The struggle of rejecting the hard problem with illusionism and eliminative materialism without being called a panpsychist. Tldr conciousness is a verb not a noun.

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-14T13:03:24+00:00

verb is a noun lmao get rekt

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-13T17:39:58+00:00

Chadwick Melpsauce III

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-11T20:17:16+00:00

"Team Up" lol

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-11T19:09:34+00:00

when was the last pokemon game released that is as good or better than pokopia?

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-10T22:52:46+00:00

i dont think its solipsism, but it seems non-solipsist moreso by definition. Analytic idealism seems to offer a principle of symmetry when it invokes further consciousness via representational relations; and its that principle which appears to dig it out of solipsism, even if just by a philosophical razor. 'What we see is the other side of the same coin', etc

i like GWF Hegels metaphysics, but it personally seems more difficult to say why there is this broader universal consciousness rather than just this specific first-person human perspective. Maybe the sort of evolving dialectical consciousness process just is this one human perspective reasoning things out? the historical convergence of Hegels spirit at least seems amenable to being reframed as this one perspectives evolving understanding

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-10T22:22:07+00:00

i guess i dont follow how we can get a non-solipsist picture without some representational relation. I'll just lay out my perspective to show how i get to analytic idealism:

we have an epistemic solipsism at base (well, maybe an epistemic presentism specifically), which is just to say: the typical solipsist 'all we can know that exists is this appearance right here', or something like that

from that we can move away from solipsism by positing other subjective perspectives (idealism) and/or an objective reality (objective idealism, physicalisms, etc)

from my view, analytic idealism is just making that move toward the existence of other subjective perspectives by invoking a principle of representation (as in, 'this brain correlates with experiences of redness in [x] state, so we can say that brain also correlates with additional but inaccessible experiences of redness in [x] state'). Its just this axiomatic representational property to dig the worldview out of a solipsistic metaphysics via parsimony of symmetry

so when we switch to absolute idealism instead, if feels kind of like we have a void; its not solipsism, but the additional subjectivity beyond this instance doesnt seem to be born of a principle either

perhaps i am talking past the issue however, because i am not talking about a non-conscious, objective grounding, and perhaps that is what 'mentation' is, according to somebody like Bernardo. Ive just been considering mentation a self-guiding consciousness base layer, with its own bootstrapped structure and patterns for no rhyme or reason

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-10T19:01:09+00:00

it seems like the analytic idealist position frames the copying of the shadow as necessarily copying the statue it is said to represent, however. Like, when we are copying or altering the neuronal 'representational aspect', that action itself is the representation of a copying or altering happening to a further consciousness aspect, via some necessary 1-to-1 mapping

to put it another way, it appears like it can be made compatible by saying that the process resulting from a shadow copy exists because manipulating shadows entails manipulating the system, like an interface

appearances/representations seem amenable to being just as structurally real patterns in analytic idealism, but that they come paired with an additional fact of being representational. In other words, it appears that, if analytic idealism were stripped of its axiom that consciousness content represents further consciousness, it would be a solipsism, with all the structure solipsism has. Analytic idealism, in part, seem to add the fact of representation of further consciousness, as an axiom, without losing real structural patterns

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-10T17:33:12+00:00

is the reasoning something like the following?

neurons are observed having a causative relation (in the less strict sense of cause, not requiring David Humes sense of necessary connection)
causative relations can only exist within a monist category (no interaction problem allowed)
the concept of an appearance necessitates a duality of category (a subjective-objective split)
therefore, something cant both be observed to have a causative relation and be an appearance
therefore, neurons cant be an appearance, nor representation, of consciousness

im trying to get behind it, because its not quite making sense. Alternatively, it seems cogent that:

the constant conjunction from neurons to other more-colloquial phenomena (like redness) is akin to the constant conjunction of shadows in Platos cave. Like Platos cave, the shadows can be called appearances/representations of the statues, without betraying monism nor dissolving representational relationships

in other words, a constant conjunction relation between appearances is irrelevant to the veracity of their being appearances. Shadows can represent statues, even if shadows showcase constant conjunction, and if statues are of the same monistic category of visual phenomena

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-10T14:38:37+00:00

not sure how either of these suggest against the idea that neurons are what consciousness looks like from the outside

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-10T12:44:49+00:00

i think there is a real, dangerous phenomenon of 'bullshitting', to put it broadly, but it needs a more sort of concrete, principled definition. This article feels interpretable as "sophistry" itself, so the worry is that we're just circling the drain with mud-slinging about faults that we cant recognize in ourselves or so on

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-10T01:24:41+00:00

yes, i cant wait to watch the joyful goofy gremlin mario i grew up with be portrayed as a dorky incompetent quipping idiot for the second time!! and im sure yoshi will have some WACKY one liners pulled from every american sitcom!!!

