do you think freewill truly exists?
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Tough one. I'd probably end up being the person who just kept politely listening while trying to shut down the conversation amicably like "well anyway" and "I must get cooking dinner now" and "my plants need moisturising" or something.
Neighbours are extremely high on the list of people I want to avoid pissing off, because a neighbour with a grudge against you could be an absolute nightmare (especially when you live in a townhouse and share walls)
wrote last edited by [email protected]let him in once. talked non-stop for nearly 2 hours. unstable. out. used to be normalish. lost his mind.
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The reason is trying to work towards a model which could actually solve the hard problem, something which the physicalism prevalent in science has failed at completely. Consciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality, and it needs to be taken seriously, any model which doesn't include it is either inacurrate or incomplete. Yes, a single particle might act randomly, but that might not hold for a more complex entangled system, especially an orchestrated one inside a living being.
wrote last edited by [email protected]There is no "hard problem." It's made up. Nagel's paper that Chalmers bases all his premises on is just awful and assumes for no reason at all that physical reality is something that exists entirely independently of one's point of view within it, never justifies this bizarre claim and builds all of his arguments on top of it which then Chalmers cites as if they're proven. "Consciousness" as Chalmers defines it doesn't even exist and is just a fiction.
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my suggestion is that if you're lacking in social contact, or even if you just want to open up more opportunities in either social life or professional, don't "suck it up" and pretend, but learn to understand and appreciate how socializing works by engaging in it like a game, learning what's actually happening in "small talk" and how to make people feel comfortable with you and gain emotional intelligence and empathy; qualities that most people look for in friends and romantic partners.
This is a severely neglected field of understanding for a lot of younger men right now and I don't think we should be making whole communities that provide validation for people avoiding the discomfort and instead we should treat it like exercise and diet. We don't exercise and diet because it feels good, we do it because the results are worthwhile. We tell people struggling with it "Just stick with it, it gets easier" and we treat that like good advice.
And again, it wouldn't be such an issue if there wasn't such a massive problem right now with social isolation. It's a message of public health, not social conformity. If you're happy as things are, nobody is forcing you to do anything, but if you battle depressive episodes or are lacking in relationships, if you don't feel like you have people to talk to, if you've never had someone give you comfort and support and you would like that, well the good news is you can have that. You can have people in your actual, real life who care about you, which can then open up more opportunities. But it takes exercise.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I had a hard enough time accepting it* for myself, and I can't expect a stranger on the internet to do so quicker than I did. I hope that some day you can reflect back on this conversation and realize you're being a bit of a dick about this.
[*]"It" meaning the inability to shape my social life the way "normal" people do it, and simultaneously live a happy and healthy life, and that this is not something that can be medicated or exercised away
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It's not a very good one since I'm not an AI
You can say this line to an AI and it will become free willed according to you.
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How Shakespearian. "Stop his mouth with a kiss."
"And another kiss."
"Keep going! More kisses, least he open his mouth and opine on the weather."
a year in the horror dawns upon you
you have trained your partner to engage in small talk to get kissed -
There is no "hard problem." It's made up. Nagel's paper that Chalmers bases all his premises on is just awful and assumes for no reason at all that physical reality is something that exists entirely independently of one's point of view within it, never justifies this bizarre claim and builds all of his arguments on top of it which then Chalmers cites as if they're proven. "Consciousness" as Chalmers defines it doesn't even exist and is just a fiction.
My line of thought is this: the most epistemically primary thing is subjective experience, because it can be known directly, thus it is undeniably real. Due to the principle of ontological parsimony, if everything can be explained in terms of experience, there is no reason to postulate something beyond it (the physical). So the way I would formulate the hard problem would be something more like "Why does our experience contain the appearance of a physical world at all, and how are they related?".
I guess this might not resonate with you either, if you don't believe in phenomenal consciousness as all. Personally I have a hard time understanding physicalist reductionism, how can you say that something like the experience of redness is the same thing as some pattern of neurons firing in the brain? These are clearly very different things, and even if one is entirely dependent on the other, it doesn't mean it's non-existent or illusory.
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My line of thought is this: the most epistemically primary thing is subjective experience, because it can be known directly, thus it is undeniably real. Due to the principle of ontological parsimony, if everything can be explained in terms of experience, there is no reason to postulate something beyond it (the physical). So the way I would formulate the hard problem would be something more like "Why does our experience contain the appearance of a physical world at all, and how are they related?".
I guess this might not resonate with you either, if you don't believe in phenomenal consciousness as all. Personally I have a hard time understanding physicalist reductionism, how can you say that something like the experience of redness is the same thing as some pattern of neurons firing in the brain? These are clearly very different things, and even if one is entirely dependent on the other, it doesn't mean it's non-existent or illusory.
