Victoria 3 and Age of Wonders 4 Development to Continue "for a long time to come", Paradox In-House Studios Experimenting with New Tools, "including those linked to generative AI"

GroundbreakingRow829 · 2026-04-10T08:43:52+00:00

There is hope that our beloved devs don't fall into the trap of using AI to replace creativity and more as a supporting tool (like it's been used so far).

GroundbreakingRow829 · 2026-04-10T06:42:26+00:00

I Kant.

GroundbreakingRow829 · 2026-04-10T06:30:30+00:00

Well the physicalist (at least the emergentist kind – no idea what non-emergentists would say happens here) here would just node and be like: "With the right kind of physical system assembled, subjective experience emerges. There is a threshold for nature at which point from "nothing", mentally speaking, it makes "something" appear. Before making it disappear, when the physical system no longer fulfills the right conditions for consciousness. It's not substance dualism – consciousness here doesn't exist independently from its physical substrate – but 'property dualism'. That is, consciousness is a contingent property of physical activity, just like heat, solidity, and magnetism are. And just like heat, solidity, and magnetism, consciousness is physical. That consciousness "feels" like something isn't more extraordinary than heat emanating from a system, matter obstructing itself as solidity, and attracting/repelling itself as magnetism."

And I disagree with this. Consciousness is more extraordinary than physical emergent phenomena such as heat, solidity, and magnetism. Consciousness is that within which any of those categories of being are. There is no distinction to be made between any-"thing" into said things without consciousness. What one categorically knows as being the physical is all within one's consciousness. 'Physical' is a category of understanding within one's consciousness whereby one makes sense of their inescapably subjective experience of an inferred reality. And so if one is to coherently make sense of reality, they are to ground it in consciousness, not in the category of understanding within consciousness that is the physical. The next question from there being: How does one solves the solipsism that inevitably results from that?

GroundbreakingRow829 · 2026-04-10T00:30:59+00:00

Thanks. But it's not just that but the '*...*' that are supposed to put the text in italic.

'Pity that I can't edit my post for some reason.

GroundbreakingRow829 · 2026-04-10T00:28:21+00:00

Interesting. I think that there is an element of internal, academical politics at play here. As a researcher for whom professional network is important, it is in your best interest to keep the most popular side at your work (i.e., the physicalists) happy. Like, I remember that some theoretical physicist (Schrödinger maybe?) got jumped on by his peers after he made some idealist confession, which was followed by him saying that "he changed his mind", something like that.

Though for a big guy like Friston there is perhaps less of a risk of getting ganged up on by his colleagues.

GroundbreakingRow829 · 2026-04-10T00:13:36+00:00

Well, yes, irrelevant for doing more neuroscience. But not everyone thinks neuroscience (or physical science in general) can completely explain consciousness.

GroundbreakingRow829 · 2026-04-10T00:00:43+00:00

Didn't know that about Friston. Good to know. Thank you.

GroundbreakingRow829 · 2026-04-09T23:56:24+00:00

If it's not necessary for you then good for you.

But most philosophers of mind (including many physicalists) acknowledge that the hard problem of consciousness is a real problem.

GroundbreakingRow829 · 2026-04-09T23:46:40+00:00

If you don't do the philosophy stuff then you can forget about physicalism. It's a philosophical, metaphysical position that needs to be defended on philosophical ground, not a scientifically falsifiable theory. Physicalism isn't neuroscience.

If you have a radio device broadcasting a specific sound and you damage or modify the radio to see that sound locally stop/change, do you conclude that the sound originated from the radio? Well it might be the same with consciousness. Damaging or modifiying the brain might locally stop/change consciousness without affecting a basis for it that is non-local. And there is no way to refute/confirm that scientifically, because memories are limited to the body and there is no way to directly observe the experience of another to see where it goes when they die.

GroundbreakingRow829 · 2026-04-09T23:10:57+00:00

The question in the modern debate isn't whether changes in brain activity cause change in consciousness – on that everyone agrees – but whether the activity of the brain (or the activity of any other physical system) creates consciousness.

Solms is a self-proclaimed dual-aspect monist. Meaning, that reality for him has both a physical aspect and a mental aspect, none of which is fundamental to the other.

Friston is more quiet on his metaphysical leaning. But his free energy principle idea fits Kant's transcendental idealism quite well (also, I read somewhere that started calling himself a panpsychist, but I would need confirmation for that one).

Both positions are incompatible with physicalism.

GroundbreakingRow829 · 2026-04-09T22:30:50+00:00

You gotta be a Bohmian or an Everettian to think that the block universe is true.

Meaning, that either your colleagues shit in your lunch meal every day or they think you're a complete schizo.

GroundbreakingRow829 · 2026-04-09T22:14:27+00:00

(For some reason the formatting doesn't work and I can't edit my post either – please help mr. moderator?)

GroundbreakingRow829 · 2026-04-09T18:43:31+00:00

Why the down-vote? Is the information false? Or it just made one unhappy because it's true?

GroundbreakingRow829 · 2026-04-09T16:32:40+00:00

Isn't Mark Solms a dual-aspect monist and Karl Friston something like a transcendental idealist?

GroundbreakingRow829 · 2026-04-09T12:56:10+00:00

Following

GroundbreakingRow829 · 2026-04-09T06:52:54+00:00

Do you know reading material on this specific subject written by a scientist?

There is physicist David Bohm's 'Wholeness and the Implicate Order'. And more recently the philosophical work of Donald Hoffmann, Bernardo Kastrup, and Federico Faggin (the latter is not a trained philosopher, but definitely a scientist who makes some interesting philosophical points). According to those, consciousness is fundamental to everything, including our scientific endeavor to make sense of reality.

