>>17046005
>It follows that electrons must be able to experience pleasure and pain
This does not follow from your prior premises and any conclusion derived from this notion is therefore unsupported.
If the experience of pleasure or pain are, themselves, weakly emergent phenomena, no individual component of the system need experience it.
What weak emergence does imply is that these sensations are fundamentally reducible to those core components. This need not work the other way around.

Example: a word is made of a combination of letters/sounds and communicated meaning. The letters themselves are not words nor is the meaning in and of itself. A word only arises when these elements are combined. Yet that word remains fundamentally reducible to those elements. That's weak emergence.

>>17046016

> What weak emergence does imply is that these sensations are fundamentally reducible to those core components. This need not work the other way around.

But according to quantum mechanics it actually would, necessarily, work the other way around.

Because every linear combination of a set of valid quantum states is, itself, also a valid quantum state. And, every valid quantum state can be expressed as a linear combination of eigenstates.

From your reply it seems like you concede that electrons would necessarily be able to experience the core-components of pleasure or pain but you do not concede that they would necessarily be able to experience pleasure or pain itself.

But in that case, we can just specify an electron residing in a quantum state that is an appropriate linear combination of those core-components.

Assuming that this is experientially equivalent to the sum of many electrons in those various states, but with lower multiplicity, this works out to an individual electron being able to experience something on the order of 10^-28 times the pain of a human being by residing in a quantum super-position that is a linear combination of all of the electrons in a human mind.

This would be like if letters could reside in a superposition, and a particular letter had a 25% chance of being a P, A, I, or N. In that case, a letter really can become a word, just with a lower multiplicity than the word itself when assembled out of separate letters. Like 25% of the actual word.

Note that I don't truly believe electrons can get sad. Everything that I am saying here should be interpreted as a reductio ab absurdum of trying to reduce subjective conscious experience to weak emergence of quantum states. I think the concept falls apart if you apply any rigor to it.

>>17046045
There's the fucking Q-word...
The concept of "hardness," for example, is meaningless in the quantum regime despite trivially being a property of compounded quantum states expressed at the macro level. So this argument of yours is a non-sequitur. Just because something is a property of a large quantum system does not imply it is a property of the components within.

>From your reply it seems like you concede that electrons would necessarily be able to experience the core-components of pleasure or pain but you do not concede that they would necessarily be able to experience pleasure or pain itself.
No. I do not concede that an electron "experiences" anything at all. My point is explicitly that experience itself may very well be a weakly emergent phenomenon. You cannot assert that any particular component of a system holds a property solely on the grounds that the system as a whole expresses that property. This line of reasoning is literally a documented logical fallacy (fallacy of division).

>>17046073

>There's the fucking Q-word

I didn't involve any woo woo and everything I stated was technically accurate as far as I am aware. So I'm not sure why you're cursing me out for bringing up QM unless you're simply allergic to discussing it.

I only explained, if electrons experience any semblance of a conscious state, in any form, then you could mix-and-match these states together, even with just one electron. Because that's how QM works.

In fact there are particles in the standard model that only exist as a super-position of other particles. Neutral Pions are a good example.

If this is bullshit woo woo, I would like you to actually explain why you think so instead of just dismissing it entirely. Which I guess is easier for you because you don't have to engage.

>"hardness," for example, is meaningless in the quantum regime

Hmmm... but the four fundamental forces of Gravity, Electromagnetism, Nuclear Weak Force, and Nuclear Strong Force still exist. So the components which lead to the perception of "hardness" actually are present in the quantum regime, in an embryonic form, and are "experienced" by subatomic particles.

>You cannot assert that any particular component of a system holds a property solely on the grounds that the system as a whole expresses that property. This line of reasoning is literally a documented logical fallacy (fallacy of division).

Yes, it would be a fallacy. Because the case where none of the parts of a system hold a property, but the system holds the property, is known as "strong emergence". But we excluded this from the very beginning, because we are looking at "weak emergence", where at least some of the elements of the system hold the emergent property.

And if some of the particles held the property, but not others, then this would already prove mind-substance dualism. So in this case, either the entire system holds the property, or the property does not exist. But consciousness does exist. because you're reading my reply.

what about the people who think consisness don't exist , and to some degree a human is a consiuos as a cell.

t-hatless retard.

