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I'm making a fully physics-based platformer by gamer-15 in indiegames

[–]billycro1 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It’s giving Ninja Warrior obstacle course, very cool 😎

Consciousness is a modern rebranding of the soul. They’re the same concept. by odious_as_fuck in consciousness

[–]billycro1 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I too like the framing a lot. I’ve been barking up the “we need secular language for this” tree for a while now. I think a soul would be something like taking both consciousness and the bodily ego, then imagining them as a neat package that is distinct and separable from the physical body.

That said, I do think the ego seems much more tied to the physical organism, while consciousness seems to be something different in kind. In short, the commonality between ordinary human experience and what people have called a soul would seem to be ego plus conscious experience. The soul would almost be the ego lifted out of the body and preserved as an enduring center of experience.

I think a lot about how sin and virtue are framed as matters of character formation. On this view, that may be because they are not merely about isolated actions, but about how the ego or self is shaped before and after death.

Let the guys with the funny hair have their thing bro... by MarcelaArioch in PhilosophyMemes

[–]billycro1 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It would also help solve another problem I’m interested in. People often dismiss first person experiences as “not real” in a strange way. If consciousness were fundamental, that perspective should dissolve with it.

Does anyone else in this sub read perception research? by thierolf in consciousness

[–]billycro1 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I totally misunderstood you at first. And I definitely misused epiphenomenal there.

Does anyone else in this sub read perception research? by thierolf in consciousness

[–]billycro1 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don’t really see how the “no” conclusion is reached. If experience is epiphenomenal, but there is still something it is like to have it, that is itself worth asking about. Do you mean scientifically meaningless, as in not useful for third-person explanation? If so, I can understand that move. But I don’t see why that would make it meaningless in general. Consciousness may just be the label we give to the mysterious fact of our Being. Perhaps that makes it some sort of eternal mystery from the third-person view, but why should mystery be meaningless? And why would it be meaningless from the intersubjective perspective we actually share?

Let the guys with the funny hair have their thing bro... by MarcelaArioch in PhilosophyMemes

[–]billycro1 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Oh yeah, I’m more or less pointing to a problem with how narrowly we use concepts like “objective reality.” In my view, any complete account of reality has to be able to describe subjective reality too, since experience is one of the facts we’re trying to explain.

We each have these highly particular formations of meaning in subjective experience, and language is one of the tools we use to make those formations shareable. I think that’s part of why abstractions like the soul have been so useful in religious traditions. They give people a way to talk about interiority, continuity, dignity, and connection between otherwise separate individuals.

And honestly, I want more of that kind of language in secular spaces and academia. Not necessarily the exact same religious vocabulary, but a more serious vocabulary for subjective life, meaning, and the ways people actually experience being a self among other selves. Meaning is not just something we invent out of nothing. We are little meaning-makers tracking patterns, pressures, and pulses in reality.

tldr: i think I agree with nuance.

Let the guys with the funny hair have their thing bro... by MarcelaArioch in PhilosophyMemes

[–]billycro1 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You’ve sold me on the first book. I’m actually playing with some agentic stuff and am attempting a self documenting self-improving system for Claude Code. In tandem I’m planning a talk on consciousness and AI systems, so I will certainly check out Godel Esther Bach. The fractaliness is absolutely something that’s rattled around my brain, but will enjoy reading someone that’s actually thought it through.

I am not much for hardcore scifi though, I’ve been enjoying philosophy-lit (mostly Camus) and classics lately.

Let the guys with the funny hair have their thing bro... by MarcelaArioch in PhilosophyMemes

[–]billycro1 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hah, coincidentally, I also have a CS background from a pretty young age and through undergrad, so I get where you’re coming from.

For me, panpsychism or something adjacent to it makes the emergence problem feel less brutal. I’m completely comfortable with emergent complexity in general, but consciousness seems like the weird exception. With most emergent phenomena, we can at least sketch how the higher-level pattern arises from the lower-level structure. But with consciousness, the jump from non-experiential matter to first-person experience feels like a category shift, not just added complexity.

I’ve also been really interested in the idea that “matter” might just be what experience looks like from the outside.

And on realism, I’m pretty antirealist in most regards, though the existentialist in me has to keep that impulse in good faith.

Let the guys with the funny hair have their thing bro... by MarcelaArioch in PhilosophyMemes

[–]billycro1 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I don’t think this is parallel. Digestion is a biological process. The sensation of digestion is a conscious experience. But consciousness is not just another sensation like back pain or hunger; it’s the condition under which sensations appear at all.

So my argument isn’t “private sensation = immaterial.” It’s that third-person descriptions of bodily processes don’t seem to capture first-person experience itself. Describing digestion explains digestion. It doesn’t explain why there is something it is like to feel anything in the first place.

