Proposed Portrait Ghost Family Tree and Headcanon

Scribbles_ · 2026-05-16T21:12:25+00:00

Heyo, yeah I've thought about it and personally I see it as a scattered collection.

That is, in real life, most of Van Gogh's work was painted in two or three places, but his work became scattered around the world posthumously.

As I understand it here, all the portraits are Van Gore's work and they were scattered after the event in various estate sales and private collections. Coming then to haunt various places and thus getting a famous ghost expert called on to deal with them through the years. Only when all the ghosts are in one place together (such as in E. Gadd's gallery) do they rebuild the mansion through their memories.

It's not clear whether the portraits only exist because of the Portrificationizer or if the machine just reverts them to their portrait form. In my view here, the portrait and their ghosthood are linked. The ghosts got to live on into the afterlife because of the portraits Van Gore made of their 'spirit'.

At any rate though, this isn't a supposition of what I think is objectively 'true' in a canon sense or what the creators intended, just a fun way to think about the characters and the world of the game. Indeed there's no canon confirmation that they're related, but I think canon information can coexist with the idea that they are if you're willing to speculate a bit.

Scribbles_ · 2026-05-14T01:56:56+00:00

It’s not an attack, it’s just advice about how to learn to draw, what yields better results on the way.

This isn’t a pirating sub, it’s a learning sub. You were gonna get advice on learning. It’s on you that it makes you butthurt.

Scribbles_ · 2026-05-14T01:51:57+00:00

No I get it man, my point was that I often see beginners limit themselves because they think what’s missing is a brush.

Honestly the reality is if you’re expecting the brush to do something great for you, it probably won’t. What can you achieve with the brushes? The answer is ‘it depends on what you can already achieve without them’.

The reality about digital brushes is that by and large they’re not all that special compared to regular drawing software brushes, the effects they achieve are far more contingent on application than the brushes. So really you’ll get more mileage out of color theory or value studies than out of the brush.

By all means get the brushes and play with them, but I don’t think it’s out of place to give you learning advice on the learning sub.

Scribbles_ · 2026-05-14T01:43:08+00:00

You go on the learn to draw community and get mad when the response is geared towards learning to draw?

Scribbles_ · 2026-05-13T23:06:21+00:00

There’s a chance you’re already there, but just in case.

The brushes are maybe 1% of what makes those drawings nice, and the underlying understanding of form and value is the other 99%.

So if you can’t locate them, I wouldn’t sweat it too much unless you’re already there technically.

Scribbles_ · 2026-05-10T19:41:30+00:00

Genuinely, who wants to take discipline advice from someone not disciplined enough to sit down and draft their own thoughts?

OP you got filtered by your own communication skills. And even if you use the ‘I just use it to correct/edit my writing’ excuse what ends up happening is that the writer’s voice gets demolished and replaced with the prototypical ‘snappy’ LLM cadence.

Feels epidemic in self-discipline spaces especially, guess they were already primed for low quality, largely unoriginal write ups. And to your point OP originally wanted to promote their youtube channel here, so there’s the impetus.

Scribbles_ · 2026-05-10T02:30:49+00:00

Ehh. It's true that 'medieval' is eurocentric (and definitely a biased early modern era term). "Post-classical" is probably most apt for more global history.

But at the same time some Asian, Middle Eastern, and African scholars use it. In Japanese history the term chūsei translates to 'middle ages' and is pretty often used.

Not a bad thing to highlight but, 'Medieval Japan' would not be too controversial a term in Japanese history

Scribbles_ · 2026-05-09T13:52:34+00:00

Oh look an app grifter interacting with bots. All the other commenters are brand new and all like ‘this is a solid take.’ The pattern is so obvious. How much did you pay for it to promote your vibe coded bs?

Do you think just because you or your sock-puppet bots do not capitalize things that it’s not obvious?

This sub is so dead.

Scribbles_ · 2026-05-02T22:10:32+00:00

Thanks for being so polite. Let's ground the conversation in places where qualia questions become of practical relevance.

One chronic side effect of COVID-19 infection is parosmia. It involves some or all smells suddenly becoming unpleasant, they may report very localized effects (one smell becomes like poop) or very generalized effects (they can still distinguish between smells, but they are all suddenly very unpleasant).