>>17046099
>the case where none of the parts of a system hold a property, but the system holds the property, is known as "strong emergence"
And this is where you are fundamentally mistaken. Emergence, both of the strong and weak varieties, is explicitly defined as a property expressed in a collective that is expressed by none of the individuals. Where they differ is that strong emergence implies this property could not be modeled as interactions of the base components whereas weak emergence suggests the property is a direct outcome of those interactions.

You pretty much sum it up here:
>the four fundamental forces of Gravity, Electromagnetism, Nuclear Weak Force, and Nuclear Strong Force still exist. So the components which lead to the perception of "hardness" actually are present in the quantum regime, in an embryonic form, and are "experienced" by subatomic particles.
So long as we drop any connotations that come with the word "experience" here.
"Hardness" does not exist at the quantum scale, yet all the fundamental forces that cause hardness to exist in practice do. That is weak emergence.
Now replace the word "hardness" with "consciousness" and you should roughly understand the position that hardline materialists, at least of the weak-emergentist variety, actually hold.

You don't understand what emergent behavior is.

>>17046005
>>17046045
by contradiction cannot provide a positive witness under uncertainty/QM because you lose universal LEM

>>17046119

>So long as we drop any connotations that come with the word "experience" here.

Why drop these connotations with fundamental particles and then proceed to retain them with human beings?

A bag of chemicals claims to have a "soul", it says you are "oppressing" it. The bag of chemicals demands "rights" and "privileges". Why should we care about that any more than we care about the bleating of livestock or the whirring of heavy machinery?

I mean, I actually do care about livestock, hence am a vegetarian. And I would care about heavy machinery if I believed that it was ensouled. But what makes a human being any more "conscious" than heavy machinery, if the core-components are just elementary forces?

Do you understand that this is like trying to build a stone castle out of sand? If that's even possible, then either the sand is a type of stone, or the stone castle is not a stone castle. Any other determination is merely sophism involving multiple layers of semantic obfuscation.

>>17046222
>Why drop these connotations with fundamental particles and then proceed to retain them with human beings?
Because in this case, "experience" is an approximated description borrowed from our perceptual vocabulary, used as a semantic shortcut, hence the quotation marks.
Are you on the spectrum?

>>17046222
>But what makes a human being any more "conscious" than heavy machinery, if the core-components are just elementary forces?
The entire point of this discussion is about the weak emergence of consciousness. This question right here is literally what we've been deliberating on. That the elementary particles involved are the same does not imply the same consequences arise from two distinct arrangements.
Animal or machine consciousness and the surrounding ethics are beyond the current scope of this conversation. Whether my thermometer is capable of suffering is merely tangential to any claims about fundamental particles "experiencing" anything. Weak emergence does not imply they do despite your earlier assertions.

>Do you understand that this is like trying to build a stone castle out of sand?
No, it's not. The term "stone castle" is literally defined as "a castle made of stone." You had already defined a quality of the material in naming the object.
A "conscious being" is never explicitly defined as "a being made of conscious components." At least it's not a definition I've ever come across. So this is you playing word games by conflating different applications of similar-looking language structures.

>>17046234

I am going to ignore your other reply for the moment (I assume you are not two different anons) because I think that this one in particular reveals the entire convert structure of your position.

You put experience in scare quotes and refuse to define it as anything other than a semantic shortcut. So I am inferring that you believe that the term "experience" is a semantic shortcut.

There you have it. All other points revolve around this original point and it becomes the well-spring of all subsequent disagreement between you and me.

You think stuff like pleasure, pain, love, and hate are just semantics. Which obviously invalidates all conventional systems of ethics or else reduces them to the status of semantics as well.

In that case, who cares if I am wrong? Even the idea of being "wrong" is just semantics. Truth and falsehood become weakly-emergent phenomena in a given language system.

I can just choose a language system where my preferred set of beliefs weakly emerge as "true", and this is no less valid an experience than rapping about eating chocolate or tap dancing on the empire state building.

Because it's all just word soup lacking any inherent I S N E S S or I S T I G K E I T to speak of.

>>17046260
First off: im >>17046235 and not >>17046234
We are, in fact, two different people.

Secondly, that's not what he was saying at all. Not to put wirds in his mouth but what he was obviously getting at is that you are conflating two entirely different use cases of the word "experience."
Experience in the conscious sense is not the same as experience in the interactive sense. Conflating the two causes you to perceive contradictions where there are none.

>engaging in philosophy brainrot
you reap what you sow, plus something even worse is hiding behind that weak mask
don't say I didn't warn you

Life is a machine. Replicate the machine, replicate life. Conscious life is a much more complicated machine. Replicate it, you've replicated the consciousness. We're not made of space magic. We're a process that can be understood, improved, etc.

