> "Qualia don't exist"

Ok cool. Notice how you can't really claim "the sun does not exist trust me bro" and have people take your seriously, but somehow it's ok to say that about consciousness the way we experience it?

If we are all mistaken about our own consciousness existing or mistaken about what it really is then it's on you to show us the truth, otherwise you're just posturing.

I like where your going. You’re almost there… but the universe does not have a chaotic nature- the parts of it we comprehend we call “ordered” and the parts we don’t we call “chaotic “ but these are subjective terms.

>They literally haven't though. What are you talking about exactly?

They have, let me reiterate. The explanation is simply "Qualia don't exist"

>It explains everything other than the "we" you mention. There is no mention of conscious experience in any of our physical models. The onus is on you to show how you get from those barren physical models to our rich experiences.

Depends on what the claim is. We would use occam's razor. On one had you have the most successful and predictive model/framework in human history.

If you want to claim some other model or idea that has never made a useful prediction ever, then the onus is on you.

Currently materialism hasn't explained the full details of how a thundercloud works, but no-one really thinks or expects there to be some non-materialist explanation.

So the default is materialism since it's been pretty successful for pretty much everything ever investigated. There is zero reason to think it can't explain conscious experience.

If you think there is some other model or theory which can explain it better then the "onus is on you to show how", or even make a single useful prediction.

Most arguments against free will are specious. They take “freedom” in its most absolutist sense and then attack it. There’s a very simple way to understand free will: Free Will equals consciousness. For instance, we deduce a rock has no free will because all it ever does is just sit there. Humans have more consciousness (free will)than rocks so a human can pick up the rock and skip it across a pond or carve it into a semi-conductor. The more mind you have, the more freedom to think about things and how to be. Freedom = mind. If you want to argue against the existence of mind, be my guest.

>How might the two of us simultaneously be talking about something that has no existence? Us talking about it requires a kind of existence,

The conception of an idea does not necessarily mean that it exists in any real capacity. Take magic for example: Shooting a fireball by saying a few words and willing the thing into existence or lifting a rock with nothing but the power of your mind can't be done in real life, but we can conceive of a reality where it might be possible.

>and us coming to talk about it presumably requires a force of some kind (especially since it has happened simultaneously).

Coincidence. No outside force necessary.

> Yep they have.

They literally haven't though. What are you talking about exactly?

Are you talking about people making correlations between MRI scans and self-reported conscious states? That's nowhere even close to what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a coherent, precise mathematical model of what physical states give rise to what conscious states. No such thing exists.

> Well on one hand you have a model which explains everything we have ever studied, on the other hand you have a model which hasn't made a single useful prediction or insight ever.

It explains everything other than the "we" you mention. There is no mention of conscious experience in any of our physical models. The onus is on you to show how you get from those barren physical models to our rich experiences.

>That's just plain not true. Nobody, materialists or otherwise, has a coherent model to explain even a single quale. IIT is the most coherent proposal so far but even that fails to explain even the most rudimentary quale.

Yep they have. The problem is "quale" as you define it doesn't exist, hence can't be explain by materialists.

I think the illusionist's might have put it better than me.

​

>What's backwards to me is ignoring the significance of your own conscious experience existing in favor of a model of the physical world that we know for certain is incomplete.

Well on one hand you have a model which explains everything we have ever studied, on the other hand you have a model which hasn't made a single useful prediction or insight ever.

Kind of makes sense to go for the model which hasn't explained everything than the model which has never made a single useful prediction.

> It seems quite clear to me that the materialist understanding of the world has a much better model.

That's just plain not true. Nobody, materialists or otherwise, has a coherent model to explain even a single quale. IIT is the most coherent proposal so far but even that fails to explain even the most rudimentary quale.

> This just seems weird and backwards. So what if if our conscious experience of the world is the first thing that we experience or know? That doesn't make it fundamental.

What's backwards to me is ignoring the significance of your own conscious experience existing in favor of a model of the physical world that we know for certain is incomplete.

Our base physical models are general relativity and quantum mechanics, and not only do we not know how to reconcile them neither of them leave any room for consciousness so you have to do a lot of handwaving about how consciousness is emergent in complex systems and whatnot.

You don't have the tiniest bit more coherent account of consciousness than an idealist.

Recently I stumbled upon "four-dimensionalism", the metaphysical theory of time. My question is, if it's true, how do we experience the universe linearly? How do we move through this temporal dimension when movement itself implies time? Shouldn't the universe be a long tangled spaghetti structure of events that exists at all times simultaneously?

Agreed, intention is where it’s at. Anything can be corrupted.

No, I meant what isubjective experience even is. If you have zero first person access to any experience, then it's impossible to comprehend what it even is based on any description thereof. This is not a linguistic issue.

The whole conundrum is that concluding processing goes on doesn't give you an inkling of an idea subjective experience even exists or understand anything even if one were to tell you.

Without access to subjective experience all you have left is dry processes you can have a fully exhaustive account of without ever knowing what subjective experience even is.

Especially the people that “help” and post it all over the internet to showcase what a “good person” they are

I guess it just depends on the intentions of the person. But I value people that help when a opportunity is presented to them instead of seeking it. For some reason people that seek to help others give me the ick lol like what are you trying to prove to others. Also people that go into “serving” for religious purposes tend to get an ego.

