This was very helpful to supplement my class. I was disappointed you didn’t have many more videos!

@TheVeganVicar

Жыл бұрын

Most of Phil's videos are on the Mind Chat channel that he shares with a colleague.

I really like Russellian Monism. But there are a couple of things that prevent me from endorsing it; the problem of combination and the problem of mental causation. It seems to me that the intrinsic nature of a complex entity is exhausted by its structure. In other words, if I know the constituents of a complex entity and their behaviors and relationships, nothing would be left out about its intrinsic nature. This is not true of simples (space, time and fundamental particles). It seems quite intuitive to suppose that simples have an intrinsic categorical nature that grounds their dispositions. Our brains are complex and thus do not seem to possess an intrinsic nature extra to their structures. The other problem comes from the possibility of zombies and shuffled qualia. If zombies are possible, then it would mean that our behavior could also be grounded in any intrinsic nature other than consciousness. On the other hand, the same conscious state can conceivably ground different behaviors. My pain could be your itch. So the very same quale of pain can correspond to different behaviors in two people. This makes consciousness unnecessary and insufficient for behavior production and thus epiphenomenal. In other words, unless we can provide a necessary link between the intrinsic nature of our brain states and their causal powers, we would end up with epiphenomenalism.

@llb224

6 жыл бұрын

Hi Dara, on your first point, maybe thinking about the fundamental nature of even the smallest understanding of a quark reveals an epistemic gap in our understanding of the microphysical components of this world. The Russellian monist could hold that either continued empirical evidence pertaining to the extrinsic properties of even smaller, undiscovered constituents could bring us closer to the most infintisemal and hence reveal that all of matter, as it pertains to extension, is describable via extrinsic properties. Or, they could alternately argue that there are intrinsic properties that require a new form of science we are yet to conceptualize. (e.g. What could dark matter have to say about itself extrinsically that may inform our present conceptualization of matter? This could be a possible avenue.) Just some food for thought.

@MonisticIdealism

5 жыл бұрын

dara ghaznavi A purely Monistic Idealism has no combination problem and no problem of mental causation. Substance monism with property monism and irreducible consciousness fits perfectly with causal closure and there still being mental causation. It's when you get into property dualism (a distinction of mental and physical) that puts one back to the mind-body problem simply couched in new terms. Versions of idealism like Cosmic Idealism in particular avoid any combination problem since they don't have an atomistic ontology (where macro minds emerge from micro or proto-mental states) but a holistic ontology in that all concrete facts are grounded in facts about the mental states of (or the mentality associated with) a single cosmic entity. This cosmic subject is simple and could be said to either have no parts or is prior to its parts. In regards to the possibility of zombies and shuffled qualia it depends on what kind possibility you are referring to. Maybe they are conceivable (which is questionable) but this doesn't mean they are metaphysically possible. My pain could be your itch? I'm not seeing how this is coherent. Qualia is _for me_ so to speak, it is subjective and something that is apprehend directly. If you experienced what I experienced then my pain would be your pain. Whether that's actually possible though is another story.

@ibperson7765

3 жыл бұрын

Dara where is the dividing line between awareness of time and time, awareness of space and space? These fundamentals exist outside the knowing of them, and hence represents distinct primitives? Monism has answers this I believe.

great talk. thank you!

The panpsychism argument has a major problem: the word "in".(the decoherence question: where does the "not-in" end and the "in" begin?) Absolute Monism (per Shankara 788-820) is a superior argument. Everthing IS Consciousness, not "in" something else. That's a dualist perspective. True Monism can be likened to a vast Ocean of Pure being, where the waves and ripples in the state of ignorance (Maya) are mistakenly thought to be separate from the Ocean of Pure Consciousness or Brahman. Schroedinger stated "The subject and object are One". That being the case, there can no no dualist model where one "in" essence is Consciousness and another "not-in" starts. Thus, Pantheism is correct, and Panpsychism has too many flaws.

