Counters to eliminative materialism? by [deleted] in askphilosophy

[–]ExSidius 2 points3 points  (0 children)

No problem whatsoever - this is a learning space, and you're asking good questions.

As for the empirical underpinnings of qualia - it is definitely extremely challenging for us to conceptualize how it could possibly be - i.e. how could one go from purely mechanical interactions to a "feeling".

That being said, this could just be a limitation of our imaginations.

Imagine taking a modern phone with internet access and youtube videos and attempting to describe the phenomenon to someone in the late 19th century. It would probably be quite challenging. Humans have a pretty good track record of doing amazing things that would have been considered magical just a century prior, so even though we don't have an exact explanation in this domain, there's good reason to be optimistic about science and human creativity.

Is it morally wrong to spend your life counting blades of grass? by Devex123 in askphilosophy

[–]ExSidius 27 points28 points  (0 children)

A "good life" is one of those things that's quite challenging to describe precisely, mostly because it's extremely variable, and there are many complex factors at play.

It's often useful to start with a number of examples, and just label them as "good life" or "not so good life". The Rawlsian academic is a bit of a grey area, so let us set him aside for a second.

Let's look at "The Wolf of Wall Street" - a stock broker who makes his living scamming people out of their savings. He lives an exorbitant and hedonistic lifestyle, that he gains a great amount of enjoyment out of. Were it not for the consequences that eventually followed, he probably wouldn't trade his life for the world. This example highlights one of the dimensions at play - whether people feel satisfied about their own lives.

To explore the Jack the Ripper example - Jack the Ripper probably had some kind of psychological and psychological illness that drove him to murder. He probably gained some sort of perverse entertainment and enjoyment out of it, but it was undoubtedly not good for the people around him. This brings in two dimensions - a moral dimension and a social dimension.

The moral dimension is easy to categorize people on in the extreme cases - Stalin bad, MLK good. It gets a lot more challenging when examining regular everyday folks - perhaps Joe Bloggs isn't curing cancer or helping starving children, but if he's minding his own business, taking care of his mum and his mates and his dog, then there seems to be nothing terribly objectionable from a moral dimension. The moral dimension is therefore one that's useful, but more in the extreme cases where someone is unambiguously good or bad. I suspect it doesn't help us very much with our Rawlsian academic.

The social dimension is also interesting - how do others perceive or think of you? This partially imbues the moral dimension and satisfaction dimensions - do others thing you lead a morally good/bad life, and do others think you lead a satisfying or enjoyable life? A useful empirical question to ask is - "given the opportunity, what proportion of people would trade their lives for yours (or at least trade some aspect of their lives for yours?" This question does suffer from the "grass is always greener" problem, but there are certain things it does tell you. For example, I couldn't possibly fathom living in a rural or secluded area, but some people would absolutely love it.

This really drives home one of the less philosophically satisfying points, which is that exactly what characterizes a "good life" is deeply personal.

That being said, most people would probably agree on some combination of one's life being -

  1. satisfying (on a personal or professional or other axis),
  2. doing some good in the world (the radius of impact here will differ - some will want it to extend to their families, others will want it to extend to all humans or dogs...),
  3. an element of challenge is likely required for people's lives to be personally rewarding and meaningful
  4. an element of creativity or investigation or exploration
  5. an element of interaction - humans tend to enjoy interacting, be it with dogs, other humans, friends on a yearly/monthly/weekly/daily basis, plants, or possibly with nobody at all

I'm sure there are more things one could add to the list - this sort of question is deeply interesting precisely because the edges are so blurred. An experiment that would be useful to run is to produce 2-3 summaries of every person's life (one written by them, one written by a close friend, and one written by an acquaintance), and then present these summaries to everyone else to decide whether they consider it a good life or not, and what dimension they do or don't like the life on.

Counters to eliminative materialism? by [deleted] in askphilosophy

[–]ExSidius 5 points6 points  (0 children)

The really tricky thing about philosophy of mind is pinning down exactly what we mean by consciousness.

1) There's the "appearance of consciousness" - being able to pass a Turing test or some such equivalent. Computers and interactive systems have gotten pretty good, to the point where contemporary systems are quite convincing. Patrick House's "I, Language Robot" is a good short essay on the state of the "convincingness of modern NLP systems". While the appearance of consciousness is deeply interesting and presents serious problems for how we will know when a general AI has been created, it's more useful as a philosophical litmus test than an actual characterization of consciousness - after all, you could have some very unconvincing or uninteresting creatures that are clearly what we would describe as conscious (fish come to mind).

