Consciousness Live! -Do I know how to work the Chat?

0:05 okay I am live once again I think I'm figuring it out hey look this is the chat okay so we're back over here doing this again um I just had had previously started a live talking about the sixth season of Consciousness live my

0:39 podcast and um I had made some mistakes so I'm trying to figure this out so if you don't know if you're just if you're going to watch this later or or whatever uh if you're joining me now um I had some problems with my last uh my last live discussion and you know these things are live if you haven't watched that one that I did with Rachel Dennison by the way you should watch it because it it comes on we were talking for a half hour uh before I realized that I hadn't hit go live um I just h i it's no

1:13 one cares but I hit start streaming which connects OBS to the YouTube and then there's a seever button that you have to connect that says go live that starts it actually broadcasting so me and my infinite genius Hood didn't realize that and uh it I saw that it was streaming I thought the connection was there and I was like we're live and then we started talking and then I gradually was figuring out as I was talking with her that we were not maybe live and I was very confused so I was listening to what she was saying and also thinking to myself

1:47 should I interrupt her and tell her that we're not live actually um but then I was listening to what she was saying and she was answering my question it was interesting but uh it yeah so I waited for her to finish and then I I told her oh yeah we're not live but it was very embarrassing and ridiculous so now I'm trying to make sure that everything is is nailed down um and I also want to incorporate the possibility of taking comments from the the viewers um such that there are now I record these whenever anyone is available so it's hard to actually get a

2:19 set schedule and who knows when anyone is around or whatever and I don't really announce these or advertise them especially since I'm off Twitter um there's no real place I mean I'm on Blue Sky you know if I I announce them over there but uh anyway I'm easily distracted is that a shiny thing no what I'm trying to say is I yeah after that really embarrassing live Fiasco I wanted to make sure that it didn't happen again so uh on the previous version of this live stream um I started it accidentally marking it as

2:55 for kids so the chat was disabled so I'm trying to make sure that I know all the right settings and how to do it from OBS instead of doing it from um from YouTube probably nobody cares about this but in if it if anybody is listening and happens to be around they could type something in the chat and let me know that I know how to do that because I've never done it before um in the meantime just to reiterate some things that I was saying uh I'm I'm excited I have some several guests lined up and I've already mentioned them but I in the

3:28 previous accidental video but I'll say them again here it was Michael Graziano Eric switchable um Steve Fleming matthus Michelle and Ned block so those are the persons that I have lined up for this six season of Consciousness life I actually can't believe that I've been doing this podcast for six years and that before that I was doing SpaceTime mine for what I don't know a year and a half or something like that so I've been doing doing these conversations for quite some

4:02 time that's what I enjoy the most is um having those kinds of conversations it's really useful for me um I should probably do more to make sure that the guests like explain the topics I don't really do any of that sort of stuff so there's a lot of like when I listen to other podcasts they always you know make sure that people explain stuff and I always find that kind of boring but of course you know I'm one person and so uh many other people they wouldn't they might find that interesting so who knows

4:34 but uh I always just try to go right for the conversation and um and not much else but uh I guess that you know different persons will enjoy different things okay so anyway if there's any questions or you have any comments I would be happy to have them because I am trying to figure out whether I can do this chat in real time so um on the other notes I have asked a lot of people uh sent out a lot of emails um and usually what happens is you know you get

5:08 a spattering of people that reply and then later trickles uh people say yeah I'll do it but I'm not busy until August or something like so so it's still possible that I'll be able to arrange some further conversations than the ones that I have already but uh um it's actually a lot of work and you we're having to read three books just for this so that's fun and exciting uh but also a lot of work and not that I'm against it but uh okay so let's see

5:44 here um the what else is going on around here I'm kind of stalling to see if anyone's going to use the chat feature to make sure I don't know if it's just because I don't know how to do it or if no one's doing it but I've seen people chat here before or I mean type in messages um have I actually I think I have yeah I think at the last time actually there that's how I knew we were live finally um was that there were people chopping ah look there's someone that just said something to me uh scentifier what do you think of

6:20 phenomenal transparency being an analytic operary truth as in qualia by definition just refer to what its likeness um there's a lot going on in that sentence there uh what do I think of phenomenal transparency being analytic a priori I mean generally I'm sort of suspicious of analytic a priori truths uh unless they're supposed to analytic means True by definition or something it depends on what you mean by analytic lots of people mean different things by

6:54 it um but if you just mean sort of like once you understand the meaning of the words then you sort of think that it's true like all bachel are unmarried or something then if that's what you mean uh phenomenal transparency I I'm I'm familiar with transparency claims but I guess I haven't heard the term phenomenal transparency to be honest with you um but then you say qualia by definition just refer to what it's likeness uh I mean that's how I use the term I I

7:27 don't really use the term qualia I think qualia is kind of an oldfashioned word actually no offense um but I I feel like it's like got a lot of baggage um and uh as long as you sort of mean something innocuous by it I'm not against it but yeah I do think that uh um if qualia means anything then it means what it's likeness um the what it's like aspect I guess the reason why people might Maybe why you're asking I don't know you feel

8:00 free to follow up uh I've seen other people invite people on so I could talk them face to face I don't know how to do that either though um but at least now I know I can see chats so that's good uh but um I guess the people who might be a little unhappy with that claim would be people who think that you could have unconscious qualities mental qualities that occur unconsciously um like the painfulness of pain but not being conscious pain fulness of pain or the redness of red but not being conscious

8:33 redness of red so even there sometimes people will say yeah they're fine with that but what they mean is something like um the what is likeness which is unconscious but if you so there's terminological disputes there all over the place uh but but I am a phenomenal realist in whatever sense that you like that so I think that there is something that's like what it's like those properties um a properties of creatures you could say they properties of States you could say they're properties of individuals uh is in you know equivalent in my way of thinking

9:10 um does that answer your question I don't know I'm kind of just rambling because I'm not 100% sure what what you're asking um but since I'm rambling uh one of the reasons why I like the shomi argument which is an argument that's you know that uh that starts from the conceivability of a creature physically just like myself which is conscious and merely

9:44 physical um sometimes people you if you read you know I thought I thought of this one day when I was really angry arguing with someone um and they were talking about zombies and telling me that physical physicalism was false as as a result and I was just so frustrated I was like well no dualism is false because I can imagine physical Consciousness it's like as silly to say that but then um so born out of frustration these creatures that I called shambes it turns out that they've been hanging around for

10:15 a while under different names and people have thought of this a few times in the literature before I had so nothing in this new Under the Sun uh in fact when I wrote about this on my blog way back when someone immediately came over and said oh someone already thought this turns out was Keith frish so and and a couple other people too Scott sturgeon has a paper on this from before cot baylock and others so the idea that Consciousness could be physical is uh you know nothing new to physicalists people who like physicalism think that Consciousness could be physical um

10:50 so I see that you just said something I'll finish my rambling and then see what you said um but uh so clearly it's seem to me that it's conceivable that Consciousness is physical that argument which starts from the conceivability of Consciousness being physical seems to me to work against illusionism and dualism at the same time um and the reasons for that are interesting but let me see what shenti fire says so the reason I ask is because I'm probing if the identity

