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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   25694 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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You're now fighting the spirit of the thought experiment to make simulation an infeasible dissolving mechanism due to technicalities.

The point isn't the limitations of the hardware she has or the time available, the point is the separation between "information" and "experience" that people intuitively feel.

But she "has all the information" about how vision works and what apples are made of. In a physicalist frame, there can't be any non-physical process. There's nothing else but the physical processes involved, so consciousness and qualia and whatever other things are proposed either don't exist or arise from the physical phenomena. It is, again, assuming that there is some special non-physical qualia-ness to "seeing" which can not be understood from facts and is not simulable even in principle. If you buy that, you are a dualist.

You're now fighting the spirit of the thought experiment to make simulation an infeasible dissolving mechanism due to technicalities.

I think it is you who are fighting the spirit of the thought experiment. Mathematicians and physicists use demons in thought experiments when they want to signify a being with the capabilities you are describing.

It is, again, assuming that there is some special non-physical qualia-ness to "seeing" which can not be understood from facts and is not simulable even in principle. If you buy that, you are a dualist.

I'm okay with being called a dualist (I am a Christian) but it's funny to be called one for thinking that there is a difference between firsthand experience and knowledge of something.

Frank Jackson is using that commonsense understanding to attack physicalism. If physicalism cannot be defended without parsing a difference between understanding something from facts and experience, then perhaps it should not be defended. But of course Jackson, a physicalist, believes that the new experience of seeing the color red is caused by a physical change in the brain, and thus (as I understand it) his position is that rather than learning anything new about the color red, she's learning something about her brain.

Speaking of demons, let's talk about Laplace's demon, which you reference in your OP:

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.

Now, if we accept your theory, there's no randomness at all in the universe, as you note:

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.

Very well. However, if there's no randomness, it means the world is fundamentally ordered, but that such an order, although real is fundamentally unknowable. If it is fundamentally unknowable, because it is beyond our light cone, it is beyond the realm of physics. I'll let you speak on that:

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.

In other words, in the name of parsimony, you've constructed an entire definitionally unknowable, unprovable, and unfalsifiable metastructure that you contend the entire universe runs by.

Buddy, we all contend that every single day we aren't committed solipsists. We take the data we have and then posit a model that explains the data, predicts future data, and fits with what logically must be true.

But I'm really not making much of a change at all - everything follows from physicalism.

We take the data we have and then posit a model that explains the data, predicts future data, and fits with what logically must be true.

The data that we have so far shows that true randomness exists and that the universe is not simulable. You ask people to accept on faith that physicalism solves this.

Your OP takes a swing at religion and (by implication) moral realism, but the interesting thing about moral realism and at least most religions is that they believe the truth is actually knowable, even though they postulate an unprovable (or at least difficult to prove) metastructure to the entire universe. Your system has all of the baggage of the unprovable metastructure but explicitly says that discovering how it works is off-limits.

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