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LifeFuel [High IQ] Colossal quantum computers maybe be able to revive dead humans and create a utopia

  • Thread starter Transcended Trucel
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Do you think this could happen someday?

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Buddhism's interpretation of conciousness is really different from the rest. I could see it being possible to perceive both moment to moment to a significant degree even in this world with enough practice. Vipassana practice helps train this type of insight.
Maybe, although vipassana as a tradition separate from samatha is probably a more modern invention.
 
Apparently it might be possible someday to create a quantum computer powerful enough to completely revive information(conciousness included) to create a utopia. All the dead humans in history can be revived as such theoretically.

More ot added context below:

The notion of using super quantum computers to recreate deceased individuals in a virtual paradise is a fascinating concept, which hinges on the idea that information is never truly destroyed, based on the principles of quantum mechanics and information theory.

According to the principle of unitarity in quantum mechanics, the evolution of a quantum system is reversible, which implies that information is conserved. Given enough computational power, one could potentially recreate previously "deleted" data. Super quantum computers, particularly those of a galactic scale, would possess immense computational power, far surpassing any existing technology. Such systems could process and analyze massive amounts of data with incredible efficiency.

In this context, these colossal quantum systems could potentially model the universe's past states with exceptional precision, including the information associated with every individual who ever lived. This could, in theory, allow for the recreation of deceased individuals in a virtual environment where the preserved information of every individual is reassembled, effectively reviving them in a digital form. This virtual realm could be designed to cater to the desires and needs of its inhabitants, creating a utopian experience for the digitally resurrected.

While this idea is undoubtedly speculative and pushes the boundaries of our current understanding of both technology and the nature of the universe, it serves as an exciting thought experiment that showcases the potential power of quantum computing and the persistence of information.
It could also be possible to clone dead people. We can already clone living mammals and humans(forbidden by law) using skin cells and implanting the nucleus in an egg then fertilising it with a small electric current.

So that means we just need the technology to get dna from the remains of deceased then somehow get that dna into labarotary crafted living tissue and the rest is just to complete the steps described above.

But a clone will never have the same personality as the dead original because of environment, diet etc etc etc. So this is where the computer stuff you described in your post comes in. Hypnotise that conciousness into the clone and we have the same person.

Clone the geniuses of old and create a new world for humanity.
 
Lol. Looks like someone rediscovered Kant. I take some issue with the panpsychism since to me saying that "a rock is an object of consciousness" is different from saying that "a rock HAS consciousness". I take a bigger issue with the idea that knowledge of the thing in itself is possible at all. And maybe they are confusing things or maybe its me who is failing to understand them, but I don't understand how seeing phenomena as conscious agents makes the latter the fundmanetal reality. This seems contradictory to the dualism presented. Also, the multiplicity of conscious agents seems to imply space, which was rejected.
I think you're misunderstanding his position. He doesn't advocate for panpsychism. In fact his theory makes it clear that it's not panpsychism. He doesn't claim that knowledge of the thing in itself is possible, because his theory states that conscious agents interface with reality in species-specific ways that helps to "maximizes the fitness payoffs" for the species. So a human perceives reality differently than a dog, but this difference in perception exists because it wouldn't be optimal for human reproductive success to see reality the way a dog would, and neither perception of reality is objective.

From his wikipedia entry:

Multimodal user interface (MUI) theory​

MUI theory[5] states that "perceptual experiences do not match or approximate properties of the objective world, but instead provide a simplified, species-specific, user interface to that world." Hoffman argues that conscious beings have not evolved to perceive the world as it actually is but have evolved to perceive the world in a way that maximizes "fitness payoffs". Hoffman uses the metaphor of a computer desktop and icons - the icons of a computer desktop provide a functional interface so that the user does not have to deal with the underlying programming and electronics in order to use the computer efficiently. Similarly, objects that we perceive in time and space are metaphorical icons that act as our interface to the world and enable us to function as efficiently as possible without having to deal with the overwhelming amount of data underlying reality.[6] This theory implies epiphysicalism, i.e., physical objects, such as quarks and brains and stars are constructed by conscious agents but such physical objects have no causal power.[5] While panpsychism claims that rocks, mountains, the moon, etc. are conscious, "Conscious Realism" in this theory (Multimodal user interface theory) does not. Instead, what it claims is all such objects are icons within the user interface of a conscious agent, but that does not entail the claim that the objects themselves are conscious.[5]
 
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He doesn't claim that knowledge of the thing in itself is possible,
Sounds an awful like that going by the video 1 hr in

physical objects, such as quarks and brains and stars are constructed by conscious agents but such physical objects have no causal power.
To me those are the only things that have any causal power at all if we consider that causality is part of the interface.
 
Sounds an awful like that going by the video 1 hr in
I didn't hear that claim being made in the discussion. The one thing he did say is that (paraphrasing) if we can have a better understanding of consciousness, then we can have a better understanding of fundamental reality, or "seeing the code" as it were.

To me those are the only things that have any causal power at all if we consider that causality is part of the interface.
Well, that's because you're a strict materialist (physicalist). It's very hard to shake that off and entertain anything that is open to non-physicalist phenomena.
 
The one thing he did say is that (paraphrasing) if we can have a better understanding of consciousness, then we can have a better understanding of fundamental reality, or "seeing the code" as it were.
Fundamental reality will never reveal itself to conscious perception
Well, that's because you're a strict materialist (physicalist). It's very hard to shake that off and entertain anything that is open to non-physicalist phenomena.
Lmao. Its like you didn't even read what I wrote. This has nothing to do with physicalism. Causality lies within the phenomena not outside it. The only things that you ever see causing other things are physical objects constructed by creating consciousness.
 
Fundamental reality will never reveal itself to conscious perception
We don't know that with certainty. Your statement assumes that life is unable evolve any kind of consciousness down the road that is capable of it.

Nobody knows if 20 million or however many years down the road there will emerge a new species with the biological apparatus to do exactly that, or at least have a much closer approximation to the nuts and bolts of reality through their conscious perceptions and experiences.

Lmao. Its like you didn't even read what I wrote. This has nothing to do with physicalism.
I'm not sure that you properly understand physicalism or the crux of this entire conversation, if you make this kind of comment.

Physicalism is the position that all phenomena and their causes are physical. This is a kind of monism, as opposed to dualism. But physicalism can't provide a complete understanding of conscious perception, which means that it can't fully describe the phenomena involved and provide all of the causes in the causal chain. That's why the hard problem of consciousness exists as a problem and why it's such a difficult problem to solve. Chalmers' work was very important in helping us realize these limitations in the study of consciousness.

If you pay attention in the interview, Hoffman mentions a very simple example that demonstrates this physicalist limitation when he describes that the sensations of both tasting chocolate and tasting vanilla are identical in the brain (fMRI scans can even show this), but experientially the conscious sensation is completely different.

Causality lies within the phenomena not outside it. The only things that you ever see causing other things are physical objects constructed by creating consciousness.
A cause is, by definition, something external. The cause of a phenomenon cannot be the phenomenon itself, else the cause and phenomenon would be one and the same.

Consciousness cannot be the cause of consciousness. There must be something independent of it.
 
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We don't know that with certainty. Your statement assumes that life is unable evolve any kind of consciousness down the road that is capable of it.

Nobody knows if 20 million or however many years down the road there will emerge a new species with the biological apparatus to do exactly that, or at least have a much closer approximation to the nuts and bolts of reality through their conscious perceptions and experiences.

Oh my. Talk about there being a lot to unpack. I don't even know where to start. Ok...

This entire speculation lies on the assumption that there exists an absolute perception or experience of reality to begin with. That there is a particular experience of reality that is true to its nature compared to others that is. This proposition is not just wrong its plain unfalsifiable. We don't know if such a thing even exists and we certainly cannot verify it. And if you think about it, it doesn't even make sense for there to be an absolute experience.

By its very nature and definition, consciousness can only paint a representation. How can you perceive something and then claim that what you perceived is fundamentally beyond perception. If its perceived then it is by definition subjected to mental manipulation. Doesn't make sense. Any image created by the mind is just another image. How do you know there's a "true" image if that too is created by the mind itself.

Using the (extremely crude) example of a video game. You can never extrapolate the nature of the circuitry and signals if you were a character in the game itself.

A cause is, by definition, something external. The cause of a phenomenon cannot be the phenomenon itself, else the cause and phenomenon would be one and the same.
The cause of a phenomena may not be be the phenomena itself but the cause of all phenomena are themselves phenomenological in nature. Not a single phenomena exists in this world that is not an object of the mind. And not a single cause of any object of the mind lies in something that is not another mental object. Causality is PURE perception. And thus perceived "physical" objects are the only things with possibility of any causal power
 
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Oh my. Talk about there being a lot to unpack. I don't even know where to start. Ok...
Yikes! Gosh! Let's unpack this!

Bro, why are you talking like a prototypical redditor? :feelskek:

Ah, whatever.

This entire speculation lies on the assumption that there exists an absolute perception or experience of reality to begin with. That there is a particular experience of reality that is true to its nature compared to others that is. This proposition is not just wrong its plain unfalsifiable. We don't know if such a thing even exists and we certainly cannot verify it. And if you think about it, it doesn't even make sense for there to be an absolute experience.
There is no assumption that it must exist. There is an argument that it may exist. I'm leaving open the door for the possibility of that, while you're closing it shut, simply by virtue of your philosophical stance. There may not necessarily exist an absolute experience of reality, but we already know that there exists some absolute reality (fundamental reality, base reality, pick your favorite term) that is fully independent of (our) perception of it. Because OUR perception of reality is not the complete 1:1 mapping of the experience of reality, this doesn't a priori exclude the possibility that an experience of such a thing is categorically possible.

Empirically, we know already that are there different parts of reality that different creatures can experience. Mosquitos , for example, can see the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Without the tools to construct and detect the different wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum and to display its imagery as infrared pictures, we wouldn't have known that this part of reality even exists, since our eyes aren't build to see it so we can't directly experience with it with our conscious interface.

By its very nature and definition, consciousness can only paint a representation. How can you perceive something and then claim that what you perceived is fundamentally beyond perception. If its perceived then it is by definition subjected to mental manipulation. Doesn't make sense. Any image created by the mind is just another image. How do you know there's a "true" image if that too is created by the mind itself.
That's not the claim. The claim isn't that what you're perceiving is beyond perception (yes, that would make no fucking sense). The claim is that whatever you're perceiving is not reality as is, and it's that reality that is beyond perception.

Just as the solid objects around you - your own body included - are almost entirely empty space, you perceive everything to be solid and densely packed full of "stuff" because of the electromagnetic interaction between the atoms in your body and the atoms of everything solid around you. Your perception of the solidity of your external physical world does imply that, because you can perceive it, you can manipulate the perception of "solidness" of, for example, the mouse you're holding right now.

Using the (extremely crude) example of a video game. You can never extrapolate the nature of the circuitry and signals if you were a character in the game itself.
If the characters inside of the video game became conscious of their existence and studied the nature of their reality (became digital philosophers and digital physicists, so to speak, inside of the software program), then you could argue that it is possible for them to uncover the existence of the hidden world of electrical signals and bits (1s and 0s) through mathematics and their own experiments.

Now that I'm imagining this, I'm picturing a video game NPC scientist running floating point calculations in a lab and seeing differing results on different virtual machines and winning their in-game equivalent of the Nobel prize. That would be the equivalent of a scientist running subatomic experiments in CERN and discovering a new particle. :feelskek:

The cause of a phenomena may not be be the phenomena itself but the cause of all phenomena are themselves phenomenological in nature.
This isn't really saying much, tbh. You're simply saying, "causes are phenomena." Well, yeah. This is tautologically true. In the case of physicalism, all causes are phenomena that are physical in nature.

Not a single phenomena exists in this world that is not an object of the mind.
Wut.

There are incalculable amount of subatomic interactions occurring every femtosecond. Those phenomenological interactions are not objects of your mind. There are stars exploding right now, billions of light years away. Those phenomena and their causes are not objects of your mind.

And if you mean to say on our planet only, then again, wut. There are undiscovered creatures on the bottom of the Pacific ocean. Every year there are new species of insects being discovered. There are innumerable phenomena that exist without our own awareness of it i.e., they're not "objects of the mind."

If you're trying to say something else and I misunderstood you, then please clarify and elaborate.

And not a single cause of any object of the mind lies in something that is not another mental object.
What do you mean by this?