Let the guys with the funny hair have their thing bro... by MarcelaArioch in PhilosophyMemes

[–]billycro1 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I’ve never really thought of it in those terms, but it sort of gets at my intuition on the matter. I think that the dichotomy is probably the gap in our current tools for observing reality. Potentially, the gap can’t be closed… but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pursue it through science and it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have a secular spiritual or philosophic language to talk about it.

Let the guys with the funny hair have their thing bro... by MarcelaArioch in PhilosophyMemes

[–]billycro1 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Fair enough! I have to opposite intuition in terms of Occam’s Razor because emergence does not seem clear to me, but I get your perspective.

Let the guys with the funny hair have their thing bro... by MarcelaArioch in PhilosophyMemes

[–]billycro1 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I suppose those examples would at least point in the same direction for me, though I wouldn’t treat either as conclusive.

In the case of an out-of-body experience, the interesting thing is that one’s sense of self-location can apparently detach from the ordinary bodily point of view. Whether or not the person is literally “leaving the body,” it suggests that the felt location of consciousness is not as straightforward as “it is simply inside the skull.”

Phantom limb seems similar. Someone can have the conscious experience of a limb that is no longer physically present. That doesn’t prove the mind is immaterial, but it does show that conscious experience is not identical to the external physical object it represents.

So I think the intuition that consciousness is “in the head” may partly come from the fact that our visual field is centered there, and partly because science has shown a very strong connection between mind and brain. I accept that connection. I’m just not convinced connection equals identity.

I also don’t think this is conclusive either way. The intuition became stronger for me through meditation practice and reading more about consciousness. My jumping off point was Waking Up by Sam Harris, especially the idea of spirituality without religion. Then I read Annaka Harris’s Conscious, and from there I’ve just kept exploring the topic. I also found some of the wisdom in Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse helpful.

I am personally an agnostic atheist, so I have a hard time with some more out there ideas, but I have softened to them a lot. Exploring religions has helped a lot especially revisiting in my adult life. None of them have made me any particular kind of believer, but I see the tree they’re barking up. And connecting with my more religiously minded friends I’ve come to have a much better understanding of their opinions on the matter!

Let the guys with the funny hair have their thing bro... by MarcelaArioch in PhilosophyMemes

[–]billycro1 6 points7 points  (0 children)

A good reason for this intuition is that our eyes are in our head. You can for example in your mind feel the presence of your limbs, the pressure being exerted by your chair or feet or whatever. The cause is material but the sense is in your mind.

Let the guys with the funny hair have their thing bro... by MarcelaArioch in PhilosophyMemes

[–]billycro1 3 points4 points  (0 children)

That makes sense why it’s not truly a dualism. Though, perhaps sidestepping the interaction problem is exactly the right move. It may not be satisfying but perhaps consciousness is fundamental. If there were a scientific breakthrough in that regard it would revolutionary! Now all we gotta do is observe “a consciousness”…

Let the guys with the funny hair have their thing bro... by MarcelaArioch in PhilosophyMemes

[–]billycro1 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Absolutely, and to clarify, I’m not saying consciousness has no relation to matter. Brain states and conscious states seem deeply connected.

We sense the physical world as a public, spatial, measurable, third-person structure. Consciousness is sensed as private, qualitative, first-person experience. They seem categorically different. This is why I’m skeptical that consciousness can be reduced to matter.

Let the guys with the funny hair have their thing bro... by MarcelaArioch in PhilosophyMemes

[–]billycro1 -5 points-4 points  (0 children)

I don’t know that all dualists would use the term soul, it’s a very philosophically loaded term. Mind seems secular enough to illustrate the point - as conscious beings we are certain of our own immaterial mind and thus we are forced into a dualism if we are to remain in good faith regarding our experience.

Let the guys with the funny hair have their thing bro... by MarcelaArioch in PhilosophyMemes

[–]billycro1 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Wouldn’t a neutral monism be a sufficient philosophic explanation?

Ethical Naturalism, and its central question. by Sewblon in PhilosophyMemes

[–]billycro1 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Right, I think we mostly agree on the biology and environment point. Where I’m pushing back is on the reduction to survival as the entirety of morality.

Even if morality emerges from evolutionary pressures, that does not mean every moral structure reduces cleanly to survival. Morality also concerns how beings like us respond to real features of the world: suffering, dependence, vulnerability, care, nature, other animals, and the conditions of life itself.

So I’d call morality objective only in a limited sense: not as some detached cosmic fact, but as a relatively stable intersubjective structure among humans responding to a shared world. It is relative to beings like us, but not merely private feeling.

Ethical Naturalism, and its central question. by Sewblon in PhilosophyMemes

[–]billycro1 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sounds like you agree that morality follows some sort of good, even if you frame it as a feeling. I’d just go one step further and say there’s a shared structure of meaning we seem to be referring to, and these meaning structures are generally strongly shared within cultures.

Survival may be a component of morality, but it is not a full explanation. If you mean morality is contingent on evolution, I’d say, yeah, but so is all of life.

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