>>17046260
Forgive the double post, but I feel like this isdue is worth explaining in pedantic detail, given how this post of yours reflects a very common error you make whenever you engage in these arguments:
Let's say someone says to you "this rock experiences gravity." There are two ways one could theoretically interpret that statement:
>this rock is consciously aware of the sensation of gravity bearing down upon it
>the force of gravity is acting upon this rock.
Given the bizarreness of the former interpretation, the latter is most parsimonious unless the speaker had made it explicitly clear that they are some variety of panpsychist or something of the sort.
In isolation, since the claim that a rock has some level of conscious awareness is such an uncommon (and arguably stupid) one, you would interpret the more benign and trivially true version so long as the following are true about you:
>1. You have a basic command of the English language.
>2. You are reasonably intelligent.
>3. You have a baseline level of respect for the intelligence of the speaker.
If you fail at #1, then it's not entirely your fault but can be remedied. Improve your semantic understanding of the language and maybe study Grice's Maxims.
It would be unreasonable for me to assume #2 is your problem as this is something a sufficiently literate child will seldom struggle with. But if it is then I don't know what to tell you. Nothing I can say will raise your IQ.
If #3 is your problem, then the solution is simply to deflate your ego. It is incontrovertibly you who picked up the wrong interpretation of that statement in a way that a literate and intelligent person never would in good faith.

>>17046235

>Animal or machine consciousness and the surrounding ethics are beyond the current scope of this conversation.

It's absolutely within the scope of the conversation. Because you should be able to define "consciousness" or "experience" in a way that preserves moral objectivity.

Not saying that you couldn't do that, but you certainly haven't done that. And as far as I can tell, you're just defining "experience" as the sum total of a bunch of forces, plus maybe speech and writing capability.

In that case, yes. It's easy to construe "consciousness" as a weakly emergent phenomenon AND also say that the constituent elements of a person don't have to experience anything. Because you are abusing an implicitly vacuous definition for "experience".

However, a tape recorder can speak and a mimeograph can write. Is it murder if I break a tape recorder? What special property gives human beings special consideration over any other material arrangement, if "experience" is not tied to moral consideration?

After all, I could suggest that human beings are nothing more than stochastic tape recorders puppeted by a bunch of non-sentient subsystems. A meat-recorder, if you will. What special property gives a meat-recorder the right not to be recycled into nutrient paste?

I will answer that question. Our experiences as humble meat-recorders have intrinsic metaphysical meaning that is irreducible. It is this metaphysical meaning, not speech or writing capability, that is necessary in order to define "experience" in any objective fashion.

[1/2]

>>17046668

You are using weak-emergence as both a summoning-circle and a salt-line. A summoning-circle if I ask you, "how is it that it is like a thing to be a thing", and a salt-line if I ask you, "why would it not be like a thing to be an electron".

But it can only be one of those two possibilities. You cannot summon an apparition and then immediately exorcise it.

Either "experience" is vacuous, and it is vacuously true that everything has a degenerate form of it, or else you're on the hook for explaining how an irreducible property of the aggregate isn't present in any of the components nor even some degenerate form of the property.

Yes, you can argue that in weak-emergence the property need not be in the components. But what I've repeatedly tried to explain, and perhaps failed to explain, is that a degenerate form of the property still has to be present in at least some of the components.

At the beginning of this conversation you (or was it somebody else?) said that words are weakly emergent from letters. But in fact, letters are considered words in most dictionaries. I didn't immediately point this out because I didn't want to get accused of pedantry.

But I point it out now to prove a point. And that point is: I think you're making an analogous error when it comes to hypothesized weak-emergence in material aggregates.

[2/2]

>>17046324

There are three ways in which you might define "experience":

Sense #1: The thing human beings are "feeling" when they make statements like "Ow, You Just Cut My Hand Off!" or "Wow, This Soup Has Good Broth!". (hereon termed "Sentient Experience")

Sense #2: A force acting upon two or more point particles. (hereon termed "System Experience")

Sense #3: A force acting upon one point particle. (hereon termed "Particle Experience")

Eliminative materialism requires us to assume that Sentient Experience is just a special case of System Experience.

Now assume that Sentient Experience is not a special case of Particle Experience. This leads to a Sorites paradox because we can take a System Experience and slowly turn it into a Particle Experience by removing one particle at a time from the system.