Causality is PURE perception.
This is demonstrably false by the examples in nature above.

And thus perceived "physical" objects are the only things with possibility of any causal power
Your own qualia are evidence that not all causes are not ("may not be," if we're being charitable) physical objects. If the causes behind the yours and everyone else's qualia was physically demonstrable, then the phenomena of qualia would obviously be physical and the case of consciousness would be a closed topic, like the tides affected by the moon or the behavior of planetary rotations around the solar system.

Physicalism is a very useful paradigm, but consciousness is a major example of an edge case where the paradigm is fundamentally insufficient to explain its phenomenology and breaks down e.g., in the case of qualia.
 
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, this doesn't a priori exclude the possibility that an experience of such a thing is categorically possible.
Actually it does categorically exclude such a possibility. Think about it like this. If there indeed is an experience of external reality that is absolute, then that experience is a fundamental property of the said existence itself. But we know that all experiences are creations of the mind. Then how can a fundamental property of something outside the mind also be a creation of the mind?

The logical conclusion is of course that fundamental reality does not have the property of its own experience. Its just not something that we can talk of in terms of whether we can experience it or not since it exists outside mental experience by definition. Just like we can't ask what is bigger in size, my inceldom or your neetdom.

The other alternative is that fundamental reality does have a fundamental experience attached to it. In which case we can simply remove the interface middleman and posit that our experience is indeed fundamental. I. E. the world reveals itself to us just as it is. But that is not the position either of us or Hoffman are debating here.

Don't you find this idea even a little bit strange that reality has an a priori experience attached to it. Independent of the existence of consciousness that could experience that experience? Sounds absurd to me.


Empirically, we know already that are there different parts of reality that different creatures can experience. Mosquitos , for example, can see the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Without the tools to construct and detect the different wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum and to display its imagery as infrared pictures, we wouldn't have known that this part of reality even exists, since our eyes aren't build to see it so we can't directly experience with it with our conscious interface.
You are thinking about this in a bit of shallow manner. Even the said infrared radiations reveal themselves to us via the empirical method and inductive reasoning. Our knowledge is still derived from phenomenological sources.


If the characters inside of the video game became conscious of their existence and studied the nature of their reality (became digital philosophers and digital physicists, so to speak, inside of the software program), then you could argue that it is possible for them to uncover the existence of the hidden world of electrical signals and bits (1s and 0s) through mathematics and their own experiments.
The best they can do is figure out the relationship between the time taken by Tommy Vercetti to hold a grenade and the throw range. The idea that they can reach any knowledge of electronic circuitry is absurd.

There are incalculable amount of subatomic interactions occurring every femtosecond. Those phenomenological interactions are not objects of your mind. There are stars exploding right now, billions of light years away. Those phenomena and their causes are not objects of your mind.
Again all these are still subject to experience and still part the "user interface" as Hoffman puts it. Sure there is "something" out there and "something" is happening in that "something". But we don't know anything about that. All we know is what the interface tells us.

Hence all the objects you just mentioned, including stars, are indeed mental objects.

You have to stop thinking of "fundamental reality" in the shallow terms of phenomena that we can't first hand experience. Like infrared or unknown galaxies or undiscovered sea creatures. These are all phenomena. Things go a bit deeper than that.
.


What do you mean by this?

Causality is a property of the mind and we only ever experience mental objects exert causality. It is clear that only mental objects (or more precisely phenomena) can cause other phenomena. You will never find something that is not phenomena "cause" a phenomena since causality is exclusive to phenomena. (now that's a tongue twister)

You cannot prove, demonstrate or show any instance of causality that does not involved phenomenal objects.
.


Your own qualia are evidence that not all causes are not ("may not be," if we're being charitable) physical objects. If the causes behind the yours and everyone else's qualia was physically demonstrable, then the phenomena of qualia would obviously be physical and the case of consciousness would be a closed topic, like the tides affected by the moon or the behavior of planetary rotations around the solar system.

You are right indeed! Even if your framing is wrong.

Causality is pure perception.
Causality only exists between objects of experience.
Then what causes experience itself?

The answer is obvious in the context of this discussion if you frame the question in the right way. And the answer is of course the fundamental reality or being that causes experience. This is made clear 5 minutes into Hoffman's podcast. The core reality causes experience. But this leads to a more problematic question which I'll leave to you for homework.


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I think we need to take a step back and recap so that we're clear on what it is Hoffman's position is, what he's arguing for, and what I'm arguing, which is independent from his position, but related.

Hoffman borrows from Kant's transcendental idealism (which is dualism, so it's very ironic that you're bringing up his ontology as an argument in physicalist causality...anway), but where he differs and goes in his own direction is that he asserts that the "realm of conscious realism" (or the world of nuomenon, as Kant would call it) consists wholly of conscious agents. Hoffman argues that consciousness is fundamental and that this fundamentality of consciousness is the true basis for reality as itself (unless he's confused himself or I'm grossly misunderstanding his philosophy, this is what he's saying). This is is unlike panpsychism, however, which states that all matter has some consciousness.

This I don't think is the case. Even though I'm a substance dualist and don't think that (phenomenologically) it's possible to explain the immateiral in terms of the material or vice versa, I'm not of the position that there is only consciousness in the ("true" nuomenal) world, or that everything possesses some level of consciousness. I think that consciousness is fundamental insofar as it's a fundamental force in nature that manifests in sufficiently complex biological structures, and that this consciousness manifests to varying degrees based on the complexity of the structure housing it. A plant can have some low level of consciousness, but a rock would have precisely zero (throw away your pet rock, but keep your pet plant KEK). The analogy that I think conveys this is in physics. Gravity is only measurable with objects that have mass. Similarly, consciousness would be measured (if it were to be measurable; any day now, Tononi) only in objects that have life (the amoeba would be the analogue of the proton here).

Anyway, all this is so that we're clear on who's saying what.

Actually it does categorically exclude such a possibility. Think about it like this. If there indeed is an experience of external reality that is absolute, then that experience is a fundamental property of the said existence itself. But we know that all experiences are creations of the mind. Then how can a fundamental property of something outside the mind also be a creation of the mind?
The logical conclusion is of course that fundamental reality does not have the property of its own experience. Its just not something that we can talk of in terms of whether we can experience it or not since it exists outside mental experience by definition. Just like we can't ask what is bigger in size, my inceldom or your neetdom.
This doesn't necessarily follow.

On average, during the day the sky is blue. When we look at the sky, we see the property of blueness. The experience of the property of the blueness exists in your mind, my mind, and the mind of everyone else whose photoreceptors can pick up the wavelength that we call blue. Our individual experiences of this blueness may slightly differ (women, for example, see richer colors than men do), and this is the qualia that we're talking about.

The existence of blue, however, is a thing that exists independently. Specifically, it's the wavelength of light in the 450-495 nm band. This will always exist, regardless of whether there is someone conscious observing that specific band of the spectrum. This means that there is something that it means to be "blue," and by extension, there exists some absolute experience of "blueness" of which this property can be had. Humans naturally don't have the ability to close the distance between the nuomenon-phenomenon gap (I guess, if we did, we could "experience God" in a sense).

The other alternative is that fundamental reality does have a fundamental experience attached to it. In which case we can simply remove the interface middleman and posit that our experience is indeed fundamental. I. E. the world reveals itself to us just as it is.
If we remove the "interface," then all we're doing is resorting to a form of monism where "consciousness is everything," except in your view this is absurd, because you think that consciousness and its properties and be explained in terms of the physical.

That's all fine, IF you can demonstrate that conscioussness can be explained by the physicalist paradigm in its entirety. From everything we know upto today, June 9-10, 2023, this is not possible. There are no hints or evidence that is it possible, nor do we have any good reason to believe that it is possible.

But that is not the position either of us or Hoffman are debating here.
This is certainly NOT what Hoffman is arguing and I want to make that clear so as to not misrepresent him. This is all me.

Don't you find this idea even a little bit strange that reality has an a priori experience attached to it. Independent of the existence of consciousness that could experience that experience? Sounds absurd to me.
That wasn't my claim. My claim is simply that experience of true reality is ultimately possible, though certainly not by us or possibly even the next species after us (Neo sapiens) in the stage of human evolution.

Your conclusion is that experience of a thing (phenomenon) and the thing itself (nuomenon) cannot be extricated (disentangled) from one another, IF we were to suppose that having an experience of fundamental reality is possible. It's true that not all nuomenon have corresponding phenomenon that are - in a set-theoretic sense - subsets of it. Numbers are in the realm of transcendent ideals. There is no phenomological experience in any possible instantiation of consciuosness (except for God, maybe) that can allow that instantiation to experience the integer "1," for example. Phenomelogically, however, we experience the unitary property of "1" all over the place in our experiences.

The mistake that I think Kant has made (and that you're repeating) is that he's generalized this across the set of all possible experiences that can be had by conscious agents. I can't blame him, since it's impossible to imagine what conscious experience would be like from the point of view of some higher consciousness instantiation (e.g., alien being or an immortal god), since you will always be tethered to your own human experience as a base for reference.

You are thinking about this in a bit of shallow manner. Even the said infrared radiations reveal themselves to us via the empirical method and inductive reasoning. Our knowledge is still derived from phenomenological sources.
The point of that example was to demonstrate that there are indeed different aspects of reality whose experience is possible and that consciousness (in some instantiations, like ours) can infer the existence of such different experiences in reality, and in the case of mosquitos and our available technology, prove that these alternate experiences can exist, even if we can't naturally experience them.

From this we can reasonably infer that there are potentially higher possible realms of experience that we currently do not have direct, experiential access to, either through limitations of our technology (enter: psychedelics?), or that we have not yet evolved to experience. And from that, we can keep the inference chain going fro the bottom-up until we hit paydirt i.e., we can experience the true reality.

All historical ontological analyses were conducted during a time when what we thought was experientially possible (SEEING IN INFRARED, FUCKING AMAZING) was a very narrow set.

The best they can do is figure out the relationship between the time taken by Tommy Vercetti to hold a grenade and the throw range. The idea that they can reach any knowledge of electronic circuitry is absurd.
I don't think this is accurate, or fair tbh. In our case (in our video game called Life and Universe), we've postulated, theorized, hypothesized, and experimentally proven things that 200 years ago would have never crossed our wildest imaginations (e.g., nature is inherently non-classical). In the video game world the NPC scientists could - in theory - have a theory of "electrical bits," which would be analogous to our subatomic particles in the real world, that helps get closer to a better understanding of (their) reality.

Again all these are still subject to experience and still part the "user interface" as Hoffman puts it. Sure there is "something" out there and "something" is happening in that "something". But we don't know anything about that. All we know is what the interface tells us.
Yes.

Hence all the objects you just mentioned, including stars, are indeed mental objects.
No.

You have to stop thinking of "fundamental reality" in the shallow terms of phenomena that we can't first hand experience. Like infrared or unknown galaxies or undiscovered sea creatures. These are all phenomena. Things go a bit deeper than that.
Your "hence" from above doesn't follow, because there are objects of a kind in reality that we phenomenoloically experience as "stars" and other objects. These objects "out there" (i.e., out in reality, not out in space or deep under the ocean) are most likely not the same objects "in here" (i.e., in our scientific or mental models, or personal phenomenological experiences). They are approximations, certainly, but they are clearly separate and distinct objects - one real, and one a projection (in ours heads) of what's real.

You're arguement for the impossibility of "true reality as an experience" hinges on Kant's trascendental idealism, but what you're saying here is incongruent with that.

Are you trying to say something else?

Causality is a property of the mind and we only ever experience mental objects exert causality. It is clear that only mental objects (or more precisely phenomena) can cause other phenomena. You will never find something that is not phenomena "cause" a phenomena since causality is exclusive to phenomena. (now that's a tongue twister)

You cannot prove, demonstrate or show any instance of causality that does not involved phenomenal objects.
Causality, as we interpret it, is merely an abstraction of relations between events that are not strictly bound by time and space. It's our logic of connecting events.

