An Argument against Substance Dualism

Post by **Sy Borg** » March 25th, 2018, 11:08 pm

My eyesight isn't what it used to be but now I can see that your avatar is well suited to the chat :)

In terms of those fractal layers, whether we look "up" or "down", what we observe appears to be mindless. It raises the question as to whether that is an observer effect or if entities at our scale (what Dawkins refers to as "middle world") truly in the "sweet spot" for consciousness in nature?

I had actually meant to speak about conditioning and how "you" will be very different from the "you" of several decades ago. I see the ego as a mental shield that separates you from everything else.

Re: the thought experiment about disembodied spirits, it's odd to imagine some incorporeal thing entering the body and overriding the effects of the existing brain and organs, as though their configurations and condition didn't count. I guess they must be those "tricky" cases that medicine cannot explain :)

Londoner · Post by **Londoner** » March 26th, 2018, 4:11 am

BigBango wrote: ↑March 25th, 2018, 3:54 pm Londoner, you are aguing an extreme position. You are demanding “experential” evidence of a thing that you are not experiencing. There is nothing wrong with your argument except that it fails to provide you with views of the world that have proved to be more useful, pragmatic and consensus building. It’s seems to me you must have played peek a boo games with an evil parent that never returned from behind the couch.

Aldous Huxley, after experimenting with LSD, suggested that our nervous system, rather than enabling experential states, actually serves to act as a governor and instead limits what we would be experiencing without it.

No; science works perfectly well in describing the world in which we live, the world as it is perceived. That is the pragmatic view.

You are insisting that this is not good enough. That somehow you have knowledge of a mysterious world behind that world.

Science does not speculate about such things. Science deals only with the measurable i.e. the perceivable. What you are doing is 'metaphysics'.

Mosesquine · Post by **Mosesquine** » March 26th, 2018, 6:03 am

Londoner's position is absurd. The position of the one shifts from extreme skepticism (e.g. denying space and time absurdly) to Berkeleyan empiricism (e.g. only perceived things acceptable???) The view of Londoner is not acceptable for its changing nature!

Gertie · Post by **Gertie** » March 26th, 2018, 8:08 am

Londoner

Gertie wrote: ↑
Today, 8:20 am
Well to break this down, firstly there's the knowledge question, one can't ever know for certain that anything exists aside from one's own experiential states.

I can either infer from my experiencing of pigs and rocks and Londoner and everything else that they exist independently from my perception/experiencing, or admit I can't know anything other than the experiencing itself, which is a bit of a conversation stopper!

That's the choice as I see it.

If I infer that pigs and rocks and a whole universe exists independently of me and doesn't disappear when I'm not looking or asleep, then we have a shared world and we can start categorising and reasoning from our observations. And note an apparently significant difference between what we call material stuff, and experiential states

I agree colour is construct of brains/minds, it's how we experience photons bouncing off stuff then interacting with our optical system. We're limited critters who function a particular way - But that's a different issue to whether photons and the things they bounce off exist when no-one's looking. .
I do not see how inferring that things exist independently of my perception exist can be meaningful, or useful

As far as they might exist in that sense I can say nothing about them. It is like suggesting that there might be another dimension that exists but is entirely unconnected to our own. Yes, that might be the case, but so what? Whether it does, or it doesn't, it makes no difference. There is no possible observation that could either prove or disprove its 'existence', so the claim that it 'exists' is empty of meaning.

Well it's both meaningful and useful to me, so your generalised claim can't be true. It would be like the difference between having a relationship with a human lover and mindless VR doll, If I believed the lover wasn't real, I was 'making it up', it would feel less meaningful. Like the Star Trek Holodeck. As regards useful, if I believed my lover or anyone else wasn't real, I'm at liberty to murder, treat badly, do anything as long as I got away with it in my imaginary world. So the difference might be unknowable, but it absolutely matters to me, and I act as if it's real. I suspect you do too.

