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Interesting. How would we test for it? Is there a way of telling the difference between something that has sentience and something that mimics it?

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I thought I asked some good questions, would you be willing to reply?

>Materialism is incoherent and leads to absurdities and it's gonna remain that way until you find a coherent mathematical model of consciousness.

Sorry when I said incoherent I mean inconsistent.

If it's possible to provide a coherent mathematical model of consciousness, then that model isn't incoherent/inconsistent.

I'm saying non-materialist models are normally inconsistent hence impossible.

>Even if it is all an illusion you have to show exactly how the illusion is constructed.

I'm saying that materialism is the only possible option since you can rule out all alternatives though reductio ad absurdum.

> > > > > But what I do know is that all the alternatives I've looked into lead to are incoherent and lead to absurdities.

Materialism is incoherent and leads to absurdities and it's gonna remain that way until you find a coherent mathematical model of consciousness. Put up or shut up, your idea of consciousness is not the tiniest bit less handwavey than the idealist's. You have no clue what's actually going on, and hiding behind the successes of various physical sciences doesn't make your case stronger if you can't even model a single instance of what we call "quale". Even if it is all an illusion you have to show exactly how the illusion is constructed.

>You're just begging the question though. You're assuming materialism is correct even though that's exactly what's being contested.

Yes, I'm assuming materialism is correct. It's an educated guess.

But what I do know is that all the alternatives I've looked into lead to are incoherent and lead to absurdities. They all seem to lead to consciousness being an epiphenomena or that the brain is different and doesn't obey the laws of physics.

Imagine a 2d plane like in super mario, only replace the temporal dimension with the 3d spacial dimension (depth). It would look like all frames of the game are arranged one in front of the other. Which means that Mario becomes a long worm-like creature whose depth consists of his past states/frames. My question is, what animates him? What is it that iterates through these frames and makes the linear reality we are familiar with. And most importantly, how can it iterate through the frames of time itself? Iteration/movement implies time, you need time to go from one frame to the other, but it's impossible to use time to iterate through time itself.

> "actually existing as a thing or occurring in fact; not imagined or supposed" (from Google) > > > > Tangible, touchable, interact-able, experience-able. Perhaps more specifically "as pertains to reality" > > > > For the specific use "...any real capacity." it means that just because you can think of it and make it "real" in a sense (real within a story, lore for a game, etc.), doesn't mean that it is something you can find in reality and interact with.

Are thoughts real?

>>> The conception of an idea does not necessarily mean that it exists in any real capacity.

>> Is this claim (...an idea does not necessarily mean that it exists...) "real"? Is it true?

> Yes, just because you can conceive of something doesn't automatically make it a reality somewhere in the universe.

"The conception of an idea does not necessarily mean that it exists in any real capacity" is real, exist, and is true though?

> Personally, I believe there are no gods, nothing supernatural. Everything is natural and anything that seems supernatural is simply something we don't yet understand well enough to explain via natural laws. Therefore, it is reasonable to be skeptical of any claim about a god or gods. I can take the believer at their word when they describe aspects of their god, since that is what they believe about it and doesn't really affect me but when they start saying that I must believe in their god or such and such thing will happen I need proof. As far as I'm concerned they are just believers in a fantasy, until they can provide proper evidence. I myself tried to provide proper evidence for a believe in the christian god and that simply wasn't possible.

What's your take on abortion rights?

>impossible

I agree with you. Even the deductive logic that is used to describe biological phenomena can't be described in biological terms to begin with. So why should consciousness?

Denying that Qualia exists would also mean, that there is no practical reasoning in checking if a programmed machine is doing something because of its programming or because it makes a conscious decision.

To me the claim that idealism is a fallacy in itself sounds like a reductionist view of the human experience and an outdated epistemological error that leads to a cartesian determinism of what it means and feels like to be a human and have a consciousness. Its reducing the whole question down to a primitive utilitarian sense of: If we can't do good predictions of it, therefore we categorically shouldn't bother.

This idea of a "pursuit of happiness" to begin with seems problematic to me?

A pursuit for meaning would be the ethical choice I would rather want to decide on. If it creates unhappiness than okay, contemplation can lead to necessary suffering.

Acknowledging happiness as a byproduct has been a liberating experience and made me contempt in realizing that it is okay to not be happy all the time. If my "pursuit of happiness" would mean I'd have to choose ignorance to preserve the mentioned cocoon than I'd rather want to face a painful truth than a comfortable lie.

Does that notion make sense to you?

Well, I would think one should conclude that the inability of human language to directly evoke some previously never sensed sensory experience is a linguistic issue, and isn't a problem to be solved with language, it's just a fact about how human language works.

Getting back to the blog post this was about, it says,

>I argue that if consciousness is only knowable through the unique metaphysical relation we bear to it, then it necessarily follows that other significant phenomena may exist in our universe we don’t know about without the necessary metaphysical relation(s).