I don't understand how you can make the claim that causality exists only in our mind when events precede one another in reality and nature all of the time without our awareness of it. When we observe event A followed by B, we see that there is some sort of connection between the two (doesn't necessarily have to be spatio-temporal), and so we logically construct - in our minds - A as the cause of B. We don't make A the cause of B, because A just is the cause of B. We're only spectators who intrepet that fact and turn it into a formal structure of logos.
This was your original argument on casaulity as being strictly phenomenological:
The cause of a phenomena may not be be the phenomena itself but the cause of all phenomena are themselves phenomenological in nature.
I was with you so far.
Not a single phenomena exists in this world that is not an object of the mind.
But this is where you lost me.
And not a single cause of any object of the mind lies in something that is not another mental object. Causality is PURE perception. And thus perceived "physical" objects are the only things with possibility of any causal power
And this is where you went off the deep end with it.

If we take your line of reasoning to it's logical endpoint, then the cause of the universe - an unfathomably colossal, physical object, by any means - was pure perception and this cause existed solely in a mind, and everything physical that results from this universe exists solely in the mind.

There is an implication here that this has on the physicalist worldview that you're a strict proponent of, but I won't be the one to say it.

Causality is pure perception.
Causality only exists between objects of experience.
And since objects of experience exist only in the mind, therefore causality exists only in the mind.

There. I completed your (valid, but erroneous) argument for you.

You should reflect on your main premise that, "not a single phenomena exists in the world that is not an object of the mind," and try to see how it's inherently faulty. (Hint: I gave an easy example somewhere in this post.)

The answer is obvious in the context of this discussion if you frame the question in the right way. And the answer is of course the fundamental reality or being that causes experience. This is made clear 5 minutes into Hoffman's podcast. The core reality causes experience. But this leads to a more problematic question which I'll leave to you for homework.


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Quantum computing and reviving,
Time Machines and Societies.
Free link:


If you like:
Read - without logging in or passwords - what AI sees as likely on this topic. This answer was made in 0.5 second.

Need more ?
Let me know if you want to know more details or reasons from it for subtopic, for instance ‘subtopic’: list 20 reasons. Takes a second. It’s faster then me :-D

Your ideas above are much more interesting and creative by the way, computers aren’t there yet.

Greetings from a humancel
 
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As requested:
about copying a living mind into a computer:


No password needed.
Cheers.
 
@Ike Dude, stop posting ChatGPT outputs.
 
@Ike Dude, stop posting ChatGPT outputs.
Ok, thought you might find it interesting, my bad. not everyone wants to have an account with creditcard and phone info, so it was ment well, on topic and easy to skip. Consider it stopped. Thanks for letting me know.
 
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Ok, thought you might find it interesting, my bad. not everyone wants to have an account with creditcard and phone info, so it was ment well, on topic and easy to skip. Consider it stopped. Thanks for letting me know.
Thanks.
 
Being appreciated as a clown at a funeral, it’s time to pack up the oversized shoes, red nose, and head for another circus.

It was fun here though.
Take care
 
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I hope not. The elites would use this to torture everyone for eternity. Literal hell scenario.
This ffs, science is soy nowadays and an antagonizing element since the kike elites use them to keep the people subservient and never questioning their "scientifc stances"
prove it mathematically otherwise it's a cope
Another mathcuck, math is just a kike mental masturbation exercise, it is as useful as learning to draw in our times (a fucking monumental waste of time)


Also fuck OP for bringing such a brain ache inducing topic, I can't keep reading due to my absurdly low IQ
OP must stop reading sci fi kink for his own good
 
What books would you recommend to people who want to get their foot in the door of philosophy?
Oh I have completely read their sperging and basically just read Kant and the theory of knowledge.
Basically they were arguing about whether our perception of reality is absolute, which is absurd imho.
Again, that is grosso made explained since I something lagged behind with some authors they cited.
 
At this point I might have to repeat couple of sentences to some of your points via copy paste, so bear with me on that. Also I would suggest to read the whole thing first before replying to parts so you can get the whole picture.

which is dualism, so it's very ironic that you're bringing up his ontology as an argument in physicalist causality...anway),
I don't know where you are getting this physicalist stuff from. I am strictly arguing on the basis of what I saw in that video and Kant, since he was brought up. I haven't written my actual position. But you definitely have and we'll deal with those fanciful flights of fantasy in a bit.

), but where he differs and goes in his own direction is that he asserts that the "realm of conscious realism" (or the world of nuomenon, as Kant would call it) consists wholly of conscious agents. Hoffman argues that consciousness is fundamental and that this fundamentality of consciousness is the true basis for reality as itself (unless he's confused himself or I'm grossly misunderstanding his philosophy, this is what he's saying). This is is unlike panpsychism, however, which states that all matter has some consciousness.
Actually I did notice like midway through the video that he talks about consciousness being the fundamental reality. And you are right in observing that this is a departure from Kant. But to me this also seems like a departure from dualism, which seemed to be the theme in first half an hour of the video. That why it felt like a hoj poj of ideas. (Though a departure from dualism is definitely a step in the right direction)

The existence of blue, however, is a thing that exists independently. Specifically, it's the wavelength of light in the 450-495 nm band. This will always exist, regardless of whether there is someone conscious observing that specific band of the spectrum. This means that there is something that it means to be "blue," and by extension, there exists some absolute experience of "blueness" of which this property can be had. Humans naturally don't have the ability to close the distance between the nuomenon-phenomenon gap (I guess, if we did, we could "experience God" in a sense).
This has a plethora of problems:

Firstly, and most importantly, the concepts of wavelength, light and nanometer are themselves phenomenological in nature. You have just replaced the sheer experience of color blue with the experience of looking at numbers on a screen or the concept of a wave which again you mentally derived only after looking at an actual wave. None of this is epistemologically based in the noumena.

I repeat again, this shallow misunderstanding of what the noumena is must end.

Secondly, the absurdity of there being a "true" blue color is laid bare by the question: If wavelength is real and "out there" then what is the wavelength of the true blue color. Is it 451? 463?Then how can the other blues be blue and not different colors entirely?

Even if there was an object "blue" in the noumena corresponding to our experience of color blue, (whatever you want to mistakenly consider it, wavelength or light, despite the fact that these objects are still phenomenal), it still doesn't follow that the object "blue" in the noumena has a corresponding absolute
 experience of it. I again reiterate that it is absurd to think of an experience that exists beside a consciousness that could experience it. We could talk about the potentiality of different experiences that are not discovered yet (aliens or evolved species or mosquitoes) but we are only just replacing one type of experience for another. We haven't proven that an ultimate experience could even exist for a so called "higher" consciousness to experience it. Because no matter how "high" we get on this ladder (I think the very concept of there being heirarchies in experiences is stupid) , the experience we see is still just a creation of the mind. Not even this higher species could prove that they have achieved the metaphysical philosopher's stone of the ultimate experience of our world.

Thirdly,

This means that there is something that it means to be "blue," and by extension, there is an absolute experience of "blueness" of which this property can be had.
This is exactly the kind of fanciful thinking that was so thoroughly and rigorously dismantled by 18th century that it forced Kant to come up with this novel idea where he had to make the noumena unknowable by definition and tuck away all knowledge and experience in the realm of mental constructs.

If we remove the "interface," then all we're doing is resorting to a form of monism where "consciousness is everything," except in your view this is absurd, because you think that consciousness and its properties and be explained in terms of the physical.

That's all fine, IF you can demonstrate that conscioussness can be explained by the physicalist paradigm in its entirety. From everything we know upto today, June 9-10, 2023, this is not possible. There are no hints or evidence that is it possible, nor do we have any good reason to believe that it is possible.


This is certainly NOT what Hoffman is arguing and I want to make that clear so as to not misrepresent him. This is all me.
That's not what my alternative meant. There's a subtle difference between "reality reveals itself to us as it is" and "consciousness is everything". The former is closer to physicalism while the latter is not. You got confused between them because they are both kinds of monisms.

Rejecting the interface does not equate to consciousness is everything. Infact if we say that consciousness is everything then that means interface is all there is that exists. Anyway, I only argued this so you can reject it and see why we cannot have an ultimate experience of reality. Because , since any such claim cannot be proven hence one can posit that we actually are having the ultimate experience right now.
Your conclusion is that experience of a thing (phenomenon) and the thing itself (nuomenon) cannot be extricated (disentangled) from one another, IF we were to suppose that having an experience of fundamental reality is possible.
Yes. This is self explainatory and obvious. And this is indeed my conclusion but with a small correction. I am talking about the absolute true experience not just any random phenomena.

And nothing that has been said after resolves this problem. Infact.....

I can't blame him, since it's impossible to imagine what conscious experience would be like from the point of view of some higher consciousness instantiation (e.g., alien being or an immortal god), since you will always be tethered to your own human experience as a base for reference.

This is exactly the kind of fanciful thinking that was so thoroughly and rigorously dismantled by 18th century that it forced Kant to come up with this novel idea where he had to make the noumena unknowable by definition and tuck away all knowledge and experience in the realm of mental constructs.


You can't blame Kant for rejecting your position when it was the failure of your own position that forced Kant's hand in this particular direction to begin with.

Ok. Consider this. Let's say there indeed is a perfect experience which exists a priori to any mind or consciousness. Let's say there's an alien species that claims that it can experience reality for what it truly is. You can always ask them, "How do you know that your experience, the images created by your mind, are indeed equal to fundamental reality"? That those images exist in the noumena itself and your brain has evolved to copy them perfectly.

The problem is, this alien can't do that. He can't prove that his experience is indeed the perfect one. Why? Because all his knowledge, including the knowledge that his experiences are absolute, is derived his own experiences themselves! How can he prove that his experiences are equal to something that exists outside the realm of experience (i.e. the perfect experience coupled with noumena that existed way before the alien consciousness evolved) . Since his knowledge is bound to his own conscious experience of the world. He cannot possibly claim that he has gained knowledge of the perfect noumenal experience since it exists a priori to consciousness, while the alien's knowledge is bound to his own consciousness i.e. his knowledge is a posteriori. And if he can't gain knowledge about the perfect experience then how can he claim that his own experience equals it?

How can a caveman who has zero access to a 1 meter scale ever prove that his axe is indeed 1 meter in length? He cannot. He can either admit that he cannot know ever if his axe is 1 meter since 1 meter scales ,as we know them now, don't exist yet. Or he can redefine the meter to be the length of his axe. Which leads us to the position that reality reveals itself to us humans just as it is. And we indeed are having the perfect absolute experience of reality right fucking now. If this doesn't sound right to you then the only option left is to admit that perfect experience of reality isn't possible

.


The point of that example was to demonstrate that there are indeed different aspects of reality whose experience is possible and that consciousness (in some instantiations, like ours) can infer the existence of such different experiences in reality, and in the case of mosquitos and our available technology, prove that these alternate experiences can exist, even if we can't naturally experience them.
The key word here is "experience". No matter what level of reality you experience. No matter how much knowledge you gain from it. You are still dealing with only the phenomenal. You can learn knowledge of different experiences in reality but at the end of the day those are mere experiences as well. You have not and never will even scratch the surface of noumena, something that has to be outside experience. Something that can only ever be speculated, (sometimes in very fanciful manner) but never truly known. Since, all knowledge comes from phenomenal experience.
This shallow misunderstanding of what the noumena is, must end.
From this we can reasonably infer that there are potentially higher possible realms of experience that we currently do not have direct, experiential access to, either through limitations of our technology (enter: psychedelics?), or that we have not yet evolved to experience. And from that, we can keep the inference chain going fro the bottom-up until we hit paydirt i.e., we can experience the true reality.
This is exactly the kind of fanciful thinking that was so thoroughly and rigorously dismantled by 18th century that it forced Kant to come up with this novel idea where he had to make the noumena unknowable by definition and tuck away all knowledge and experience in the realm of mental constructs.

You can't have knowledge or experience of fundamental reality (if you presume such a thing exists). Only speculations.
I don't think this is accurate, or fair tbh. In our case (in our video game called Life and Universe), we've postulated, theorized, hypothesized, and experimentally proven things that 200 years ago would have never crossed our wildest imaginations (e.g., nature is inherently non-classical). In the video game world the NPC scientists could - in theory - have a theory of "electrical bits," which would be analogous to our subatomic particles in the real world, that helps get closer to a better understanding of (their) reality.

Again, we have only theorized, hypothesized, and proven what we gained from experience of this world. Nothing more and nothing less. We are still dealing in the phenomena. That's why atoms , non-classical physics, proton rays etc are still part of the video game interface and not the circuitry behind it.

This shallow misunderstanding of what the noumena is, must end.