11:23 Theory can be defended which would seem to have to deny transparency as there are hidden as there's a hidden physical Essence ah interesting um yeah so I am friendly to the identity Theory myself um so yeah if you think that uh the redness of red is a brain State and we can introspect the redness of red but not the brain SP H the brain State aspect of it um then it's seems like uh

12:01 the thing which is phenomenal namely the brain state had some non what it's like property or something like that is that the way the objection is supposed to go because the way I would tend to hear it is to say something more like uh well that physical state does have a what is likeness property so there's really there's nothing hidden there what's hidden is the the basis of it the the the metaphysical nature of it so to speak but what's not hidden is the

12:35 what its likeness and that is the physical so there's the qualia part the the what is likeness doesn't exhaust its its nature because it's a physical state but uh so I guess you do have to deny something like um Revelation right you have to deny the the Revelation thesis if you're interested in that I

13:07 had a discussion with Philip Goff about that way back a long time ago the very first discussion I had with him um and we talked a lot about uh about that my own particular view is to think that there's like an an aspect of it of the state which is a what islik aspect and then there's the physical aspect um we only have introspective access to one of those aspects some people don't like that way of talking but uh you know it's interesting though I see why you're asking now yeah I like that are you defending the identity Theory or

13:42 um just uh I mean you say you say want to see if it can be defended but what I meant to ask is like are you interested in it or are you trying to attack it oh someone wants to ask questions but it's commuting so I'll return turn in later okay um yeah I was mostly just testing this to see if I if it worked but I can hang around for a little while I guess if people are hanging around my uh the kids are at

14:16 of play date so a little bit of time friendly I'm friendly to Identity Theory but struggle to believe it suppose you have a house with a front and a back aspect of aspects in themselves are distinct yeah I'm asking because of God um you struggle to believe the identity Theory uh huh yeah I mean before I get to the other point

14:48 that you're making I I um I wonder if people who struggle to believe the identity Theory struggle to believe the other theories not I'm not saying you aren't I I don't know you although um yeah so pism seems just as struggle is that a word um that electrons are conscious seems pretty bizarre uh so identity theory is it as bizarre as that um that it could be a brain States

15:24 it depends on certain views I mean if you have a certain view of perception that you mix with that then yeah can you seem pretty pretty bizarre but I I don't know if it see I don't know if I struggle to believe the identity Theory it just seems like yeah be sort of interesting if that's the what it was but uh then again you know could be something else so uh suppose you have a house with a front and a back aspect those aspects in themselves are distinct um they're distinct in the sense that

15:57 they have to be viewed from a particular place um oh no a qual a quietist uh and an upside down smiley face I don't know what these emojis means I come from a pre- Emoji time guys we didn't do Emojis so I don't know what upside down emoji means um but I think it means like I said something ridiculous I have no idea uh okay I'm literally not joking you know but I come

16:30 from the day where we thought it was cool to spell hell on a calculator 7734 upside down oh yeah naughty naughty okay anyway you should never let me in front of a camera because I start going off the rails very quickly um but so I I think that the the house is a house and then there are certain things you have to be in a place to view so the

17:03 house viewed from the inside is distinct from the house viewed from the outside there's not two things there's just a house which has an interior and an exterior so uh you just can't see the exterior excuse me you can't see the interior from the exterior you you have to go inside you have to be inside so with Consciousness I think if it's a brain State then that it would be like that um you've got to be inside you've got to be in the brain State uh you got to instantiate the state I mean not inside the state obviously but you know

17:36 you got to be in the states in order to um be able to have access to that property which is there even when viewed from the outside but you just don't have access to it I mean that's the way that I would uh think about that um but yeah I wish people would pay more attention to the identity Theory you know my position has has always been and that's kind of what I was hinting at a second ago my position has always been that the identity theory is just as absurd as any of these other theories so it's equally

18:10 it's just as bizarre as you pick your favorite Theory I mean I think functionalism is bizarre because of things like you know organizing this a nation state into a mind and um organizing popsicle sticks in the right way could result in a mind I think that's very strange but I struggle to find to find that as something that I could take seriously with respect to Consciousness but you know that could just be the last Prejudice of my pre-philosophical sense that's really

18:42 ingrained in me um my gut reaction that there's got to be something biological um to account for Consciousness but anyway so my I don't want to get derailed my point was simply to say that um I think it's equally strange it's as strange as any of these other views uh um yeah so dual aspect monism as far as I understand it which you know I don't really under I don't know so I

19:18 tried to find someone to talk to about this um and I found someone who kind of endorsed a neutral monism which is as close as I could find uh and I have that conversation you know by the way the Consciousness life stuff that I do a lot of it I try to find people who have views that I don't really understand and I want to talk to them to find out why they hold those views not to attack them or anything um but uh sometimes I get carried away and do start attacking but that's not my

19:51 intention um but the dual aspect monism is that there's one kind of stuff that's neither physical nor mental but has these two aspects um what somehow presents to us or something to to whatever it is to something uh these two aspects the physical that we call the physical and the mental so I I think that the differences between that view um the differences between that

20:25 view and the identity Theory well they're at the metaphysical level so the identity Theory says that you know the stuff that's physical um is not mental in any way and then you build up some stuff and then you get uh combination of physical stuff that is consciousness the analogy is with water and gold you build up some physical stuff and then you get gold or water um so that's very different at the metaphysical fundamental level than it is uh or the dual aspect monist who thinks that the fundamental stuff is

21:00 neither physical nor mental and that some in some sense physical stuff isn't fundamental so you know that's the difference um the difference is is there not at the epistemic level but at the metaphysical level but I see why why you're asking that but uh um by the way Mike or or is it K Mike I don't know what to call people who I only know by their handles but uh you're saying what theory is do I endorse and is not bizarre I don't really endorse any

21:33 Theory I think um that all of this stuff sometimes people get mad at me when I say this but I truly believe that this stuff is difficult and that nobody knows um I endorse what the is them like nobody knows could be anything um so instead of like thinking a theory is true I think that what you should do is kind of distribute your belief amongst the options in a way that reflects how much You' be willing to bet on them in sort of you know an a bayian way if you want

22:05 to simplify it but I think that some views are more probable than others and some that I would be more likely to defend and others I'd be more surprised to find out that they were true um but I don't really uh that's why I just start arguing with most people because if I find someone that wants to attack physicalism I'll defend physicalism if I find someone attacking dualism I'll defend dualism there are some dualist views that I take more seriously than others and if I if reality happened to be a way that was

22:41 dualistic or non dualistic I would be like okay that's interesting um so my own personal view is that I don't know but I but I think that what my strongest commitment um the one that uh I def I think that my Bedrock like default that I fall back on a lot is some kind of identity Theory between the mind and the brain and a global physicalism so that's kind of where my my intuitive assessment that's where

23:17 my intuitions lie I would say if like just naturally I sort of feel like yeah physicalism and identity Theory when I was younger I was kind of like a naive duelist and uh I just thought yeah when I read decart I was like duh this is clearly you know I thought the conceivability argument was shut and just done um but uh because of mental causation mostly um well the pineal gland