I'm currently reading, "the psychology of totalitarianism", the author suggests that much social anxiety is created from our inability to be confident in what we try to express with each 9ther.

Words are an expression of what we think, but if we each assume different meanings from words without knowing, how can we be sure of anything?

I understand the cosmological argument to mean, how the universe begun.

The ontological argument is about the nature of being.

I am guilty of confusing the 2, but can they be separated?

Can anything exist if it has no witness?

Is there a cosmological argument without an ontological one first?

It stands to reason, all things must exist if only to oppose non existence.

All truth resonates out of hypocrisy.

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Wouldn't you say that being on the same page about big decisions seems impossible as of yet? After all, we all watch the same hollywood movies and celebrate similar kinds of holidays, and if you asked the average person about their morality the answers wouldn't be too different. And yet, there seems to be a disconnect between how people describe themselves and the behaviors they actually display. There seems to be a huge gap between how people identify as mature and peaceful and yet act much the opposite. And it's like every drop of criticism fails to rust away our behavior because there's some kind of beautiful spark to what we do and why we do it that can't be explained as mere hedonism or recklessness.

Perhaps "ending arguments about behavior" isn't the point. The point is to keep people from being surprised and confused by the most irritating and most stupendous actions anybody can possibly take. Doesn't it seem like we're all online to try and do that? Come up with a way to deconstruct the type of adult-minded decisions and well-contemplated actions that make our hearts squirm with resentment or possibly blissful awe? So that we can actually, really control ourselves when we feel as though control is what we already have in abundance?

How something "reads" is a function of the content of the document itself as well as the quality of the mind ingesting it.

This just came up on /r/askphilosophy: https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/zfmr50/chat_gpt_helping_with_philosophy_are_tutors_going/

Short answer: it isn't accurate.

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>And that's the way you know what it even is. To experience it.

No, perception is one way you can know things, but it is prone to biases, faulty information, illusion, hallucination, etc.. That's why having objective means of measurement or studying things generally is necessary in science, and how e.g. neurology can describe how vision works. Just having vision might lead to false explanations of how vision works. Obviously before microscopes, X-ray imaging, etc., much less was known in biology. [Actually in this instance you probably mean "know what an experience is like", but my point is any knowledge based on that wouldn't be something you could learn verbally, so it's just an aspect of communication. It wouldn't mean someone couldn't know "coffee tastes chocolatey" if they don't know what chocolate tastes like. Facts like that could be known without first person apprehension just based on how the sense work, etc.. ]

Experience gives first person apprehension of some sensory system, but my point was that the inability to convey in language what some experiences are like to speakers who can't have the experience is not a problem of knowledge, at least not something solvable by philosophers like how certain problems are solved in physics to determine experimental results. It's just a brute fact that certain organisms like humans are limited in their senses, and can't perceive beyond them, at least not without some future biotechnology, like to allow humans to sense infrared like snakes or hear higher frequencies like dogs or so on.

Whatchu mean it's not a word

> We know how to examine the brain to some extent and we have improved on that significantly

On a percentage basis, how close are we to having perfect understanding of the entire system (including when brains are networked)?

> ...we also know that all who we are is contained within our bodies.

We don't actually, but there is certainly no shortage of belief who have faith that that is true.

> We require no metaphysical concept to understand that.

To understand what is really going on here, I believe it inevitably gets deep into metaphysics, depending on one's definition - for me, I use this one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics

> My argument is simple here. We are fundamentally real within our context of understanding. We do not require claims that suspend the reality to explain anything about ourselves.

Oh, I didn't realize your statements were an argument.

If it isn't too much trouble, would you be willing to continue this conversation in a form of only objectively true statements? (And if not: why not?)

> My thinking is that we have no demonstrated need for anything beyond our experiences within our reality to explain these concepts.

Your thinking may be correct, but it may also be incorrect.

Consider: what are the odds that your cognition and the "knowledge" that it rests on has zero substantial flaws?

and the lights!

my eyeballs are attracted to glitter

You seem to mean cosmological arguments rather than ontological arguments. Of cosmological arguments, you seem to specifically have in mind the Kalam, as other varieties don't rely on the assumption of a "caused beginning".

But anyway, Kant talks a great deal about the idea of reason as inevitably seeking the unconditioned as the conclusion of a regress of explanations and problems arising therefrom. I'm not comfortable enough with Kant's nuances and subtleties to attempt any more thorough explanation from that, but here's an overview from smarter people.

Thanks for the response :)

Fair enough. If we had figured out a way to model society at the level of abstraction in your example, we'd have psychohistory.

It might be worth a clarification that it's not the complexity of the model, but the chaotic nature of the underlying system that's makes it intractable. If you had just as many variables, but they were pool balls being hit, you'd be able to predict the outcome with high accuracy.

It's exogenous random variables and stochasticity in the effects themselves that create the chaos, not the complexity of the model itself. (in my understanding)

If you've tried modeling this with differential equations I'd be super curious to see! I've never made a CLD model before, only the DAG version.