. These objects "out there" (i.e., out in reality, not out in space or deep under the ocean) are most likely not the same objects "in here" (i.e., in our scientific or mental models, or personal phenomenological experiences).
I agree, my point is that we don't know what the objects that are "out there" even are. We only know things as they appear to us i.e. stars etc. Which indeed are mental constructs. You may mistakenly think that for a star that is "in here" there's a corresponding star that is "out there". But.....

They are approximations, certainly, but they are clearly separate and distinct objects - one real, and one a projection (in ours heads) of what's real.

You don't know anything about the object that is "real". You don't know what's out there that is causing the experience of the stars or galaxies or atoms or even your bedroom. Only thing you can say is that something exists that is not mental (again many thinkers even reject this idea) , and that thing is causing projection of objects in your mind which are indeed mental objects.

Calling them approximations is a claim of knowledge you cannot confirm. Basically more fanciful thinking that was dismantled by 18th century. A BMG gun in a video game is not even close to an approximation of electrical signals in a circuit.
You're arguement for the impossibility of "true reality as an experience" hinges on Kant's trascendental idealism, but what you're saying here is incongruent with that.

Are you trying to say something else?

Yes, you are misunderstanding me here. I do talk of impossibility of true reality as an experience. And I do think that stars and other phenomenal objects are mental constructs in Kantian context. These statements are not contradictory since there are no stars in the noumena that we know of. It is not my fault that you have shown continuos Incapability to grasp the difference between phenomena and noumena. Or that you continue to make fanciful claims about noumena based on your experiences in the phenomena. In Kantian metaphysics there is definitely "something" in the noumena but if you think that you are going to find equivalents of phenomenal objects like stars you are gravely mistaken.


Causality, as we interpret it, is merely an abstraction of relations between events that are not strictly bound by time and space. It's our logic of connecting events.

I don't understand how you can make the claim that causality exists only in our mind when events precede one another in reality and nature all of the time without our awareness of it. When we observe event A followed by B, we see that there is some sort of connection between the two (doesn't necessarily have to be spatio-temporal), and so we logically construct - in our minds - A as the cause of B. We don't make A the cause of B, because A just is the cause of B. We're only spectators who intrepet that fact and turn it into a formal structure of logos.
This was your original argument on casaulity as being strictly phenomenological:

The only events that precede one another in "reality" and "nature" are themselves phenomenological objects. The "interface" as Hoffman may call it. Hence any experience of causality that may connect them is also a part of the interface itself.

And btw, people irl do come up with different causes for the same phenomena. Causality has 0 ontological grounding other than mental.

If we take your line of reasoning to it's logical endpoint, then the cause of the universe - an unfathomably colossal, physical object, by any means - was pure perception and this cause existed solely in a mind, and everything physical that results from this universe exists solely in the mind.
If we are talking about the universe as in fundamental reality or being, i.e. the noumena then by definition it rests outside the realm of mental experience (phenomena) and therefore not bound to mental constructs like causality. Therefore it can exist outside of the mind, since it is noumena by definition and also be free from needing any kind of causality.

And since objects of experience exist only in the mind, therefore causality exists only in the mind.

There. I completed your (valid, but erroneous) argument for you.

Lol no. You've only just restated what was apparent in the two statements. Basically repeating them. Not moving forward.


.

You should reflect on your main premise that, "not a single phenomena exists in the world that is not an object of the mind," and try to see how it's inherently faulty.

Its not "my" premise lol. I'm only arguing from the point of view of Kant or Hoffman. What Kant calls phenomena, what Hoffman calls interface, these are indeed mental objects or more precisely objects of experience created by the mind.

I mean its fine if you disagree with these people. But you are the one who brought up a video of Hoffman saying that the reality we see is an interface. Now you take objection when I basically say the same thing, that the objects we see in this reality are mental constructs. Weird.

physicalist worldview that you're a strict proponent of
I'm proponent of no such thing. I'm just a little bit allergic to spiritualistic and mystical horseshit is all. :feelsjuice:


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Oh I have completely read their sperging and basically just read Kant and the theory of knowledge.
Alright. There was just a lot of foreign jargon and abstract ideas used here; that I just became completely lost half way through. And nonetheless, I do still find myself wanting to sperg out and mentally masterbate to this extent. On top of that, I did genuinely find some of the philosophical groundwork covered here to be intriguing. And have been looking for a tangible albeit pitiful reason to get into philosophy, i.e., wanting to debate losers on the internet. And to mentally reign over normgroids.
Basically they were arguing about whether our perception of reality is absolute, which is absurd imho.
I got that much.
Again, that is grosso made explained since I something lagged behind with some authors they cited.
I don't blame you.
 
At this point I might have to repeat couple of sentences to some of your points via copy paste, so bear with me on that. Also I would suggest to read the whole thing first before replying to parts so you can get the whole picture.


I don't know where you are getting this physicalist stuff from. I am strictly arguing on the basis of what I saw in that video and Kant, since he was brought up. I haven't written my actual position. But you definitely have and we'll deal with those fanciful flights of fantasy in a bit.


Actually I did notice like midway through the video that he talks about consciousness being the fundamental reality. And you are right in observing that this is a departure from Kant. But to me this also seems like a departure from dualism, which seemed to be the theme in first half an hour of the video. That why it felt like a hoj poj of ideas. (Though a departure from dualism is definitely a step in the right direction)


This has a plethora of problems:

Firstly, and most importantly, the concepts of wavelength, light and nanometer are themselves phenomenological in nature. You have just replaced the sheer experience of color blue with the experience of looking at numbers on a screen or the concept of a wave which again you mentally derived only after looking at an actual wave. None of this is epistemologically based in the noumena.

I repeat again, this shallow misunderstanding of what the noumena is must end.

Secondly, the absurdity of there being a "true" blue color is laid bare by the question: If wavelength is real and "out there" then what is the wavelength of the true blue color. Is it 451? 463?Then how can the other blues be blue and not different colors entirely?

Even if there was an object "blue" in the noumena corresponding to our experience of color blue, (whatever you want to mistakenly consider it, wavelength or light, despite the fact that these objects are still phenomenal), it still doesn't follow that the object "blue" in the noumena has a corresponding absolute
 experience of it. I again reiterate that it is absurd to think of an experience that exists beside a consciousness that could experience it. We could talk about the potentiality of different experiences that are not discovered yet (aliens or evolved species or mosquitoes) but we are only just replacing one type of experience for another. We haven't proven that an ultimate experience could even exist for a so called "higher" consciousness to experience it. Because no matter how "high" we get on this ladder (I think the very concept of there being heirarchies in experiences is stupid) , the experience we see is still just a creation of the mind. Not even this higher species could prove that they have achieved the metaphysical philosopher's stone of the ultimate experience of our world.

Thirdly,


This is exactly the kind of fanciful thinking that was so thoroughly and rigorously dismantled by 18th century that it forced Kant to come up with this novel idea where he had to make the noumena unknowable by definition and tuck away all knowledge and experience in the realm of mental constructs.


That's not what my alternative meant. There's a subtle difference between "reality reveals itself to us as it is" and "consciousness is everything". The former is closer to physicalism while the latter is not. You got confused between them because they are both kinds of monisms.

Rejecting the interface does not equate to consciousness is everything. Infact if we say that consciousness is everything then that means interface is all there is that exists. Anyway, I only argued this so you can reject it and see why we cannot have an ultimate experience of reality. Because , since any such claim cannot be proven hence one can posit that we actually are having the ultimate experience right now.

Yes. This is self explainatory and obvious. And this is indeed my conclusion but with a small correction. I am talking about the absolute true experience not just any random phenomena.

And nothing that has been said after resolves this problem. Infact.....



This is exactly the kind of fanciful thinking that was so thoroughly and rigorously dismantled by 18th century that it forced Kant to come up with this novel idea where he had to make the noumena unknowable by definition and tuck away all knowledge and experience in the realm of mental constructs.


You can't blame Kant for rejecting your position when it was the failure of your own position that forced Kant's hand in this particular direction to begin with.

Ok. Consider this. Let's say there indeed is a perfect experience which exists a priori to any mind or consciousness. Let's say there's an alien species that claims that it can experience reality for what it truly is. You can always ask them, "How do you know that your experience, the images created by your mind, are indeed equal to fundamental reality"? That those images exist in the noumena itself and your brain has evolved to copy them perfectly.

The problem is, this alien can't do that. He can't prove that his experience is indeed the perfect one. Why? Because all his knowledge, including the knowledge that his experiences are absolute, is derived his own experiences themselves! How can he prove that his experiences are equal to something that exists outside the realm of experience (i.e. the perfect experience coupled with noumena that existed way before the alien consciousness evolved) . Since his knowledge is bound to his own conscious experience of the world. He cannot possibly claim that he has gained knowledge of the perfect noumenal experience since it exists a priori to consciousness, while the alien's knowledge is bound to his own consciousness i.e. his knowledge is a posteriori. And if he can't gain knowledge about the perfect experience then how can he claim that his own experience equals it?

How can a caveman who has zero access to a 1 meter scale ever prove that his axe is indeed 1 meter in length? He cannot. He can either admit that he cannot know ever if his axe is 1 meter since 1 meter scales ,as we know them now, don't exist yet. Or he can redefine the meter to be the length of his axe. Which leads us to the position that reality reveals itself to us humans just as it is. And we indeed are having the perfect absolute experience of reality right fucking now. If this doesn't sound right to you then the only option left is to admit that perfect experience of reality isn't possible


The key word here is "experience". No matter what level of reality you experience. No matter how much knowledge you gain from it. You are still dealing with only the phenomenal. You can learn knowledge of different experiences in reality but at the end of the day those are mere experiences as well. You have not and never will even scratch the surface of noumena, something that has to be outside experience. Something that can only ever be speculated, (sometimes in very fanciful manner) but never truly known. Since, all knowledge comes from phenomenal experience.
This shallow misunderstanding of what the noumena is, must end.

This is exactly the kind of fanciful thinking that was so thoroughly and rigorously dismantled by 18th century that it forced Kant to come up with this novel idea where he had to make the noumena unknowable by definition and tuck away all knowledge and experience in the realm of mental constructs.

You can't have knowledge or experience of fundamental reality (if you presume such a thing exists). Only speculations.


Again, we have only theorized, hypothesized, and proven what we gained from experience of this world. Nothing more and nothing less. We are still dealing in the phenomena. That's why atoms , non-classical physics, proton rays etc are still part of the video game interface and not the circuitry behind it.

This shallow misunderstanding of what the noumena is, must end.


I agree, my point is that we don't know what the objects that are "out there" even are. We only know things as they appear to us i.e. stars etc. Which indeed are mental constructs. You may mistakenly think that for a star that is "in here" there's a corresponding star that is "out there". But.....



You don't know anything about the object that is "real". You don't know what's out there that is causing the experience of the stars or galaxies or atoms or even your bedroom. Only thing you can say is that something exists that is not mental (again many thinkers even reject this idea) , and that thing is causing projection of objects in your mind which are indeed mental objects.

Calling them approximations is a claim of knowledge you cannot confirm. Basically more fanciful thinking that was dismantled by 18th century. A BMG gun in a video game is not even close to an approximation of electrical signals in a circuit.


Yes, you are misunderstanding me here. I do talk of impossibility of true reality as an experience. And I do think that stars and other phenomenal objects are mental constructs in Kantian context. These statements are not contradictory since there are no stars in the noumena that we know of. It is not my fault that you have shown continuos Incapability to grasp the difference between phenomena and noumena. Or that you continue to make fanciful claims about noumena based on your experiences in the phenomena. In Kantian metaphysics there is definitely "something" in the noumena but if you think that you are going to find equivalents of phenomenal objects like stars you are gravely mistaken.




The only events that precede one another in "reality" and "nature" are themselves phenomenological objects. The "interface" as Hoffman may call it. Hence any experience of causality that may connect them is also a part of the interface itself.

And btw, people irl do come up with different causes for the same phenomena. Causality has 0 ontological grounding other than mental.


If we are talking about the universe as in fundamental reality or being, i.e. the noumena then by definition it rests outside the realm of mental experience (phenomena) and therefore not bound to mental constructs like causality. Therefore it can exist outside of the mind, since it is noumena by definition and also be free from needing any kind of causality.



Lol no. You've only just restated what was apparent in the two statements. Basically repeating them. Not moving forward.