Regarding photons, they do not exist - not in the sense that we say objects of perception exist. We do not think photons exist because we have seen them - it is impossible that we could ever do that - but because they are part of a scientific model. They are like 'gravity', a description of a relationship that exists between things that are observable, it is not itself a 'thing'.

OK. So you know stuff about photons which I didn't, and now I do too. Seems like there's a world out there we can know stuff about and have a shared language for

. Regardless, the question is whether the thing that's observable exists independently of being observed. So how about Ellen, does she exist when nobody observes her? Or you? I know I do, so you can't be right.
...

Yes the experiential states are all I (not we - I don't know you or anyone else exists) have, or know directly, everything else is inference. It could be that nothing exists other than my experiential states. Even my memories could have sprung into existence last Thusday, or only when they come to m…
It isn't whether I know other things 'exist' or not, it is what that claim of 'existence' could mean. If we are talking about objects of experience, then I understand what a claim that objects 'exist' might entail, but I do not understand what it would mean for an object outside experience to 'exist'.

There are other types of evidence that objects we can't directly observe exist, which are part of the scientific model of the world, or there are fossils of critters which used to exist etc. You can accept or reject such evidence, but if you know what eg fossils are then you have a good idea what it means for an object to exist outside of direct experience.

The question of knowing whether anything other than one's own experiential states exist, is the first one you need to address. The answer is one can't know. There is no 'bridge of knowing' between the experiencer and the object of experience. But if you can accept the unprovable possibility that your experiential states refer (roughly) to things which exist independently of you, and go with that, then eventually the sort of world model we currently share arises, well has arisen, from people acting as if there is a world out there which we share and construct shared models of. Or you can reject that, and claim that nothing exists but your own experiential states, and then your arguments about how humans are this or that is irrelevant, because your claim is no-one exists but you. So you really have to choose between those two lines of objections, you can't logically go back and forth between them.

There's a reality beyond experiential states which exists or doesn't exist regardless of one's ability to know. If you, Londoner, claim that nothing exists beyond your own experiential states, I know for certain you're wrong, because I know for certain my own experiential states exist. So if that is your claim, you're mistaken. However, you might not exist independently of my experiential states.

But if we're going to have a conversation, we're tacitly agreeing we accept each other's existence, and that we accept we share enough common knowledge about the world we both inhabit to communicate coherently.
...

But once I infer my experiential states refer to/interact with stuff which exists independently of me, including other people much like me, we can start comparing notes about our experience. I can tell you I saw that pig when you weren't there. You saw my friend Ellen when I wasn't there. Ellen repo…
First, we cannot compare notes about experiential states. My experiences are mine alone. It may be that when Ellen reports 'seeing a pig' her experiences are quite different to yours. We cannot tell, because both you and she use the same word 'pig' for their experience. I know the name of the colour that grass is, is 'green'. Even if my experiential state when seeing grass was what you call 'red' we could never know it.

Yes, experiential states are inherently first person/private, that's just the way it is. But we can compare notes, everybody does it (unconsciously) in pretty much every encounter. You and I are consciously doing it now. It's true each of our models is different, limited and inaccurate, but there is enough common ground to make our shared world work. If you and I both look at the same spot and report seeing something pig-like, we can agree we're looking at what we call a pig, rather than a tree, or hearing a symphony.

Even if we somehow knew that all humans sensed things identically, it would still be no help. Not unless we also knew that human sensory apparatus was of some special quality, such that it showed reality.

I don't think anyone's claiming to know ultimate reality. The world model we share itself suggests we evolved for utility to navigate the world at a certain level of granular observation and with 'quick fix' adaptive kludges, not to be reality detectors. There a bunch of evidence of our flaws in perception and cognition, which supports that account.

So we have no 'picture' of any independent world. It would be a contradiction in terms! A picture is an object of sensation, but this independent world is supposedly independent of our sensations.

We have models, individual and shared, which are good enough to work. And the fact that they do work suggests we're getting some of it right.