23:56 interactionism is that's poor dayart but you know interactionism in and of itself is not as silly an idea I think um and it certainly isn't ruled out by anything that we know um there's some reasons to think that it's you should be suspicious of it it's not my preferred view but I don't think that uh it's is like logically incoherent or refuted by anything that we know for sure the kind of interactionism that I would be most like dualistic interactionism like the Mind non-physical mind interacting with the physical world I would think in the

24:28 quantum realm probably is the your the best place to find some kind of interaction like that it doesn't really violate the laws of physics we know it now what you can get out of that is a different question and you know people have explored that I like the chers and um uh Calvin McLean is it uh I'm blanking on his name for whatever reason but um I'm interested in that kind of stuff but my default view my like the thing that I think like If I Were King of the world I would make it so that that physicalism were true because it just seemed like that

25:02 seems to me to be sort of the way things work uh okay so now is it bizarre well I was going to point this out I'm going to be talking with Eric switzgable in two weeks um who has a new book coming out called the weirdness of the world uh and in it he tries to argue for what he calls Universal bizarreness and Universal dubby uh I don't know say dubiety dub dub what dubiousness um so the idea is supposed to be that uh every answer to the Mind Body problem is theoretically

25:40 strange what he calls a theoretical Wilderness a bizar every every um according to him every Mind Body Solution has a bizarre outcome for example mindbrain identity has the outcome that you know there could be physical beings that behaved very much just like us but weren't conscious any way simply because they had a different Constitution that their what was in their head their quote unquote brain was made from computer chips um if

26:15 mind brain identity is true then those kind of creatures can't be conscious now my own view is that that's just an intuition we've never met anything like that although we have chat jbt and things like that that put pressure on that uh not the Consciousness part but just I think put pressure on this idea that we could incrementally be getting closer to something that has that kind of behavior uh which then would really blow our circuits our intuitive circuits so yeah um is there any non-bizarre theory of this stuff I don't know I'm going to try to convince Eric that physicalism isn't as bizarre as he

26:46 thinks it is for sort of the reasons I've been already hinting at that I just don't think that uh the consequences are all that serious so yeah um so what do you say precisely like you I do not really fully endorse the particular good H I'm more agnostic position which exactly what quity C most of all well I would disagree with that I don't know maybe you using that term in a slightly different way but if you mean the kind of quality quietism that comes from people like

27:19 Pete mandic um I think he means more than that I think he he he means the he means to indicate the idea that the very concept of qualia is kind of bankrupt it doesn't mean anything and that people use it as a way to pretend like they're saying something meaningful like qualia is physical or qualia or nonphysical um when it can't be used to say anything meaningful because it's like a nonsense gibberish word that doesn't have a reference and so

27:51 therefore we shouldn't speak about it we shouldn't theorize about this stuff because we don't have any way to talk about it um I think that's more uh that's stronger than maybe what you meant by by quietism maybe what you mean is that well it's just so difficult to choose between an option in this area that we shouldn't waste our time trying to argue about it because it's just you know you could pick any one of these things so yeah I don't know if I'd be that that pessimistic

28:26 um yeah anyway so before I forget what I was going to say though I was trying to say that the thing that I'm most committed to is like physicalism and the super most committed I am is to the claim that physicalism hasn't been refuted so that's the thing that I usually end up arguing with people about is that people think that like the conceivability arguments just refute physicalism or there's something laughably absurd about physicalism you know people like Bernardo who say it's just Bonia or it's nonsense or it's completely like we should be over it by now there's books called the waning of physicalism it's like those kind kinds of things kind of annoy

29:00 me so when someone comes around saying the AR priori arguments against physicalism just refute it and we should move on with our lives then I go no they don't so I don't think they uh physicalism has been refuted in any meaningful sense what I think is that there are some reasons that some people have for looking elsewhere which is fine um yeah the Beetle and the boxing see I disagree with that that way of thinking about I also don't use the word qualia because maybe you could that the way it's been traditionally defined as being ineffable

29:35 something you can express in words and something that's private that only you can know about and things like that those are things um uh that I don't think are required in order to believe in phenomenal Consciousness so that's why I think talking about phenomenal Consciousness is more interesting and also as shanier was just saying yeah so the what what's going to be bizarre is going to be culturally relative exactly so exactly so someone saying someone in a language that I cannot pronounce sorry

30:11 um is saying good evening what do you think about solipsism is it possible to be consistent solipsism believe in free well H interesting you know I I tried to find a solipsist to talk to for my podcast Consciousness live I did find one I think um and I do have that discussion up there um solipsism it depends on what you mean by it so uh there's different meanings to that term some of which are I think kind of almost true in other words that you that couldn't possibly well not possibly but would be

30:44 very strange if they were true um so on one meaning of the term I think what most people think by it is simply uh that there's only one mind probably you're thinking it's yours but obviously it would be mine so solipsists are gen sometimes cast as this view that that that there's only one mind on the other hand you might think well no solipsism is the view that we only have evidence for one mind um whether or not there are timal minds or not it's that uh we learn to use Mental Language by our own case so um uh that's a

31:22 more limited claim um simply I don't know if you have pain because what I mean by pain is only Anchored In my own case so how could I know like you know it doesn't make any sense to talk about pain for you because pain simply means the state that I go into in certain instances um so I don't know uh if you think the first one that is just that there's just one mind um I think yeah that The Logical problem of solipsism no one's ever solved that I don't think anyone's ever

31:55 really refuted solipsism or given a knockdown argument that uh that solipsism is false I I'm going to be talking with someone in two weeks this guy Eric I mentioned already he has an argument he tries to make against solipsism starting from the fact that he's lost that chess so he says well G I've lost that chest before and if I was the only mind then why would I want to beat myself I would got myself win or something like that so um if allism were true you predict different things I don't know if that argument works we'll see how seriously he takes it um but uh I think there's all sorts of practical

32:30 reasons not to take solipsism too seriously and I also think that I don't really believe that you have to reach absolute certainty to know something so I can't rule I can't know with certainty that that that I am the only mind or not but I don't think that means I don't know it so um I see someone saying translucency which is something I'm more interested I mean that I would more endorse but hold on I'm trying to say say something about solipsism so uh about free will you know Free Will is one of those

33:04 things I probably started out as a really radical libertarian and Free Will and have kind of gradually been beaten down over the years and thinking okay compatibilism or something like it is probably true although I don't like to have to admit that um but uh if you think that compatible ism is true then sism and compatible ism go hand in hand it's fine uh on the other hand I don't know why it would um I don't know why uh it would it Go wouldn't work with libertarian free will

33:39 either if you thought that that was a thing so I think that you know questions about Free Will are kind of orthogonal to questions about Sol systm but I don't know maybe you had something in mind that would put them at odds with each other or something like that um my own view is to think that solipsism is is false even though I can't prove that it's false um but uh you know let's see okay a limit of yeah so that's the one some someone saying uh K Mike is saying they would induce a li endorse a limited

34:13 materialism I guess out of all the views when I said I was kind of hedge my bets I guess the one view I wouldn't hedge my bets on is the limit of materialism I mean I was talking with Dave chers about this one time and he said that he you know thinks that there's a small chance that illusionism could be true or limited materialism could be true and I was kind of Blown Away by that because yeah I don't really see how it could be true to be honest with you I don't really see how there could be someone in the same situation as me right