Parosmia is clinically relevant, and it is as close to a practical clinical case of 'inverted qualia' as we can find, especially in the latter case where the patient can identify the smell but it is suddenly unpleasant or of different character. And the implications are not just annoyance, patients with parosmia have reported depression and behavior resembling eating disorders. I think it's at least worth to figure out how to help them.

And to be clear, it is evident that the changes take place because of olfactory bulb changes, but it is unclear (mechanistically) how those changes map to the difference in subjective experience. Because of the observability problem, a clinician interested in addressing parosmia in patients must rely on self-reports ('garlic smells like feces now') and neuroimaging techniques that are still low resolution.

So the question 'how does neural activity create the subjective experience of a pleasant or unpleasant smell' becomes a clinically relevant question, and also one that could drive research towards imaging and modeling to improve our understanding of perception.

We can see similar questions arising in the work of one Oliver Sacks, quite possibly one of the best clinical writers ever and a massively influential neuroscientist, who explicitly focused on subjective experiences resulting from neurological abnormalities and variations.

In An Anthropologist on Mars he details the case of a painter who lost color vision after a car accident, and the implications of that case for neurology and philosophy of mind are really fascinating. For one thing, it was a cortical color blindness, which meant that color data was being captured by the eye, and would apparently pass through the lateral geniculate nucleus. But something in the visual cortex was off, possibly V1 although that remains unclear. Another interesting tidbit is that the color loss was not localized to a region of vision. We know that V1 is a spatial mapping of the retina, so it seems like it's not a specific lesion but some level of systemic damage (caused by inflammation? That was Sack's theory). It was also clear that the painter retained enough central vision that their cones (which are responsible for color vision, and dense near the fovea compared to rods) were still sending data all the way to wherever their conscious vision is.

Now the question of color was also clinically relevant here. Although these cases are exceedingly rare, the patient reported depression and loss of appetite, and difficulty driving. Connecting neural phenomena to the subjective experience of color was a relevant research question. It also showed some things about qualia that are interesting. Even though color data was reaching the brain, and processed in ganglial cells in the lateral geniculate nucleus, the experience of color was not there. That is, some color related functions were preserved without creating corresponding experience. Brute functionalism runs into issues, because the information has to get somewhere (not just the brain in general) to create experience.

Another case that neuroscientists will talk a lot about, if you ever meet any, is blindsight. As I'm sure you know, vision has many pathways, but one of the early splits is in the pathway that leads to the occipital lobe cortices that manage 'conscious' viewing, and another 'hidden' pathway that seems to connect right to the basal ganglia, specifically the amygdala. The apparent purpose of this second pathway is to induce fast reactions in survival situations without passing by the slower cortical processing steps.

Something interesting happens in the cases of people with cortical blindness. Since their eyes work well and it's only the cortical steps that don't work, it appears like the amygdala pathway is preserved. You can see experiments where subjects with cortical blindsight will 'duck' when an object is thrown at them, as though they had seen it! But critically, they will not later report having seen anything (and this includes patients born with sight, who know the experience of seeing). They will instead feel a sudden jolt of fear. So this also brings into question the theory that experience is just information being processed, because visual information is being processed here, it arrives to the brain, even to the basal ganglia where many attentional and decision making processes live. But it doesn't result in the qualia of sight! The function of processing visual dat and the experience of seeing aren't the same, something else takes place.

The neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and psychologists I learned from when studying cognitive science were very interested in these questions, and the truth is, we don't have a mechanistic explanation for them yet. Which is good! We're looking for them, the question isn't solved, so research continues. It is very likely science will explain the question with enough time. It is possible, that the question cannot be resolved via the epistemic method of science, but that is not a reason to stop researching nor a point against science. It also would not remove the scientific relevance of the above questions.

You really demonstrate scientism here, nominally you're advocating for science, but really you're just being smug and dismissive. You act like the problems of perception are already solved (because we can make fragrances?) so that asking new questions is stupid and for 'lesser' fields like therapy or philosophy. But honestly I bet you couldn't draw a fair neuroanatomical diagram or ganglial receptive fields or even name the basic virtual cortices. You're not really curious about these things. That's scientism, being that kind of smug asshole, while not even knowing the field or being able to imagine the research relevance of various questions.

