>I'm not a panpsychist.

Apologies then, but you seem quite keen on defending it.

>The mind can be understood far more easily as a separate entity from consciousness.

Elaborate? I'm interested.

>That's a shame, isn't it? Empathy is how you remove differences between each other, not by simply stating a premise. It's not that psychedelics won't show you this, but you are so conditioned to not give any credence esoteric ideas.

I don't see it as a shame. My empathy works pretty well. And you frankly have no idea how 'esoteric' my beliefs are. I'm willing to entertain any idea; when I entertained panpsychism I found it incoherent and unconvincing.

>I find it ridiculously humorous that you just brush away the oneness as being a matter of fact, when in fact a direct experience of this oneness is what changed an astronaut forever.

People change constantly. Astronauts are people too. Why should I find this particularly compelling?

>It isn't just a meaningless statement, it means that all the distinctions that we can draw up amongst humans, animals, or any living being for that matter, are completely subjective.

I wouldn't say all distinctions, but even so I don't see this as any sort of major revelation. Perhaps for an anthropocentrist, which is something I'm very far from.

>Ego isn't bad, it is just unruly and often compels you to do things that are counterproductive to your life. What is recommended is that you grow out of your egoic habits/thought patterns.

I think a little unruliness makes life more interesting. Counterproductivity, chaos, suffering, a bit of destruction - all spices of life. The egoless and the egoed are perfect foils for each other. Alas, I prefer discussions of metaphysics and epistemology to axiology; more potential objectivity to work with. I was just expressing an aside.

>I'm not a panpsychist, so I don't know why you keep referring to it.

Er, this entire comment chain is about panpsychism.

>What seems like hippie nonsense is the same nonsense Buddha spouted. I'm sure he was heck of a hippie.

Probably.

>Stoicism has a metaphysical aspect that sounds almost like the same hippie nonsense that offends you.

I don't know enough about stoicism to comment, but sure, possibly.

>You have no idea how encumbered you are by the weight of your ego. True independence is not being bogged down by the vagaries of your mind. And who ever told you that by giving up your ego, you are giving up your freedom of being an individual?!

Evidently I don't even know what an ego is, but I don't feel any particular weight or encumbrance in my life beyond what's necessary to keep my feet on the ground and provide traction to keep moving forward. Floating isn't really my thing.

>It is called liberation in spirituality for a reason. It is a liberating experience.

I felt liberated enough saying I was no longer convinced of atheism. I don't think I can handle any more liberation.

>it isn't a manic delusion I can assure you.

Sorry but the deluded never believe they're deluded lol. It's part of the definition.

As fun as this is though I'm mostly just here to discuss panpsychism, not the values of unity and ego death and the Buddha etc. I'd be here all day otherwise.

As a dualist I recognize the existence of phenomenal conscious experience alongside physical existence, and as a theist (not of any religion) I believe this conscious experience could persist beyond death. Consciousness is contingent on our physical bodies while we're alive but it's not a logical necessity that it must always be that way. I'm not trying to convince you of theism or dualism, I'm just stating that it's possible to believe in both an afterlife and the existence of a physical universe.

Also Nietzsche's concept of eternal return could count as a sort of physicalist afterlife, no? Provided that the universe turned out to be cyclical? You could also return as a Boltzmann brain or something. Iunno, physicalist afterlives are weird.

I'm probably operating with different definitions than all you panpsychists. For me mind means 'qualia' and 'oneness' or 'unity' would imply we all share qualia. I've done psychedelics before and I don't think any amount of them will ever make me start seeing through other people's eyes. Sure, we're all united in that we all experience qualia, we're all living beings, whatever, but that's a pretty meaningless statement. Furthermore, I don't see why everyone thinks having an ego is a bad thing. It's not synonymous with being selfish. I value independence and see no compelling reasons why I ought not.

I'm a dualist and a theist and to be totally honest panpsychism seems like hippie nonsense even to me. The intense feelings of love and unity and 'ego death' that people get from psychedlics - and being an astronaut, apparently - seems to me like a form of manic delusion caused by an overwhelming flood of emotion. It's like religious ecstasy and people thinking they've spoken to God. It's just, iunno, unbecoming. I mean absolutely no disrespect by my phrasing by the way, I'm just not sure how else to put it.

I don't ignore reality and I still believe in an afterlife 🤷‍♀️

Okay, I feel "isolated" and I reject the "panpsychic nature of reality". Once again, where is the evidence that panpsychism is correct?

>Children’s prisons are among some of the most violent, though I don’t want to focus on the gruesome details – it only bludgeons the reader into apathy.

"Please don't think about why some of these kids are in here in the first place, just continue to be outraged."

Cute until you remember some of these kids are murderers

What do we call a facility where these 'hurricanes' can be sequestered? 'Hurricane sequestration facility' seems a mouthful. Is there a shorter word we can use? Something about six letters long, perhaps?