Having consciousness is a necessary condition for all knowledge, but it is not a sufficient condition for knowing about a particular thing, even for knowing about consciousness. Before any understanding of how brains work people had consciousness but didn't know what it actually was, that the experience of tasting pistachios was the brain activity resulting from eating pistachios. Having an experience is not the same as knowing what it is. People experience plenty of things without knowing what the experience is.

With language, we can describe what some experiences are like in terms of experiences that a speaker would understand, like people describe various tastes as nutty, or chocolatey, and so on. That way people can sometimes imagine what experiences are like without ever having had them, by their similarity to whatever they have experienced. Hence having had some experience of X isn't always a necessary condition for knowing what X is like, because it could be understood by relation to Y or Z. Or it could be imagined in relation to objective facts. Some things could not be conveyed like that, like the experience of a bat at least largely could not without some kind of mutation scenario or highly advanced implantation or surgical goings on.

Science and religion are at they're worst when they become dogmatic in the truth. They become weaponized for control, be it, Anthony Fauci claiming to be the science, or believing your faith demands you kill.

But both are utilities for good, if they persistently lead you to wonder.

Without religion, science may not have been discovered ( as in the method to question it all).

Without science, religion would purely be dogmatic, rather than expanded to find wonder in more.

I agree that an ideology fettered in absolutism is a problem—except free-speech—but my point isn't about what is right or wrong individually.

It's about why all arguments disagree fundamentally, yet all struggle with the same fault.

They all assume there was a beginning.

We all assume a beginning must have happened, but I'm trying to suggest that must be an assumption overlooked and obviously wrong.

To assume everything came to be with a start point, means agreement can never be found.

But if existence always is, there is no need to disagree on how everything begun.

For all things to come from nothing, something must exist: as nothing has no meaning unless it has something to be without.

Existence can't have a beginning to explain how it came to be. Existence just has to be, as it can't be any other way.

Could you expand on that thought

>What meaning do you ascribe to the word "real"?

"actually existing as a thing or occurring in fact; not imagined or supposed" (from Google)

Tangible, touchable, interact-able, experience-able. Perhaps more specifically "as pertains to reality"

For the specific use "...any real capacity." it means that just because you can think of it and make it "real" in a sense (real within a story, lore for a game, etc.), doesn't mean that it is something you can find in reality and interact with.

>Is this claim (...an idea does not necessarily mean that it exists...) "real"? Is it true?

Yes, just because you can conceive of something doesn't automatically make it a reality somewhere in the universe. You have to find it and prove that it exists first. You can postulate ways that it might exist (done often in science before the actual discovery of something) but to say that it for sure exists before you have actual evidence is folly. You can only say that it might exist or even very much probably exists. Which leads to your next question...

>Seems reasonable, but examples in the physical realm is playing on easy - how about metaphysical questions like is there a God(s)?

Personally, I believe there are no gods, nothing supernatural. Everything is natural and anything that seems supernatural is simply something we don't yet understand well enough to explain via natural laws. Therefore, it is reasonable to be skeptical of any claim about a god or gods. I can take the believer at their word when they describe aspects of their god, since that is what they believe about it and doesn't really affect me but when they start saying that I must believe in their god or such and such thing will happen I need proof. As far as I'm concerned they are just believers in a fantasy, until they can provide proper evidence. I myself tried to provide proper evidence for a believe in the christian god and that simply wasn't possible.

What topics is he interested in?

then please at least provide reliable data or to a paper that proves such causality of your country's, then.

You're just begging the question though. You're assuming materialism is correct even though that's exactly what's being contested. Your whole argument hinges on the promise of "we'll figure it out eventually". You barely have even an outline of a coherent theory of consciousness yet you act as if it's essentially solved.

> The conception of an idea does not necessarily mean that it exists in any real capacity.

What meaning do you ascribe to the word "real"?

Is this claim (...an idea does not necessarily mean that it exists...) "real"? Is it true?

> 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.

Seems reasonable, but examples in the physical realm is playing on easy - how about metaphysical questions like is there a God(s)?

Okay. Ty!

Honestly, I would start with Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Don’t read any reviews, just get it on Amazon and read it. He lays out a lot of this in a nuanced way that would be helpful in many ways. Don’t listen to what anyone says, the book wasn’t made for anyone but those asking the kinds of questions you’re asking.

Thats an intriguing point of view. Where do I go to learn more about the objective comprehension of the universe's nature?

>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.

Consciousness is completely real in a materialist sense. What we experience is real and will be fully explained by biology and the like.

But this hard problem or whatever you are talking about is just an illusion which is logically incoherent and is impossible. The reason you struggle to understand how how it fits in with materialism is that you are talking about something inherently impossible under all real systems and models.

You’re in line there with my philosophical choices, as well as my intellectual heroes, Royce, James and Peirce. Fictional ontology is a cornerstone of Pragmatism. But just because they are all postulative in nature does not mean we despair. They are all not all equal, some are better than others.

The problem comes in when you absolutize your ontology, like religion does and science has done.