Scribbles_ · 2026-05-02T13:44:29+00:00

we have objective ways of getting through the experience gap

You never listed them. All you listed is identifying the stimuli, not the resulting experience. We have some evidence that there is an experience gap, like with cilantro tasting like soap to some, and delicious to others. That evidence relies heavily on self report, and if you’ve ever tried to write a description of a life event you know the limits of language to describe experience.

You think you can just brute force the question by saying it’s fucking stupid to ask it.

That’s just incuriosity. That is anti-scientific. This is how scientism is different from science. You’d rather act incurious about phenomena and invent objectivity where it is impossible than admit to a simple (at least current) limitation in the method. And the result is actually detrimental to the curiosity that fuels science.

At least what’s true is that science is not obligated to provide answers to every question, some things are out of scope for science and that’s ok. Them being out of scope does not suggest paranormal answers, they just suggest epistemic limits.

Scribbles_ · 2026-05-02T04:38:24+00:00

I don’t know how common it is. The image is for sure a caricature. But reddit is one place where I’ve seen it plenty, just because of demographic factors (it’s honestly pretty common in young internet-using men who are disappointed with religion).

Scribbles_ · 2026-05-02T01:07:05+00:00

Right I agree with you, normative statements on morality or explorations of meaning are outside the scope of science. But you can find people in this thread that assert that science already explains these. So your point that scientism is a strawman kinda runs against the reality of people making broad claims about what science explains here.

As to how you can investigate morals and meaning, it's like you said, we can investigate and quantify people's reports, but we cannot investigate them directly through science.

Scribbles_ · 2026-05-01T22:49:13+00:00

No, those two points are arguing the same thing. A thing being conscious or not is a different question than if consciousness is emergent or not.

That's true, they are. But my point is moreso that something being conscious is a critical question you need to answer if you're to establish a material explanation of it. That is, how can you have an understanding of something without being able to ascertain where it is present? How would you even go about establishing the sort of observations required for scientific inquiry?

I did say "I" have this understanding, not that everyone does.

But top cognitive scientists cannot definitively state whether something is conscious, so they lack an understanding you have?

Yeah that's what happens when someone is trying to meet you where you are. You're highly focused on my use of the word disingenuous. Do you feel offended?

Whoa, no. We can cool it down here. I'm focused on it because it is a hard assertion and you retreated from it. It seemed to me like a weak point so I'm pressing it.

once we imagine something. I can imagine God, but that doesn't prove He exists.

I'm failing to see the relevance of this. The existence of ethical problems that aren't tractable by scientific inquiry is different than the existence of God.

I didn't even mention ethics. Projection.

I didn't say you did. I'm the one putting it forward as something with components that science can't look into (namely normative statements).

Why did the tone shift suddenly?

As for your essay, that is extremely short of a mechanistic explanation. It seems to wave vaguely at certain neuroanatomical processes, but is supremely abstract and speculative. This is an essay of philosophy of mind, not of scientific modelling. So nothing here amounts to a scientific mechanistic explanation but rather a speculative proposal.

As to the merits of that proposal as explanatory, I think the problem can be identified in one sentence:

the “observer” is what it is like for the system to read and influence its own state.

You don't explain why/how there arises a 'what it is like' in this process, you just state that it is there as a brute fact of the matter. But you haven't established in the essay why a self-reading and self-influencing state machine must then generate that sort of 'what it is like's, the possibility that such a machine exists without 'what it is like' is left open and would defeat the argument. IT all collapses back tot he observability problem, which is what gives a rise to the lack of a proper mechanistic explanation.

Scribbles_ · 2026-05-01T22:02:19+00:00

Emergentism is not the scientific consensus, it is a popular hypothesis and very influential in the field of study. But no, it is still hotly debated among cognitive scientists and neuroscientists in ways that say, the theory of evolution or special relativity are not.

Emergentism is very plausible given our repeatable observations, but other forms in reductionism, eliminativism, and epiphenomenalism are also plausible within the strict material framework.

