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Friday afternoon culture war thread? No formal education outside STEM? Alright, let's solve philosophy by messily banging out a manifesto in under an hour and just paste it out there like I know what I'm talking about:
Searle's Chinese Room is no more interesting than p-zombies - both are empty questions. If you are definitionally not allowed to observe an empirical difference then the answer to the question is mu, as both answers yield exactly identical predictions about the future and so are the same answer.
Searle is assuming "understanding" means something functionally undetectable - he's smuggling in that there's "something more" to what we do, as all phenomenalists do. Even if we could open the brain and look inside to 99% accuracy, they'd continue to chase their mystery into the gaps. Their position is fundamentally reliant on there being an unknown element in play. If we had 100% certain explanation of exactly how the brain does what it does, there'd be no mysterious phenomenon left without explicitly postulating a non-physical ingredient.
Same story for Mary's room. If Mary has 100% understanding, then it's not possible for her to learn something new on seeing the apple, as she could just simulate the experience ahead of time. 100% means 0% remains, and anything else isn't part of the brain's physical system. The experiment's "insight" presupposes consciousness is not an operation of the brain.
I'll go one further. Every avenue that purports to explore the "hard problem" of consciousness must necessarily smuggle in dualism in just the same way. Either the mind is deterministically/probabilistically generated by the physical processes in play within the brain (or perhaps elsewhere in the body if your theories are exotic enough) or it is not. ANYTHING the mind "experiences" must come from these physical phenomena, unless there is some other thing not contained in the set of physics which is causing them.
To accept any theist view, one has to find some element of the world that cannot be explained by physics, else parsimony demands we not introduce the relevant deity. If one has such an element in mind, it belongs to a separate magisterium and so the dual layers of the universe themselves are quite an expensive answer to whatever question it was you couldn't answer. Further then, any specific description of or proscriptions from other magisteria cruelly desecrate poor parsimony's corpse. I simply can't see how any rigorous thinker can go this way.
A common objection might be that math or logic is not physical, but mathematics and logic can be instantiated in the physical - one can count apples, one can apply inputs to silicon logic gates. Let me clarify a bit. I am not saying that math and logic are physical. I am saying that despite the apparent ontological cost of introducing new categories, that cost is in reality dramatically reduced because as we can see by instantiating them physically they are not separate magisteria but manipulations of this one.
"Free will" is a popular card in the theist deck beyond the necessary, saying that God has granted us this. Agency is a useful fiction, and as we cannot map the causal web anywhere near deep enough to fully apply determinism to the actions of conscious beings, we are (for now?) free to let ignorance be bliss. But how could it be any other way? For matter to "choose" to behave differently than physics requires it to would be going right back to dualism again, once again importing that very same separate magisterium - and this time not only in the creative capacity, but in a 'has observable physical consequences' way.
Philosophy's mostly hokum. Essentially everything comes down to empiricism and consequentialism, but remembering that unknown and unknowable are distinct classes and keep in mind that Chesterton's Fence works everywhere. That is, assume an external reality exists (because without one everything falls apart and you can't get anywhere), find out what you can, be humble about what you can't or haven't yet, and make decisions based on the known consequences and not-known-to-be-impossible possibilities for which those Fences help you choose in the absence of your own data. To those who cry out that virtue ethics or deontology or any other framework are needed, hogwash! Prioritizing a virtue above and beyond its apparent consequences is really just going up a level and looking at second/third/fourth/etc order effects - sure, in this instance a bad thing happens, but because Virtue is preserved later more goodness happens with higher total value. It's all just fancy window dressing over consequentialist reasoning. Categorical imperatives are just nth order effects with very high n. Being the kind of person who does/doesn't do the thing reinforces other practices of doing/not doing the thing and sets the example that people should/shouldn't do the thing and etc. You're free to use these heuristics, because you can't fully map the causal web, but don't pretend they're some fundamental truths.
Justice (and many of its brethren concepts) are n-th order effect based feedback mechanisms that society instantiates to adjust the behavior of its constituents.
"What is good" is a category error and the values that congnitive systems overlay onto the world are simply chosen axioms (which consequentialism helps pursue the satisfaction of).
This is Physical System Realism.
To leverage PSR and eliminate even more persistent questions: the "self" is the shared boundary of several cooperating systems - a mind, a body, a genetic sequence, perhaps a few more - where they all align in roughly the same place: where their direct and immediate physical instantiation and control end. There are quite a few known pathologies of confused identity that map precisely to these boundaries falling out of sync. In some cases, when a person is particularly invested in the fate of a social organism they are a part of and very strongly feel "part of a community" their identity model may well include that (and this may again explain some pathologies).
Art fulfills axioms related to happiness and wellbeing through satisfying aesthetic preference or providing new heuristics (subtextual messages). Ideas are potential memes or infiltrators or viruses of the cognitive system, but upon examination most are benign. The true threat category is those that change axioms, but then we must allow for the possibility that if the axioms are ranked, a meme may "beneficially" change lower axioms in service of optimizing the higher.
Put very plainly, "believe what is true, act on what is helpful" - which just sounds like common sense. You only have to take it seriously.
Since everything non-quantum is fully clockwork without free will, can we clean up quantum mechanics? Superdeterminism sounds pretty cheap. What extra cost does it impose on us, besides needing to assume the expansion of the universe (which we already accept) began at a single point rather than beginning from some non-single-point state?