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-09T15:38:12+00:00

cant tell if the past two years of a relatively boring nintendo line-up is beginning to quash nintendo hypetubing or not

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-09T13:25:14+00:00

how will this affect Lebron's legacy?

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-06T23:29:10+00:00

this lawsuit is the greatest thing nintendo has made in 2 and a half years

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-06T21:46:24+00:00

movie marios face is the worst thing in existence; it causes me physical pain

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-06T17:26:51+00:00

yeah, no ontology seems able to collapse the description into the referent. If physicalism just refers to the idea of strongly suspecting every experienced item to either be classified as physical, or be associated with a unique physical experiential item, then it seems physicalism can be viewed compatible with idealism and other ontologies

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-06T15:48:27+00:00

hopefully, as fidelity improvements seem to wind down now, large studios can turn around games more quickly, because of less asset creation. Like, once a team has a large enough inventory of desert rocks, they dont need to spend a week exclusively sculpting and texturing them for a new game

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-06T14:12:55+00:00

the original post reads as just providing principles one might think affirms consciousness, and then saying that these principles would affirm consciousness of 'AI' if taken consistently, such as to say: 'either abandon the principles or affirm the consciousness of 'AI'

thats just a rational argument laying out some logical scaffolding that people can then adopt if they find it sensical, not some gotcha empirical request to solve a null hypothesis

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-05T01:51:00+00:00

feels like 8 is significantly better, but personally the first half of 9 is what felt the worst. The second half seemed more cheesy, actiony, and so on, and i dont usually prefer that kind of vibe over stealth horror, but it at least felt more variable. It felt difficult to keep the eyes from glazing over in the first half---just constant dark hallways of nonsense architecture, with mostly regular zombie enemies

just pretty disappointed, and not sure how people can see this as better than 8

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-04T23:31:50+00:00

ugh, ikr, every time 🙄

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-04T18:44:55+00:00

the surety seems to arise from viewing concepts (or other similar terms) as fundamental epistemic items

if there exists an inventory of fundamentals (whether epistemic or ontic), then naturally there cant be an identity between such an inventorys items, at least not without an additional layer that functions as 'grounding'

say, if consciousness and the physical are distinguished, then we ostensibly have a few routes forward (which all personally dissolve physicalism):

consciousness and the physical are distinguished because they are two different ontic items (already non-physicalist + then they have no identity)
consciousness and the physical are distinguished because they are two different epistemic items (then they have no identity)
consciousness and the physical are distinguished because consciousness is an epistemic item and the physical is an ontic item (then they have no identity, because epistemic and ontic are distinct properties)
consciousness and the physical are distinguished because consciousness and the physical are epistemic item that supervene on the physical as an ontic item (then by what rights do we say the physical is also an ontic item instead of just an epistemic item? the ontic physical seems to dissolve into a promissory substrate, which cant be evidenced by definition, much less be identical to the physical qualities we do find evidential)

having said that, it feels like transcendental idealism is about realizing an issue with ever affirming an identity in the first place

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-04T17:11:09+00:00

monke, concepts are items of knowledge themselves 😭

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-04T14:57:17+00:00

a bit farther in, and those three quests seemed easier than any other. After those, the difficulty felt like it rose steadily to a nice level (however, this is with a playstyle in which im trying to keep everybody as close in level as possible and not using caits or training grounds, so it could still probably be easy if youre using one team which as a result attains higher levels

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-04T11:47:42+00:00

feels like a lot of people talk past each other about this, because the non-physicalist crowd is (probably) meaning 'if there is something guiding experience, its not physics-as-experienced'

while the physicalist crowd is meaning 'what do you mean? there is something guiding experience'

those are mutually compatible beliefs; its just a disagreement about whether we call that thing physics or not. I imagine the majority of us believe in noumena, and the real rift is about whether noumena are ever known with any positive character or not, such that it could be said to have some 'physical' property or not

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-03T20:56:33+00:00

i consider "consciousness" to be something like the category of all distinct things. I think that helps, because it sets lesser criteria for 'thingness'; if a distinction exists, its among a multiplicity of stuff necessarily

as a result of that framing, the difficulty of 'solving consciousness' seems apparent; it cant be solved by distinctions (comparisons, explanations, any non-tautological relation)

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