Each time we ask the question: "does the system retain the Sentient Experience which it had before"? And like any Sorites paradox, this forces us to refine a formerly vague definition. Here are the possible ways of resolving it:

Possibility #1: there is a hard cut-off at some point where removing a single particle from the system turns off Sentient Experience like a light-switch. This isn't a satisfying answer and it raises major difficulties with the notion that Sentient Experience is weakly emergent.

Possibility #2: Sentient Experience can be fractional and it gradually approaches 0 as you incrementally remove particles from the system. But in that case, the Sentient Experience of a point particle would still be a non-zero quantity.

Possibility #3: Sentient Experience doesn't exist, and there is no sand-heap. But in that case, we just nuked conventional morality from orbit.

So in conclusion, if I am "steel-manning" eliminative materialism, then I will assume possibility #2. You are correct in that this resolves to panpsychism, wrong in that I was trying to insult your intelligence, or the intelligence of anyone else in this thread for that matter.

>>17046668
>you should be able to define "consciousness" or "experience" in a way that preserves moral objectivity
I'd rather not jump the is-ought gap.
In other words: the essence of consciousness says nothing about morality. What is right or wrong is independent, albeit related, to the study of ethics.
This is a discussion about ontology. Let's keep it that way.

>>17046670
>Either "experience" is vacuous, and it is vacuously true that everything has a degenerate form of it, or else you're on the hook for explaining how an irreducible property of the aggregate isn't present in any of the components nor even some degenerate form of the property.
>irreducible
There's your problem. You assume consciousness to be irreducible where it may or may not be.
You beg the question in that you assume consciousness is a thing in itself when weak emergentism explicitly states it is not.

Can I prove this framework is correct? No. I never claimed I could.
My point is it is a logically coherent position to hold.
You are the one claiming to have disproven it.

>>17046005
But who was brain

>>17046691

I'm not arguing for an "is-ought" gap. Not at all.

I'm saying that the refusal or inability to accept objective morality as axiomatic incinerates your social credentials as a sentient human.

You could even be right, and it would still justify my treating you as though you have the utilitarian status of a fresh oil reserve ripe for my financial nourishment.

I no longer have any reason to listen to you, reply to you, care about your opinion, or save, help, or not exploit the fuck out of you in any way.

And if you don't like that, welp, you just soundly rejected the most basic idea necessary to qualify as a member of cooperative human civilization.

>>17046005
>5. It follows that [individual element] must be able to exhibit [collective property]. If this isn't true, a contradiction is reached as it shows that [any weak emergence] is strongly emergent, i.e. it introduces at least [N] novel effects that are not present in its constituent physical elements.
Babby's first category error. Dualists and Materialists are mongoloids of equal magnitude and opposite direction. How's that for a dualism? In general, this subject seems to attract almost exclusively "people" who can't think.

>>17046005
>1. Eliminative materialism, which is a negation of mind-substance dualism
While we're at it, might as well point out you made babby's first logical error in premise #1: the negation of mind-substance dualism is... uh... not-mind-substance dualism, so you'd have to refute that. Refuting eliminative materialism does nothing to validate the world's second most retarded take about consciousness.

>>17046718
>I'm saying that the refusal or inability to accept objective morality as axiomatic incinerates your social credentials as a sentient human.
I fundamentally disagree.
Legalism + arbitration is the rough ethical framework followed by every society since the beginning of civilization.
It is that conflation between social goods and objective goods which "NPC" types are notorious for.

I need not appeal to some platonistic ideal of "morality" to justify my actions. I am confident that the average person lives a better life as a product of my existence and actions than they would without me, even if it's only in a small way.

Only NPCs and bugmen believe in objective morality unironically.

>>17046718
>your willingness to sign into my arbitrary moral contract determines whether or not I will "exploit the fuck out of" you
>morality is objective, btw
You are objectively not a good person.

>>17046904
He's a cancerous retard but he's not wrong. If you don't subscribe to what I consider basic human values, you're not human to me. That said, he's not human to me, either. Just a bit closer to a human than cancerous Western pluralists who think alien mindsets should be tolerated.

>>17046905
Subscribing to "basic himan values" is different from thinking those values are "objective," thoughbeit.
I can agree that anyone who doesn't see anything wrong with raping children loses status as a human with rights. But I can also understand that this comes from a place of subjective, albeit quasi-universal, values within the society that I call home and would like to preserve.