So I agree that if you and I and Ellen exist independently, we all have our own particular models of the larger world we share. And inverted qualia is an issue, there's no way of knowing if my green is your blue, etc. Never-the-less we can construct a similar enough shared model which works. Whether my up is your down, we can both catch an apple falling from a tree because of what we agree to call 'gravity'. We can even have shared predictions, based on what we agree to call the laws of nature and causation. We can talk about atoms and brains, and we can talk about the difference between that material stuff and experiential states - and understand each other. That this incredibly complex world can be discussed by two people coherently shows that we can know things in a limited way about it.
...

And we have language for all that, as well as atoms and forces and materialism, a whole scientific model of how the world of physical stuff works. We can't directly experience being the kettle or seed, but we can observe and categorise as best we can. Imperfectly, incompletely, from a third person p…
I disagree with the last sentence. How could we see any difference? That would only be possible if we could compare one against the other, but all we can ever have is experience.

Everything but one's own experiential states is inference. We build models based on the nature of those experiences, what type of world they describe. But our models don't comfortably encompass both experiential states and material stuff. We don't have a theory for the relationship between the two, and it's hard to see where one would come from. So currently at least we have hypotheses like substance dualism, substance monism, anomalous monism, property dualism, panpsychism, to try to get a purchase on how we can in principle express their relationship. But our perceptual and cognitive limitations might mean we're not up to the job.

In fact we can note that experiential states have no place in our scientific materialist model.
But here is the paradox; we are born into an experiential state and we always live within it. The scientific materialist model comes later and is validated by it; we only hold a scientific theory true because it is validated by experience. If we really had a theory about what reality consisted of outside experience, then our theory would not be scientific, it would be metaphysical.

It is a paradox. But we still get on with trying to make sense of the world. I think the key thing, even taking into account all the legit problems you've raised, is that we are able to communicate coherently and agree about things, and put them in a box tentatively labelled True, and thus build tentative working models of the world we share. Science, Empiricism, Objective Third Person, Soul, Mind/Body are ways of talking about these things which are rooted in our history, and do in turn influence the way we think and construct our models. All the caveats you've mentioned are relevant, but still we can come up with extraordinary complex and even unintuitive models which scientists themselves call 'weird' and 'spooky'. So we have a methodology which is limited, but works, in terms of materialist explanations of the world and ourselves. But after all that is done, the big elephant in the room is the relationship between the physical and mental.

We ended up arriving at this scientific materialist model without ever having to invoke the existence of experience, and now the question is how do they relate, what's the bigger picture which encompasses both. We have clues, like neural correlation which points towards some kind of monism (itself an idea fraught with paradox), we note that material stuff seems to have existed before consciousness, which points towards emergence, we note we can recognise conscious-like behaviour in certain complex organic systems like us and pigs, which points towards complexity and perhaps certain types of material substrates being key, and so on. But what we don't have is the underlying theory, or even a way to test hypotheses, owing to the private first person nature of experience, which isn't a good fit with third person observation methodology of science. It's a genuine mystery. And means we're at liberty to philosophise to our heart's content

Londoner · Post by **Londoner** » March 26th, 2018, 11:57 am

Gertie wrote: ↑March 26th, 2018, 8:08 am Well it's both meaningful and useful to me, so your generalised claim can't be true. It would be like the difference between having a relationship with a human lover and mindless VR doll, If I believed the lover wasn't real, I was 'making it up', it would feel less meaningful. Like the Star Trek Holodeck. As regards useful, if I believed my lover or anyone else wasn't real, I'm at liberty to murder, treat badly, do anything as long as I got away with it in my imaginary world. So the difference might be unknowable, but it absolutely matters to me, and I act as if it's real. I suspect you do too.

I'd say you have it entirely back to front.

Your position is that you do not think your lover is 'real'. You think that behind all the bits of your lover you can see, touch, etc. there is another lover - a 'really real' lover.

You are always on the Holodeck, since when you leave the Holodeck and walk around The Enterprise you see that too as an illusion. That everything you see and touch is some sort of projection from a real reality behind the sensible reality.

Now me; I do not see the point of your 'reality behind reality', especially since it is something I can never know anything about. I am quite happy understanding 'reality' as being the world presented to the senses.