34:46 now physically just like me who thought they were conscious and weren't or who had this other kind of Consciousness that these guys are talking about I I really just don't I can't I can't make sense of it um what I can do is make sense of a closely related claim which is that our pretheoretical notion of Consciousness is

35:18 radically different than Consciousness actually is that would be okay that's what I've called weak illusionism and other people call that too I think Dave coined that name that term but anyway I think weak illusionism is is uh almost everyone has to accept it I don't know of any views out there that wouldn't accept that some aspect of Consciousness doesn't present the world as it really is there some some part of our epistemic relation to it isn't off in a way so um but uh to to to really think that I'm

35:56 not conscious right now to really take that seriously I don't really know how to do it I don't um to believe that I have phenomenal Consciousness but not to really have it uh I sort of know how to say the words and conceptually think of a creature who's in a situation like that but I can't think of it happening to me I just don't like right now like and this is what the people who endorse that of illusionism that's what they say is that if you think that you know

36:30 zombies are conceivable or and I think they're epistemically conceivable if you think that you know that then you don't know you aren't one right now it's I just don't understand I can't understand that so out of all the positions that there are I would assign the very least possibility to to illusionism and almost zero it's close to zero let's say arbitrarily close to zero for illusion ISM and eliminativism when it comes to the propositional attitudes like beliefs and stuff even there I was just like I'm kind of with f

37:04 Jerry foder on this he said if if poke psychology were wrong it would just be the greatest disaster in the history of mankind or science of the mind um what would that even mean for there not to be beliefs uh really I mean I don't even know I I know a closely related claim that in the there are not going to be things like sentence like structures that we would so so that's different but that's not to say that at the psychological level excuse me should have brought some

37:39 water that's not to say that at the psychological level there wouldn't be such things as beliefs or these other F psychological attitudes so let's see now uh phenomenal translucency being inconsistency with identity Theory not just transparency as in Mary would still learn still learn new information in addition to the structural Dynamic info um so I believe Mary would learn something

38:10 new 100% agree that she would learn something new when she sees red uh she would learn what it's like for her to see red and what it's like to see red um because she didn't know that before she would know about the brain state but to use the house analogy it's a bit like knowing about the exterior of the house without going inside so you may be able to say some things about it in fact think she would be able to say some things about it like that it's structurally relationally similar to Pink and less similar to green and so forth um she might be able to map out the human color quality space because

38:44 she would have access to all that third person information from other persons she would know all the science as it were so she would know that red is more similar to Pink than it is green and all those kinds of things um I even think that after she sees red for the first time she'll be able to deduce uh that red is a brain state or vice versa that brain state is red um and so these mix match ones where she sees a color but doesn't know which one it is the reason I think that is because like think about the water in H2O case

39:16 like imagine someone who didn't have the concept of water well they're not going to get the concept of Water by looking at physics um they need the concept once they acquire the concept then they're in a position to deduce that water as H2O if you think that can be done which I on certain days do think can be done on other days I get skeptical so I do go back and forth um but I do think that's it's not ridiculous to believe that you could deduce that water's H2O if you were an ideal agent who had all the relevant information some some

39:50 constrained set of Base information how how small of a constrained set we could debate about but I think you know okay um I'm kind of convinced by the cmosc arguments with this idea that you could you could build something which would do this anyway so um what so what's going to happen when she married looks at the tomato or whatever is she's going to acquire A New Concept she's going to first of all have the experience um she going to see red then

40:24 she's going to get the concept oh that's what it's like to see red concept the phenomenal concept the direct phenomenal concept the one that you can only have when you're seeing red or otherwise have red in your mind I'm a fantasic I think so I can't visualize things like when someone says imagine a tomato I just I don't know what I do but I don't see a tomato um so uh I'm usually looking at something red when I'm talking about this stuff but if you're picturing in your mind that's great for you uh with sounds I'm a bit better so I can

40:57 picture sounds mentally but uh not not visual stuff okay good so um you acquire a concept the one that you can have only when you're having the kind of experience that's relevant so you're looking at the red thing or visualizing red and you're like that's what it's like to see red and look there it is so um that concept I claim can't to be had except by having the experience you can't get it in another way uh so on my

41:33 view I think yeah Mary's going to acquire this concept that she didn't have before and couldn't have got before because you have to have the experience to acquire the concept once the concept is acquired that together with her perfect physical knowledge allows her to make these deductions the reason she couldn't do it inside the room according to me is because she didn't have the concept not because Consciousness isn't physical it's just that she doesn't have the uh like how can she to do something that she doesn't have the right concept for

42:05 again think about water and H2O if she doesn't have the concept of water she's not going to be deducing anything about water being H2O you need to First be um now you can get the concept of water without having to be exposed to water you can Define it as de clear drinkable stuff that falls from disguise Etc and know pretty much all there is to know about it as far as that goes SOC consciousness is different like that um but that doesn't have anything to do with physicalism or non- physicalism that has to do with something called concept empiricism and concept empiricism is the claim that some

42:38 Concepts have to be acquired from experience um probably the radicalist views that all of them do but uh the the the more restricted claim is just that some of them do uh so I I think that if any of them are candidates for being acquired from experience trans it'ss these kind of phenomenal Concepts so so that would be my way of thinking about the um the Mary case oh so Sergey all right thank you

43:14 Sergey for saying that I know I I don't know how to pronounce these things so that's very useful so you were thinking in that way if we use definition that there is just one mine let's say mine why can't I control a reality um around me yeah um so because if if it's produced all in the mind then you should be able to control it I don't know so you dreams are a good way to think about this I would say sge if I hopefully I'm pronouncing s right uh in the dream I often can't control

43:50 what's going on I've had like relative I've had brief lucid dreams um and I usually wake myself up when I realize that I'm lucid dreaming which is my problem I'm like yeah I did it damn woke up uh but it's something you can practice by the way it's interesting but I've actually talked to someone who said that they could lucid dream and couldn't control the things in their lucid dream um I had a discussion with this guy Evan Thompson the philosopher who who who's speaking about this anyway okay so and sometimes in

44:24 lucid dreaming people say they can control the things in their dream but often times in a dream you can't control the stuff uh that that is going on or you can control it only limitedly so even things that you can normally control like you know um I often have this dream I'm running away from something and I'm trying to run as fast as I can uh but but I'm slow or I I think I Know I Can Fly And I'm trying to jump into the air and fly but I I'm only jumping kind of really high and floating but not like super flying off and I'm like why can't I just fly and if you think about those kinds of things I mean I'm I'm in a dream right so clearly if

44:57 there's ever a case where uh everything is made by my mind it would be there um and yet I don't control everything um now why well I don't know because sub subconscious things are in control of it and conscious mind blah so I mean I think that would be sort of the answer um uh to your question um it's because there's other things going on whether that means you have free will uh well I don't know so suppose if Sol say were false you can't I mean this is something I often say about the Free Will debate but I don't really know what counts

45:30 because like for instance I can't jump to the Moon um and people laugh at me but this is something that as a kid I was mad that I was not able to do I was like this is sort of unfair like I would really like to be able to jump to the Moon I heard you could go up there people flew there um so why can't I jump that high it's just unfair of of physical reality that it doesn't allow me to jump as high as I want to so you know that's childish thinking obviously um but I this is actual thoughts that I had as a kid I was like I want to jump