>>17046729

>Pleasure and pain are collective properties that need not be present in the individual elements of a material aggregate

I remove one electron at a time from a human brain kept in stasis, until there is only a single electron. At what point did it become incapable of suffering?

Suppose you admit a hard cut-off. Information cannot propagate instantaneously, even information about the number of particles in a system. Therefore, at no time can any material aggregate accurately determine that enough load-bearing particles are or are not present inside the system for "suffering" or "joy" to be felt.

If you deny that pleasure and pain are well-defined terms, then it doesn't matter if I am wrong. The only reason we "care" about beliefs being incorrect, are that incorrect beliefs either cause suffering or prevent happiness. That doesn't matter if "suffering" and "happiness" aren't real ideas to begin with.

If you admit there is no hard cut-off and that pleasure and pain are still well-defined terms, then it is trivial that they must be fractionally present in the individual elements.

>Category error

The issue with the idea of a "category error" is that it is ambiguous. Saying that something belongs to a different category than material is already very close to saying that it constitutes a distinct substance.

If you say that something is in a different category than material but doesn't constitute a distinct substance, in set theoretic terms you essentially just said "x is not an element of A nor is x an element of anything not in A".

i.e. you just said that x doesn't exist. Which is technically a valid deductive argument, but if we accept it then there is by definition no reason to care about holding incorrect beliefs, as we would not be conscious beings.

>>17046730

>Eliminative materialism is a form of mind-substance dualism

I legitimately don't comprehend you and can't tell whether or not you mistyped your reply in some way.

>>17047827
It's an emergent property, not something fundamental to particles. It would also emerge if, instead of particles, it was simulated information. You won't look at a single particle and say it has temperature.

>>17046939
>Subscribing to "basic himan values" is different from thinking those values are "objective," thoughbeit.
There's no practical difference between basic human values being objective and it being ok to treat you like a subhuman for undermining them. "People" who mumble about how basic human values are not objective are effectively shilling moral subjectivism, which undermines those values, which makes it ok to treat them like subhumans. Hope that clears things up for you. There's no need to even get into how moral subjectivism is false on a philosophical level.

>>17047827
>I remove one electron at a time from a human brain kept in stasis, until there is only a single electron. At what point did it become incapable of suffering?
The person becomes incapable of suffering when the brain entered stasis, you clinical imbecile.

>The issue with the idea of a "category error" is that it is ambiguous
There is nothing ambiguous here. If weak emergence is true, emergent properties only apply to the aggregate, not to any of its individual parts.

>I legitimately don't comprehend you
It's because you're not only retarded but also psychotic, which causes you to hallucinate nonsensical quotes nowhere in the thread.

>>17046892

>It is that conflation between social goods and objective goods which "NPC" types are notorious for. ... I am confident that the average person lives a better life as a product of my existence ...

Even concepts like "good", "bad", "better", and "worse" are already equivalent to assuming that objective morality exists. Because we could measure it in terms of "good" and "bad".

There can by definition be nothing that is "bad" about "suffering" or "good" about "joy" without objective morality. You seem incapable of dealing with the consequences of your own materialist belief system.

>>17046901

>Only NPCs and bugmen believe in objective morality unironically.

Then there is by definition nothing morally wrong with me believing in it, and using it as a justification to punish you for not believing in it. The argument is entirely self-negating.

>>17046904

It's not even a moral contract. It's whether or not you can accept an idea as basic as "suffering is bad" or "joy is good". That already implies that phenomena, including actions, can be categorized as "good" or "bad".

>>17046939

>[Basic human values come] from a place of subjective, albeit quasi-universal, values within the society that I call home and would like to preserve

"Quasi-universal" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this sentence, as it is a synonym for "objective".

In fact you basically just said: "yes, I believe in objective right and wrong, but not in any way that could be used in a deductive argument to falsify eliminative materialism".

How convenient for you.

>>17047848
>The argument is entirely self-negating.
What argument? The only thing you quoted is the observation that you are not a moral agent. How come 4chan """intellectuals""" are almost always incoherent 80 IQ inbreds shitting out word salad?

>>17047830

> You won't look at a single particle and say it has a temperature

A single particle doesn't have a well-defined temperature. Two particles are the minimum necessary to describe a "system", and so they do have a well-defined temperature. There you go. I was able to identify the hard cut-off for you.

And no, the gas does not "know" what its temperature is, but I don't claim that it needs to in order for temperature to be well-defined.