OK. So you know stuff about photons which I didn't, and now I do too. Seems like there's a world out there we can know stuff about and have a shared language for . Regardless, the question is whether the thing that's observable exists independently of being observed. So how about Ellen, does she exist when nobody observes her? Or you? I know I do, so you can't be right.

You cannot possibly know if things exist when they are not observed. Once again, to me that is not a problem. I am quite content to work on the assumption that they do. You are the one who is insisting on knowing something you cannot possibly know. Think about it; the thing that's observable exists independently of being observed. What possible observation could confirm that an unobserved thing exist!

The point about such metaphysical claims about worlds behind the perceived world is that they are all unverifiable. There are no end of similar metaphysical hypotheses; we might all be in the Matrix, everything that happens may be a projection of God's Will, the world may be newly created second-by-second....there is no possible observation that can tell us which - if any- are true.

There are other types of evidence that objects we can't directly observe exist, which are part of the scientific model of the world, or there are fossils of critters which used to exist etc. You can accept or reject such evidence, but if you know what eg fossils are then you have a good idea what it means for an object to exist outside of direct experience.

No, I have no idea what it means for 'an object to exist outside of direct experience'. Describe such an object...an object that does not look like anything, feel like anything, smell like anything...

Yet again, for me the object 'exists' as it is experienced. That is good enough. It is you who wants things to exist in a mysterious extra-sensory way.

There's a reality beyond experiential states which exists or doesn't exist regardless of one's ability to know.

So, since it is something that we can never know anything about, what is the point? Like all the other metaphysical theories, whether they are true of false makes no difference at all to anything in the world we live in.

If you, Londoner, claim that nothing exists beyond your own experiential states, I know for certain you're wrong, because I know for certain my own experiential states exist. So if that is your claim, you're mistaken. However, you might not exist independently of my experiential states.

That does not work. You only know about other people through your own experiences; you cannot know that they are also having experiences. They might all be robots (or P-Zombies, to be philosophical).

And for the last time; I do not claim that 'nothing exists beyond your own experiential states'. I can have no idea whether it does or doesn't - and nor can anyone else. I am saying that claims about existence or non-existence only make sense when they are related to things we can experience, to phenomena (as distinct from some noumenal essence somehow behind phenomena).

If I say; 'This cat exists' and I am asked ''Why do you think that?' I can answer by listing all the ways the cat can be experienced. People will then understand what the claim that 'it exists' implies.

But if I say 'This noumenal cat exists' and I am asked ''Why do you think that?', what can I say? The noumenal cat cannot be experienced at all. I cannot say anything at all about what a noumenal cat would be like. I can give no reasons. In that case, the claim 'it exists' is empty of meaning.

We have models, individual and shared, which are good enough to work. And the fact that they do work suggests we're getting some of it right.

Sure: 'right' in the sense of being useful for our purposes, i.e. predicting the experienced world. That is the only criteria for 'rightness'. Why they work is not something we can ever know. As Newton said ' Hypotheses non fingo'.

Everything but one's own experiential states is inference. We build models based on the nature of those experiences, what type of world they describe. But our models don't comfortably encompass both experiential states and material stuff. We don't have a theory for the relationship between the two, and it's hard to see where one would come from. So currently at least we have hypotheses like substance dualism, substance monism, anomalous monism, property dualism, panpsychism, to try to get a purchase on how we can in principle express their relationship. But our perceptual and cognitive limitations might mean we're not up to the job.

I do not think there is any job to be done. I think that what you call 'material stuff' is a creation of language. It is possible through language to talk about the world as if we were not part of it; a 'view from nowhere'. But we can never have that view and we cannot explain what that view would be like.

It is like being asked to describe 'colour' - but your description is not allowed to include any experience of any specific colour. It is impossible, not because we are inadequate philosophers but because it rests on a misunderstanding about the way the word 'colour' is used.