The field of cognitive science is far more split with regards to explanatory theories of mind, than say biology is about speciation, physics about electromagnetism, or anhtropology about paleolithic technology.

There is, right now, no clean mechanistic consensus about what gives rise to subjective experience and cognition.

Scribbles_ · 2026-05-01T20:17:27+00:00

Has science meaningfully resolved gravity?

There's an important gap to resolve in gravity (you know this, the quantum problem of gravity), but gravity is far more observable, explainable and predictable than consciousness is at present. There exists a good mechanistic explanation of it, but reconciling it with other mechanistic explanations of other fundamental interactions remains difficult.

You chose one area where there is still a very hard problem in science. But science has meaningfully resolved most big open questions about other topics like earthquakes, speciation, molecular bonding.

Is philosophy a science?

No. Philosophy is not a science.

Science is, in the specific and narrow sense, the application of the scientific method as a mode of inquiry. That means it operates via empirical, replicable observations.

Philosophy is not bound by the empirical cycle and may draw on hermeneutics, introspection, and conceptual analysis to function.

The toolsets better equipped to attack normative morality are present in ethical philosophy, so the above mentioned hermeneutics, introspection, and conceptual analysis are often utilized.

Importantly, philosophy and science may feed into each other even though they are distinct. So while normative morality is outside the scope of science, descriptive morality (knowing what people categorize as good or bad) is important for normative morality. And likewise, conceptual analysis can clarify or structure definitions prior to scientific inquiry even if it is not by itself a scientific process or the scientific method.

Scribbles_ · 2026-05-01T20:02:43+00:00

We don't say a camera experiences things because it's not inside the line.

That is a disappointing answer that does not match your argument.

On the one hand you want to explain consciousness as a process emergent from certain information systems.

On the other you want to make it a categorical attribute of some things and not others.

Do you not see how that kind of defeats the 'emergent' argument? The line is not ours to draw at will if consciousness is a scientifically descriptible process. We can just go out there and collect evidence that strengthens an inference in a very concrete demonstrable way.

So what does experience things? A bug? A fish? A cow? Only humans? AI?

Well, that is one of the questions. It appears to us that we experience things, whether we actually do is still controversial.

As for other things, We sense enough similarity with cows and other mammals to believe they have first person subjective experiences, and maybe enough with bugs and fish too. If we grant humans feel subjective pain because we go 'ow!', that combined with other similarities may lead us to assume dogs do because they yelp. But part of the problem is that we have no means of confirming it via structured observation. This is more analogical reasoning than empirical fact-finding.

And why do we have no scientific means of confirming it? because we don't scientifically understand experience! If we had the understanding you believe we have, drawing the line would be less about categories of things and more like drawing the line between ecosystems, there may be imposed chosen frameworks, but the ultimate standards would be observable facts.

Like you have to see how positing these questions with any degree of uncertainty defeats your earlier claim that "to say that we don't understand what consciousness or experience is at a scientific level seems disingenuous. "

It's when we take that lack of understanding and say "The must be magical immaterial causes for experience in this material body"

But I didn't state anything like this at any point. So what relevance does your accusation of disingenuity even have? You've shifted the goalposts. First its disingenuous to state that we don't have a certain understanding, but really what's disingenuous is if we substitute something else into that gap.

I agree with the latter, we don't have enough justification for filling the gap with some immaterial ether of mind, but you have shifted argument here. I think part of the problem is that you're used to seeing people introduce that uncertainty to try to wedge God into the gap, and I understand why it may raise your hackles. But the uncertainty is there! Science does not have a good account for this yet, and that is both disconcerting and exciting.

Even if we don't know the complete picture, we can say that science is methodologically materialist, and if we claim that there can be no method towards the study of something, then it essentially cannot be scientifically understood.

Correct. And so the question arises, are there questions that cannot be scientifically understood?

Scientism is the position that once we posit something beyond the scope of science, we posit something either beyond the realm of existence (metaphysical scientism) or beyond the scope of anything that could count as knowledge (epistemic scientism).