I do claim that in order for mental "knowledge" to be well-defined, including "knowledge" of "suffering" or "joy", "knowledge" of whether or not the conditions have been met for "consciousness" would have to be present in the aggregate.

Which is only possible if this "knowledge" bubbles down to elementary particles, because only elementary particles "know" how many of themselves are present or not.

>>17047835

I remove one electron at a time from a human brain kept in stasis, until there is only a single electron. At what point [would it] it become incapable of suffering [even if brought out of stasis]?

Until you address this question, rather than pretending not to understand it, I'm not replying to you further.

>>17047858
>At what point [would it] it become incapable of suffering [even if brought out of stasis]?
When you damage so much that the person never regains consciousness. It's really funny watching 80 IQs trying to be clever.

But look, I understand your dumbshit thought process, even if you don't understand it yourself:

You ASSUME suffering is some kind of ontologically distinct, first-class phenomenon. Then you say: well, if complex brain dynamics represent only weak emergence, they can't be the source of suffering, because they can't produce anything ontologically new. So the suffering would have to come from the primary elements (like the particles making up your brain), which is absurd.

Your obvious error is that you just assume something that contradicts weak emergence in the first place, on the nonsensical basis that you can tell apart pleasure from pain or whatever hallucination.

>>17047867

>...pleasure [and] pain [are] hallucination[s].

I believe I already addressed this, though? If that is true, then there is no advantage to one's own belief system being accurate? This would "delete" any reason for me to prefer truth over falsehood, or being 80 IQ over being 200 IQ for that matter.

>>17047877
>>17047877

This seems like a "Dutch Book" to me.

Either I am right and it does matter, or I am wrong and it doesn't matter.

Either you are right and it doesn't matter, or you are wrong and it does matter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_book_arguments

>>17047877
Notice how your psychotic illness causes you to hallucinate quotes again. Meanwhile everything I actually wrote stands unchallenged.

File: brainlet-cube.png (185 KB, 567x502)

185 KB PNG

>This seems like a "Dutch Book" to me.
They really shouldn't teach low IQs how to read or write.

>>17047882

Your exact quote:

>Your obvious error is that you just assume something that contradicts weak emergence in the first place, on the nonsensical basis that you can tell apart pleasure from pain or whatever hallucination.

My interpretation: your tacking on "whatever hallucination" at the end of the sentence would be interpreted by anyone with a basic command of conversational English that you believe pleasure and pain are hallucinations.

My response: this is a "Dutch Book" for me because the only scenario in which you are correct is one where you cannot benefit from being correct.

Your final counter-argument:

>>17047886

Pathetic. But feel free to post another reaction pic if it makes you "feel" any better (by definition only possible if you are wrong).

>>17047848
>Even concepts like "good", "bad", "better", and "worse" are already equivalent to assuming that objective morality exists.
That is not even remotely true and anything you say which follows from this statement is invalid.
If I said a movie was "good," what would that imply?

>>17047893
>My interpretation
You got steamrolled and your only way out was to go full retard about the last three words of the last sentence. Let me amend it for you:

Your obvious error is that you just assume something that contradicts weak emergence in the first place, on the nonsensical basis that you can tell apart pleasure from pain (or whatever your hallucinated justification was).

>>17047893
You do tealize there's at least like 4 different people shitting on you right now?
I highly doubt >>17047882 and >>17047886 are the same person.

>>17047916
I don't care. All you anti-intellectuals might as well be the same person. Dozens of academic philosophers have verified and validated my argument. As we speak, my definitive proof of mind-body dualism is being reviewed for publication in a prestigious journal.

>>17047921
Lying on the internet is a cool and fun thing to do.

>>17047922
One more word from you and I'm gonna hit you with my Dutch book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_book_arguments

Even if you're right about my lying it just doesn't matter. My argument is correct and worthy of publication.

>>17047927
>My argument is correct and worthy of publication.
No it is not.
Throughout this thread, you have demonstrated:
>you don't understand weak emergence
>you can't tell the difference between a word and a thing
>you can't comprehend the distinction between subjective preference and ontological value
>you misapply a term you clearly just learned yesterday (dutch book) thinking you can throw it around to bypass anything resembling logical rigor
These are mistakes a first year philosophy student wouldn't make.

If you tried to publish this, whatever institution you sent it to would be more likely to send you a legally actionable cease and desist letter than seriously consider it for peer review.

