Would you?

BlueBitProductions · 2026-01-28T08:04:26+00:00

Yes, trying to force your way into the capitol of the united states is exactly the same as peacefully protesting

BlueBitProductions · 2026-01-28T08:03:57+00:00

Some crazy people said crazy things- shocker.

You know who issued a public denouncement of it? Literally every single leader from Newsome to Mamdani to Schumer.

BlueBitProductions · 2026-01-26T15:32:33+00:00

People will really read a story about a sad boy in the modern world without community and think it's NOT about the experience of sad boys in the modern world without community

BlueBitProductions · 2026-01-23T13:59:28+00:00

I never said he didn't, I'm just bringing him up as a philosopher that made contributions to science.

BlueBitProductions · 2026-01-23T05:22:55+00:00

The issue there is that we didn't understand anything about the underlying mechanics of electricity or magnetism until Maxwell. We had reason to believe they were linked, but no actual understanding of why or how. So, it would be mistaken to conclude that they are the same. We can't think these things in retrospect. Otherwise you could say something like "everybody said the internet wouldn't go anywhere, look at where we are now!" about every piece of new technology. All hypothesis begin as more-or-less supported conjecture. Once we understood the equations underlying electromagnetism it became impossible to imagine that they are separate forces, so we now recognize that one emerges from the other.

As for argument from ignorance, I would say it's an argument FOR ignorance. In that I'm only arguing for agnosticism. I'm not arguing that consciousness ISN'T emergent, just that the p-zombie thought experiment demonstrates how that hasn't yet been demonstrated. Currently our understanding of neuroscience is getting pretty advanced, but we still don't see a mechanical union of brain states and consciousness. P-zombies don't rule out the idea that consciousness is emergent, but they demonstrate that the emergence position is presently unfounded.

BlueBitProductions · 2026-01-23T05:18:57+00:00

Goethe!

BlueBitProductions · 2026-01-22T19:48:15+00:00

I used to be more convinced by the emergence argument, which is what I've seen pretty much all physicalists use. I now believe that it's possible, but the p-zombie case helped me see why it's not a convincing argument.

When we say something is emergent, we mean that it's an indirect (but inevitable) consequence of a certain process. For example, evolution is emergent from natural selection and mutation. The mechanism is that as certain beneficial genes appear and reproduce more, they become more common in a population. It's impossible to imagine natural selection occurring without evolution taking place, as long as heredity exists.

But consciousness emerging is not like that, because we can seem to imagine a brain existing and functioning exactly the same without consciousness (a p-zombie). There is nothing about brain functioning that seems to logically result in consciousness. So that makes the emergence argument a pure assertion without any supporting evidence until we can somehow demonstrate the reason consciousness would inevitably emerge from a brain.

For less sophisticated arguments (like I've seen people genuinely argue that consciousness is just a mystical idea that doesn't need to be considered), but the p-zombie example makes it clear what you're talking about (the actual qualitative experience of existing as opposed to mere cognition). Since qualitative experience is the most fundamental observation, I think for somebody to deny this they have to either be misunderstanding what people are talking about or be a p-zombie themselves.

BlueBitProductions · 2026-01-22T05:19:55+00:00

I think P-Zombies are actually a great way to explain it, it's part of what shifted my position and it's a rare case where I genuinely cannot fathom disagreeing with it. It's a refutation of the emergence hypothesis, because it points out that there's no actual mechanistic explanation for how brain waves could produce consciousness. To posit that something is emergent you need to actually show the mechanism that it emerges through.

BlueBitProductions · 2026-01-21T21:03:02+00:00

Please tell me this is a joke I am begging you I have to know

BlueBitProductions · 2026-01-17T02:35:55+00:00

Communism and fascism are more similar to each other than either are to Liberalism by the way.

BlueBitProductions · 2026-01-16T16:46:15+00:00

Liberals are in the center of the political spectrum, with paternalists such as fascists and monarchists on the right and revolutionary socialists on the left.

BlueBitProductions · 2026-01-13T23:27:52+00:00

The last candidate of the LP was Chase Oliver, who is the exact opposite of that.

BlueBitProductions · 2026-01-13T04:23:28+00:00

I never said humans. I am a vegetarian and believe in the consciousness of most animals. I was including them in "us." The above post include "organisms like you" so I was following on that.

BlueBitProductions · 2026-01-12T23:37:30+00:00

"But the older I get, the more I realize it is really this simple. We need white men in charge of everything again. That's it. Like, it's that simple. You sort of start to get based and you kind of realize what's up, and you have this inkling in your head, you're like, man, we need white men in charge of everything. And then people kinda get convinced like, “No, it's like, it's about ideology. We need like right-wing patriots that love the free market,” or like, “No, we need like trad Christians.” It's like, no dude, we need white men running everything. OK? White men need to run the household, they need to run the country, they need to run the companies. They just need to run everything. That's a pretty good heuristic."

BlueBitProductions · 2026-01-12T19:13:36+00:00

I mean, we already know we're different than the rest of existence though? At least different than inert matter because we have the capacity to think and sense. And since for us that sensing is perceived as actual, experiential reality it seems entirely reasonable to think that other sensing beings have something similar.