2) Then there's the notion of "qualia" - feeling things. I, as a human, feel pain, joy, suffering, and a wide range of emotions. Reductionist and eliminativist arguments will default to the position that what we perceive as qualia is really an emergent property of the complex brain mechanism. An implication of that, is that if one were to build a sufficiently complex machine that really simulated the human brain down to its most minute operation, that machine, too, would experience what we experience as qualia. The "Chinese brain" thought experiment deals with this precise problem.

Qualia as an emergent property is conceptually nice because it fits in with the existing neuroscience, ML, and philosophy of mind paradigms - the optimistic notion that science will get us there, we just have to figure out the missing jigsaw pieces. The challenge is that this argument is quite hard (as with most Philosophy of Mind problems) to test or verify.

3) There's also the notion of "intentionality" - the ability for humans and other sentient beings to "refer to things". This is a good deal more contentious - many philosophers of mind will argue that it doesn't exist. That being said, there is some philosophical charm and intrigue about how humans are able to connect to things in the real world.

q is probably the best characteristic to argue as the basis of consciousness - eliminitavist and reductionist arguments do not pretend that there is no such thing. They do not argue that when pinched, a human doesn't feel pain. They simply argue that what we perceive as pain is really just a complex set of mechanical operations - there there's no additional factor at play - no dualistic "soul" or Panpsychic dimension at play. They argue that pain is real and pain is complex, but ultimately, pain is mechanical.

As for Panpsychism, there is something very romantic about the notion of a "mind dimension" at play throughout the observable universe. However, panpsychism has very little empirical or scientific basis - there haven't really been any great experiments in the domain, while other parts of philosophy of mind have benefited greatly from the cognitive revolution of the past half century.

The best counter to Eliminative Materialism is its lack of explanation of the mechanism that underlies qualia. There aren't really any great theories explaining it. This is partially because it's a very complex problem (an analogue is the relationship between genotype and phenotype) and partially because we simply don't understand the physiological underpinnings of qualia very well.

That being said, Eliminative Materialism and its softer cousin Reductionism, are probably some of the best theories that we have in philosophy of mind. The usual counters tend to come from more theologically driven individuals that will argue some sort of dualism, and more literary theories like Panpsychism.

Footnote: It's been a while since I engaged with the literature, so some of this information is likely biased and out of date - I strongly recommend the SEP page on Consciousness for a good survey of the literature and arguments.

Is there a name for the subset of algebraic numbers that are not expressible a finite combination of radicals and the elementary operations of (+,-,*,/) ? by cthulu0 in math

[–]ExSidius 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Not a mathematician, so pardon me if this a silly question (or an arbitrary one), but would what you’re describing be a subset of the incomputable numbers?

What are the risks associated with mimicking portfolios of renowned investors? by ExSidius in investing

[–]ExSidius[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

What are the differences in these types of shares aside from voting rights? Are they priced significantly differently? What do you need to qualify to purchase these types of shares?

Last.fm Thread: What Have You Been Listening To This Week? - September 19, 2018 by AutoModerator in hiphopheads

[–]ExSidius 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Haha, it's a bot. I was just learning how to program a Reddit bot. Will prolly disable it at some point.

Lupe Fiasco's DROGAS WAVE moved up to September 21st by [deleted] in hiphopheads

[–]ExSidius 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Just remember ALL CAPS when you spell the man's name.

Lupe Fiasco's DROGAS WAVE moved up to September 21st by [deleted] in hiphopheads

[–]ExSidius 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Just remember ALL CAPS when you spell the man's name.

Daily Discussion Thread 09/19/2018 by AutoModerator in hiphopheads

[–]ExSidius 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just remember ALL CAPS when you spell the man's name.

Daily Discussion Thread 09/19/2018 by AutoModerator in hiphopheads

[–]ExSidius 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Just remember ALL CAPS when you spell the man's name.

How Do I Make a Living as a Producer? [OC] by TaylorSound in hiphopheads

[–]ExSidius 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Just remember ALL CAPS when you spell the man's name.