>>17046672
I missed this post. It's worth addressing:

>Eliminative materialism requires us to assume that Sentient Experience is just a special case of System Experience.
No. They are categorically different things. "Emergent from" is not the same as "a special case of."
Consciousness is not a force. The sense in which you "experience" joy is fundamentally distinct from the sense in which your neurons "experience" the electromagnetic force. "Experience" may as well be two different words here.
But that doesn't mean other points you raise in this post are completely incoherent:

>Possibility #1: there is a hard cut-off at some point where removing a single particle from the system turns off Sentient Experience like a light-switch. This isn't a satisfying answer and it raises major difficulties with the notion that Sentient Experience is weakly emergent
Your rejection of possibility #1 is on the grounds that you don't like it? That's not a valid argument.
>Possibility #2: Sentient Experience can be fractional and it gradually approaches 0 as you incrementally remove particles from the system. But in that case, the Sentient Experience of a point particle would still be a non-zero quantity.
What if it's fractional and discrete? You could keep removing elements and the thing would be "less conscious." But there would still be a point where there is no consciousness at all.

There's also your hidden assumption that this is primarily about quantity at all. A lead ingot has far more electrons per unit volume than brain matter but I don't assert that those are conscious. The arrangement of matter is crucially relevant.

Back to the word analogy:
"Hat" is a word. "Ht" is not. I have removed a single element to turn a word into a non-word. "Hta" is also not a word despite containing all the same elements as the word "hat." Arrangement matters. If you stuck an egg beater in by brain I'd lose consciousness very rapidly.

>>17048048
>Your rejection of possibility #1 is on the grounds that you don't like it?
He rejects it on the grounds that it's absurd. Without that filter, you're just pissing in a sea of piss. Have fun sorting out which of the infinitely many absurd possibilities is the right one - an argument you can have with other philosophical retards devoid of the aesthetic sense needed for this discussion.

>What if it's fractional and discrete?
That's just his possibility #1 again. Are you literally retarded?

>>17048074
What's absurd about it? If consciousness arise from a particular arrangement of matter then it follows that removing or dismantling all instances of that arrangement within a system would result in a loss of consciousness. There would also exist a "minimum viable" for consciousness where removing or rearranging any element would also end the process.
(This comes with obvious caveats like the possibility that consciousness can take many different forms and/or many distinct arrangements may result in it).

>That's just his possibility #1 again. Are you literally retarded?
I was mainly making an explicit distinction from a plausible, though perhaps uncharitable, interpretation of "like a light-switch." If #1 would be interpreted as meaning a transition from being every bit as conscious as I am now, removing elements, then suddenly the void then the distinction matters. If we allow some animals, or people for that matter, to be "more conscious" than others with option #1 then the distinction evaporates.

If this thought experiment were pu in practice, how I imagine it would go is:
>fully conscious
>relevant elements start to be removed
>ideas become less complex
>thoughts start to slow
>senses start to dull
>fewer things can be interpreted at a given time
>the distinction between "thinking" and "feeling" starts to blur
>lose concept of the self as distinct from raw experience
>slowly fade to black

Something kinda like that at least. When you're down to that last discrete element then you'd likely only be capable of "thinking," "feeling," or whatever one discrete concept at the time, either bitwise or analog in value. It would be a serious question whether you'd be aware that you're "aware" of anything at all long before that point.

>>17048093
>>17048093
>What's absurd about it?
It suggests an unnoticeable physical difference may, abruptly and arbitrarily, catapult the physical object in question into a fundamentally different category. And when I say 'may', I mean may or may not. Because there's no principled way to tell if the next atom is the one the brain needs to maintain some degree of consciousness. It's nonsense.

>If consciousness arise from a particular arrangement of matter then it follows that removing or dismantling all instances of that arrangement within a system would result in a loss of consciousness
What do you mean "removing or dismantling all instances of that arrangement within a system"? This statement makes no sense. Presumably, the entire brain is an instance of such an arrangement. OP asks: does it really have to be that particular arrangement? Clearly not, so how much can you alter the arrangement before it stops working?

>I was mainly making an explicit distinction from a plausible, though perhaps uncharitable, interpretation of "like a light-switch."
You're not making any real distinction. Under your naive picture, removing small bits of the brain will cause a difference in degree... until you get to that one magical atom that'll cause a difference in kind, and that's the one OP (who's admittedly very retarded) was asking you about in the first place. You've not circumvented it.