There's no such thing as "subjective experience," again the argument for this is derived from a claim that reality is entirely independent of one's point of view within it, which is just a wild claim and absolutely wrong. Our experience doesn't "contain" the physical world, experience is just a synonym for observation, and the physical sciences are driven entirely by observation, i.e. what we observe is the physical world. I also never claimed "the experience of redness is the same thing as some pattern of neurons firing in the brain," no idea where you are getting that from. Don't know why you are singling out "redness" either. What about the experience of a cat vs an actual cat?
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You can say this line to an AI and it will become free willed according to you.
An AI isn't even concious
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I had a hard enough time accepting it* for myself, and I can't expect a stranger on the internet to do so quicker than I did. I hope that some day you can reflect back on this conversation and realize you're being a bit of a dick about this.
[*]"It" meaning the inability to shape my social life the way "normal" people do it, and simultaneously live a happy and healthy life, and that this is not something that can be medicated or exercised away
I really am glad to know that I'm coming off as a dick on this, that is my every intention, we need more people willing to break social convention and say "Hey this thing that makes you comfortable? It's fucking your life up. Stop it."
That's what I'm doing, thank you for the feedback, if it's not impacting you the way you want, I don't really care because I do get enough positive feedback in other environments that I don't feel I'm actually harming anyone by saying "thing you don't like."
We need to read more things we don't like. We need to be challenged. We need to know we can change, we can hold others to this same standard too.
If we don't, we're going to lose thousands of years of progress as our species degrades further and further into isolated headspaces.
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There's no such thing as "subjective experience," again the argument for this is derived from a claim that reality is entirely independent of one's point of view within it, which is just a wild claim and absolutely wrong. Our experience doesn't "contain" the physical world, experience is just a synonym for observation, and the physical sciences are driven entirely by observation, i.e. what we observe is the physical world. I also never claimed "the experience of redness is the same thing as some pattern of neurons firing in the brain," no idea where you are getting that from. Don't know why you are singling out "redness" either. What about the experience of a cat vs an actual cat?
wrote last edited by [email protected]What I mean by subjective experience is what you might refer to as what reality looks like from a specific viewpoint or what it appears like when observed. I'm not sure whether you're assuming a physicalist or idealist position when you say "what we observe is the physical world". My issue with this is that observation usually implies the existence of something which is being observed, the appearance upon observation, and possibly also an observer.
If you claim that the physical world doesn't exist independently of observation, and is thus nothing beyond the totality of observed appearances (seems to me like a form of idealism), then what is being observed? If there is no object being observed, and the fact it it apparent from multiple perspectives is simply a consequence of the coherence of observation, where do the qualities of those appearances originate from? How come things don't cease to exist when they're not being observed?
If you claim that the appearances don't exist independently of the physical world being observed (the physicalist interpretation), why does the world appear different from different perspectives? How do you explain things like hallucinations (there is no physical object being observed, but still some appearance is present)?
The reason I brought up that example is because physicalists usually deny the existence of qualia and claim they're nothing beyond the brain processes correlated with them.
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If a colleague asks me "Hi, how're you doing?" it's small talk and I'll respond something like "Oh you know, the usual." If my partner asks me "Hi, how was your day?" it's a genuine question and I will respond "That fucking dickhead at work that always plays nice and personable came around with another set of "urgent" requests and no fucking clue what he's actually asking for, whether it's possible or why I told him last week it isn't."
The difference is in how serious I take the question.
I think that's still small talk either way tho? The fact that you launch into some part of your day doesn't change that it's gauging your mood on her end. You could just as easily answered: "Snoozefest, how about your day?" or "Nightmarish headache from start to end, hold me". See how these are all logical answers that would (I hope) evoke a different response from your partner?
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I think that's still small talk either way tho? The fact that you launch into some part of your day doesn't change that it's gauging your mood on her end. You could just as easily answered: "Snoozefest, how about your day?" or "Nightmarish headache from start to end, hold me". See how these are all logical answers that would (I hope) evoke a different response from your partner?
The fact that you launch into some part of your day doesn't change that it's gauging your mood on her end.
Maybe not, but the fact that me launching into that is an accepted and expected part of the response does.
If a manager calls me about a project and asks how I am, they don't want me recounting an earlier frustrating interaction. As you say, they're trying to gauge my mood, but ultimately my mood or how it came to be are irrelevant because we're here to talk business. If I omit my headache, they don't care.
If my GF asks me, she actually wants a response. If I omit my headache and she finds out later, she'll be upset: "Why didn't you say so earlier?"
That expectation is the difference.