Halc · Post by **Halc** » March 27th, 2018, 8:42 am

Greta wrote: ↑March 25th, 2018, 11:08 pmIn terms of those fractal layers, whether we look "up" or "down", what we observe appears to be mindless. It raises the question as to whether that is an observer effect or if entities at our scale (what Dawkins refers to as "middle world") truly in the "sweet spot" for consciousness in nature?

I noticed this, but I think one can only be conscious at one's own layer. If my cells were fully conscious, they would not know what it is like to be a human, having as much access to my consciousness as I have access to yours. But the cells are life forms and don't necessarily die if I do, nor do I die if any particular cells die. Mitochondria don't know what it is like to be a cell. They are two layers down. Looking the other way, perhaps a community or country could be a life form, with an even higher consciousness. No human would know what it is like to subjectively be that entity, however much they're a part of it.

Re: the thought experiment about disembodied spirits, it's odd to imagine some incorporeal thing entering the body and overriding the effects of the existing brain and organs, as though their configurations and condition didn't count.

An interesting answer. I didn't say 'disembodied spirits', but that came to mind for you. Am I a spirit animating a body (which gets swapped in the experiment)? Yet you describe it more like a demon possession overriding physical function. The physical brain is subject to will that is a function of prior states (fully determined or not) and this thus not free willed. But a body possessed by an overriding spirit IS free willed, and can be held responsible for what it makes the body do in a way that the physical body is not responsible. Presumably the spirit of the poetry-reader is displaced during the experiment. Perhaps it is now picking flowers (a swap).

The monist answer is just a physical state is transferred, sort of a teleport. Suddenly Greta is at the poetry reading and instantly the audience knows because you look nothing like the poetry reader. The reading does not continue.

If there is a spirit (or whatever word one likes to use to describe the mental component of a dualist relationship), then several answers apply:

If I am a featureless identity that has things (a body, consciousness), then I am that cardboard box. The poetry reader gets a new serial number somewhere and the reading goes on. The poetry reader is now objectively responsible for acts that you have done in the past, because that is based on that serial number, which is in essence what you are.

If I am an epiphenomenal experiencer, then the swap is very much like leaving the cinema showing of the flower-picking feature and crossing the hall to the poetry feature. The poetry reading goes on unaffected. Same answer as above except no responsibility is carried by this epiphenomenal experiencer, who is not actually a flower picker or poetry reader, just a spectator.

If I am a causally effective spirit, then I can influence what my physical state does, and I bear objective responsibility for choices made. Then one has to define the separation of what the brain does and what the spirit/soul does. Which holds memory? Which knows how to play the piano? Which is averse to pain? Which determines your intelligence? Hence the swap-thought experiment. It sort of flushes out which of these functions go with you when your spirit is transferred but the brain does not. The poetry reading may or may not go on depending on answers given.

---

The thread is about substance dualism, vs other sorts of dualism and possibly vs. non-dualism. I think all my cases apply to either version, the distinction being the nature of the mental aspect, and not so much it's function. Does the res-cogitans have a location, even if not extended? Is it 'in' the universe at all? Is going to 'heaven' and act of moving to a new 'place', or is it just a change of experiential state? Can't say I have an opinion, but if you're going to hold to the view, I think these can't just be dismissed.

BigBango · Post by **BigBango** » March 27th, 2018, 5:01 pm

Thank you Halc, for leading us through the implications that result from taking various popular dualist substance positions. I also thank Greta for having some even deeper insights that might help us begin to understand these truly befuddling abstractions. The key that Greta points to is, in my opinion, both the significance of layers of being and the direction given to us by Penrose.

While I think Penrose’ ideas on “cell consciousness” are interesting I don’t think they qualify as a serious explanation of the nature of the mental. Quantum Mechanics or more specifically the superposition of physical matter seems to me to be less an artifact of consciousnes and more a matter of what can be known about matter and still be verified by measurement with instruments made of physical matter.

On the other hand, Penrose’ hypotheses on the nature of the universe before the Big Bang suggest continued “vertical” universes that have evolved into our familiar universe with the Big Bang preceded by a Big Crunch. Instead of the many worlds (parallel) of other theorist’s (driven again by QM) we can at least get some additional “ideas”, if not hard evidence, about layers of our world that existed before the Big Bang.