They're young and they broke the law, i.e. are offenders. What else should they be called?

I love how this subreddit of 'philosophers' gets offended by innocuous and reasonable questions and just silently downvotes instead of offering any serious answer.

Good thing science isn't the sole arbiter of what can be said to exist. Consciousness is perfectly coherent if you're not a radical physicalist.

>The logical reason is that there is another universe exactly like this one which means the zombies are exactly like humans but lack qualia. This means they believe they have qualia and say that they have qualia when you ask them.

I suppose that's fair enough, but personally I'd say there's a tacit assumption in any thought experiment that causality is 'reset' and the hypothetical world plays out according to whatever has been changed in the thought experiment to begin with. In which case these p-zombies wouldn't believe they have qualia.

>Of course it can. We can literally record you experiencing the redness of red.

>I have. He makes no sense. Like you he keeps making insane and completely unsubstantiated claims like "qualia can't be detected" when we can clearly detect you experiencing qualia.

What magical machine is this that records my qualia? You can measure my brain activity all you want but that's not the same thing. Neural correlates of consciousness are not consciousness.

The insanity here is the inability to understand what I'm talking about when I refer to the most fundamental aspect of human existence. My only options are to believe that physicalism has resulted in some sort of collective self-denying delusion (a la Daniel Dennett) or that philosophical zombies actually exist, are among us, and are debating philosophy of mind with us. I can't tell which one I prefer.

>Given all of that how can you be sure I am not experiencing the qualia of echolocation?

Because I'm sure you would've told me by now if you were lmao

>Arguing about the definition of words nobody can agree with. That's philosophy in a nutshell.

Truer words have never been spoken. Anyway it's far past my bedtime, gotta call it a night/morning. Have a good one 🤙

>How?

Because a zombie has no qualia and I know I do have qualia because I'm currently and constantly directly experiencing qualia.

>The zombie thinks they have qualia.

>No you wouldn't. You'd talk about it just as much because you would think you have qualia.

According to whom? That's not part of the thought experiment and I see no logical reason to assume that. I've spent this entire discussion establishing exactly why that wouldn't be the case. The zombie would only think it has qualia (assuming it understands the correct definition of qualia and hasn't been lied to) if it actually does have qualia and thus it wouldn't be a zombie.

>Honestly it makes no sense to me.

Then I'm afraid I must conclude you yourself are a p-zombie :)

>But they are physical. Your perceptions are physical. Your feelings about your perceptions are also physical.

>But it's physical. Your subjective experience can be measured in a machine by examining your brain activity.

>Subjective experience is physical and there is no need for a special word to talk about it.

Neural correlates of consciousness are physical and can be measured but consciousness (qualia) itself is not and cannot. But this is a whole argument by itself. I'd recommend reading Chalmer's The Conscious Mind for a better understanding.

>Why? Why is this definition of creation only limited to fundamental ontological properties (whatever that means).

The article in the post we're arguing in the comments section of should answer this question.

>We can guess. We can theorize. We can simulate. We can mathematically model. We can build machines to mimic it. That's what humans do to understand things beyond our perception.

What these things do is convert that information into a form we can access. But we can never experience the quale of bat echolocation, or bird magnetoreception, or shark electroreception, et cetera. At this point we've just arrived at the Mary the color scientist thought experiment.

>Do you know why? It's because nobody can define the word metaphysical consistently.

'Philosophy' has never been properly defined either, but here we are.

>The point is the neither the observer or the zombie itself can know whether or not they are a zombie.

Someone who isn't a zombie would know they themselves aren't a zombie though. Someone who possesses qualia would be able to recognize that fact. The point of the thought experiment is for those qualia-having people to imagine the existence of physically-functional humans who have no qualia and to consider the philosophical/metaphysical/epistemological implications. It makes perfect sense to me.

>Can we though? This is the whole problem You can't conceive of such a world because that world would be exactly like this one.

It would be almost entirely physically identical. Qualia are non-physical by definition. They're the result of physical processes, yes, but qualia are not physical themselves. And I can easily conceive of such a world existing. I know that if I were a p-zombie I'd probably talk about qualia a lot less!

>Your question is saying there is a physical eye seeing physical wavelengths of photons and a brain is undergoing physical processes. So if you are perceiving anything it's due to physicalism. There is nothing metaphysical about perceiving colors.

You got me here. I know there are no idealists on reddit so I still made that example for physicalists really, haha. But I still think it works - subjective color experience itself is a quale, and that's what the whole example is about.

>This argument boils down to "anything anybody can conceive of is real and exists using the words real and exist in the ways we are familiar with".

Hence why I put 'crude'. The argument doesn't work for everything that can be conceived of, only fundamental ontological properties. If humans were all blind we wouldn't discuss sight experience, but most of us can see and thus we can discuss sight experience. The discussion of sight experience itself is one thing that tells me that others can see, and when I apply this logic to qualia this is how I overcome solipsism.

