For anybody following this thread, who may have missed this one (which has no replies):
The model of reality I am defending here isn’t just another item on the metaphysical menu. If we replace physicalism with 2PC, a large number of serious problems in cosmology either disappear completely or are reframed in a way as to make them tractable (and new science is required, which I do not supply).
I did not attack your character, no. I attacked the way academia operates, especially the fact that it is deeply “siloed” (one mile deep, one inch across), and that it is systematically resistant to significant paradigm shifts, especially if they are inter-disciplinary. Academia cannot deliver a grand synthesis of knowledge, because it is designed in a way what makes that completely impossible. Academics are forced to play the game by the rules enforced by the status quo. Incremental. Don’t upset the applecart or you won’t get published/funding/tenure. That is why the truly revolutionary work takes place outside academia (Nagel, McGilchrist, Vervaeke, etc…)
If that’s not you, I apologise for the misjudgement.
I was banned from Reddit, yes. Is that relevant? Reddit is run by the defeated postmodern political left, and I am a hard realist. I was banned for expressing political views that the gatekeepers decided were “compromising community safety”. Things which people in the UK are now able to say in public, because politics has changed, and the law has been clarified. I don’t know what the rules are here, so I’ll leave it at that.
Strangely enough, I feel no guilt or shame…
Yes its relevant because if im picking up on it then others will as well. Two decades ago this was fine. Now adays? People are pathetic and will go out of their way to find a reason to haunt you, even if you did nothing wrong, not that this has happened to me before. You went out of your way to make everyone aware of being banned on reddit then for your thread which is why I brought it up. You have quality posts and I would hate to see it get locked down which I bet you have experienced before already. On one of the only threads that I made on here, someone just told me they came off of a two week ban if I remember correctly.
No, that is not what I am saying. I am saying this:
Our brains maintain a dynamic model of the world, with ourselves in the model as an entity which persists over time. We could easily build a robot which does something like this (and presumably we already have). But the robot wouldn’t be conscious. It would have a perspective, but it would experience nothing.
Humans, and presumably other complex animals from about the level of a worm onwards (in terms of evolutionary descent), don’t just have the perspective. They experience a world, and assign value and meaning to different possible futures.
My point is that physicalism cannot account for the difference between the robot and the animal. What is this extra thing?
Any chance we could stay on-topic? I am not interested in talking about this. It’s purely personal, and nobody else wants to read it.
You took offence at something I said, and decided to overtly attack me personally in response. Note that I have not responded in kind.
Exactly the same applied on Reddit. I was not banned for personal attacks. I was banned for saying prohibited things about reality.
What the robot lacks is the biological phenomenon that animals have.
I think consciousness is a biological phenomenon, it emerges under conditions of satisfaction (not only involving the brain but the environment and causal history etc). No wonder there is no simple consice explanation (yet) of how it emerges.
If the robot were as sophisticated as a biological human, how would we know that it doesn’t experience anything?
Let me guess, you are going to quote Kuhn on The Structure On Scientific Revolutions now. Yeah, I get who you are trying to represent right now.
[quote]You took offence at something I said, and decided to overtly attack me personally in response. Note that I have not responded in kind.
Exactly the same applied on Reddit. I was not banned for personal attacks. I was banned for saying prohibited things about reality.[/quote]
I can disagree, but ill agree for your sake. I’ll drop it. I’m not sure if you deleted or one of the mods already flagged one of your posts, but whatever your response was to me before, I cannot review whatever you said now. Oh well. Ill review your other thread then.
I am very happy to talk about Kuhn’s book. Was he right or was he right?
You can disagree about why I was banned from Reddit??
What it lacks is consciousness. Calling it a “biological phenomenon” doesn’t mean anything beyond “this requires a brain”.
Why should there be a subjective biological phenomenon? The hard problem is impossible because biology, like all the hard sciences, has to be be as objective as possible. The whole point of (physicalist) science has always been to eliminate the subjective, so why should we expect it to be able to account for consciousness? [Note…this has always been Nagel’s point].
In order to fix this situation, we have to stop assuming science must always be physicalist. Conscious animals aren’t normal physical objects. Something else is going on.