What doesn’t seem to have been seriously considered is the possibility that what we refer to as the “mental” may serve to be Mereological glue to hierarchically adjacent layers. With that understanding a mulicelled organism’s consciousness is a tight collection of all its cellular feeling. The nervous system becomes a specialized organ of focusing the consciousness on particularly important (to the organism) feelings. The experiments conducted on “blind” sight verify that sight is supported at lower levels even when the more specialized organ of sight is impaired by a severed optic nerve.

Halc · Post by **Halc** » March 27th, 2018, 6:21 pm

BigBango wrote: ↑March 27th, 2018, 5:01 pm Thank you Halc, for leading us through the implications that result from taking various popular dualist substance positions.

I didn't think they were specifically 'substance' positions, and I'm not sure I represented them as would an actual adherent to the position. Somebody describing a view not held tends to insert strawman assumptions.

For instance, I don't think typical dualistic beliefs fall outside of methodological naturalism, and thus make empirical predictions, putting them in the realm of science. Yet the proponents seem not to be in any pursuit of what would be an obvious falsification of the opposing view.

Post by **Sy Borg** » March 27th, 2018, 7:23 pm

Halc wrote: ↑March 27th, 2018, 8:42 am
Greta wrote: ↑March 25th, 2018, 11:08 pmIn terms of those fractal layers, whether we look "up" or "down", what we observe appears to be mindless. It raises the question as to whether that is an observer effect or if entities at our scale (what Dawkins refers to as "middle world") truly in the "sweet spot" for consciousness in nature?
I noticed this, but I think one can only be conscious at one's own layer. If my cells were fully conscious, they would not know what it is like to be a human, having as much access to my consciousness as I have access to yours. But the cells are life forms and don't necessarily die if I do, nor do I die if any particular cells die. Mitochondria don't know what it is like to be a cell. They are two layers down. Looking the other way, perhaps a community or country could be a life form, with an even higher consciousness. No human would know what it is like to subjectively be that entity, however much they're a part of it.

Yes. The issue is like trying to understand what future advanced general AI experiences or not. If they eventually transcended simulation of consciousness to the real thing, not even a Turing test could decide for certain.

Halc wrote: ↑March 27th, 2018, 8:42 am
Re: the thought experiment about disembodied spirits, it's odd to imagine some incorporeal thing entering the body and overriding the effects of the existing brain and organs, as though their configurations and condition didn't count.
An interesting answer. I didn't say 'disembodied spirits', but that came to mind for you. Am I a spirit animating a body (which gets swapped in the experiment)? Yet you describe it more like a demon possession overriding physical function. The physical brain is subject to will that is a function of prior states (fully determined or not) and this thus not free willed. But a body possessed by an overriding spirit IS free willed, and can be held responsible for what it makes the body do in a way that the physical body is not responsible. Presumably the spirit of the poetry-reader is displaced during the experiment. Perhaps it is now picking flowers (a swap).

LOL - I consume too much sci fi and fantasy! I am struggling to understand the concepts you were brainstorming above (possibly because I am becoming more closed minded with age).

For me, "spirit" simply pertains to individual idiosyncrasies, the product of the feedback loops between all parts of the body, with the brain being by far the most influential. Still, there have been some fascinating cases of heart transplant patients finding themselves engaging in some novel behaviours that turn out to be typical of the donor. All parts make a difference, but time makes more. Nailing down who one has been fundamentally from cradle to present is difficult - what is the commonality between infant Hal and today's Hal?

At a more fundamental level, everything could be said to have a spirit, a particular way of being or doing ... a singular configuration of perturbations in the fabric of reality ... organised and systematised eddies in the stuff of the big bang that display particular tendencies for a time until they dissipate and are often replaced by entities with similar tendencies.

I also think I mentioned earlier that dualism may be both real and apparent, depending on one's perspective. So very small things - while being whole entities in themselves - act essentially as information, as bits (qubits?) and bytes, in very much larger entities.

