"I know because I get paid to know" is remarkably weak reasoning.

I find that most debates with conspiracy theorist types devolve into a discussion of "How do you know anything?" with one side of the argument blindly believing mass media and the other side blindly believing anyone on AM radio. On health care, what's knowable is that uninsured people are suffering and dying to preventable ailments, and that life and pain-free living are not luxuries but human rights (whether or not the constitution explicitly says it).

Ihr seid verfluchte huuuuuunde!

Ground and pound is hard with such short arms.

*beg

*beg

>> ^Almanildo:
Is there any reason to doubt his awareness now? I can't see any.

Scientific reductionism is unscientific.

As far as we can tell, my consciousness exists because of the unique configuration of everything at the time of my birth. There's no way we can scientifically eliminate factors and test to see if I would still be the consciousness that was brought into existence. If we ask what factors were necessary to bring me into existence, we have to say "everything."

If we conceive it is possible to artificially create consciousness, then we have some crazy scenarios to imagine. For example, "pulsing" a consciousness on and off in rapid succession and giving it no memory so each entry to the world is its first. Is it the same consciousness? Is there any suffering? Is there any change to the state of a consciousness without the necessary cues of memory and senses? Is there no additional energy cost to producing a million consciousnesses inside a neural network versus just one?

What is consciousness if it is completely textureless and featureless, depending entirely on its host brain for all its function? The answer "an illusion" has to be disqualified because this "illusion" is at the foundation of all we know and experience. There are illusions in our conscious experience, but if it were entirely an illusion there would be no reason for anyone to be experiencing it. The term "illusion" itself requires a viewer to be experiencing it, who presumably would be conscious as well.

I have no doubt science will inform us more on this subject, but if I had to predict it, I would say that reductionism just won't do. Consciousness must be some kind of energy, and follow similar laws of other energies, and not just be an infinitely reproducable phenomenon. If it is infinitely reproducable, then everything in existence has a consciousness value and ours is just higher or more concentrated. One of those two.

>> ^chilaxe:
So do we modern secular intellectuals make use of any Gods of the Gaps?

Our conscious experience is all gaps. We can make the gaps smaller but they are always there.

>> ^guymontage:
i doubt its as hard as yahtzees says it is


It is that hard. I gave up on it, but came back to it later after reading about how other people play it, and did much better and beat it. I think the main difficulty is that there are invalid ways to try and play it. For example, you NEED to have either a bow or an offensive spell to beat some bosses or to survive certain levels. You also need to use a shield until you master the rolling around. Also, never dual wield. If I had known these things from the start, I wouldn't have quit the first time. So Yahtzee's review is valid. That's what happens when you don't show people how to play your difficult game.

He's like the foundation block for reason in the US legislature.

>> ^Almanildo:

Postulating a new kind of physical interaction isn't substance dualism; you have to take the new stuff completely out of physics to call it dualist.

On the subject of determinism, we don't really know whether physics is deterministic. My belief is that it's not. However, it's not a given that determinism is even relevant for the problem of free will. Daniel Dennett argues (quite convincingly in my book) that it's not.


I don't see the point to that definition of substance dualism. How much farther removed from "physical" can you get than existing in a separate, invisible dimension? All the statements substance dualism makes about consciousness can still be true in a scenario where consciousness is part of an extra-physical dimension.

I watched Dennett's talk, the salient point comes at the conclusion which is "free will exists in the sense that matters," which is to say "real" free will doesn't exist, and that the universe is still ultimately deterministic in his view.

Does Kurt Loder have a beard?

In reply to this comment by marinara:
nice beard lodrr. are you related to kurt loder?

Dear Space,

Please enjoy this chair.

-Humanity

>> ^Psychologic:

The argument for/against souls is irrelevant to philosophical dualism. Regarding the cause of consciousness, dualism is simply saying "Your princess is in another castle."

>> ^brain:
If elementary particles undergoing quantum effects isn't physical, then I don't know what is.


That's the point, that today's "non-physical" is tomorrow's "physical." Dualists argue that consciousness results from physical interactions that we can't presently perceive, and that these interactions aren't limited to our perceivable dimensions.

@Almanildo, the problem with classical physics-based consciousness is that physics is deterministic, and our experience of consciousness is non-deterministic. We've recently gone from thinking that we were completely free-willed to a more complex understanding of brain chemistry and motor functions, but the basic experience of awareness and self-guided thought seem fundamentally impossible to pin as deterministic.

The stranger thing about this is that he "confronts" his girlfriend about missing food. Makes them sound like bitter roommates.