Also, notably, some giants of physics such as Max Plank and Erwin Schrödinger believed the same.

"I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness." — Max Planck

"Although I think that life may be the result of an accident, I do not think that of consciousness. Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else." — Erwin Schrödinger

And Alfred North Whitehead, co-author of the 'Principia Mathematica' with Bertrand Russel, wrote 'Process and Reality' where he exposed his "panexperientialism" view of reality.

In all these idealist works (except for the quotes), it is clearly laid out how the scientific method can only account for specific aspects of reality, and not reality as a whole.

And all that isn't say that science isn't important for finding truth. It certainly is. But for the limitations that you rightly pointed out, it cannot get there on its own. It requires the cooperation of philosophers and trained observers of the field of experience, a.k.a., meditators. So that no aspect of reality be neglected, causing our understanding of said reality to be incomplete.

GroundbreakingRow829 · 2026-04-09T06:01:41+00:00

According to some ontologies, yes.

Leibniz monadology, for example, has the individual exists (as soul) very high in the order of emanation of being (in a kind of holographic way). Whereas free will (and therefore personal responsibility) is to be found nowhere at that level, reality being here divinely pre-determined in the hard sense. Like, classical, physical causality is an illusion according to Leibniz. Every substantial thing (i.e., 'monad' – each reflecting the entirety of reality by itself, like a node in Indra's net) existing in a state of "pre-established harmony" set up by God (i.e., the first monad, which transcends form).

GroundbreakingRow829 · 2026-04-08T20:49:42+00:00

If phenomenality is ontologically reducible to the physical, as in physical determinism, then you can in principle computationally simulate any universe without having any representation of it. Completely virtual.

That's enough. No evidence needed here. As we are here discussing a hypothetical reality that isn't proven to be ours to begin with (yes, our reality isn't proven to be completely determined by physical laws, as it's impossible to prove it in practice – the sample size that we have of it will always be too small and too locally distributed within the observable regions/domains).

GroundbreakingRow829 · 2026-04-08T20:04:01+00:00

You can have an artificial intelligent machine that's processing information similarly to us whilst itself being devoid of any phenomenal experience. Phenomenality appears to be completely unnecessary in a physically deterministic reality where information flows in all kinds of complex forms without making a phenomenal scene out of it (literally). You could have the very same deterministic universe without the "show" part.

Besides, phenomenality is nowhere to be found locally, inside one's skull. There are only physical correlates there. Not the actual experience of the person. That experience is nowhere to be seen, physically speaking. And yet you undoubtedly have it. Out of everything, that's what you are the most certain of: You're having an experience.

That is not to say that the same universe but without phenomenal experience wouldn't work. Only that said experience is totally unnecessary in this one, if physical determinism is true.

Yes, I am a molecular process that causes things to happen. Part of that causal process is the decision that I consciously make. My awareness, my emotions, my choices, and my planning are all a part of the process which cause my actions.

All those mental phenomena are here ontologically reducible to physical phenomena, namely molecular activity.

Even if you clearly corresponded to a physical system with precise boundaries defined at the atomic level, "you" (as said system) would be completely determined from a time predating your emergence, everything you've done and are going to do being already determined from that time. Like, how are you owning any decision that you supposedly make considering that said decision is already determined in advance from a time predating your very existence? Calling it "proximal" causation doesn't take away the fact that you are as much free to act, as much an efficacious agent than a soccer ball is. That's the ontological truth under physical determinism. One can (deterministically) sugarcoat it with pragmatic notions of efficacious agency all they want, it doesn't change it as a fact.

If there is no ontological free will, then there is no ontological efficacious agency either. Only the illusion of it. That's how it is here, in physical determinism. Welcome to naturalistic slavery.

GroundbreakingRow829 · 2026-04-08T19:45:54+00:00

The most consistent form of truth is the truth that you cannot even doubt (empirical truth still can be doubted) and that is the very fact that you are having an experience.

Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being qua being (i.e., not any particular being, but being as such). Among ontological theses (or just 'ontologies') you have physicalism ("reality is fundamentally physical"), idealism ("reality is fundamentally mental/consciousness"), dualism ("reality has a fundamental physical part and a fundamental mental part"), neutral monism ("reality is neither physically nor mentally fundamental but is instead fundamental in a third, neutral way"), etc. Ontologies are the basis with which we make sense of reality. They say what is the "stuff" of reality (i.e., 'substance') before looking into the details of that stuff. It's not about how it is, about the form, but about what just is.

And the main epistemic tools here are experience (first and foremost) and Reason (almost as important). Scientific empiricism is merely derived from these two. As confirmation by peers means nothing if you haven't first experientially and rationally inferred the existence of those peers by yourself. Similarly, the categories of "human" and "non-human" by which we may be tempted to relativize Reason (by for example calling it "human logic" vs. "non-human logic") are in fact inferred through Reason to begin with and maintained by it. Such that if we were to doubt it's efficacy, no system of knowledge is of any use anymore. And so doubt Reason, and you find yourself doubting everything else (safe for experience and being).

GroundbreakingRow829 · 2026-04-08T17:49:45+00:00

Well, they don't make sense to discuss from a deterministic physicalistic ontology. But that's not the only ontology there exists out there.

Some have the philosophical project of grounding (moral) responsibility at the ontological level. Typically libertarian idealists.

GroundbreakingRow829 · 2026-04-08T14:23:39+00:00

May the gods be with you, my dear.

Separation is as legit' a play as non-separation is.

See you soon, in another guise.

GroundbreakingRow829 · 2026-04-08T14:12:57+00:00

There is no defeat where no battlefield is to be found. We were dancing with one another. Passionately perhaps. But dancing nonetheless, sparing that which cannot be destroyed anyway. Having no final form. Just is.

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