Halc wrote: ↑March 27th, 2018, 8:42 amIs going to 'heaven' and act of moving to a new 'place', or is it just a change of experiential state? Can't say I have an opinion, but if you're going to hold to the view, I think these can't just be dismissed.

Experiential, with heaven and hell are right here on Earth, available to us on any day, depending on our luck - and I expect that such pleasure and pain exists anywhere that sensate life exists.

Of course, if string theorists were right about the extra dimensions, as sci fi and fantasy fan, that opens up tantalising possibilities regarding different kinds of consciousnesses.

BigBango · Post by **BigBango** » March 27th, 2018, 8:17 pm

Greta, please don’t drag us into the matrix. Londoner’s position is just “Solipsism”pure and simple. It is considered a philosophical “surd” that denies not only the possibility of the efficacy of language it also denies that philosophy has any merit. Therefore to argue his position is to have no philosophical grounding on his side with which to argue. Philosophical argument does assume there are some “a priori” truths!

Post by **Sy Borg** » March 27th, 2018, 8:36 pm

BigBango wrote: ↑March 27th, 2018, 8:17 pmGreta, please don’t drag us into the matrix.

I took the blue pill, BB, so the Matrix is where I reside :8)

BigBango wrote: ↑March 27th, 2018, 5:01 pmWhile I think Penrose’ ideas on “cell consciousness” are interesting I don’t think they qualify as a serious explanation of the nature of the mental. Quantum Mechanics or more specifically the superposition of physical matter seems to me to be less an artifact of consciousness and more a matter of what can be known about matter and still be verified by measurement with instruments made of physical matter.

Yes, the Penrose/Hammerhof ideas were not an explanation, just an attempt to take one more step towards one.

Descartes' effectively ran into the same measurement problem as you described, determining that he must be a mind rather than a body. What decided this? His mind, but it would say that, wouldn't it? :)

Perhaps any measuring tools we use will inevitably bring us to to the conclusion that reality is akin to the tool? Enter Kant, and the seemingly impassable line between what is perceived and what is real.

BigBango wrote:On the other hand, Penrose’ hypotheses on the nature of the universe before the Big Bang suggest continued “vertical” universes that have evolved into our familiar universe with the Big Bang preceded by a Big Crunch. Instead of the many worlds (parallel) of other theorist’s (driven again by QM) we can at least get some additional “ideas”, if not hard evidence, about layers of our world that existed before the Big Bang.

What doesn’t seem to have been seriously considered is the possibility that what we refer to as the “mental” may serve to be Mereological glue to hierarchically adjacent layers. With that understanding a multicelled organism’s consciousness is a tight collection of all its cellular feeling. The nervous system becomes a specialized organ of focusing the consciousness on particularly important (to the organism) feelings. The experiments conducted on “blind” sight verify that sight is supported at lower levels even when the more specialized organ of sight is impaired by a severed optic nerve.

Interesting idea. No, I'd not considered it, but will.

Atreyu · Post by **Atreyu** » March 27th, 2018, 10:10 pm

To get back to the OP, and to keep it simple, Substance Dualism is false simply because it rests on the false assumption that because we cannot directly perceive any material directly associated with psychic phenomenon such as thought, awareness, feeling, etc, that there must not be any.

This is a very narrow, shallow view. My position is that there must be some kind of material associated with the 'soul', simply because there must be some kind of material associated with all perceived phenomenon. We simply cannot perceive all the matter of the Universe (think 'dark matter'), therefore we cannot define and classify it (beyond merely calling it 'unknown' or 'dark' matter).

Post by **Sy Borg** » March 27th, 2018, 10:52 pm

Atreyu wrote: ↑March 27th, 2018, 10:10 pmThis is a very narrow, shallow view. My position is that there must be some kind of material associated with the 'soul', simply because there must be some kind of material associated with all perceived phenomenon. We simply cannot perceive all the matter of the Universe (think 'dark matter'), therefore we cannot define and classify it (beyond merely calling it 'unknown' or 'dark' matter).

