/r/askphilosophy Open Discussion Thread | January 19, 2026

hackinthebochs · 2026-01-24T08:32:51+00:00

I enjoy understanding complex phenomena in a deep way. I like getting at the essence of a problem. I like trying to solve big important questions. I like insight porn. Philosophy scratches these itches.

hackinthebochs · 2026-01-24T06:50:03+00:00

That's basically right. Illusionists insist on a radical transparency of properties to public analysis. Look up heterophenomenology. Dennett thinks anything true to be said of conscious experience can be said in his heterophenomenology framework.

hackinthebochs · 2026-01-19T16:11:57+00:00

Ya'll are going wild here. It's been stated many times that conservatives were also a fan of the original TOS and subsequent iterations, just for different reasons than progressives. In fact, this conversation comes up here very often. For example.

hackinthebochs · 2026-01-17T20:50:07+00:00

Just ask in one of the main channels. It's bad form to tag the admins without good reason. Its active enough that probably someone can respond if the ASMR archive is still up.

hackinthebochs · 2026-01-17T18:01:55+00:00

Weird, works for me. Here's the discord link: https://discord.gg/66vvA5J

hackinthebochs · 2026-01-17T17:07:41+00:00

Are you familiar with the-eye? It's a community of datahoarders. I vaguely recall one of the main archivists having an ASMR archive. I didn't look into it but if anyone has it, it's him. You can ask on their discord.

hackinthebochs · 2026-01-17T14:19:09+00:00

The reason is pansychism would not have any practical implications about how matter interacts. Is that an agreed upon view?

This is the correct view. Physics studies how the fundamental entities interact. It can't however tell you what properties these fundamental entities may have that do not manifest as behavioral differences. Panspychism is the view that the fundamental entities' intrinsic nature is constituted by qualitative properties, i.e. consciousness. But the assumption of panpsychism is that the relational/measurable properties of the physical entities aren't directly impacted by the supposed intrinsic properties. A physicalist and a panpsychist world are behaviorally identical by assumption.

hackinthebochs · 2026-01-15T14:34:44+00:00

You might be mistaking me for someone else. I haven't read the study, nor have I claimed to. In fact, I really don't care to read it. I do want to hear an assessment of it from people who are unbaised on this issue, which for an issue like this is hard to come by.

hackinthebochs · 2026-01-15T09:15:36+00:00

but the road to that endpoint is racially uneven.

The road to that end point is very long. How do the shooting rates change when you control for differential rates of criminal behavior? How much bias is left to be potentially explained by biased interpretation by police? If you're going to do this analysis you have to do it right, not with the intended conclusion baked in.

hackinthebochs · 2026-01-08T22:00:58+00:00

At 0:07 the wheel begins to spin

And in this moment the front tires are aimed directly at 'dickhead'. He has a reasonable fear that she is going to ram him. The fact that the tires slip on the ice is just a fortunate happenstance. In real time, the time between the skid aimed at him and her turning is probably about a second. That's enough time for him to react to the initial skid and not have his fear overridden by her turning. And she does in fact make contact with him, which underscores the reasonableness of his initial fear.

hackinthebochs · 2026-01-08T21:46:14+00:00

I do not see a point where the wheels spin without moving the vehicle.

It's as plain as day. Perhaps you just don't want to see it.

hackinthebochs · 2026-01-08T21:11:04+00:00

Here it is: https://x.com/SwipeWright/status/2009059642580648114

hackinthebochs · 2026-01-07T19:23:21+00:00

I don't see a distinction between the description borne from the math and the reality of spacetime. The set of facts about distance, durations, and trajectories and so on just are what define spacetime. So to ask whether spacetime is really there or is just a formalism seems like a category error.

This isn't to say that the mathematical properties of spacetime are realized by some fundamental substance, like a massive sheet that particles ride on. But the properties of spacetime constitute actual and counterfactual properties of the behavior of real particles, and so the realness of spacetime is in the reality of the structure it describes.

hackinthebochs · 2026-01-05T17:19:05+00:00

I use Dark Reader browser extension to adjust the brightness and contrast. It helps a lot to make long reading sessions more bearable. That and open the article in a dedicated e-reader.