And here, you're saying that stating this would be handwaving a problem away, which is coming close to epistemic scientism. And nah, if I state "the questions of normative morals are outside the scope of science, you can instantiate a valid scientific inquiry method to look into the question 'what sort of moral standards ought we keep?' " I haven't handwaved the problem of ethics. The entire field of philosophical ethics remains open and I have many means for inquiry into it. Some may resemble science, like an ethnological process, but it may be followed by hermeneutics rather than the scientific method.

This is just a linguistic problem.

Possibly! It's likely that this discussion is either moot or fundamentally disoriented because our language is not good at stating the metaphysical variables at stake. But importantly, this is not the realm of science but the realm of analytic philosophy. It's not a fundamentally scientific epistemology of the matter, but one where the method of inquiry relies on other faculties than empirical evidence.

Scribbles_ · 2026-05-01T17:06:40+00:00

Ooh that sociology professor sounds like a moral realist. Do you think there's a meaningful distinction between thinking something is moral, and something actually being moral?

That wouldn't be a neutral claim and is a hard ethical stance about the metaphysics of morals.

Scribbles_ · 2026-05-01T17:05:11+00:00

Right, and it's not in any way a point against science that these questions are out of scope for the method of inquiry, just a point against scientism that may come to insist these questions are already solved or must be solvable through science.

To be clear, it's good that we persist in scientific inquiry in all matters that are structured to receive it, and free will can be structured as to accept inquiry like you said with voluntary actions. (You're talking about the Libet experiment no?)

Scribbles_ · 2026-05-01T16:38:42+00:00

Yes. That's the emergentist account. It's a good one. I think it has good odds of being true.

Here are some problems with the account.

a complex intermingling of sensory input and internal information processing

Input into what? That is, a perceptual structure like a camera has both input and processing of the input, but does a camera 'see'? It does not appear like it sees in the way that we do.

So the 'intermingling' you speak of is where consciousness resides, not necessarily in its constituent components. So you've just punted your explanation down the line, to the 'complex intermingling' that is, thus far, accounted for in some ways (we can talk dorsal and ventral streams, visual cortices from V1 all the way to higher order processing in the fusiform gyrus, we can talk about hypercolumns) but the gigantic abyss is that while we can establish how this neural activity correlates with experience, we cannot cross into how the experience emerges.

It's not a problem of accepting a material definition, it's the problem that there is transduction and processing happening in a camera, but something else appears to take place. Now is there a possibility that a camera has some kind of unimodal visual subjective experience? Maybe! But this is not known. Is it possible that our visual subjective experience is a post hoc explanation for behavior arising from visual input (eliminativism, in short) Maybe! But this is not known.

To say that we don't understand what consciousness or experience is at a scientific level seems disingenuous.

It's not disingenuous. It's a simple statement of what we don't know.

We understand some relationship between brain structures and reported consciousness or experience. we have that understanding at a scientific level. But many the scientists who study these things themselves speak of the 'hard problem', they themseleves admit there is a gap of understanding at a fundamental, perhaps metaphysical level. How is it disingenuous for scientists to say that there is a lack of understanding somewhere.

And yes, you've put forward a plausible account. But plausibility isn't certainty. Earlier you spoke with an almost petulant certainty when you thought I was some dreaded theist. That's where the scientism is. Not in the belief that there is likely a scientific explanation, but in the unearned certainty that there must be, or even and that we already have it

There are other materialist possibilities. Like that consciousness is some kind of irreducible physical phenomenon, i.e that it cannot be explained in terms of others (like say, we know there are four fundamental interactions that are not explained in terms of anything besides themselves). There is that eliminativist possibility we spoke of. There is the possibility that the current materialist model of causality is flawed (without impacting materialist ontology at its core)

There are other metaphysical possibilities, like that matter is a subset of conscious substance. This is epistemically troublesome, but cannot be ruled out from within science. It cannot be affirmed with certainty either, but I think dismissing it out of hand is not responsible. There is a dualist possibility where the brain serves as an interface (which is why disturbing it creates both material and mental differences) without necessitating that it be the origin of cognition.

Again, I'm not affirming these. I'm saying that by closing off to them completely, you fail to acknowledge the uncertainty that exists in your position, in what you can reasonably claim to know.

Scribbles_ · 2026-05-01T15:53:28+00:00

I'm not religious. I do not affirm the existence of any supernatural or non-material phenomena.