Its not "my" premise lol. I'm only arguing from the point of view of Kant or Hoffman. What Kant calls phenomena, what Hoffman calls interface, these are indeed mental objects or more precisely objects of experience created by the mind.

I mean its fine if you disagree with these people. But you are the one who brought up a video of Hoffman saying that the reality we see is an interface. Now you take objection when I basically say the same thing, that the objects we see in this reality are mental constructs. Weird.


I'm proponent of no such thing. I'm just a little bit allergic to spiritualistic and mystical horseshit is all. :feelsjuice:


View attachment 773227
This is starting to feel like work and losing its fun appeal, but I will get back to this probably tomorrow.

Just FYI, the original plot and starting point of this discussion arc was just to tag people I thought found the topic of the theory of consciousness interesting and posted something about alternative theories in the topic. I know @Copexodius Maximus doesn't find the work of Hameroff and Penrose interesting, for example, but I didn't know his take on Hoffman.

What books would you recommend to people who want to get their foot in the door of philosophy?
There is no book to "get your foot in the door of philosophy." Study symbolic and formal logic, informal logic, and argumentation theory (dialectic, eristic, rhetoric - the last of which you should learn to spot, but not employ yourself).

Then you pick a topic of personal interest, ask questions (mostly "why"), and make an effort to seek answers. In a formal setting like universities, you will learn these things generally and broadly, and then pick and choose areas of interest in the branches of philosophy (ethics, metaphysics, logic etc.). In school you're going to have to learn the philosophies of different thinkers because you'll be writing words (so so many words) about them, but in reality you don't need to study them. It's good to know their philosophies, though. Some philosophers have concepts and reasoning that is difficult for the casual reader to follow. Schopenhauer is a famous example of this. You're mostly likely going to be better off reading books about Schopenhauer and his philosophy than you are reading his original texts. Informally, you could branch off and trailblaze your own path, but you can only realistically do this if you have a solid grasp of logic and reasoning and catch yourself from falling into pits of errors (fallacies).

And have been looking for a tangible albeit pitiful reason to get into philosophy, i.e., wanting to debate losers on the internet. And to mentally reign over normgroids.
If this is your motivation for wanting to learn and do philosophy, then you're better off saving your time and energy. You will turn into a miserable, arrogant cunt who falls victim to the Dunning-Kruger effect, and starts to hate everything and everyone who doesn't see the world like he does. Trust me, I've witnessed this first-hand myself, mostly with political philosophy types but also greatly with philosophy of science and religion types. It's like a micro version of the biblical fall of Lucifer.

You should learn philosophy (and math tbh) with the goal of wanting to learn and obtain truths about things. If those things are more in the natural world, then just learn science.
 
This is starting to feel like work and losing its fun appeal, but I will get back to this probably tomorrow.

Just FYI, the original plot and starting point of this discussion arc was just to tag people I thought found the topic of the theory of consciousness interesting and posted something about alternative theories in the topic. I know @Copexodius Maximus doesn't find the work of Hameroff and Penrose interesting, for example, but I didn't know his take on Hoffman.
I picked up Penrose's book in college long ago but never fully committed. Maybe I'll try again, the guy is a genius.
 
It wouldn't technically "revive" humans, it will only simulate an identical clone of the deceased person.
 
At this point I might have to repeat couple of sentences to some of your points via copy paste, so bear with me on that. Also I would suggest to read the whole thing first before replying to parts so you can get the whole picture.


I don't know where you are getting this physicalist stuff from. I am strictly arguing on the basis of what I saw in that video and Kant, since he was brought up. I haven't written my actual position. But you definitely have and we'll deal with those fanciful flights of fantasy in a bit.


Actually I did notice like midway through the video that he talks about consciousness being the fundamental reality. And you are right in observing that this is a departure from Kant. But to me this also seems like a departure from dualism, which seemed to be the theme in first half an hour of the video. That why it felt like a hoj poj of ideas. (Though a departure from dualism is definitely a step in the right direction)


This has a plethora of problems:

Firstly, and most importantly, the concepts of wavelength, light and nanometer are themselves phenomenological in nature. You have just replaced the sheer experience of color blue with the experience of looking at numbers on a screen or the concept of a wave which again you mentally derived only after looking at an actual wave. None of this is epistemologically based in the noumena.

I repeat again, this shallow misunderstanding of what the noumena is must end.

Secondly, the absurdity of there being a "true" blue color is laid bare by the question: If wavelength is real and "out there" then what is the wavelength of the true blue color. Is it 451? 463?Then how can the other blues be blue and not different colors entirely?

Even if there was an object "blue" in the noumena corresponding to our experience of color blue, (whatever you want to mistakenly consider it, wavelength or light, despite the fact that these objects are still phenomenal), it still doesn't follow that the object "blue" in the noumena has a corresponding absolute
 experience of it. I again reiterate that it is absurd to think of an experience that exists beside a consciousness that could experience it. We could talk about the potentiality of different experiences that are not discovered yet (aliens or evolved species or mosquitoes) but we are only just replacing one type of experience for another. We haven't proven that an ultimate experience could even exist for a so called "higher" consciousness to experience it. Because no matter how "high" we get on this ladder (I think the very concept of there being heirarchies in experiences is stupid) , the experience we see is still just a creation of the mind. Not even this higher species could prove that they have achieved the metaphysical philosopher's stone of the ultimate experience of our world.

Thirdly,


This is exactly the kind of fanciful thinking that was so thoroughly and rigorously dismantled by 18th century that it forced Kant to come up with this novel idea where he had to make the noumena unknowable by definition and tuck away all knowledge and experience in the realm of mental constructs.


That's not what my alternative meant. There's a subtle difference between "reality reveals itself to us as it is" and "consciousness is everything". The former is closer to physicalism while the latter is not. You got confused between them because they are both kinds of monisms.

Rejecting the interface does not equate to consciousness is everything. Infact if we say that consciousness is everything then that means interface is all there is that exists. Anyway, I only argued this so you can reject it and see why we cannot have an ultimate experience of reality. Because , since any such claim cannot be proven hence one can posit that we actually are having the ultimate experience right now.

Yes. This is self explainatory and obvious. And this is indeed my conclusion but with a small correction. I am talking about the absolute true experience not just any random phenomena.

And nothing that has been said after resolves this problem. Infact.....



This is exactly the kind of fanciful thinking that was so thoroughly and rigorously dismantled by 18th century that it forced Kant to come up with this novel idea where he had to make the noumena unknowable by definition and tuck away all knowledge and experience in the realm of mental constructs.


You can't blame Kant for rejecting your position when it was the failure of your own position that forced Kant's hand in this particular direction to begin with.

Ok. Consider this. Let's say there indeed is a perfect experience which exists a priori to any mind or consciousness. Let's say there's an alien species that claims that it can experience reality for what it truly is. You can always ask them, "How do you know that your experience, the images created by your mind, are indeed equal to fundamental reality"? That those images exist in the noumena itself and your brain has evolved to copy them perfectly.

The problem is, this alien can't do that. He can't prove that his experience is indeed the perfect one. Why? Because all his knowledge, including the knowledge that his experiences are absolute, is derived his own experiences themselves! How can he prove that his experiences are equal to something that exists outside the realm of experience (i.e. the perfect experience coupled with noumena that existed way before the alien consciousness evolved) . Since his knowledge is bound to his own conscious experience of the world. He cannot possibly claim that he has gained knowledge of the perfect noumenal experience since it exists a priori to consciousness, while the alien's knowledge is bound to his own consciousness i.e. his knowledge is a posteriori. And if he can't gain knowledge about the perfect experience then how can he claim that his own experience equals it?

How can a caveman who has zero access to a 1 meter scale ever prove that his axe is indeed 1 meter in length? He cannot. He can either admit that he cannot know ever if his axe is 1 meter since 1 meter scales ,as we know them now, don't exist yet. Or he can redefine the meter to be the length of his axe. Which leads us to the position that reality reveals itself to us humans just as it is. And we indeed are having the perfect absolute experience of reality right fucking now. If this doesn't sound right to you then the only option left is to admit that perfect experience of reality isn't possible


The key word here is "experience". No matter what level of reality you experience. No matter how much knowledge you gain from it. You are still dealing with only the phenomenal. You can learn knowledge of different experiences in reality but at the end of the day those are mere experiences as well. You have not and never will even scratch the surface of noumena, something that has to be outside experience. Something that can only ever be speculated, (sometimes in very fanciful manner) but never truly known. Since, all knowledge comes from phenomenal experience.
This shallow misunderstanding of what the noumena is, must end.

This is exactly the kind of fanciful thinking that was so thoroughly and rigorously dismantled by 18th century that it forced Kant to come up with this novel idea where he had to make the noumena unknowable by definition and tuck away all knowledge and experience in the realm of mental constructs.

You can't have knowledge or experience of fundamental reality (if you presume such a thing exists). Only speculations.


Again, we have only theorized, hypothesized, and proven what we gained from experience of this world. Nothing more and nothing less. We are still dealing in the phenomena. That's why atoms , non-classical physics, proton rays etc are still part of the video game interface and not the circuitry behind it.

This shallow misunderstanding of what the noumena is, must end.


I agree, my point is that we don't know what the objects that are "out there" even are. We only know things as they appear to us i.e. stars etc. Which indeed are mental constructs. You may mistakenly think that for a star that is "in here" there's a corresponding star that is "out there". But.....



You don't know anything about the object that is "real". You don't know what's out there that is causing the experience of the stars or galaxies or atoms or even your bedroom. Only thing you can say is that something exists that is not mental (again many thinkers even reject this idea) , and that thing is causing projection of objects in your mind which are indeed mental objects.

Calling them approximations is a claim of knowledge you cannot confirm. Basically more fanciful thinking that was dismantled by 18th century. A BMG gun in a video game is not even close to an approximation of electrical signals in a circuit.


Yes, you are misunderstanding me here. I do talk of impossibility of true reality as an experience. And I do think that stars and other phenomenal objects are mental constructs in Kantian context. These statements are not contradictory since there are no stars in the noumena that we know of. It is not my fault that you have shown continuos Incapability to grasp the difference between phenomena and noumena. Or that you continue to make fanciful claims about noumena based on your experiences in the phenomena. In Kantian metaphysics there is definitely "something" in the noumena but if you think that you are going to find equivalents of phenomenal objects like stars you are gravely mistaken.




The only events that precede one another in "reality" and "nature" are themselves phenomenological objects. The "interface" as Hoffman may call it. Hence any experience of causality that may connect them is also a part of the interface itself.

And btw, people irl do come up with different causes for the same phenomena. Causality has 0 ontological grounding other than mental.


If we are talking about the universe as in fundamental reality or being, i.e. the noumena then by definition it rests outside the realm of mental experience (phenomena) and therefore not bound to mental constructs like causality. Therefore it can exist outside of the mind, since it is noumena by definition and also be free from needing any kind of causality.



Lol no. You've only just restated what was apparent in the two statements. Basically repeating them. Not moving forward.




Its not "my" premise lol. I'm only arguing from the point of view of Kant or Hoffman. What Kant calls phenomena, what Hoffman calls interface, these are indeed mental objects or more precisely objects of experience created by the mind.

I mean its fine if you disagree with these people. But you are the one who brought up a video of Hoffman saying that the reality we see is an interface. Now you take objection when I basically say the same thing, that the objects we see in this reality are mental constructs. Weird.


I'm proponent of no such thing. I'm just a little bit allergic to spiritualistic and mystical horseshit is all. :feelsjuice:


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This sounds very similar to Theravada Buddhism, where no experience is taught to be greater or more real than another. Although the argument given by them is that because consciousness only arises due to a cause, and so the only thing different in the kinds of conscious experience you have is the different rearrangement of conscious data packets in a way. Saying a flame caused one by one source of fuel is more real or greater than another doesn’t really make any sense.

