are no experiments you can conduct to prove that 10 x 10 is 100, for example; that’s just something you have to reason through yourself. Does that mean math is a crock of shit? Clearly not.
Philosophy is also like this. It’s not science, but it’s more rigorous then some woowoo speculations. Because philosophy is not just coming up with random ideas and speculations; it is a practice in testing the logical coherence of ideas. When I said that it was more like math than science in that sense, I wasn’t joking. Professional philosophers often use a specific type of algebra to manipulate ideas symbolically, allowing them to formally tease out their logical implications. We don’t need to go that far, but you get the picture. There are a lot of constraints you have to work with in order for ideas to succeed in this domain.
Even if you don’t like doing philosophy, you’ll have to do it implicitly. This was one of the points Bsit was making. Assuming a materialist worldview is taking a philosophical stance on the nature of the world. It is a mistake to treat materialism is a scientific theory; it isn’t. Think of it: what’s an experiment you could do to decide between materialism and idealism? It sounds quite plausible that no such experiment exists.
So then why do many people associate materialism with scientific thinking? Because it is a background assumption of science. And background assumptions like this are the domain of philosophy. If you don’t want to question these background assumptions, then fine. But just know that unquestioned assumptions are often a dangerous thing, especially at the foundational level. We don’t want to be building up from a shaky foundation.
I am not stretching the definition, and I’m not saying it’s the universe itself.
Even in idealism it is still a subjective inner experience. Except when you have a subjective inner experience of a biological organism that is how the organism exists. It is not the organism that gives rise to the experience, but the experience that gives rise to the organism. In idealism, consciousness and all of your other definitions are left intact, except the order of operations is reversed like this.
It might be helpful to think of this in terms of perception. What comes first: your consciousness, or your perception of the colour red? Well, your consciousness comes first, because your perception is a state of consciousness. In idealism, it would be like this not just for your perception of a thing, but for the thing itself. So, say a crowd has the perception of a big rock. The rock would exist because the crowd is there to have that perception or the potential for that perception.
You might think this makes no sense because the organism, a physical object, comes first, before the perception. So clearly physical objects cause these perceptions? But idealism would reject that claim. Because it would reverse the order of operations, as discussed above: an organism, even your own body, is just another object that in perception, so that organism exists due to those perceptions.
Note that this is not the same thing as solipsism. Idealism is not saying your personal, individual perceptions are causing the world into existence. Assuming a nontheistic reading of idealism, it would instead be the collective perceptions of many agents working in unison that bring the world into existence.
I hope that makes sense.
You argue that philosophy is like maths because it is rigorous, uses logic, and isn’t empirical science. However, mathematics operates on universally agreed upon axioms. Because the axioms are agreed upon, the proofs are definitive. In philosophy, the axioms are exactly what is being debated so it isn’t as rigorous.
Formal logic only guarantees that if the premises are true, the conclusion logically follows, it doesn’t guarantee that the premises are actually true in reality.
I don’t know why you keep citing “pattern matching” here, it’s the wrong term to use. My complaint that “Anyone can claim anything which can’t be proved” is a complaint about soundness. You can use flawless first-order logic to mathematically manipulate absolute nonsense, but it doesn’t make the conclusion sound.
I’m not doing that, I’m just citing more evidence for it being the case and employing Occam’s Razor.
If we look at the cosmological timeline, the universe existed for billions of years before biological organisms evolved. If reality requires the “collective perception of many agents” to exist, how did the universe exist before agents evolved to perceive it? You fail to explain how non-physical “agents” can exist prior to the physical organisms they supposedly conjure into reality.
If a rock exists in the dark on an uninhabited planet purely because it has the potential to be perceived if someone were there, then the rock possesses objective, independent existence outside of any actual observer’s mind. This directly contradicts your earlier premise that experience/perception must come first.
This is literally changing the definition. In biology and common parlance, consciousness is defined as an emergent property or function of a biological brain. By redefining it as an independent, pre-existing, reality-generating force that creates biology, you have entirely changed the ontological nature of the word.
I appreciate philosophy has value, helps us form hypotheses and that we all hold unquestioned background assumptions but I’m afraid you’re not going to be able to convince me of idealism without strong evidence. This argument has been going on for centuries with no resolution so we might as well agree to disagree. At the end of the day, it’s empirical science vs. untestable speculation.
That’s not true. There are rules of logical inference that can be taken as axioms. These axioms are the reason why, as you stated, if all the premises in a valid argument are true then the conclusion must also be true.
Of course. But this still gives us a lot to talk about. If someone makes an argument, they must defend the premises. If you disagree with the conclusion of the argument, you must find a flaw with one of the premises, etc
This is not the definition, so I’m no changing anything. In all my years of studying this topic in an academic setting, the definition I have always come across is something like “subjective inner experience; the feeling of what it’s like to be something.” What you are doing here is you are including your preferred ontology into the very definition of consciousness itself, so when someone disagrees you claim they are wrong by definition. Its a sneaky move but its not going to work here
Can you convince me of materialism with some strong evidence? You can’t. And don’t say that I’m reversing the burden of proof here, because that misses the point: namely, that these are not ideas that you necessarily can prove using evidence. They are primarily philosophical/metaphysical views, rather than scientific hypotheses, and so they must be evaluated using different tools.
This is a good critique, because it addresses the logical coherence of the views being discussed here. It is, in other words, a philosophical critique.
Recall that in my first message about this that I wasn’t trying to defend idealism, I was just saying that Bsit and you were trying to talk past one another. That was because his defense was philosophical and your rebuttal was scientific. But now there has been a shift, and your rebuttals are philosophical in nature. So now everyone seems to be on the same page.
This is exactly where I was trying to get things, so as far as I’m concerned my work is done here.