46:03 to the moon what the what's going on around here um okay so I'm not able to do that no matter how hard I work no matter how exercise diet Training Positive Thinking um maybe I invented jetpack and all that stff but I mean just using my body there's no way I'm going to be able to launch myself physically and jump high enough to go to the Moon so okay does that mean I'm not free in any important sense um I mean the young me felt that I was an infringement on my freedom but everybody I've ever mentioned this to thinks that

46:37 I'm being silly when I mentioned this to people as a kid they laughed at me and even now when I tell this story people still laugh say what are you talking about of course you can't jump to the moon say I know but why you infringing on my freedom well most people don't feel like that is an infringement on their freedom they feel like you know they're perfectly free it's just that reality doesn't allow you to do certain things because that's just how reality works so uh now if all of reality is made by your own mind then does that mean that in some

47:11 sense uh that uh that there's something in your mind that's out of your control and that you're don't free the control or something like that well there I think you're going to start talking about what counts as you um so maybe they're uh maybe those those things are you and maybe you are freely controlling them in some sense so even in my dream scenario when I wasn't when I was trying to fly and only jumping kind of high maybe my a part of my mind was in control of that and um I was trying to work out something or there was I was I was freely doing it so I don't know I think

47:44 these issues are are Complicated by I see why you asking that question now it's interesting um yeah let's see uh doesn't this entail that the scentifier again Concepts cut thinner than properties Concepts cut thinner than there's more Concepts in properties yes um as there's one property rejecting property dualism with other empirical identities like

48:15 Mar has multiple properties I'm not sure I'm I'm following um following this uh so is this like the the the Jack Black objection um that there's got to be that that there's got to be two properties there because we identify the um the phenomenal

48:51 aspect uh by by something by the what is liken this bit that seems like maybe a property of the state um but in this case there's only one property uh yeah well what I'm not sure which property um or how Venus has one property so Venus has well the property of being seen in the morning um and the property of being seen in the

49:25 evening and in that respect so does the brain State the property of having an external obser observable profile and one that's presented to the inside so to speak um but I do feel the pull of a property duelist kind of push here with which is that if you really lean on this there's two

49:58 things bit then it sounds like there's well two things but there's only one thing um there's only one thing which can be um viewed from different angles so to speak uh but that doesn't make the thing so viewed two things it means that there are two views on it so um and even there you have to be careful because when you start talking about the views it can s like well that thing itself is the it's phenomenal it's kind of maybe a phenomenal awareness or

50:30 something like that uh yeah I mean this stuff is interesting so I'm glad that you're pressing on this stuff let's see my view on the afterlife is it studied in the field of philosophy uh well I don't yeah I think mostly in philosophy religion maybe but even in philosophy of technology and simulation Theory people would talk about something like this maybe but

51:01 uh um my own view is like as far as things are considered now I'm very skeptical that there is such a thing as afterlife I don't think that there's any good reason to believe that there is a non-physical aspect of reality or that there is such a thing as a soul or anything that survives bodily death um and I haven't really been convinced by out of body experiences near death experiences um afal projection I mean I've talked to various people who say things like this and I'm willing to be

51:34 convinced because I do like empirical reasoning um and if there were this kind of evidence that would be like pretty good it be conclusively interesting um but I just don't think it's very good I don't think the case is shut I don't dismiss it I don't think we know so I'm certainly open to there being something um More Than Physical reality but I don't really think that uh we have much reason to believe it and my current considered view is that we have more reason to think that we live in a simulation than

52:08 there is to think that there's an all- knowing all powerful morally perfect God so if there's anything like an afterlife then it would have to involve uh simulating various worlds so I do think that if Consciousness is simulatable if you can be uploaded into a computer which I think the jury is out on and I'm skeptical of but you know my skepticism is being eroded by um these empirical results that we keep keep finding um so I I think that if that were the case then you know if there's anything like

52:41 an afterlife it would be involved being uploaded into a a digital reality uh but other than that I don't think we have any reason to expect that there is one naturally occurring um although you know various views about the mind have certain certain uh indic implication that but I don't think it has anything to do like I for example I don't believe that you have to be a dualist to think there's an afterlife I think you could be it's perfectly fine for there to be a physical afterlife you could be a physicalist and still be an afterlife uh you know lock was very the philosopher John Lock was very worried

53:13 about this stuff he he wrote his whole stuff on personal identity was originated from his trying to make sense of how he could be a Christian and believe that there was only physical stuff um so you know L was pretty sensible in this way he said look if God's all powerful he could super add Consciousness to physical mat material just make it a physical property um and if that were true then what would it mean for me to be bought you know to have an afterlife well it would be somehow bodily resurrection and in fact some religious texts talk about bodily resurrection and they claim that the

53:46 body is important um an important part of the of the Resurrection so uh could an all powerful all- knowing morly perfect being make there like after this physical body dies could it be reproduced in some other plane of existence yeah I don't see why a perfectly all powerful all- knowing being couldn't do something like that um maybe that's what the Multiverse is guys so who knows uh I I don't know that there's very much written per se about

54:18 the afterlife as it occurs in religions but I think people have written about this other stuff I've been talking about so yeah I think did that answer that question I'm not sure uh let's see what would a scientific breakthrough that could make hypothesis about the hard problem of Consciousness testable um who is this bador PG okay uh cool well I don't know

54:52 because the hard problem is supposed to be exactly the result of some properties that Consciousness presents which make it not testable so the traditional heart problem I mean people talk about zombies and married but you don't need that stuff to talk about the heart problem as chers originally presented it so the the basic problem is this science explains structure and function um explanations from The Sciences talk about what something is

55:24 made out of its structure and what it does what its function is uh but Consciousness can't be explained by structure and function that's the second premise of chalmers's argument not I'm not saying that as trus the conclusion of that is that Consciousness can't be explained by natural science um so the second premise is the one that does all the work or a lot of people might think and it simply says that Consciousness is not explainable by structure and function

55:57 um that's on the basis of introspection it just doesn't seem like Consciousness has any relation to structure or function according to these guys so then okay so then you might just end it right there and say so you can't explain it big deal quietism yay um but then the argument continues and says well if it were physical then science could explain it so therefore not physical so you have to go through all those steps um to uh to get to the conclusion uh that Consciousness is not physical

56:31 but my point is that the second premise of this argument that namely that Consciousness doesn't have anything to do with structure or function um that being true rules out any way to test it basically um and you can kind of see that with the zombie stuff this is what people always harp on so if the zombies are conceivable then that means that you could have physical duplicates of me like literally just like saying stuff like this um that don't have any Consciousness and um any phenomenal

57:07 Consciousness and that's like okay so then no scientific thing could ever test that and that's why people like Philip um say well SC materialism and and idealism and pism are all empirically On a par which I sort of tend to agree with on some days other days I wonder about this but some days I tend to agree so uh now so I don't think anything's going to make it a testable hypothesis if you instead mean by the hard problem not