Just FYI, the original plot and starting point of this discussion arc was just to tag people I thought found the topic of the theory of consciousness interesting and posted something about alternative theories in the topic. I know @Copexodius Maximus doesn't find the work of Hameroff and Penrose interesting, for example, but I didn't know his take on Hoffman.
The problem I have with consciousness being the primary reality as Hoffman says is that people can become actually unconscious, but time keeps passing on. Would you say all the time in between didn’t happen if no one was experiencing it? Maybe someone who also believes jn the copenhagen interpretation would say so, but my point is you would have to way too far deep into the nature of reality to even begin to show this as a possibility.
 
there is no book to "get your foot in the door of philosophy."
I know, that was a remarkably retarded question; something as complicated as philosophy would've never been that simple. But, I didn't know how else to ask.
Study symbolic and formal logic, informal logic, and argumentation theory (dialectic, eristic, rhetoric - the last of which you should learn to spot, but not employ yourself).
Can you elaborate on why I shouldn't employ rhetoric? Is it because of sophistry? And should I read up on these topics in this particular order?
Then you pick a topic of personal interest, ask questions (mostly "why"), and make an effort to seek answers. In a formal setting like universities, you will learn these things generally and broadly, and then pick and choose areas of interest in the branches of philosophy (ethics, metaphysics, logic etc.). In school you're going to have to learn the philosophies of different thinkers because you'll be writing words (so so many words) about them, but in reality you don't need to study them. It's good to know their philosophies, though. Some philosophers have concepts and reasoning that is difficult for the casual reader to follow. Schopenhauer is a famous example of this. You're mostly likely going to be better off reading books about Schopenhauer and his philosophy than you are reading his original texts. Informally, you could branch off and trailblaze your own path, but you can only realistically do this if you have a solid grasp of logic and reasoning and catch yourself from falling into pits of errors (fallacies).
Understood.
If this is your motivation for wanting to learn and do philosophy, then you're better off saving your time and energy. You will turn into a miserable, arrogant cunt who falls victim to the Dunning-Kruger effect, and starts to hate everything and everyone who doesn't see the world like he does. Trust me, I've witnessed this first-hand myself, mostly with political philosophy types but also greatly with philosophy of science and religion types.
I was partly joking. But nonetheless, I'd like to imagine that I wouldn't fall victim to the Dunning-Kruger effect (lol); since, I'm aware of it. However, I definitely see how going into philosophy with that intent would lead someone to unfounded conceitedness and being an oblivious git. And I try, oftentimes, to not take myself too seriously. But I do recognize that I'm as vulnerable to being a pretentious faggot like anyone else. I'll keep it in mind. And I'll make sure not to become close minded but not too open minded to where my brain falls out.
You should learn philosophy (and math tbh) with the goal of wanting to learn and obtain truths about things. If those things are more in the natural world, then just learn science.
I'm interested in all of it. But I personally find that the uncaptured metaphysical territory the most interesting.
 
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This sounds very similar to Theravada Buddhism, where no experience is taught to be greater or more real than another. Although the argument given by them is that because consciousness only arises due to a cause, and so the only thing different in the kinds of conscious experience you have is the different rearrangement of conscious data packets in a way. Saying a flame caused one by one source of fuel is more real or greater than another doesn’t really make any sense.
I don't know much about Buddhism, but yes, the idea that there could be a fundamental absolute experience of reality doesn't sit right.

In the Kantian sense experience is not just caused by reality but also by how the mind manipulates the data to create an image. So you are indeed right in saying that conscious experience caused by one mind cannot be greater than another.
 
Better off making a virtual isekai world and putting a chip in your brain so your conscious can transfer to it. Change the settings in the world so you're 6'6, extremely powerful with magic, charming, and have a harem of sexy anime girls.
 
I don't know much about Buddhism, but yes, the idea that there could be a fundamental absolute experience of reality doesn't sit right.

In the Kantian sense experience is not just caused by reality but also by how the mind manipulates the data to create an image. So you are indeed right in saying that conscious experience caused by one mind cannot be greater than another.
Kant was probably influenced by mahayana Buddhism, along with many philosophers and writers in the West since the 1800s.
 
Kant was probably influenced by mahayana Buddhism, along with many philosophers and writers in the West since the 1800s.
Don't know about Kant but Schopenhauer started right where Kant left off and that guy was big on Buddhism.
 
Don't know about Kant but Schopenhauer started right where Kant left off and that guy was big on Buddhism.
Yes, although he used Buddhism to feed his nihilism jfl.
 
I don't know where you are getting this physicalist stuff from.
From your very first reply when I tagged you, as well your posts in the past hinting at the materialist point of view:
Lol. Looks like someone rediscovered Kant. I take some issue with the panpsychism since to me saying that "a rock is an object of consciousness" is different from saying that "a rock HAS consciousness". I take a bigger issue with the idea that knowledge of the thing in itself is possible at all. And maybe they are confusing things or maybe its me who is failing to understand them, but I don't understand how seeing phenomena as conscious agents makes the latter the fundmanetal reality. This seems contradictory to the dualism presented. Also, the multiplicity of conscious agents seems to imply space, which was rejected.
Panpsychism is typically thought of as a form of monism. If you take issue with panpsychism then your alternative choices are dualism, which you've made clear you're not in favor of (in this post below and elsewhere), because you don't think the immaterial exists, and physicalism, which is the most common monist philosophy.
(Though a departure from dualism is definitely a step in the right direction)

This has a plethora of problems:

Firstly, and most importantly, the concepts of wavelength, light and nanometer are themselves phenomenological in nature. You have just replaced the sheer experience of color blue with the experience of looking at numbers on a screen or the concept of a wave which again you mentally derived only after looking at an actual wave. None of this is epistemologically based in the noumena.
The nuomena isn't some idealistic world in the Platonic sense. It's the real world. Everything we (phenomenologically) experience is based on the nuomena. All of our sensory (phenomenal) experiences of it are crude approximations of what's objectively real.

I repeat again, this shallow misunderstanding of what the noumena is must end.
Based on your statement above and some further below, I agree.

Secondly, the absurdity of there being a "true" blue color is laid bare by the question: If wavelength is real and "out there" then what is the wavelength of the true blue color. Is it 451? 463?Then how can the other blues be blue and not different colors entirely?
Blue is just a nominal label. If our sensory experiences were rich enough to distinguish between 450 and 451 nm of color difference and we had the biological apparatus to know (i.e., experience) that difference, then we would probably have about a 10,000 or more words for colors, because we could probably see the entire EM spectrum with that level of granular distinction.

Even if there was an object "blue" in the noumena corresponding to our experience of color blue, (whatever you want to mistakenly consider it, wavelength or light, despite the fact that these objects are still phenomenal), it still doesn't follow that the object "blue" in the noumena has a corresponding absolute
 experience of it.
This is true. The state of a thing simply being in the real, objective world does not imply that there must be a corresponding experience to that being or its various states of being. In this regard, we can never truly know the true nature of any other being or what it's like to be anything else in the real world other than what we are: human. We can't know the true nature of a stone pebble, because we'd have to be a stone pebble to experience what it's like to be a stone pebble. But stone pebbles can't experience (themselves or anything), because they don't possess consciousness to any degree. We also can't know the true nature of light emitted at 450 nm, because we're not photons and photons also don't possess the ability to experience themselves or things around them (that we know of).

However, this Nagelian framing of nuomena is not what Kant had initially meant when he referred to the inaccessibility of the nuomena. He simply defined this as a blanket limitation. To know a thing-in-itself as-is is to experience the thing-in-itself as-is. Kant epistemologically pigeonholed himself out of knowing the true nature of a thing, because he had framed all knowledge as phonemenological experience distinct from his definition of nuomena. The problem that Kant either doesn't state or himself realize is that not all nuomena are the same, just as not all phenomena are the same. The nuomena of godhood, for example, is not the same as the nuomena of doghood. They are in the same category of things-in-themselves, but that's where the similarities begin and end. This is where the nuomena/phenomena distinction has its logical limitations when applied to truth-seeking, and why you can't apply Kantian metaphysics holistically to the study of consciousness. It's unclear if Hoffman realizes this limitation in Kantian ontology, but regardless, he doesn't fully subscribe to Kantian metaphysics, because Hoffman's conscious realism is a non-physical monism, whereas Kant's transcendental idealism remains within a physicalist monist framework.

While you're stating that looking at numbers on a screen about the wavelength of a particular color is a phenomenon (yes, the phenomonon of looking at numbers on a screen JFL), there is knowledge gained about the thing-in-itself without experiencing the thing-in-itself (the wonders of consciousness...). But what does it mean to know the thing-in-itself here when we're speaking of the wavelength band of 450-495? The question itself is absurd and demonstrates why the nuomena-phenomena distinction is not entirely useful in the context of consciousness and experience.

I again reiterate that it is absurd to think of an experience that exists beside a consciousness that could experience it. We could talk about the potentiality of different experiences that are not discovered yet (aliens or evolved species or mosquitoes) but we are only just replacing one type of experience for another.
"Experience" can only be had by conscious agents or entities possessing consciousness, so yes, it is in fact absurd to think of experience that exists beside a consciousness that could experience it. It doesn't make sense to talk about things which can't experience things to experience things. I didn't claim otherwise, so I'm not sure where this confusion is coming from.

We haven't proven that an ultimate experience could even exist for a so called "higher" consciousness to experience it.
But we can - even through a priori reasoning - prove that higher and lower experiences exist.

Because no matter how "high" we get on this ladder (I think the very concept of there being heirarchies in experiences is stupid) , the experience we see is still just a creation of the mind.
What the fuck is this? Are you fucking kidding me right now?

Are you honestly trying to tell me that a person with Down syndrome, who is also born blind and deaf (holy fuck, talk about NEVER BEGAN), does NOT have a lower category of experience than a 145 IQ chad with top-tier athlete genetics?

Forget intra-species differences. Are you seriously trying to tell me that a goldfish has the same richness of experience as a human does?

Not even this higher species could prove that they have achieved the metaphysical philosopher's stone of the ultimate experience of our world.
That's only attainable through godhood, if we're being hypothetical. You might experience the ultimate experience of probably a very small set of things (one, maybe two things max), but never possess the totality of experience.

Thirdly,



This is exactly the kind of fanciful thinking that was so thoroughly and rigorously dismantled by 18th century that it forced Kant to come up with this novel idea where he had to make the noumena unknowable by definition and tuck away all knowledge and experience in the realm of mental constructs.
This isn't an argument. Try again, or don't try at all, brocel.

That's not what my alternative meant. There's a subtle difference between "reality reveals itself to us as it is" and "consciousness is everything". The former is closer to physicalism while the latter is not. You got confused between them because they are both kinds of monisms.
But then how do you meaningfully differentiate between the two - "reality reveals itself to us as it is" and "consciousness is everything" - if reality is only revealed phenomenologically through conscious experience, as you're arguing in the defence of the Kantian position?

If everything that is revealed is revealed through conscious experience, then conscious experience itself is the revelation of everything. They effectively become one and the same.

Rejecting the interface does not equate to consciousness is everything. Infact if we say that consciousness is everything then that means interface is all there is that exists. Anyway, I only argued this so you can reject it and see why we cannot have an ultimate experience of reality. Because , since any such claim cannot be proven hence one can posit that we actually are having the ultimate experience right now.
I repeat, I've never claimed that "ultimate experience" is possible by us. In fact all of the examples of experience I gave demonstrate how our experience of reality is severely limited and how we augment our understanding of reality better through technology.

My claim was that true knowledge of reality is attainable. It may or may not be through personal experience, and it certainly is not attainable by us, but the definition of the nuomenal does not exclude the possibility of the attainment of this knowledge - directly or indirectly - by default. You can't simply define something out of the realm of possible experience when you yourself are but a droplet in the massive ocean of possible experiences.

Yes. This is self explainatory and obvious. And this is indeed my conclusion but with a small correction. I am talking about the absolute true experience not just any random phenomena.
I see.

Ok. Consider this. Let's say there indeed is a perfect experience which exists a priori to any mind or consciousness.
No, sorry. I can't consider that, because I never claimed that such a consideration is possible. But I will entertain your hypothetical nonetheless.

Let's say there's an alien species that claims that it can experience reality for what it truly is. You can always ask them, "How do you know that your experience, the images created by your mind, are indeed equal to fundamental reality"? That those images exist in the noumena itself and your brain has evolved to copy them perfectly.

The problem is, this alien can't do that. He can't prove that his experience is indeed the perfect one. Why? Because all his knowledge, including the knowledge that his experiences are absolute, is derived his own experiences themselves! How can he prove that his experiences are equal to something that exists outside the realm of experience (i.e. the perfect experience coupled with noumena that existed way before the alien consciousness evolved) . Since his knowledge is bound to his own conscious experience of the world. He cannot possibly claim that he has gained knowledge of the perfect noumenal experience since it exists a priori to consciousness, while the alien's knowledge is bound to his own consciousness i.e. his knowledge is a posteriori. And if he can't gain knowledge about the perfect experience then how can he claim that his own experience equals it?