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What I mean by subjective experience is what you might refer to as what reality looks like from a specific viewpoint or what it appears like when observed. I'm not sure whether you're assuming a physicalist or idealist position when you say "what we observe is the physical world". My issue with this is that observation usually implies the existence of something which is being observed, the appearance upon observation, and possibly also an observer.
If you claim that the physical world doesn't exist independently of observation, and is thus nothing beyond the totality of observed appearances (seems to me like a form of idealism), then what is being observed? If there is no object being observed, and the fact it it apparent from multiple perspectives is simply a consequence of the coherence of observation, where do the qualities of those appearances originate from? How come things don't cease to exist when they're not being observed?
If you claim that the appearances don't exist independently of the physical world being observed (the physicalist interpretation), why does the world appear different from different perspectives? How do you explain things like hallucinations (there is no physical object being observed, but still some appearance is present)?
The reason I brought up that example is because physicalists usually deny the existence of qualia and claim they're nothing beyond the brain processes correlated with them.
wrote last edited by [email protected]What I mean by subjective experience is what you might refer to as what reality looks like from a specific viewpoint or what it appears like when observed.
So... reality? Why are you calling reality subjective? Yes, you have a viewpoint within reality, but that's because reality is relative. It's nothing inherent to conscious subjects. There is no such thing as a viewpoint-less reality. Go make a game in Unity and try to populate the game with objects without ever assigning coordinates to any of the objects or speeds to any of the object's motion, and see how far you can go... you can't, you won't be able to populate the game with objects at all. You have to choose a coordinate system in order to populate the world with anything at all, and those coordinates are arbitrary based on an arbitrarily chosen viewpoint. Without picking a viewpoint, it is impossible to assign objects the majority of their properties.
If you claim that the physical world doesn’t exist independently of observation, and is thus nothing beyond the totality of observed appearances
No such thing as "appearances." As Kant himself said: "though we cannot know these objects as things in themselves, we must yet be in a position at least to think them as things in themselves; otherwise we should be landed in the absurd conclusion that there can be appearance without anything that appears," i.e. speaking of "appearances" makes no sense unless you believe there also exists an unobserved thing that is the cause of the appearances.
But there is neither an unobserved thing causing the appearances, nor is what we observe an appearance. What we observe just is reality. We don't observe the "appearance" of objects. We observe objects.
If there is no object being observed
Opposite of what I said.
and the fact it it apparent from multiple perspectives is simply a consequence of the coherence of observation
What we call the object is certain symmetries that are maintained over different perspectives, but there is no object independently of the perspectives.
where do the qualities of those appearances originate from? How come things don’t cease to exist when they’re not being observed?
They cease to exist in one viewpoint but they continue to exist in others, and symmetries allow you to predict when/how those objects may return to your own viewpoint.
If you claim that the appearances don’t exist independently of the physical world being observed
I am claiming appearances don't exist at all.
why does the world appear different from different perspectives?
Reality is just perspectival. It just is what it is.
How do you explain things like hallucinations (there is no physical object being observed, but still some appearance is present)?
If they perceive a hallucinated tree and believe it is the same as a non-hallucinated tree, this is a failure of interpretation, not of "appearance." They still indeed perceived something and that something is real, it reflects something real in the physical world. If they correctly interpret it as a different category of objects than a non-hallucinated tree then there is no issue.
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a year in the horror dawns upon you
you have trained your partner to engage in small talk to get kissedHi honey, how's the weath--
"Go Away! I'm Not In A Kissing Mood!"
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I just went with forgoing my own self care and losing my sense of self in pursuit of meeting her ever changing expectations instead of acknowledging if come to define myself be the relationship. Not sure which is better..
Not to worry though, the papers are in the mail!
Ah, sorry to hear that. It's a tough barrier to break, when a partnership is like that. I wish you the best in the future.
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For many, small talk does not strengthen or maintain a relationship. It is something that works for some people. Others endure it for the sake of the one who does but it doesn't hold the same role for them and is not a necessity to have a loving and healthy relationship for everyone. Just as we express and receive love differently, small talk doesn't serve the same role in everyone's life. If it does for you, that's great, hopefully you're getting what you need.
As for the double duty, that is true of all communication, whether small or not. As noted above, it may be an expression of love for some people, but it's far from universal.
Not everyone finds the smaller, and often repetitive, experiences of their day to be important or valuable and people are perfectly capable of having time for the other person's life and feelings without the focus being those smaller topics or experiences. Additionally, some people have more important/larger concerns in their day to day life than how the frappuccino from Starbucks was that morning.
It sounds like you value smalltalk in your life but may not accept that it isn't as widespread as you seem to imply. I don't doubt it does what you claim for yourself and others you know. Lastly, what one considers small talk varies greatly, topics of seeming low import may be more meaningful within the shared lives of the couple, depending on what going on.