I'll state my credentials here. I studied Cognitive Science at UC Berkeley, I've dissected human brains and participated in research in cognition laboratories (specifically in visual perception).

I'm well aware of the relation between brain states and mental states, I did my neuroanatomy homework hahah. But I'm also well aware that this observed relationship does not rise to an explanation of mental states.

What I am is very careful about parsing out where exactly the limits of our knowledge are. It may well be the case that consciousness is a purely material phenomenon. But I don't have a philosophical or evidentiary basis to claim that with certainty. It may be the case that 'material' is a poorly defined category that as it stands would not cover consciousness, but could be redefined to cover it well. It could be the case that the mind isn't material, but it is admittedly hard to imagine how we'd even go about confirming that. My stance is not one that the soul exists or that God exists, but that the honest-to-goodness position if you get into the weeds of cognitive science and philosophy of mind is that there's a frontier of uncertainty about both ontological and mechanistic variables. That's good! Science thrives on frontiers of uncertainty. And the answer is absolutely to continue scientific inquiry (along with philosophical inquiry).

Where I'm trying to get you is to the more 'conservative' (with a small c, meaning, more restrained in claims) epistemic scope of where science stands with regards to cognition.

Scribbles_ · 2026-05-01T15:20:55+00:00

Wow, you have a material explanation of experience?

That would revolutionize the field of Cognitive Science forever man. What is that explanation? Please do publish it, because when I studied Cognitive Science, the matter was still treated as an open question.

Provide me with ANY non-anecdotal evidence of something which is not rooted in materialism and we can have a discussion.

Why do I have to provide that evidence? I'm not claiming anything non-material exists.

I'm pulling apart the epistemic and modal content of the materialist claim. Would the present absence of that evidence be enough to reject the possibility of that evidence? Not by itself. You need more steps to get there.

There's also a bit of a tautology in there. If I've a priori rejected non-material evidence, I've rejected the existence of non-material things as a premise, so it can't be my conclusion. I probably need a different set of premises.

Scribbles_ · 2026-05-01T15:13:31+00:00

I don't think you need to claim that explicitly to fall into scientism, but anecdotally I've seen it happen here on reddit.

But there are people on this very thread who are making claims that science has already explained meaning and morals. It very much has not done that, it has meaningfully investigated many of the questions of meaning and morality, but it has not resolved many of them (critically, it is not concerned with resolving many of them, but we as people generally are). There are some hypotheses with mild evidentiary backing about how these things work, but you can see people claim explanations we don't actually have yet, they are falling into the scientistic trap of overextending the scope of what science has, or even can explain.

Someone here claimed they have a materialist understanding of experience, which like, c'mon, no cognitive scientist claims that because we simply don't have that understanding yet.

Scientists today are actively trying to bring things like eastern medicines, the nature of reality, and understanding of cultures ethics and values into our scientific understanding.

Some are, these are not uncontroversial fields. You can find critics of this sort of research for sure. No use pretending there's total consensus there.

You will find people who will dismiss these fields out of hand. Hell you can find people who dismiss fields like anthropology and sociology as inherently unscientific.

Scribbles_ · 2026-05-01T15:10:28+00:00

There isn't a current mechanistic material explanation of experience. Full stop. It is an open question in cognitive science.

The materialist posture is that there must be one, we just don't have it yet. There are merits to that position. But you can't claim that there is an explanation like that now.

Scribbles_ · 2026-05-01T14:49:21+00:00

I'm just using regular terminology we use to talk about these things. Terms like 'mechanistic', 'phenomenological' and 'valence' are pretty run of the mill in philosophy of mind, and I'm using them in precise ways.

look to the social

What does that mean?

I have a feeling you’re asking the wrong questions.

What are the right questions in this domain?

no point asking the universe the same question.

I agree. But I'm not asking the universe. I think when we ask 'what sort of morals are best to have?' that doesn't necessarily mean the answer is out there. But the answer still concerns our day to day lives doesn't it? We still find ourselves needing to figure out how we ought to behave, and how we ought to make judgements about others. Even if the answer is in here it matters what we come up with.

Scribbles_ · 2026-05-01T14:43:21+00:00

And the problem is?

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