How can a caveman who has zero access to a 1 meter scale ever prove that his axe is indeed 1 meter in length? He cannot. He can either admit that he cannot know ever if his axe is 1 meter since 1 meter scales ,as we know them now, don't exist yet. Or he can redefine the meter to be the length of his axe. Which leads us to the position that reality reveals itself to us humans just as it is. And we indeed are having the perfect absolute experience of reality right fucking now. If this doesn't sound right to you then the only option left is to admit that perfect experience of reality isn't possible
Are you trying to claim that a priori knowledge is not possible and that the only knowledge possible is a posteriori?

The key word here is "experience". No matter what level of reality you experience. No matter how much knowledge you gain from it. You are still dealing with only the phenomenal. You can learn knowledge of different experiences in reality but at the end of the day those are mere experiences as well. You have not and never will even scratch the surface of noumena, something that has to be outside experience. Something that can only ever be speculated, (sometimes in very fanciful manner) but never truly known. Since, all knowledge comes from phenomenal experience.
See, it's precisely this kind of statement that your entire positions rests upon that is made with such authoritative vehemence and gusto that it's almost like a peculiar philosophical naivety.

There are many theories and sources of knowledge.

You can't have knowledge or experience of fundamental reality (if you presume such a thing exists). Only speculations.
We can (at least some aspects of it), but not with our human bodies, and certainly not with the current state of our technology.

Again, we have only theorized, hypothesized, and proven what we gained from experience of this world. Nothing more and nothing less. We are still dealing in the phenomena. That's why atoms , non-classical physics, proton rays etc are still part of the video game interface and not the circuitry behind it.
I think you may have lost the plot on the video game analogy. In the video game world atoms and waves don't exist, only underneath it. Electrical signals and the hardware behind the software for the video game world would be analogous to subatomic particles and quantum mechanical systems for our world. For the video game world, our quantum mechanical system (in the real world) would be what's under the hood of the electrical systems and chipsets the software runs on. Whatever is behind/underneath the subatomic particles and quantum mechanical systems governing our real world (i.e., what is beneath our circuit board and chips), we don't know yet.

I agree, my point is that we don't know what the objects that are "out there" even are. We only know things as they appear to us i.e. stars etc. Which indeed are mental constructs. You may mistakenly think that for a star that is "in here" there's a corresponding star that is "out there". But.....

You don't know anything about the object that is "real". You don't know what's out there that is causing the experience of the stars or galaxies or atoms or even your bedroom. Only thing you can say is that something exists that is not mental (again many thinkers even reject this idea) , and that thing is causing projection of objects in your mind which are indeed mental objects.

Calling them approximations is a claim of knowledge you cannot confirm. Basically more fanciful thinking that was dismantled by 18th century.
OK, so when you look up and see the twinkling of a star, what do you see? Suspend, for a moment, our knowledge that this is light from millions of years ago and that we're witnessing the past of the star that may not currently exist in its relative time.

A BMG gun in a video game is not even close to an approximation of electrical signals in a circuit.
So...consciousness is not a particular arrangement of atoms?

Yes, you are misunderstanding me here. I do talk of impossibility of true reality as an experience. And I do think that stars and other phenomenal objects are mental constructs in Kantian context. These statements are not contradictory since there are no stars in the noumena that we know of.
Interesting. And how do you know that there are no stars in the nuomena?

It is not my fault that you have shown continuos Incapability to grasp the difference between phenomena and noumena.
I never did. Not now, and not when I first read Kant. But your condescension and inaccurate estimation of my understanding is noted.

Or that you continue to make fanciful claims about noumena based on your experiences in the phenomena. In Kantian metaphysics there is definitely "something" in the noumena but if you think that you are going to find equivalents of phenomenal objects like stars you are gravely mistaken.
Someone is indeed gravely mistaken here, brother, but it's not me.

Nuomena is defined as the nature of the thing-in-itself. What thing, you may ask? Things that we have phenomenal experiences of. It's absurd to say that some things in our phenomenal experiences have no nuomenal equivalents, because everything in our phenomenal experiences, by definition, have some true nature of the thing we're experiencing - including stars.

You could, however, cautiously say the converse and be correct. You could say that there may be nuomena, which have no attached phenomenological experiences out in the world, but the problem is that nuomena refers to the physical, real, objective world, and not some abstract and nebulous theoretical world.

The only events that precede one another in "reality" and "nature" are themselves phenomenological objects.
What caused the universe, and is that cause a phenomenon? If it is a phenomenon, then who experienced this phenomenon of the universe's cause? And if you want to say "no one," then why does cause have a special exemption from being a phenomenon?

The "interface" as Hoffman may call it. Hence any experience of causality that may connect them is also a part of the interface itself.

And btw, people irl do come up with different causes for the same phenomena.
Of course. Human knowledge is full of all sorts of theories trying to explain one thing. One of those may be the lucky guess. Or not. Regardless, there is one true cause (or chain of causes) of whatever phenomenon in question.

Causality has 0 ontological grounding other than mental.
If the nuomenal world is the true world as it is, independent of our experiences of it, then whatever (true) causes that exist in the world cannot intrinsically be mental, because the mental, by virtue of the nuomena-phenomena distinction, does not represent the thing-in-itself. Therefore, whatever causes things in the objective world cannot be mental.

You're knocking down your own argument.

If we are talking about the universe as in fundamental reality or being, i.e. the noumena then by definition it rests outside the realm of mental experience (phenomena) and therefore not bound to mental constructs like causality. Therefore it can exist outside of the mind, since it is noumena by definition and also be free from needing any kind of causality.
I'm sorry, brocel, but I you're fucking up big time here.

Something being nuomenal does not exempt it from having causes. Your premise that causality is strictly in the mind doesn't hold from a very basic understanding of science. Gravity is the cause of two objects with mass being attracted and coming closer to one another. This cause is not a mental phenomenon.

Lol no. You've only just restated what was apparent in the two statements. Basically repeating them. Not moving forward.
Yeah, sure, OK. You want to correct me here, then?

Its not "my" premise lol. I'm only arguing from the point of view of Kant or Hoffman. What Kant calls phenomena, what Hoffman calls interface, these are indeed mental objects or more precisely objects of experience created by the mind.
It's the premise you're using. But that's not all you're doing. You're arguing through the lens of your own physicalism and empiricism.

That's fine, whatever. Just be aware of it.

I mean its fine if you disagree with these people. But you are the one who brought up a video of Hoffman saying that the reality we see is an interface. Now you take objection when I basically say the same thing, that the objects we see in this reality are mental constructs. Weird.
I disagree with certain aspects of certain philosophies. As I said, I brought up the video to offer alternative theories of consciousness, because the subject is related to the thread topic of reconstructing your consciousness post-mortem, not because I'm a personal proponent of the philosophy of the person outlining his theory of consciousness.


I'm proponent of no such thing. I'm just a little bit allergic to spiritualistic and mystical horseshit is all. :feelsjuice:



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So you're an empiricist with a Humean metaphysic who is triggered by anything that he thinks is outside the physicalist purview which enters the realm of the mystical/spiritual. But the idea of a philosopher defining something into existence and re-framing all possible knowledge around this definition is something you're fine with.

OK, great.
 
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Can you elaborate on why I shouldn't employ rhetoric? Is it because of sophistry? And should I read up on these topics in this particular order?
Rhetoric is a tool of persuasion, but it's the idea of "winning the argument through winning the crowd." It's fine, if you're a politician, but if you want to argue to achieve truth or test ideas (yours or others'), then rhetoric has no place in that.
 
Rhetoric is a tool of persuasion, but it's the idea of "winning the argument through winning the crowd." It's fine, if you're a politician, but if you want to argue to achieve truth or test ideas (yours or others'), then rhetoric has no place in that.
Understood.
 
Everything we (phenomenologically) experience is based on the nuomena. All of our sensory (phenomenal) experiences of it are crude approximations of what's objectively real.
The second statement here does not necessarily follow from the first one. In Kantian sense experience is not just based on the noumena but also on the experiencing mind. As for the "crude approximation" thing, we'll deal with that in a bit. Though I find it funny that you'd say something like that and then go on to call me the materialist.

This is true. The state of a thing simply being in the real, objective world does not imply that there must be a corresponding experience to that being or its various states of being. In this regard, we can never truly know the true nature of any other being or what it's like to be anything else in the real world other than what we are: human. We can't know the true nature of a stone pebble, because we'd have to be a stone pebble to experience what it's like to be a stone pebble. But stone pebbles can't experience (themselves or anything), because they don't possess consciousness to any degree. We also can't know the true nature of light emitted at 450 nm, because we're not photons and photons also don't possess the ability to experience themselves or things around them (that we know of).

That's a strange diversion. I think you've confused my words. I'm not arguing that not all things in the world have their own consciousness. I'm arguing that the noumena or fundamental reality cannot be experienced by humans or anyone since any such experience must exist a priori to the consciousness that is experiencing it.


When I say that noumenal objects don't have a fundamental conscious experience attached, what I'm saying is that there is no experience of them from the perspective of an observer. I'm not saying that they don't have a consciousness of their own (though I agree)

not all nuomena are the same, just as not all phenomena are the same. The nuomena of godhood, for example, is not the same as the nuomena of doghood. They are in the same category of things-in-themselves, but that's where the similarities begin and end. This is where the nuomena/phenomena distinction has its logical limitations when applied to truth-seeking, and why you can't apply Kantian metaphysics holistically to the study of consciousness. It's unclear if Hoffman realizes this limitation in Kantian ontology, but regardless, he doesn't fully subscribe to Kantian metaphysics, because Hoffman's conscious realism is a non-physical monism, whereas Kant's transcendental idealism remains within a physicalist monist framework.

Its already established that since noumena exists a priori to consciousness and is fundamental reality hence there can only be one of it.

But of course you'd think that different noumena or different degrees of noumena could exists since you constantly confuse noumenal reality with phenomena reality. And we indeed can have different phenomenal realities based on who is experiencing.
But what does it mean to know the thing-in-itself here when we're speaking of the wavelength band of 450-495? The question itself is absurd

Yes indeed this question is absurd. Because by making claims about wavelengths of light we have gained still zero knowledge about the thing in itself. Because our knowledge was still derived from our phenomenal experiences. There is no such thing as wavelength or electromagnetic waves in noumena that we know of. Your claim otherwise is unsubstantiated since all this knowledge still came from the phenomenal. You can reject this premise altogether and claim that reality does reveal itself to us as it is, or some approximation of it. But that'd be like taking a step backwards.

"Experience" can only be had by conscious agents or entities possessing consciousness, so yes, it is in fact absurd to think of experience that exists beside a consciousness that could experience it. It doesn't make sense to talk about things which can't experience things to experience things. I didn't claim otherwise, so I'm not sure where this confusion is coming from.
If experience can only be had by conscious agents then how can any "absolute" experience of fundamental reality exist. Since any such "absolute" experience will have to be a property of fundamental reality and hence exist a priori to consciousness.

What the fuck is this? Are you fucking kidding me right now?

Are you honestly trying to tell me that a person with Down syndrome, who is also born blind and deaf (holy fuck, talk about NEVER BEGAN), does NOT have a lower category of experience than a 145 IQ chad with top-tier athlete genetics?
In case my posts on this forum haven't made it clear already. Yes, I categorically deny the existence of subhumans.

It is indeed true that a blind or deaf person or a person with dementia will have less of an experience of phenomenal reality that other humans have. That is they will have lesser phenomenological images of the world that is created by the human mind. But when it comes to the noumena or thing in itself we are all equally blind.

As for your own value judgement regarding "IQ" or "top tier genetics" which you derived from nothing but your own conscious phenomenology. The less said about it the better.

Forget intra-species differences. Are you seriously trying to tell me that a goldfish has the same richness of experience as a human does?
Bwahahahahahahahahahah

Next time try diving 20 meters underwater with no equipment besides oxygen cylinder in questionable sunlight and try finding insects or other miniscule organisms as food. Or try distinguishing between different kinds of corals and find the appropriate one for shelter from predators.


Then tell me who has a "richness of experience" lmao.

That's only attainable through godhood, if we're being hypothetical. You might experience the ultimate experience of probably a very small set of things (one, maybe two things max), but never possess the totality of experience.
As I said, no being that claims that it can experience such a thing can prove that such a thing exists. So the claim is still unsubstantiated.