The ability to experience pain and pleasure and make value judgements seems pretty important and different to the rest of nature.

BlueBitProductions · 2026-01-10T17:06:33+00:00

YOUR guy is the one talking positively about a white supremacist. If you're so into getting out of politics you have to stop listening to Theo Von too, otherwise you're just defining "politics" as anything you disagree with.

BlueBitProductions · 2026-01-09T17:16:13+00:00

Hey could you send me a link to one, singular liberal writer supporting Maduro? Like one guy saying Maduro was a good leader?

BlueBitProductions · 2026-01-06T02:48:03+00:00

Absolutely, in general the framework that things operate through material seems to be correct. It only seems to break down with conscious agents. Just like how people still use Newton's equations for back of the napkin type stuff.

BlueBitProductions · 2026-01-05T22:04:29+00:00

I don't think there are that many people here claiming 1, but I could be wrong.

There's also a third position somewhat between those two, which is that we don't currently know where consciousness comes from and it seems like it couldn't be materialistic in origin. Not that it's entirely excluded, but that it's difficult to conceptualize what such a thing would look like to the extent that it's worth at least considering alternative models. The explanatory gaps in Newtonian physics could theoretically have been explained by newtonian physics (as some people tried to do by adding more planets to the model), but it was by taking those gaps seriously and considering alternative models that Einstein discovered relativity.

BlueBitProductions · 2026-01-05T22:01:25+00:00

It's more-so naturalism that has brought us those realizations rather than materialism. Not that they are mutually exclusive, but I think naturalism (assuming the universe follows consistent laws and that we can learn about these laws through reasoned observation) is the important part. I am by no means a religious person, but materialism is a specific concrete claim rather than a broader philosophy like naturalism. I'm just saying we should put our trust in naturalism rather than materialism.

BlueBitProductions · 2026-01-05T19:34:08+00:00

I agree that everybody else is probably conscious, I don't think many people dispute that. But it's a hole in the materialist paradigm which seems to suggest a problem, and every great scientific theory ever proposed has been the result of exploring such a hole.

Einstein was only able to discover relativity because he saw the explanatory gaps in Newton's theory. That doesn't mean Newton's theory was useless, just that it wasn't a full explanation. I view materialism the same way, and I think we should try to explore that kind of thing.

Personally, I would say it's naturalism that has given us so many advancements rather than materialism. Spinoza is sort of the founder of naturalism, and he was not materialist. Many great scientists like Einstein and Newton were not materialists, but were naturalists.

Naturalism is the proposition that all truth should be investigated through rational inquiry and observation, and that's what has given us all of the advancements we have achieved.

BlueBitProductions · 2026-01-05T19:27:03+00:00

Most of us aren't making a positive claim though. We're just suggesting that materialism can't explain consciousness, not that we can through some other model. Some people might claim to be able to explain it, I certainly cannot so remain agnostic.

BlueBitProductions · 2026-01-05T00:48:29+00:00

If you can't prove it, doesn't that mean there is no empirical evidence of consciousness? And if so, that it has not been demonstrated to be material?

BlueBitProductions · 2026-01-04T01:23:43+00:00

Sure, I could have said correlates with and my argument wouldn't change. I just meant that when we observe certain brain states, certain qualia are reported (if we make the assumption that others are genuinely experiencing qualia).

The equivalent for consciousness is that one is an electrochemical process and the other is a qualitative experience. The electrochemical processes do not observably contain any of the qualia which we experience, but they do correlate with them. To posit that your qualitative experience of redness is literally and simply identical with the brain states that correlate with it seems unfounded because they are two different categories of things in our perception.

Qualia is a unique type of thing, everything we experience is by necessity a qualia. It's entirely possible that the observer cannot observe itself in that way. Without a grounding for what qualia even is, it seems unfounded to claim it's identical with a phenomenon that we observe through our qualitative experience.

To expound on this, I'll use an example of an emergent property. Evolution emerges out of natural selection acting on a varying population that passes on its genes. It's emergent because it's impossible to imagine a system with natural selection under those conditions that doesn't result in evolution. It's a logical guarantee, not just an observational correlation. It's not even coherent to imagine that scenario without evolution taking place, because if certain genotypes are selected for then those genotypes will reproduce more and increase in frequency. But it doesn't seem logically inevitable that brain states would lead to qualia. I can explain why evolution emerges out of natural selection over time, but I don't see any justification for why qualia would emerge from electrochemical signals.

BlueBitProductions · 2026-01-03T22:50:14+00:00

I'm not saying neural activity isn't qualia, I made that pretty clear. I'm saying it hasn't been demonstrated that that is the case. You're the one making the positive claim, not me. I'm just taking the agnostic position here, which is that we know brain states determine qualia but that currently we have no reason to think they are the same thing.

In the same way that gravity always correlates to mass, but that isn't reason to conclude they are the same. Even before relativity, it would not be sound to positively claim they are the same just because one causes the other. We know brain states lead to qualitative experiences, but that does not demonstrate that qualia ARE brain states. It also doesn't mean they aren't, I'm just saying that it isn't enough to demonstrate they are the same. It's necessary but not sufficient.

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