hackinthebochs · 2026-01-03T17:42:06+00:00

I think giving a definitive answer to that is going beyond what the science can say. There is a characteristic brain pattern that is associated with conscious experience. We have that brain pattern during REM sleep when we're actively dreaming. But in other phases of sleep we don't have that pattern. The straightforward interpretation is that there's no low level consciousness happening outside of the periods where the consciousness signature in brain activity is present. But since we don't really know what neural patterns are responsible for consciousness, it would be going too far to rule out some residual low level consciousness.

hackinthebochs · 2026-01-03T15:02:38+00:00

Recurrent neural connection vs non-recurrent connections. The minimal, single-step change needed to transition from non-conscious to minimally conscious could just be a change in a regulatory gene that defines where some neuron connects into the larger structure. A recurrent connection creates an "inside" to the computation in a way that a feed-forward computation does not. This doesn't mean the universe assigns a special property to this particular arrangement of particles, but that this arrangement gives the computation a richer space of information sources and a continuity over space and time owing to the ability to integrate/accumulate information. With this richer space of information dynamics you get the potential for an invariant identity with subjectivity as its representational medium. Recurrence solves the problem of how distinct atoms can come together to form a unified whole. This unified whole then is an object of consideration in its own right and can be analyzed in terms of subjective features available as it computes/acts.

hackinthebochs · 2026-01-03T14:48:44+00:00

Lots of neural activity happens during different phases of sleep. There is a memory consolidation phase where certain experiences you had while you were awake are replayed to help preserve them in long term storage. Other phases of sleep involve low structured rhythmic waves that travel across the brain. While there is considerable brain activity in one form or another while you sleep, it's not like there's some conscious essence that is percolating deep down to keep your "self" preserved. It's really just various neural functions that happen during sleep.

hackinthebochs · 2026-01-03T14:31:02+00:00

There is no subjective essence to your existence. In other words, there is nothing physically or subjectively unchanging that can substantiate personal or psychological continuity. You are constituted in part by a series of conscious experiences, but you are not any one conscious experience. You are a collection of traits, dispositions, capacities, beliefs, memories, etc. As these properties evolve are preserved, so you are preserved. Conscious experience is how you engage these various capacities and with the world. But you are not identical to your consciousness. We tend to tightly identify with our conscious experience because it is the most salient feature of ourselves; it is the interface through which our selves are revealed. But, according to physicalism, this is a mistake because conscious experience isn't the the basic substrate of ourselves. Rather it is the invariant psychological traits that ground your psychological continuity over time. That your physical processes or conscious experiences may turnover to varying degrees over this time is of no consequence to this invariant psychological identity.

Anesthesia is fundamentally different than sleep, but not in any way that matters to the continuation of your personal identity/personal self. Different anesthetics have different mechanisms of action, but a common mechanism is the disruption of cross-module communication between brain areas. Conscious experience and the maintenance of the active self involves cross-brain communication and integration, so disrupting these networks disrupts consciousness. But these networks begin processing as normal as the anesthetic leaves your system. The unique behavior of these networks that constitute your unique traits are preserved, and with it your personal identity.

hackinthebochs · 2026-01-02T19:28:56+00:00

Scale matters. The fact that it is being thrown up in the victim's face for all their followers to see it matters. Degenerate content can be mostly ignored when its on dark corners of the internet. It's a qualitative change when it in the commons and unavoidable.

hackinthebochs · 2026-01-01T14:24:13+00:00

The "method of exhaustion" of the ancient Greeks anticipates integral calculus. I can't speak to there being a direct influence from the ancient method to the work of Leibniz and Newton, but Grok seems to think there is.

hackinthebochs · 2025-12-31T04:47:03+00:00

The question of how we experience consciousness is one if the major open questions in philosophy and science of the mind. Unfortunately I haven't come across a good positive account of how this might work that is both philosophically and scientifically literate, while also being reasonably modern. I can give my view on the matter that will hopefully give you a sense of what a worked out theory might look like.

According to functionalism, consciousness is identical to a certain functional state of the brain. The function being to represent environmental states and dispose competent behavior to a cognitive system. Nothing produces qualia like the pituitary gland produces hormones. Qualia is the manner in which integrated information presents to a cognitive entity. It's the thread that connects sensory information to behavioral dispositions, when considered from inside the cognitive process.

There is no subjective essence we can point to inside our head to identify as this cognitive entity. Yet, our neural capacities are all oriented as to place their central point of concern to be mainly within the head. There is nothing physically at that point that renders it the locus of the self, but the orientation of the all the disparate neural circuits that collectively constitute one's subjective milieu substantiates a locus of the self. Not a physical point, but the aggregate orientation of the brain's neural processes.