57:42 this um Consciousness has nothing to do with function or structure because if you're a physicalist that has to be false um maybe it can't be explained by structure and function but if physicalism is true it has to be some part of structure and function so uh well oh right what was I saying right I lost I was thinking about something else guys

58:15 sorry um right so if if it is something physical if it turns out that way then it's got to be something that is in structure and function whether it's can be explained by that you might think that's not necessary and then you get your type B physicalist and you get your type a physicalist um dispute right there but uh that that's not going to make the hard problem itself testable because it's set up in a way to be to sort of make it not testable if on the other hand what you mean is by uh making the hard problem testable if what you mean is how could

58:49 we ever provide like knockdown definitive evidence for any theory of consciousness and answering the question why is this particular physical configuration an experience of X as opposed to y or nothing at all um well then that I think you maybe you could make some progress on uh but uh you know it's going to require a theory of Consciousness becoming accepted so for example if you like higher order theories of Consciousness like some people do I don't know there's no

59:21 accounting for Taste um then well why is why is this physical configuration in a state of seeing red as opposed to any other well because it's representing itself as seeing red so there's an answer to that um now why is representing yourself as seeing red the nature of Consciousness well I don't know there you would have a Divergence so um my own tendency is to think well identity theories tend to don't require explanation so and on the other hand if they do then you can deduce it it from

59:55 the fact that uh maybe something like Consciousness requires a kind of inner awareness so yeah um I think that this is why people talk about disolving the heart problem instead of uh solving it um it might have to be a change in the concept that we use I think this is what if you if I were charitable and I wanted to interpret illusionism in a charitable way people like Keith Frankish and Daniel Dennett um what I think that they are trying to do

1:00:28 is to do what we in the business called conceptual engineering where you try to take a concept and to take it and change the way that it's used and thought of and what its content is so that they're trying to take the concept of Consciousness and change it so that it's not something that's first personal in some essential way um and they're being resistance obviously because that's very difficult and strange to do uh okay so so I don't really think that um there's going to be a breakthrough in this way that's going to that's going to get rid

1:01:01 of the hard problem I I think that like with all other scientific problems there's going to be just a lot of data and that the resistance is going to kind of fade away I mean even with water and H2O you know we tell the story about there being some definitive experiment where water was where they split it into hydrogen and oxygen but people resisted that experiment um people came with all sorts of other interpretations of it before it was accepted it was kind of just because you know more interesting questions were arising from thinking that they were separate um which is in the moves that I tend to be in where there just aren't explanations for

1:01:34 identities there they're they're posited um in order to make other kinds of explanations they aren't uh the identities themselves are posited in order to make other explanations they aren't um the result of some other explanations so the water and H2O had to be was something that was put forth as a theoretical posit to explain these other things and it turns out you can explain a lot with it um anyway okay

1:02:09 so I'm not sure if that answers your question but uh okay this is fun guys so let's see the two appearances back to shant to fire Morning Star and evening star in themselves are non-identical appearances they just have a third and causing the appearances um uh they non-identical appearances I'm not sure what to say let

1:02:46 me think about that because I see I'm getting distracted by your other question right underneath this um okay so what do I think of the letter on I it well you know I just talked I had a guy on a couple weeks ago I talked to Filipe D brigard he was one of the signers uh you know I know most of those people I know a lot of them um and I was asked to sign that letter but I said no really what I said was I want to add some stuff to it before I sign it it has to be changed and they said no it's already written you can just sign it and I was like n um but uh yeah I don't know

1:03:21 I have mixed feelings because I think that the word pseudo science is an inflammatory word that that's used as kind of an insult it's like a fighting word I would classify it as a fighting word if the person is alive and you say that they are you know their view is pseudoscientific then they're going to want to fight you uh whether academically or physically depends on the person so you know um to me I think if you're going to use that word then you have to have some very very strong not just reason to but

1:03:56 def defense of that the reasoning that you have to actually lay out very carefully what the case is and not just throw the word out with some half asked case um and I thought that the letter was very half fast in that way so that they did not even say what pseudo science was they didn't say why very clearly they thought IIT was pseudo science and it was just a a big mess in my opinion so so I'm glad I didn't sign it um but so the the the as I understand the point that I would

1:04:31 agree with from that letter which wasn't made very clearly in the letter but uh if you talk to any of them I think that what they have in mind is the following thing uh so we have a theory and the theory is being claimed to be empirically supported but when you look for the actual empirical support this is not there and it might be even worse than that it might be that the things that they're claiming support to Theory really are things that are uh auxiliary

1:05:05 or ancillary to the main Theory and that many other theories would agree with so just to take the most obvious example if you claim that the visual cortex is importantly involved in visual Consciousness then many people are going to agree with you because obviously the visual cortex is an important part of the story it's visual cortex so you're not unique in predicting that to be the um the area so if you go around saying my my theory made a prediction and it's been confirmed and you find out that

1:05:38 that prediction was that the visual cortex should be like active when people are seeing things um then you would think to yourself gee that sounds like a dishonest maybe almost dishonest underhanded way of of promoting the theory saying that there's empirical support for it um and then the empirical support is this like you know it's not false the theory does kind of say that maybe this would be true but so do like all other theories maybe not everyone but most of them um so that was the position that people were saying was the case after

1:06:13 this uh adversarial collaboration which I'm involved in two adversarial collaborations when uh in the not with the global workspace and IIT but with higher order theories um One versus first order theories that's run by David shers and N block and one which is just amongst higher order theories but it's all in the same group um uh run by different people but funded by the same group so anyway uh the the the main beef As I understood it was that in

1:06:49 this adversarial collaboration the IIT people claimed that their Theory made some prediction which was very generic and was maybe partially verified or something like that but wasn't really one of the core claims of IIT one of their didn't test one of their axioms or one of their core IIT um mathematical constructs or or an implication of it so in that sense then if you go around saying this proves my theories on the right track and it doesn't then I think you have some

1:07:22 reason to start using the the p word the pseudoscience word uh but that requires a lot of explanation in work and doesn't have anything to do with pan psychism or any of this other stuff um it had to do with whether or not the theory is as its supporters say that it is or whether they are promoting it in a way which oversells what the theory can do um and this is actually important because

1:07:56 it sucks up money from funding uh and also the popular imagination so you know when people read about IAT in the popular press and they say oh gee this theory is like leading scientific theory and it's been confirmed there's evidence for it they're getting the wrong picture according to the signers of the letter um they're getting the wrong picture you know I've I've I've tried to get Defenders of IIT to come and talk to me um so far I did a long time ago I I have M of masumi aumi on a long time ago and he's one of the writers of IIT 3 I think

1:08:28 it was um 3.0 but uh if anyone's out there wants to come on I happy to discuss this stuff so that's my view um I I wish that they would write something that was more thoroughly argued and researched uh because I when I read the letter I was like whoa dude you guys are going to publish this is fighting words and you don't really have a strong case here um they disagree they're all adults they can make their own decisions so um I didn't think it was wise to sign it as written now of course in their defense what they

1:09:01 said was this just a letter to the editor it's not supposed to make the whole case we only have 500 Words so we're really constrained um which I understand is all true and therefore maybe an argument that you shouldn't have made the case in a letter um I also wasn't really at this asssit thing and didn't know too much about this IIT versus global workspace the thing so I I really didn't really feel like I had a good rip on it you know but we did write a previous letter to the um NIH the National Institute of Health or whatever uh saying be careful with IIT