You make a fair point. Perhaps it's just the cultures I've lived in, though, but my impression is that the vast majority of people value some amount of what might be considered small talk. So for those of us who don't take to it naturally (and I am also one who's had to learn small talk... I'm okay at it in many situations now but not all) it's probably worth having a feel for it for the sake of friendly relationships with many people around us.
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What I mean by subjective experience is what you might refer to as what reality looks like from a specific viewpoint or what it appears like when observed.
So... reality? Why are you calling reality subjective? Yes, you have a viewpoint within reality, but that's because reality is relative. It's nothing inherent to conscious subjects. There is no such thing as a viewpoint-less reality. Go make a game in Unity and try to populate the game with objects without ever assigning coordinates to any of the objects or speeds to any of the object's motion, and see how far you can go... you can't, you won't be able to populate the game with objects at all. You have to choose a coordinate system in order to populate the world with anything at all, and those coordinates are arbitrary based on an arbitrarily chosen viewpoint. Without picking a viewpoint, it is impossible to assign objects the majority of their properties.
If you claim that the physical world doesn’t exist independently of observation, and is thus nothing beyond the totality of observed appearances
No such thing as "appearances." As Kant himself said: "though we cannot know these objects as things in themselves, we must yet be in a position at least to think them as things in themselves; otherwise we should be landed in the absurd conclusion that there can be appearance without anything that appears," i.e. speaking of "appearances" makes no sense unless you believe there also exists an unobserved thing that is the cause of the appearances.
But there is neither an unobserved thing causing the appearances, nor is what we observe an appearance. What we observe just is reality. We don't observe the "appearance" of objects. We observe objects.
If there is no object being observed
Opposite of what I said.
and the fact it it apparent from multiple perspectives is simply a consequence of the coherence of observation
What we call the object is certain symmetries that are maintained over different perspectives, but there is no object independently of the perspectives.
where do the qualities of those appearances originate from? How come things don’t cease to exist when they’re not being observed?
They cease to exist in one viewpoint but they continue to exist in others, and symmetries allow you to predict when/how those objects may return to your own viewpoint.
If you claim that the appearances don’t exist independently of the physical world being observed
I am claiming appearances don't exist at all.
why does the world appear different from different perspectives?
Reality is just perspectival. It just is what it is.
How do you explain things like hallucinations (there is no physical object being observed, but still some appearance is present)?
If they perceive a hallucinated tree and believe it is the same as a non-hallucinated tree, this is a failure of interpretation, not of "appearance." They still indeed perceived something and that something is real, it reflects something real in the physical world. If they correctly interpret it as a different category of objects than a non-hallucinated tree then there is no issue.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I agree with this idea that reality without a viewpoint doesn't make much sense (maybe it's not logically impossible, but our reality surely isn't like that), but I don't think an unconscious viewpoint can exist. Really, I would say having/being a viewpoint is precisely what consciousness is about.
It's easy to think of reality as some space you can just freely float around (like your unity example), but that's not how we experience it. The only viewpoints we can be absolutely sure actually exist, are our own. Let's say we extrapolate to other conscious beings to avoid solipsism. This still severely constrains the pool of all known viewpoints, but what they have in common is this; their movement is always constrained to some body, which others percieve as matter. In my opinion this hints at the fact that matter is probably not merely some symmetry within how reality is observed. Since it correlates so well with where other viewpoints are (viewpoints are always located where matter appears to be), it makes sense to say that at least a subset of viewpoints appear as matter when viewed from the outside. I think this dissolves the idea that there is no object being observed.
The reason I'm calling reality subjective rather than relative is because I think the fact we can perceive it rather accurately and that human viewpoints are mostly coherent is more the exception than the rule. Take the hallucination example; when you hallucinate an object, what is being observed? I think the only possible answer is that the "viewpoint" in your head is observing some other stuff in your head. Since brain activity during visual hallucinations is very similar to brain activity when viewing a "real" object, this is likely always the case! What our brain is actually doing is collecting massive amounts of information from the environment and constructing integrated experience based on it, which represents the macroscopic features of reality accurately, because that was evolutionarily favourable. This means that the accurate and coherent perception we experience is likely only inherent to sufficiently complex evolved systems. If other viewpoints exist, they probably perceive reality in a completely different way than we do, and for all we know, they could be completely incoherent.
In short, my metaphysical stance is something like this:
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The only ontic thing is experience, which is concentrated into minds
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Reality is a plurality of interacting minds
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Observation is when one mind affects the experience of another
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Matter is what minds appear like from the outside
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Space isn't some backdrop, but instead emerges from the relationships between minds, specifically the strength of interaction between them
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