None. So accept it. Quantum randomness is just what the current state looks like from within our light cone. With a (much) longer cone, we'd see the causality. It's all just frames of reference. From within our light cone quantum results are indistinguishable from the probabilistic models, and so since we can't escape our light cone there's no reason to worry about predetermination. Universally predetermined, locally random.
One last stroke. Surprise is your heuristic for detecting that you need to update your model. If you can see the fixed future, you cannot be surprised. With omniscience's inability to be surprised and the fixed future, the very idea of a deity "touching" the universe becomes impossible. If any deity even could exist, it would be solely one that set the initial condition of the universe and hit go - an entity elsewhere running a simulation that is our universe. Theism is now isomorphic to the simulation hypothesis. Because this generates infinite regress, parsimony demands we remove it. There can be no god.
Philosphy's pretty easy - you just can't give up when something feels cold. Friend, the universe is on average quite cold. Axiomatically choose warmth, then go find it.
Yes, it is quite possible to airily deny the existence of anything that your theory disagrees with, and therefore prove that your theory is right. It's very popular, and the basis of Scientism. But nevertheless, I am aware that I have a rich inner life, I am aware that I choose to do things and to not do things, and your theory's only response is 'ar har har, of course you don't, it's all an illusion.' Well, I do, and cold realism offers no explanation. Parsimony is a guide, not a master. If I were to psychoanalyse I would say that people are attracted to the feeling of being strong and brave enough to throw away the supposed comforts of lesser men, but it won't work. We're no closer to having a genuine understanding of the human mind than we've ever been, and any claim by neuroscientists otherwise is based on either an incredibly optimistic scaling up of electrode experiments or the naive application of whichever engineering theory is in vogue at the moment. A hundred years ago Karl Lorenz thought that we were switchboards; later we became computer programs and electromagnetic fields, last decade it was Bayes and Temporal Difference Reinforcement Learning and now it's LLMs.
A dog is allowed to enjoy the taste of human food that fell to the floor without any presupposition of a soul or self-conception that would pass the mirror test, and you are allowed to have a rich inner life composed of your various physical systems without attributing mystery to it. Your brain is doing a lot of things, all the time.
I don't know the third thing about how the brain works (I barely know the second), but I don't need to know the how to show that physicalism demands that whatever it is it must be a deterministic or probabilistic process just as I can show there is a Kolmogorov complexity of some object without being able to tell you what it is. If you allow parsimony to reduce you to a single magisterium, there can be no other way. If you refuse to allow that, well then there's not much I can do to move you.
Yes, this is my point. You have proclaimed that you are right, and therefore that you must be right. Philosophy has been 'solved' for a long time in that if you start off at certain places, you tend to arrive at certain conclusions along reasonably well-trodden paths. It has failed in that in almost every case it is impossible to prove those conclusions to those who don't share them.
Ultimately people tend to cluster philosophically according to their society, their base intuitions and their experience. 'Parsimony' to me means accepting my understanding of the world and myself at broadly face value. I experience agency -> I have agency. I have subjective experience, and we really have no idea of the nature of that 'subject' or how that experience is produced. I find 'free will is an illusion' and 'consciousness is an phenomenon of neuronal voltage shifts' to be motivated reasoning, considerably less parsimonious than accepting the reality of my experience, and proposed broadly because the prospect of two magesteria makes modern people uncomfortable.
That said, I applaud your writing your thoughts down, and I don't want to come across as too salty, but I do think it's wise to consider your conclusions as contingent on certain philosophical choices rather than plain for all to see.
To those who don't accept brute physicalism, sure, I've done nothing. But there are a great many who sure seem to like labeling themselves physicalists, yet hold on to some strange ideas that I don't think hold up. So I've only solved one half of philosophy, downstream of the physical fork.
Eh, physicalism probably accounts for some decent % of philosophy if you account it purely in terms of number of papers produced. But in terms of the possibility space of philosophy, assuming you've solved every question you've raised downstream of physicalism, you've solved maybe 1%.
Is just offhanded snark. I have no philosophical grounding - for all I know 80% of all philosophical texts are centered around whether a hot dog is a sandwich.
To quote one of my previous posts:
A lot of rationalist/scientist/new atheist/whatever guys want to hack philosophy without engaging with the tradition, and unfortunately it just doesn't work. There's a way of thinking that, if you went back to meet Isaac Newton with a modern physics textbook and explained it to him, he would agree that actually, yeah, we've figured almost all of his questions out, great that we're moving on. This is not the case with philosophy. Philosophy is the study of the eternal questions, the ones which are so difficult and complex that they couldn't be spun off into a science. In fact, that's basically the history of "philosophy" as a term - it was once the study of everything, then natural philosophy slowly became the hard sciences, other parts of philosophy became the soft sciences (for better and for worse), and philosophy remains as the questions which are too big or too thorny for the scientific mindset to tackle. Analytic philosophy has in part been an attempt to chunk off more problems into a domain of scientific assessment, but hasn't gone too well, and the eternal questions remain eternal. Also, beautiful.
Given physicalism, why something exists rather than nothing and its related reformulations are the sole family of questions that are outside the domain of science. That's a lot of the point of my post. You can't posit things beyond science if the physical is all you have and philosophical attempts to do so are confused. Is the thing you're pointing at in and of the world or is it external? If everything is in and of the world, then all things are moved only by things in and of the world and so all apparently hard questions have answers in and of the world.
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