That's basically what was proposed earlier - that the very small effectively function as bits of information for much larger "hosts".

Halc · Post by **Halc** » March 27th, 2018, 10:59 pm

Greta wrote: ↑March 27th, 2018, 7:23 pm The issue is like trying to understand what future advanced general AI experiences or not. If they eventually transcended simulation of consciousness to the real thing, not even a Turing test could decide for certain.

Turing test is to test for something behaving undetectably different from a human. It is not a test for consciousness, but one for immitation. A true self-aware AI will not likely pass a Turing test, having little incentive (other than deceit) to imitate something that it is not.

LOL - I consume too much sci fi and fantasy! I am struggling to understand the concepts you were brainstorming above (possibly because I am becoming more closed minded with age).

I am getting cynical with age. I really notice this.

Nailing down who one has been fundamentally from cradle to present is difficult - what is the commonality between infant Hal and today's Hal?

Halc (not Hal. Halc is based on 'Halcyon') has a subjective worldline that is, until challenged, a simple thing to track. Objectively, I share no identity with infant Halc, by any seeming reasonable definition of identity. So subjective is all that is left. Baby Halc is a direct causal predecessor to my current state, despite me having less than 1% of the material (if material even has identity) of that infant. Like I said, Ship of Theseus can sink me. If you start playing mitosis or clone games, the subjective identity fails. All amoeba's are 10 million years old, but pick one from 10 million years ago and ask where that one is today, and the question has no meaning.

Post by **Sy Borg** » March 27th, 2018, 11:37 pm

Halc wrote: ↑March 27th, 2018, 10:59 pm
Greta wrote: ↑March 27th, 2018, 7:23 pmThe issue is like trying to understand what future advanced general AI experiences or not. If they eventually transcended simulation of consciousness to the real thing, not even a Turing test could decide for certain.
Turing test is to test for something behaving undetectably different from a human. It is not a test for consciousness, but one for imitation. A true self-aware AI will not likely pass a Turing test, having little incentive (other than deceit) to imitate something that it is not.

Interesting point - I'd not thought of AI failing the test either through strategy or disinterest. By that point, I expect they may well be testing us.

Halc wrote:
Nailing down who one has been fundamentally from cradle to present is difficult - what is the commonality between infant Hal and today's Hal?
Halc (not Hal. Halc is based on 'Halcyon') has a subjective worldline that is, until challenged, a simple thing to track. Objectively, I share no identity with infant Halc, by any seeming reasonable definition of identity. So subjective is all that is left. Baby Halc is a direct causal predecessor to my current state, despite me having less than 1% of the material (if material even has identity) of that infant. Like I said, Ship of Theseus can sink me. If you start playing mitosis or clone games, the subjective identity fails. All amoeba's are 10 million years old, but pick one from 10 million years ago and ask where that one is today, and the question has no meaning.

Ah, I thought you were Hal C. Probably too much sci fi again ...

While infant Halc only shares a tiny number of cells with adult Halc, they are the very most important ones. After all, less than half a kilogram of your body's cells are DNA, and consider the impact of that small percentage. Information dense entities often have more leverage and power than their physical presence may suggest.

Conditioning and epigenetics mostly shape us but we do share with our infant selves are our inherited suite of limitations in our genetics (which is ultimately conditioning of earlier generations). So babies will be less or more likely to be generally dominant, submissive, smart, dumb, nurturing, aggressive, excitable, calm, extroverted, introverted, courageous, fearful, etc.

The amoeba observation can be looked at in Dawkinsian way, with DNA struggling to survive through countless iterations, each building themselves ever more adapted "survival machines" that will either grow or wither the lineage. Of course, one can take this line of thinking back all the way - that, in a sense, 13.8 billions years ago we were all part of something like a singularity (extraordinarily hot, dense and near-featureless plasma) and now we are "us".

There are many ways of looking at, or thinking about, the same thing - numerous different angles. Monism and dualism may also ultimately simply be different angles, and not the only possibilities.