@yifuxero9745

9 ай бұрын

In other words, the correct model of existence is that of Advaita Vedanta. The delusion or Maya applies to the false notion that objects are separate from each other. This is only a conventional appearance, when in reality, existence is a seamless Ocean of Consciousness, or Sat-Chit-Ananda; Truth-Consciousness-Bliss.

Interesting talk! But what about idealism? Everything being mental. All phenomena appearing in consciousness.

I like Consciousness. I want to be more aware of it and learn from it but so paradoxical in nature :/

I agree with a lot of this strongly up until it gets to panpsychism - which I'm not necessarily against but I think it has some particular weaknesses, particularly matching human experience. I look, for example, at what comes of people really playing with their subjective experiences over decades in traditional settings for that sort of thing as well as the accounts of NDE's and it seems more like what we're dealing with is functionalism with multiple realizability - ie. that having one's 'I' experience leak out or project itself into or onto something else is one of the more common mystical experience claims. There is, for example, another terminology for Ned Block's China Brain - they've been known for a long time in such groups as egregores. I get that the appearances issue, such as the craziness question of whether electrons can be conscious, would apply here even more so but I'd have to hope that - just like the giggles are wearing off a bit on thinking electrons - that people might also ask the question of whether ridiculousness of a China brain might only be a problem when it's considered at the wrong order of intensity.

@voidisyinyangvoidisyinyang885

6 жыл бұрын

I can assure you there are spirits are coherent biophotons - I have seen them - but light is not the same as formless awareness. de Broglie's Law of Phase Harmony explains it - the "Pilot wave" is formless awareness when light is turned around to zero - there is a secret relativistic mass of light as the hidden momentum or phonon energy that is reverse entropy. I have more details on my blog ecoechoinvasives.blogspot.com

@didjesbydan

5 жыл бұрын

Voidisyinyang Voidisyinyang This looks interesting, but what you have written here and on your blog seems aimed at people who already have been introduced to your general line of thinking, examples and terminology. I am interested in understanding your point of view. Is there something else you have written as an introduction to it all? Can you explain what you are talking about in this statement from your blog?: "I hear my echo in the echoing wood -- simultaneous reception of echoes results not only in the incorrect separation of clocks within a moving chain; also asynchronicity of those clocks. Clocks necessarily get entangled through time dilation; spin-echo phase-decay leads to a loss of coherence of a single clock. Phase coherence in the spin has the uncanny property of reversing the time flows backwards. We feel vibrant buzzing, hear uplifting tonal hum inside...always music in our heart and head" Thanks!

@santerisatama5409

Жыл бұрын

Rather than bottom-up panpsychism, It's more coherent to go full idealism/animism.

@santerisatama5409

Жыл бұрын

@@voidisyinyangvoidisyinyang885 My intuition has been that as light "pushes" from past, gravity "pulls" from future. Are you suggesting some kind of reversible-time theory of light, along the lines of CPT-symmetry? The problem is that both pull and push are aspects of irreversible time.

@voidisyinyangvoidisyinyang885

Жыл бұрын

@@santerisatama5409 in de Broglie's Law of Phase Harmony there is no symmetric rest frame. I just did an upload on Basil J. Hiley who quotes Einstein stating that Heisenberg's algebra means the symmetric spacetime continuum has to be removed. So time is inherently asymmetric and eternal motion with the future and past overlapping in a superluminal nonlocality. We can listen or logically infer this through meditation. I have the training manual as my first upload. The virtual photons are then absorbed and this violates the conservation of momentum. Sir John Pendry just proved this with his Archimedes Screw circularly polarized light experiment. thanks

How would, the knowledge that the firing of certain neurons causes pain, be expressed outwardly, if the neurons are firing weather they intrinsically feel pain or not.

@friiq0

4 жыл бұрын

jchandler1963 The idea is that the pain is what the firing neuron *really is* on the most fundamental level. In this view, our apparent spatio-temporal picture of the neuron’s behavior is merely what the neuron looks like from the outside. I think this is quite natural. Why should we expect ourselves to be able to use mere sense data to divine the fundamental intrinsic nature of the world? It seems to me that the best we might expect *A Priori* from our sensible faculties are pragmatic isomorphisms to objects in the outside world-not exact replications of the fundamental natures of such objects. So, it’s kind of the inverse of the way you posed it. The pain is what actually physically exists, and the interactions of that phenomenon with the rest of the physical world are what causes this apparent spatio-temporal structure we call a neuron in such-and-such a state. Russellian Monism posits that this is the case with everything. Everything has an intrinsic nature at its ontological basis, and physical science only reveals superficial models of how the world behaves, not the character of its intrinsic nature.