1:09:37 because um it's not clear that I can't be empirically tested uh and that's not bad you know if a theory can't be empirically tested then great but if you're saying not only that it can be but that it has been uh well then I think we are owed more careful accounting so that's sort of what I think about the uh thing interesting times let's see what do I think of inferring the ontological Gap from The epistemic Gap very via the

1:10:11 explanatory Gap that if the physical doesn't explain the mental the mental is not yeah I think that's where um that's sort of what I was I don't know when that was when when you wrote that but uh um uh wait I'm sorry I got distracted reading few things that are coming in um yeah so I'm very skeptical of that move

1:10:44 um I I feel the pull of it obviously like I was saying at the beginning of this stream I think um which I geez I didn't realize I've been rambling on for so long but this is I'm I'm glad you guys are asking these questions and I do enjoy having these conversations so um I'm getting text uh I'm very skeptical of these Gap jumping inferences and I feel the pull of them as I said I was probably um in my youth a some kind of duelist um when I read dickart I thought

1:11:19 it was just completely obvious that uh that AR that the argument was successful that imagine conceiving of the mind without the body was just like yeah I thought was like the clearest case I'd ever read of just like open and shut just had to be the true so I do feel the pool of those kind of intuitions but I also just wonder why it is that we take ourselves so seriously um in the sense that I wonder why we think of that those things mean anything to like why why does it why should it be intelligible to

1:11:57 us the way things are I I just don't understand why people so adamantly cling to this so it's you know had to do with a principal sufficient reason there's a whole big empiricism versus rationalism in the background debate obviously here but I find that whole Camp to be so of which I'm sort of half in by the way uh but I just find it to be B that's bizarre that that we would be able to tell simply because of thinking about it something fundamental about reality like this that Consciousness is physical or

1:12:30 not or it just seems to me so wildly counterintuitive and at odge with everything we've discovered that I don't know huis doesn't seem strong enough a word to me to be honest the people just think it's good like it's got to be this way like there's just a gap how could it be this way how could it be physical if we can't understand it I just think I don't know maybe it just is that way and we can't understand it so what would be so bad about not understanding

1:13:05 why it is that way and people really take this seriously I mean when I was on Twitter before I quit it people were yelling at me all over the place saying that this was like the stupidest idea they'd ever heard um and that was cop out of giving up and I just don't I just can't I mean I can because on certain days I feel very strongly that that yes I am as a rational agent it just has to be like that like how else like I see connection that's there it's not there a to B to inference the like I get I get all that stuff but haven't we learned over and over that we just you know been

1:13:39 wrong like just paril apostate well yeah no thousand years how long guys did you work on that and until you ended up discovering a whole new branch of geometry rather than proving the thing that you thought you were going to prove so it's not like I'm against a priori arguments it's just that if you want to start talking a prior arguments I'll start talking about the shamie argument though if you really think zombies are that um fascinating then talk about shambes physicalism so there is a preater physical has

1:14:17 Consciousness so dualism is false therefore QED rationalism rules um so I don't know I I don't take those Gap arguments very seriously I I think that to me this is why I wrote this paper um that I have called deprioritizing the op prior argument so I wasn't so much so deprioritizing comes from the police literature where they didn't legalize marijuana at first they decriminalized it or deprioritized it um where to deprioritize is to say yeah yeah it's

1:14:50 still illegal but we're just not going to like go putting effort into chasing people down so okay so I think the op priority arguments are interesting and if you knew everything then yeah you can make all sorts of APR inferences fantastic but uh you know so what how does that help us now so my official The deprioritizing View that I have is that yes when the everything is in we'll be able to a prior know which is which but by then it will be too late because we'll have done all the empirical work so

1:15:24 um that the real moving forward of the debate is going to be empirical and the analogy that I think works is with water and H2O so um we discovered empirically that water was H2O but now we know AR priori that water is H2O um we can deduce it AR priori uh because we acquired the concept empirically um but now if you sort of just think about the conditional if the world is like this and this and this

1:15:56 then water is H2O and the antecedent of that has the description of this world we live in then it's a prior knowable that if the world is this way then water is H2O what's empirically learnable is that the world is this way but that just has to do with the choir and the concept so I I do think that um the explanatory gaps will go away or they could go away I'm also open to them not going away but I think it's possible that they will go away in the fullness of time but that we shouldn't worry about it too much now because the what we need is a lot more empirical data

1:16:31 to you know refine our Concepts to get all this other stuff right um so uh that's what I would say about that so so to me they more reveal your own personal like someone that that says you know zombies really show that physicalism is false or alternatively shomi show that dualism is false people who say these things they're saying something about themselves they're saying I find it very intuitive that this is the case it seems to me that zombies are possible therefore it seems

1:17:06 to me that physicalism is false and then they're saying all true things so as long as you say it seems to me in front of everything then the argument works it's it can it does give you the reason why it seems to you that uh physicalism is false doesn't work for me um cool all right so I am gonna have to probably be going at some point um

1:17:39 when when the time is right uh oh my gosh I'm typing something and thinking different things and it's okay so I do have a bit more time though and let see who else is asking questions do did you have any conclusive thoughts

1:18:15 on how your extensive discussion with t jump went on the whole rule following Paradox normative of logic what is the best response to the Paradox oh T jump um yeah conclusive thoughts you mean thoughts in conclusion um uh yeah so I I guess I hadn't really thought too much about it I I think um that uh T jump is interesting has some interesting thoughts but also kind of

1:18:48 one trick pony in a certain manner of speaking um and the trick has limited interest so you know there's that but uh um I don't really think that he fully understands the rule following argument and I got a lot of flak for for that as well I put that video on my channel as well you know I wasn't trying to hide it but people are accusing me of being a and waste of time and people get phds out to idiots look at this guy okay so to me the rule following argument is one of the you know it's very important argument from from kryy um I think

1:19:24 that although T jump doesn't know it he has the the solution that he has in mind is the normal solution um that everyone else adopts which is that uh it's the I mean it's the one that kryp kit argued for in in the book that he wrote on this which is that it's the community so no one denies that we make these sorts of inferences the question is whether we're justified in doing it and what justifies it so clearly we we um take ourselves to be following rules uh the question is whether it's the rule

1:19:58 that justifies what we're doing um and kpk's argument tries to show that it's not the rule that justifies what we're doing it's the it's the community it's it's the it's that people have done it this way um that justifies what we're doing um so when I think that you know 7 plus 5 is 12 or or whatever the case may be the reason why I I'm not doing Quest and I'm doing Plus or whatever the case is um is on this view is simply because I live amongst a group of people that that do

1:20:31 addition that do plus um and that's what I was taught I was taught addition and because the people here do addition um so there's a they there's a community of people that do a certain thing um and I was brought up in that community and so I do that thing uh but it's it's not the the formal rules that that guide my behavior um and I I don't really think there is as far as I can tell a very any good answer to this to this Paradox that doesn't kind of admits the point that kky wanted to make um which