On the other hand, we know bats echolocate and we know the physics and the biology behind it, but most of us can't personally echolocate - and thus we don't talk about the quale of echolocation. We don't even know what it's like, so how would we talk about it? I don't have a nice fancy polished argument for this line of thought but I'm sure you can at least see what I'm aiming at here.

>Most likely this is true because the word itself carries no defined meaning and was created purposefully to be vague and malleable so as to prove a point".

I'm not sure about that. Every definition I've seen of qualia strikes at a very particular feature of human existence - subjective conscious experience. It's always seemed like a pretty straightforward concept to me.

>But they would. The experiment says they could talk about it.

Er, can you clarify?

>I understand what you are saying, your arguments don't make sense to me and I don't accept your premises or conclusions.

That's fine. These kinds of metaphysical debates usually don't result in any form of mutual understanding lol. But figured I'd try anyway.

But those sub-systems operate on the same logic as the rest of the computer. It's all computer code. Taking 'conciousness' to essentially mean 'qualia' as in the Chalmers tradition, consciousness is fundamentally ontologically different from the brain itself, despite their correlation.

To keep with the computer analogy, the brain is like the CPU and consciousness is like the light coming from the monitor. Totally separate things. The light has nothing to do with how the CPU operates, and the CPU is actually responsible for the light in first place via instructions given to the monitor. But you can, in a way, make the CPU acknowledge the light that it's creating by hooking up a webcam and pointing it at the monitor. Sort of a computer self-awareness, the same way I'm aware of my own qualia/conscious experience.

The p-zombie thought experiment isn't about whether a p-zombie could actually be identified in reality, it's about whether the concept is simply coherent; could a human that doesn't experience qualia exist and act functionally identically to a human that does experience qualia? It's just an attempt to clarify what the term 'qualia' refers to and, based on whether one finds the p-zombie idea to be coherent or not, establish whether qualia are an ontologically real, non-physical property of the universe.

To borrow from Wikipedia (Consciousness is being used here in the sense of 'experiencing qualia'):

> 1. According to physicalism, all that exists in our world (including consciousness) is physical. > 2. Thus, if physicalism is true, a metaphysically possible world in which all physical facts are the same as those of the actual world must contain everything that exists in our actual world. In particular, conscious experience must exist in such a possible world. > 3. Chalmers argues that we can conceive being outside of a world physically indistinguishable from our world but in which there is no consciousness (a zombie world). From this (so Chalmers argues) it follows that such a world is metaphysically possible. > 4. Therefore, physicalism is false. (The conclusion follows from 2. and 3. by modus tollens.)

This article is pondering whether we'd ever be able to 'know' a metaphysical property that we bear no relation to. I'll give some examples to clarify the problem. For physicalists: imagine dark matter didn't have the property of mass and thus had no gravitational effects. We would never know dark matter exists because we'd have no other way to interact with it or recognize its existence; in fact, there very well could be a form of physical 'matter' like this out there already, but we have no way of knowing it. We couldn't even really speculate on the nature of such matter beyond whether it exists.

For idealists: look at a color wheel and memorize all the colors. Imagine that the spectrum of visible light we can see is expanded by 50 nm in one direction. That new light we'll be able to detect will have colors that are not a part of the current color wheel, but are an addition to it. What do those new colors look like? I personally can't envision any colors existing that aren't ROYGBIV or pink. Perhaps such a color is metaphysically impossible?

For dualists: the universe consists entirely of mental and physical properties. Invent a new fantasy property that doesn't exist and explain it to me in a way I can understand. I'd bet this is also impossible, but perhaps I'm just not very creative!

I would personally consider it impossible for anyone to comprehend or effectively discuss an ontological property that we have no way of recognizing or being impacted by. Because a p-zombie does not have the metaphysical capacity to experience qualia it would not be able to comprehend or discuss it; as you said, a p-zombie would not know it's a p-zombie, because it wouldn't know what it was lacking. The other side of this is that, to put it very crudely, if we are able to comprehend and discuss an ontological property then it can reasonably be said to exist, even if its relation to other properties is uncertain. We possess qualia and are able to discuss it, hence why the p-zombie idea and the term 'qualia' exists in the first place. This is probably what OP means when he says "you can't know of consciousness without being conscious." In this case it really does take one to know one.

>As an observer you also don't know whether or not the subject you are talking to is a zombie. They act as if they are not, and if you ask them they say they are not.

I'd say that if I asked a p-zombie if they experience qualia they'd say "what's that?" They would not be able to understand my explanation because they don't have the metaphysical capacity to understand the ontological properties that I experience and talk about. I wouldn't be able to prove it but I'd have a reasonable suspicion that they were philosophical zombies (provided my explanation was any good). Other than discussing qualia itself though, they'd otherwise be indistinguishable from a normal human, provided that qualia aren't strictly necessary for engaging in usual human behaviors.

I hope at least some of this made sense.