Well, we can’t measure it. As things stand (in terms of scientific knowledge) we would have to rely on observing its behaviour, and what it says. We are all having to learn how to do this due to the presence of AI bots in our online environment, and it is becoming more difficult (although we’re learning fast, or at least some of us are).
It is possible we will make some sort of breakthrough whereby we figure out how to create a quasi-biological brain (think Data from Star Trek) – a quantum computer which works like a brain. Then it gets interesting, because we may well still not be able to measure consciousness, but we’d be dealing with a human-manufactured entity that might just be conscious.
Personally I hope we never get there.
Would you agree with the idea that consciousness is the mental capability and character of the biological living beings interacting with the world for communication with others, working for its wellbeing and survival?
No. Most conscious beings are almost entirely interested in their own survival and reproduction, and only co-operate with others in specific circumstances. And “interacting with the world” is something LLMs do, in their own non-conscious way.
Consciousness involves interacting with the world in a way that LLMs are incapable of. We understand meaning and values. Mostly this is applied to what things mean to us and what we value, but humans are clearly capable of something deeper and more important than that. This is why we think about morality and no other species does.
I wouldn’t consider LLMs as possible conscious beings for their inability in interacting in sympathy with humans. They are capable of interacting in information exchange tasks, but that is where their capabilities end .
LLMs lack the other side of mental functions and states what humans possess and are capable of such as will, emotions, desire and autonomy etc, which are critical part of being conscious.
Hence LLMs can interact, but in very limited way, which has little to do with being conscious.
Anyhow, I believe the word consciousness was invented originally to describe the human mind and mental state in the 17th century. Using the word to describe non human machines sounds misusing the word grossly, which lead many folks confused conflating particles, electrons and computer parts being conscious. I don’t want to see LLMs being added in there.
Yes, I agree with all that. Although I’d add that even if consciousness was invented with humans in mind, I think it is blindingly obvious that most complex animals are also conscious. Indeed, it ought to be obvious that consciousness was what kicked off the Cambrian Explosion, but physicalist science is prohibited from making that connection, because it can’t define consciousness objectively, and so cannot incorporate it into any of its models of how things actually work.
That’s plainly false. Far from all physicalists are eliminativists.
Not even eliminativists can reject the ontologically subjective mode in which the organism’s point of view exists and which characterises its experiences.
Yeah. My neighbor seems to behave in a conscious way and claims to be conscious, but I am still a little skeptical. Even if the robot claims to be conscious (or unconscious), I’m not sure where that leaves us.
I suspect that in 100-500 years, intelligent creatures will be looking back and feeling sad about their poor meat-machine ancestors.
Glad to see someone agreeing with the truth 
Yes, I agree the most complex animals are also conscious. We know that by their interaction with us, or observation on how they manage, interact and solve problems for their survival.
They seem to try to find consciousness from some matter or physical things, and brain. Consciousness cannot be reduced to these objects. A brain in the flask is just same as a rock in the field. Atoms, electrons and particles means nothing on their own.
The only place we can see consciousness is from the living biological animals and humans living in the world for their survival, reproduction and entertainment.
It is very obviously true, and has been pointed out repeatedly.
"Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them.
Subjective appearances, on the other hand—how this physical world appears to human perception—were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were treated as subjective effects of physical causes."
From chapter 3 (Consciousness) of Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (2012).
Then later in the book, when talking about physicalist theories of consciousness:
“And what they leave out is just what was deliberately left out of the physical world by Descartes and Galileo in order to form the modern concept of the physical, namely, subjective appearances.”
There are only so many options.
(1) Identity theory: “consciousness is brain activity”. In which case, what does “is” mean, given that these two things have entirely different properties?
(2) Emergence theory: “consciousness emerges from brain activity”. In which case we’ve got two things, not one. Does the thing which emerges have causal effect over what it emerged from? This is unacknowledged dualism, not physicalist monism.
(3) Consciousness doesn’t exist (or is an illusion). Of course it exists, and if it is an illusion then the illusion exists, and still requires an explanation.
None of these options makes any sense, which is why naturalists like Nagel are looking for a post-physicalist naturalism.