@user232349

3 жыл бұрын

@@friiq0 "interactions of that phenomenon with the rest of the physical world" -- there can't be any interactions between the intrinsic nature and the rest of the physical world, otherwise this intrinsic nature would be a regular physical property (it *does* something, see 5:40)

Can you explain why the physicalist approach is problematic? Can it not describe qualia as an emergent product of physical firing, driven by evolution. Consciousness as a competitive system that creates strong illusions to survive.

Theres an argument to be made that subjective experience includes ONLY consciousness. Try long enough to find the boundary between a sight and your awareness of it. The field of vision IS colors, not objects spitting colors at me. It is made of color. Then the next step is find the difference between the color and my seeing of it and my awareness of the sight of it. There is no difference, just raw color/consciousness. Again not consciousness OF color. Just colorness/awareness. All attempts to find the boundary between the color and my awareness of it will end in a recognition that I am mentally superimposing this boundary via imagination. It’s not there. Seeing light is lightness/awareness, not awareness of seeing light, not even awareness of light. Just light. Just awareness. It is MADE of awareness. Same with thoughts and feeling (sensations) and other perceptions. It is all MADE of consciousness.

@Doctor_Subtilis

3 жыл бұрын

give peirce a spin if you are the sort that wants to figure things out.

@ibperson7765

3 жыл бұрын

@@Doctor_Subtilis Thanks. Who exactly?

Interesting. I'm not sure I accept Russell's version of structuralism and intrinsic natures though. Yes, physics down tell us dispositions of entities, but it also tells us about _spatiality_ of those entities. Spatiality is part of a thing's intrinsic nature too. So there is no physical structuralism without some apprehension of intrinsicality.

Reality is huge machine

Absoloute saviour, thanks

This strikes me as astronomically off base. The only examples of conscious things that we know of are members of a small subset of biological organisms who live on a tiny rock within an unimaginably vast universe. And we don’t yet understand consciousness. So, in order to explain this gap in our understanding regarding this particular property of some organisms on our tiny planet, panpsychism posits consciousness as a fundamental property of every single particle in this vast universe. And this is supposed to be parsimonious? It sure doesn’t seem to me. Furthermore, you offer no theory that explains how these atoms of consciousness coalesce into a unified consciousness within an organism. How then is panpsychism any more explanatory than simply saying consciousness emerges from brains? At least a brain emergence hypothesis confines the present mystery of consciousness to the specific structures where we observe the phenomena. Panpsychism, on the other hand, expands the mystery to literally everything in the universe while offering no extraterrestrial examples or explanatory theory for doing so.

If god existed if he were omniscient he would have to include the world to experience it

Why use confusing conceptions like Panpsychism when you have the beautiful clarity and parsimony of Russellian Monism? The beauty of RM is that it renders terms like “mental” and “material” defunct. Good riddance. Let the ontology have the unity we should have recognized from the very beginning.

@thereal8ball975

4 жыл бұрын

I think the reason people endorse panpsychism specifically is because RM is largely silent on what the intrinsic nature of matter actually is(Russell himself said it was just just neutral). But the usual response is that this is to vague to be meaningful. so modern thinkers try to characterise it and when u do a first person perspective seems to be convincing for ppl like Goff. Therefore first person perspectives (conscious experience) all the way down (panpsychism).

@maxmax9050

3 жыл бұрын

This is one of my complaints too. A consequence of this is that you see people overemphasizing the psychic aspects of the ontology, causing people to go so far as to even think of neutral monism is a form of idealism. But of course neutral monism is about uniting the mental and material into a non-dualistic harmony.

Russell was good mathematician but a bad philosopher.