1:21:06 is that the rule doesn't really justify what you're doing um and it's not really guiding our Behavior Uh so um the best response to the Paradox is probably to learn the lesson from what I was talking about before which is to to recognize that everywhere we go we're going to when we try to figure this stuff out we meet these sorts of problems and so you know uh that's just how it works um now could I have thought of a better

1:21:44 way to explain it to T jump I think so I think I was getting very annoyed and irritated by the end of that discussion even though we had agreed beforehand that we would be serial and he was like come at me he only wants clicks by the way that's that's what he cares about he wants people to view his channel so he can get money and so he doesn't care if it's a flame war or a dumpster fire um that gets him more views actually so you know he he's happy to to to play along but uh I feel like I was getting actually truly irritated by the end of that discussion and I realized afterwards I hadn't eaten anything I was kind of annoyed that he seemed very stubbornly obstinate in his like refusal

1:22:19 to understand even if you think you haven't you anyway so that's my considered view is that I don't think there's a good answer I kind of am you know I don't don't really think we have a lot of solutions I think we have a lot of problems a lot of puzzles um okay let's see one thing I thought about Consciousness the other day has there been reports of people becoming Chum or zombie after brain damage like I sometimes lose

1:22:52 conscious ious and no one notices um I don't think so I mean there's people that lose time um but true Charmers zombies like to really be a Cher's zombie you have to not notice that you are a zombie if you can't because if you did then you would be functionally distinct so it has to be something that you can't tell is

1:23:23 happening to you if it did happen to you this is part of his argument for why he thinks you can be uploaded to the computer to a to um a digital environment that has to do with his dancing and fading qualia so if you imagine your neurons being replaced with computer silicone chips one by one and you get to the crucial one that makes it Go To None it's either you know some particular neuron or you gradually ramp down till you get to that one and you put a switch there and you just flick that that switch so that's on and off and you imagine your experience is

1:23:57 blinking in and out of existence like right in front of your face like the color red like right now I have an email in my account there's a red number 500 billion over there so it's right there um now imagine that's blinking in blink there's not there's not there's not okay so if that's happening me to me right now that would be very bizarre uh if there's one thing we feel confident about is that our conscious experience when it's happening to us is we sort of know what's going on um so if you thought you didn't have Consciousness when you replac this

1:24:29 silicon chip in my head then you would be committed on hit Cher's view to saying that you don't know that this isn't happening to you you could be having it happen right now it would be all the same um so so so there's that um and in fact chers thinks you know this is going to be practically speaking why a lot of people get converted to his view about digital Consciousness for example if your grandmother goes to the hospital you know or take my son he's eight now by the time he's 25 I'll probably be

1:25:03 deaf I've been playing music my whole life my ears are shot so you know um in in 20 years I I probably won't be able to hear if I'm alive won't be able to hear anything uh so what if I go to the surgery Department the hospital and they implant into my head an artificial not a hearing device but a new set of neurons that can process this information and then I hear my son's voice and I start crying go I haven't heard your voice in 20 years then what's he going to say well he's going to say you're not

1:25:37 hearing anything dad that's a robot in your head or is he gonna say oh wow you can hear things just fine with this digital implant so chmer thinks that's going to change people's minds when grandmas and so forth start coming home with these digital implants my own view is is that I don't know whether that's any different than wearing glasses so how do you know that the phenomenal experience isn't generated by some part of the biological brain us left so anyway um as far as the chers zombies kind of cases go yeah it would be really hard to notice if they really had their Consciousness disappear in this way um

1:26:11 and chers thinks that it's actually like a law of physics or something that this won't happen now in a more less mundane sense could you ever have like uh you know um a period of time where you just had your Consciousness disappear during the course of a day uh there was a guy who wrote a paper on this called Michael Palin and he called them part-time zombies and he tried to argue uh for something on the basis of these part-time zombies that became zombies between noon and two o'clock on Tuesdays or something uh so um but uh yeah so I don't really as far as we know

1:26:46 what we have are things where um like I said people lose time um and they still go around doing things people black out they don't remember things other people say that they did but uh nothing like this that as far as I know although I could be wrong and I don't know a lot of this stuff um okay so let's see uh do you think explanatory gaps are everywhere in nature or is the physical phenomenal Gap unable I'm temped towards saying it'd be unique case of Moran connection BR grounding yeah so I people like Ned

1:27:19 block do think that these gaps are everywhere so Ned doesn't think you can deduce that water's H2O so for for people like him he he thinks you can't even rule out that there's ghost water kind of non-physical water correlated with H2O um so you know he takes a very strong strong View and sometimes rarely during the course of a month you know if I'm if it's a blood moon during Zelda then I am tempted to accept that view uh but um generally speaking I don't I I tend to be more attracted to the view that Consciousness

1:27:55 will be unique in this way um but not even really soon super new new H super unique because I do think that the Gap will go away once we know enough um so I don't think that if we ever reached the end of inquiry and knew everything that we could physically know like all this stuff about physical reality then I think there would be no gaps um I think we would know that Consciousness was physical or not uh because we'd be able to deduce or not

1:28:28 that um now you could still I think hold out maybe but I would be very skeptical at that point I don't know so yeah I'm sort of inclined to think towards the view that there are no gaps um but then again I start to think maybe that's that hubber thing again like why what would be so wrong if even at the end of inquiry like there were no gaps or even if there were no end of inquiry such that science just always had new questions to answer um so to me

1:29:02 uh yeah that's why I split my views on this I just um I just don't know what to think I find myself profoundly puzzled by this stuff and I'm more interested in mapping out the spaces and seeing what you can and can't say and then I am in sort of being right I I just don't know the thing is very hard and the more I think about it the more I get confused so um you know I watch a lot of these online debates and what I see is a lot of people overly confident about what they know and I I'm always I mean I

1:29:36 guess I used to feel that way but I don't know how you can maintain that I really don't know how you can how that over that that sense of confidence about I know what's like or even strongly believe what's true um how that survives like coming into contact with science and philosophy once once you know how many views there are how much debate there is how many people have disagreed how many things there are to disagree about it just becomes disorientating to me

1:30:09 so um like I said my strongest commitment is to the claim that uh physicalism hasn't been refuted that's usually enough to get me into an argument or six so pretty good um yeah and then about the arbitrariness of the connection or whether or not uh it's it's simply non-derivable or or brute force or grounding or something like that um I'm very open to that sort of view as I was

1:30:43 saying before yeah interesting all right these are all very good questions um I should spend more time on YouTube because I'm always I always have fun when I show up here and have these discussions okay so uh I'll probably be ending this live stream I really only came to talk about the upcoming Consciousness live and uh to make sure I could handle the chat which now I think that I can um so thanks guys for coming by and having this discussion with me I

1:31:17 appreciated all the questions and I don't really do a great job of keeping up with the comments but I usually read all the comments even the ones that I don't respond to so if you have a question or you want to say something then feel free to go ahead I'll try to to keep up with them I've been having more time to do that I've been lurking in the comments lately because of um well I'm not teaching until March so I've just been you know having more times to spend on the internets but anyway so feel free to drop me a line send me an email uh tell me what you would like to see on Consciousness live

1:31:52 or maybe more live streams or more videos generally um and until then take it easy I'll figure out how to end live streams less awkwardly later guys okay