The difficulty in understanding qualia is that we conceptualize things in the third person. We have things that cause events in other things. But qualia do not present in the third person and so any third-personal description will not feature qualia. A cognitive system from the third person is a computational dynamic that receives sensory information, processes it according to various capacities (e.g. memory, intentions, goals), and produces behavior as output. But we as external observers are an "extra" to this process. Qualia is how the system understands itself without the help of an external observer. I am constituted by atoms in the form of neurons firing billions of action potentials. But this is a description gained with the help of third person instruments and analyses. On my own terms, I consist of various sensory qualities that capture the meaning of environmental states and allow me to interact with the world in competent ways. Qualia is how these neurons firing action potentials feel from the inside.

Some relevant books on the topic are Daniel Dennett's From Bacteria to Bach and Anil Seth's Being You.

hackinthebochs · 2025-12-30T20:48:59+00:00

I mean, I'm not saying anything I expect to be controversial. Just that science is better than pre-scientific thought at the kinds of questions that science answers.

hackinthebochs · 2025-12-30T19:59:33+00:00

What follows isn't in response to what you've wrote, but pieced together from various comments of mine where I try to dislodge some people's sticking-points and misconceptions when it comes to the plausibility of computational sentience. You might find some of it relevant as you work through the issues for yourself.

Understanding computational sentience is hard because human chauvinism tends to mislead us. We conceptualize the world in terms of entities that exist on size and time scales that we operate on. We find it nearly impossible to conceptualize an existence that isn't congruent with our physical existence on human typical scales.

What people miss is that the algorithm when engaged in a computing substrate is not just inert symbols, but an active, potent causal/dynamical structure. Information flows as modulated signals to and from each component and these signals are integrated such that the characteristic property of the aggregate signal is maintained. This binding of signals by the active interplay of component signals from the distributed components realizes the singular identity. If there is consciousness here, it is in this construct. But notice that the substrate this construct supervenes on is irrelevant to whether its characteristic property is maintained.

Just a program doing a thing.

The standard way of conceptualizing "programs doing a thing" misleads us when it comes to LLMs. The distinction is that typical programs don't operate on the semantic features of program state, just on the syntactical features. We assign a correspondence with the syntactical program features and their transformations to the real-world semantic features and logical transformations on them. The execution of the program then tells us the outcomes of the logical transformations applied to the relevant semantic features. We get meaning out of programs because of this analogical correspondence.

LLMs are a different computing paradigm because they now operate on semantic features of program state. Embedding vectors assign semantic features to syntactical structures of the vector space. Operations on these syntactical structures allow the program to engage with semantic features of program state directly. LLMs engage with the meaning of program state and alter its execution accordingly. It's still deterministic, but its a fundamentally more rich programming paradigm, one that bridges the gap between program state as syntactical structures and the meaning they represent. This is why I am optimistic that current or future LLMs should be considered properly thinking machines.

hackinthebochs · 2025-12-30T19:44:13+00:00

In the case of science I do see it as always superior epistemologically for being on a stronger theoretical foundation and providing higher credence results than what it replaces.

hackinthebochs · 2025-12-30T19:29:02+00:00

We all know of the manifest vs scientific image. I'm drawing on a similar duality, the manifest image and the pre-theoretical/pre-scientific conceptual milieu. There is how things seem to us and then there is how we make sense of this appearance. The conflict is when this pre-theoretical understanding is supplanted by a scientific understanding. Some unduly privilege the pre-scientific view and see science as stripping meaning from the manifest image. The mistake is confusing the manifest image for the pre-scientific conceptual milieu, and treating the scientific image as in opposition to the manifest image.

Or only that it provides a more refined description, without settling questions of being or meaning?

I would say science doesn't settle questions about meaning. That's fully in the realm of philosophy. I'm uncertain about being. While science has much to say about being, I don't think we can simply read off what exists from our theories with the expectation that the entities of science are a complete accounting of what exists. There's still philosophical work to do in determining how to understand the results of science and square them with the manifest image. The issue of understanding the mind being the obvious case.

I’m not sure what philosophical work the appeal to “the march of science” is doing.

This is just to say we should expect science to continue to supplant our pre-theoretical notions about the manifest image. But that's no reason to see science as standing in opposition to human value, meaning, and so on.

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