They'll be claiming that their experience is equal to some metaphysical concept of fundamental reality but how can they make that claim if all their knowledge is bound to their experiences?

In other words, I can ask an alien or evolved human, "who told you that what you are experiencing is fundamental reality itself? Your own experiences? How do you know they are not lying to you, just like they lie to a common human? "

But then how do you meaningfully differentiate between the two - "reality reveals itself to us as it is" and "consciousness is everything" - if reality is only revealed phenomenologically through conscious experience, as you're arguing in the defence of the Kantian position?

When I said "reality reveals itself to us as it is" I was not arguing from a kantian framework. That's why I used the word " ALTERNATIVE" . Please carefully read what I wrote.

Its starting to look like that this alternative is indeed your position or atleast some approximation of it.



I repeat, I've never claimed that "ultimate experience" is possible by us. In fact all of the examples of experience I gave demonstrate how our experience of reality is severely limited and how we augment our understanding of reality better through technology.

My claim was that true knowledge of reality is attainable. It may or may not be through personal experience, and it certainly is not attainable by us, but the definition of the nuomenal does not exclude the possibility of the attainment of this knowledge - directly or indirectly - by default. You can't simply define something out of the realm of possible experience when you yourself are but a droplet in the massive ocean of possible experiences.
I'm not claiming that we as humans cannot experience fundamental reality. I'm claiming that it cannot be experienced at all. (atleast from a Kantian standpoint) . Please stop misreading my points.

As for why it can't be experienced. The reason is repeated again and again that all our experiences are phenomenological, hence objects of the mind(consciousness). While fundamental reality exists a priori to the mind.

Are you trying to claim that a priori knowledge is not possible and that the only knowledge possible is a posteriori?

Cut off a baby's eyes, ears and nose. Pluck out his tongue and permanently peal off his skin. Then tell me what knowledge did he gain of this world after 10 years. If he stays alive that is.

See, it's precisely this kind of statement that your entire positions rests upon that is made with such authoritative vehemence and gusto that it's almost like a peculiar philosophical naivety.
In normal circumstances I would've asked you to prove otherwise. But I know better than to make such unreasonable demands from an apologist.


We can (at least some aspects of it), but not with our human bodies, and certainly not with the current state of our technology.
This is as good a point as any to deal with that "approximation" bullcrap.

How the fuck can you possibly claim that the reality you experience is an approximation of the fundamental reality? Did you manage to somehow peak outside your own phenomenal experiences created by our brain and sense organs and look at fundamental reality as it is. And then claim, "HMM it seems like what I usually experience is indeed an approximation of the true reality indeed hmmmm". How absurd! Why not just claim that its not an approximation but we indeed experience reality 100% as it is. I.e. the alternative that I presented. But of course you'd reject that.

Your entire argument lies on the misguided and shallow rhetoric that we can gain new scientific knowledge about the world, hence increasing the percentage of conscious experience of fundamental reality is possible. Do you not realise that no matter how many atoms we split in a collider and no matter how many telescope satellites we send into space , our fundamental qualia literally remains the SAME! That we have the same qualia as our agrigarian ancestors 500 years ago. Are you really retarded enough to believe that we are "evolving" new fundamental consciousness. And that our Agrarian ancestors did not have the conscious potentiality to gain this scientific knowledge? Stop being dense.
New scientific knowledge is not equal to new conscious experience. And it is definitely not equal to new qualia. We can make as many infrared goggles as we want but our mind still fundamentally cannot experience infrared. Of course I could make a deeper point about how even our knowledge of infrared is still based on (indirect) phenomenal experiences and hence we cannot confirm that infrared exists in the noumena. But that is way above your payscale.


And while you are busy making completely unsubstantiated and arbitrary claims about what approximation of the thing in itself we can experience, why not put a number on it. So is it 30% or 40% ? Or 5%. Since you can peer outside your own mental constructs, maybe you can tell us puny humans, who can only see with our eyes, listen with our ears and think with our brain, about just how much of the noumena we are missing out on jfl.
I think you may have lost the plot on the video game analogy. In the video game world atoms and waves don't exist, only underneath it. Electrical signals and the hardware behind the software for the video game world would be analogous to subatomic particles and quantum mechanical systems for our world. For the video game world, our quantum mechanical system (in the real world) would be what's under the hood of the electrical systems and chipsets the software runs on. Whatever is behind/underneath the subatomic particles and quantum mechanical systems governing our real world (i.e., what is beneath our circuit board and chips), we don't know yet

Your understanding of this example is fundamentally different from mine. And in this case it is not a matter of philosophical positions. I am simply the right one here.

You claim that video game npcs gaining knowledge of electric circuitry would be equivalent to us gaining knowledge of atoms and molecules. But that is incorrect since any knowledge we gained about subatomic particals or quantum physics was through our own experiences, hence it was part of our own phenomenological interface. If real life was a video game then atoms and molecules are part of that video game, not the circuitry behind it.

You claim otherwise, that atoms are noumena and just like we gained knowledge about them , the npcs can gain knowledge about circuitry.

But this is exactly where you are wrong. The npcs absolutely cannot gain any knowledge about computer circuitry based on their experiences in the game. You just fail to recognise it. Put yourself in shoes of an NPC.

A better analogy to humans discovering atoms would be an NPC in GTA discovering the wanted level star system. The NPC through its experience in the game can deduce that different kinds of crimes bring in different levels of heat from law and deduce that in this world there's a wanted system with different levels. He can even come up with a theory of how it works just like we came up with theory of atoms. But the NPC is still nowhere near discovering real world electronics

OK, so when you look up and see the twinkling of a star, what do you see? Suspend, for a moment, our knowledge that this is light from millions of years ago and that we're witnessing the past of the star that may not currently exist in its relative time.

I'm not sure what you are getting at. When I see the twinkling of a star, I see the twinkling of a star. And I recognize that this is nothing more than an image created by my mind based on something it recieved from "out there". But I also admit that I don't know what that something is or where it came from.

Cont. In next post
 
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So...consciousness is not a particular arrangement of atoms?
Not in the Kantian context. What we do know is that there is correlation between the brain states of a person and their conscious experiences as they reveal them to us through language.

Interesting. And how do you know that there are no stars in the nuomena?
I don't. That's the point. Maybe there indeed are stars in noumena that look somewhat like what we experience (leading to your "approximations" position). Or maybe they look exactly like the stars we see ( leading to the reality appears just as it is position).

My point is we can't confirm any of that. We only know what we see.

I never did. Not now, and not when I first read Kant. But your condescension and inaccurate estimation of my understanding is noted.
There is no condescension intended. It is simply a fact that a man who can claim that atoms, molecules or quantum physics are noumena doesn't understand what noumena is and doesn't understand what Kant was talking about. Or that man disagrees with every premise Kant stood for and argues for alternatives. For your sake lets assume the latter.

And I've already dealt with those alternatives in the part about "approximation."


Nuomena is defined as the nature of the thing-in-itself. What thing, you may ask? Things that we have phenomenal experiences of. It's absurd to say that some things in our phenomenal experiences have no nuomenal equivalents, because everything in our phenomenal experiences, by definition, have some true nature of the thing we're experiencing - including stars.
Nope. Your statement that we experience thing in itself is again wrong since we only experience what our mind makes us experience. Not a bit more than that. Further, you don't know that the object distinction we see in our experience is not a construct of our own mind. Heck this object distinction completely breaks apart if you look at the world as an interplay of sub atomic particles. And we haven't even left the phenomenal realm yet!

Though it is always funny to see a spiritualist argue in favour of realism and against transcendental idealism to a supposed materialist. But then again there is enough scope in your realism, through the arbitrary "approximation" argument, to fit in whatever spiritual or religious quakery you believe in.


What caused the universe, and is that cause a phenomenon?
In Kantian context you'll have to clarify which universe you are talking. If it is the universe we experience i.e. the phenomenal world. Then it is caused by the noumenal world and our mind.

If you are talking about the physical objective universe i.e. the noumenal world, then it already exists outside the scope of mental constructs like causality, so it doesn't need a cause.
then whatever (true) causes that exist in the world cannot intrinsically be mental, because the mental, by virtue of the nuomena-phenomena distinction, does not represent the thing-in-itself.
No true causes exist in the noumenal world. I thought you said you had read Kant.


.

Something being nuomenal does not exempt it from having causes. Your premise that causality is strictly in the mind doesn't hold from a very basic understanding of science. Gravity is the cause of two objects with mass being attracted and coming closer to one another. This cause is not a mental phenomenon.
The two objects that you mentioned are images in the mind, not objects in the noumena. The act of them "coming together" is also purely an image of your mind.

So sure, you are correct. Gravity exists in the human phenomenal world. And yes, that is indeed the cause of two objects coming together in the human phenomenal world.

I don't know what any of this got to do with noumena.

It's the premise you're using. But that's not all you're doing. You're arguing through the lens of your own physicalism and empiricism.
And you are rejecting that premise altogether by claiming that we can experience the thing in itself or parts of it. I mean, did you invoke these people just to vehemently disagree with their fundamental conception of reality?

So you're an empiricist with a Humean metaphysic who is triggered by anything that he thinks is outside the physicalist purview which enters the realm of the mystical/spiritual. But the idea of a philosopher defining something into existence and re-framing all possible knowledge around this definition is something you're fine with.

OK, great.
Believe whatever you want bro.
 
thats why i love .is, i came for incel related posts and i get interesting threads like this one :feelsokman:
 
Then let me ask you, what exactly is your philosophy?
That is kind of irrelevant. In this particular context I've stated that I have issues with the mention of panpsychism in that video and the idea that we can gain knowledge of fundamental reality, in my first post
 
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That is kind of irrelevant. In this particular context I've stated that I have issues with the mention of panpsychism in that video and the idea that we can gain knowledge of fundamental reality, in my first post
I'm asking you as an aside.
 
I'm asking you as an aside.
Frankly speaking. I don't know. I would've been a realist and made points like yours a decade ago. But there are arguments against that position that I think are very valid.

I could say Kant but there are valid arguments against his ideas and the concept of noumena itself. Maybe some kind of post kantian monism, but I haven't read enough to settle on a position.
 
Frankly speaking. I don't know. I would've been a realist and made points like yours a decade ago. But there are arguments against that position that I think are very valid.

I could say Kant but there are valid arguments against his ideas and the concept of noumena itself. Maybe some kind of post kantian monism, but I haven't read enough to settle on a position.
I see. I hope you figure it out, brocel.
 
Apparently it might be possible someday to create a quantum computer powerful enough to completely revive information(conciousness included) to create a utopia. All the dead humans in history can be revived as such theoretically.

More ot added context below:

The notion of using super quantum computers to recreate deceased individuals in a virtual paradise is a fascinating concept, which hinges on the idea that information is never truly destroyed, based on the principles of quantum mechanics and information theory.

According to the principle of unitarity in quantum mechanics, the evolution of a quantum system is reversible, which implies that information is conserved. Given enough computational power, one could potentially recreate previously "deleted" data. Super quantum computers, particularly those of a galactic scale, would possess immense computational power, far surpassing any existing technology. Such systems could process and analyze massive amounts of data with incredible efficiency.

In this context, these colossal quantum systems could potentially model the universe's past states with exceptional precision, including the information associated with every individual who ever lived. This could, in theory, allow for the recreation of deceased individuals in a virtual environment where the preserved information of every individual is reassembled, effectively reviving them in a digital form. This virtual realm could be designed to cater to the desires and needs of its inhabitants, creating a utopian experience for the digitally resurrected.

While this idea is undoubtedly speculative and pushes the boundaries of our current understanding of both technology and the nature of the universe, it serves as an exciting thought experiment that showcases the potential power of quantum computing and the persistence of information.
Everything is possible through math, you just need the correct formula and as stated in the post, enough power to calculate it.

Its a shame we can't devour the fabric of existence for power, maybe we could stop the universe from extending that way.
 
I see. I hope you figure it out, brocel.
I don't think I want to. Knowing Kant's premise and skepticism was brain rape enough. Already coping with the existential crises it left off. I guess one 4channer described it best saying, "you are trapped in your own mental prison". And the more I ponder on this and look at the world and other people the more I find it to be true. I don't think I can survive another event of having my beliefs in ideals, morals and God upended root and stem.
 
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