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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.
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How does your belief in everything non-quantum being fully clockwork yield non-identical predictions to my belief in free will? I contend that in this case the answer is not mu, as my belief in free will delivers superior predictions about reality. My evidence for this is the way that every functional system we have relating to managing interpersonal interactions operate off the assumption of free will, zero functional systems for managing interpersonal interactions operate off deterministic assumptions, and every attempt to build such systems off deterministic assumptions (and there have been many) have uniformly failed.
Reality around us could not be baseline reality, and our minds have a connection to the actual baseline reality. It doesn't really matter if baseline reality is God or the simulation server in this case. Claims that our minds are deterministic must confront the fact that they do not operate in a deterministic fashion at any level, and most claims and even evidence to the contrary appear to have been falsified.
Determined if you zoom out enough and crank the simulation hard enough doesn't mean it looks determined from up close in-the-moment, same as quantum experiments looking random from inside our lightcone. If the best information you've got looks like free will, use your free will heuristics.
...but if you have better information, well then, feel free to discard another wrong model. Do you have such better information? Knowable and known are distinct.
Why does he need better information to discard your theory? It's your theory that needs to provide better information to justify its adoption.
You misread me. He and you and everyone else are free to use free will as a model, but know that it is a map and not the territory and if/when you get better data, you must discard it.
In turn, so must you. It is on you to demonstrate that your claims of the territory are not just another, and inferior, map.
I believe that if you buy physicalism, I already have. You just have to take it seriously. Further, I'm reasonably certain that if the highest weighted values of an explanation are predictive power and parsimony, physicalism must be selected. If your explanatory judgment criteria are different, I admit little I've said should move you.
If you have to assume the conclusion to be convinced by what follows, you are presenting the map, not the terrain. Particularly when it requires- as you have to @FCfromSSC - ignoring the limitations of the model all the more conspicuously when pointed out.
There is nothing particularly reasonable about requiring pre-commitment to a model. It is an act of faith. Faith can be a useful approach for those who cannot prove foundational beliefs- it is completely tangential to being true or not- but 'just trust me, bro' is not a position from which someone can accuse others of ignoring reality in favor of their own model.
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