>>17048104
>there's no principled way to tell if the next atom is the one the brain needs to maintain some degree of consciousness
I agree. But that doesn't make it "nonsense" nor "absurd."

>Presumably, the entire brain is an instance of such an arrangement.
I was referring to the basic building blocks that make a brain. Let's say a particular neuron structure or perhaps even a set of compounds within individual neurons.
Obviously the brain is plastic as a whole but made of discrete parts.

>Under your naive picture, removing small bits of the brain will cause a difference in degree... until you get to that one magical atom that'll cause a difference in kind
Let's keep the thought experiment simple and imagine it's a specific, bi-phasic, molecule which represents a single "binary unit of experience." There would, of course, be billions of these in the brain. Dismantle them all and the brain is rendered an unthinking pile of goo.
If you only have one, you theoretically have some "experience," but nothing to compare it to and no opinions or thoughts about it. It a simple "on/off" state that may or may not correspond to the surrounding environment that "you" are otherwise unaware of. Combine these many, many, times over and enough comparisons could eventually made where the system could distinguish itself from the environment these units correspond to.
In this model, the amount of these units required to say a thing is "truly conscious" remains arbitrary to a degree. But the mechanism and pathway by which conscious would arise becomes well defined, at least, down to a fundamental unit.

What causes this particular molecule to act as a unit of experience is not a question I'm obligated to answer as I never claimed to know.

>>17048122
>that doesn't make it "nonsense" nor "absurd."
... to a philosophical retard. Naturally, people who double down on absurdities just don't have a sense for absurdity.

>Let's say a particular neuron structure or perhaps even a set of compounds within individual neurons.
You're trying to mask the problem by abstraction but it doesn't change anything. Intermediate structures are weakly emergent themselves, so the atome fatale point applies to them just the same. And even if OP stopped being petty about atoms, what about that one special neuron the brain needs to cling to some semblence of consciousness? Can you show me that? So your take remains equally obtuse.

>Let's keep the thought experiment simple and imagine it's a specific, bi-phasic, molecule which represents a single "binary unit of experience."
>If you only have one, you theoretically have some "experience,"
So you're just gonna bite the bullet and adopt OP's conscious particle strawman? Ok, die on that hill. Or just admit you're a panpsychist and not a real materialist.

>>17048126
>Intermediate structures are weakly emergent themselves, so the atome fatale point applies to them just the same.
Of course, if you rearranged any structure to the point where it is no longer that structure, it is no longer that structure. This is trivially true and not a paradox. Once you're at "minimum viable," taking anything away renders it non-functional by definition. There is absolutely no absurdity here.
What is absurd is OP attempting to conclude from it that the parts you removed are, themselves, conscious. Which I directly refuted.

>what about that one special neuron the brain needs to cling to some semblence of consciousness? Can you show me that? So your take remains equally obtuse.
I said very early on ITT that I don't claim to have proof of weak-emergentist materialism. I was specifically refuting OP's notion that he had found a contradiction with it.

>So you're just gonna bite the bullet and adopt OP's conscious particle strawman?
Conscious arrangement of particles.*
And even that was just a thought experiment. It could require a particular arrangement of neurons. I had a conversation with someone who was quite confident it emerges from microtubules in the cytoskeleton of the cells.
I personally am not arrogant enough to make specific claims about what causes a purely untestable phenomenon.

>>17048147
>if you rearranged any structure to the point where it is no longer that structure, it is no longer that structure. This is trivially true and not a paradox
Any structure stops being "that" structure the moment you remove a single atom from it. The question is: what makes a structure the right kind of structure? And this is a question you can't answer in terms of particle arrangements, which makes babby's naive version of weak emergence fall prey to OP's shenanigans.

I don't know how you keep getting filtered by this so many times and I'm bored with you.

>>17048154
>The question is: what makes a structure the right kind of structure?
That's not the question OP was asking. I don't know how you fail to comprehend what the goal of this discussion was.

OP claimed to have identified a contradiction with weak-emergentist materialism. That's where the goalposts are: that weak emergence reduces to individual particles having consciousness.
If OP's position were "you can't prove a weak emergent origin of the mind," then there'd be nothing to argue about because he would be correct.

>>17048156
>That's not the question OP was asking.
At the very least, it's the question we've been discussing and it keeps putting you in the dummy corner.

>>17048159
No it is not, and I have repeatedly explained this now.
OP basically said "this is not an apple because that would imply it's green and it's clearly not."
I responded "being an apple does not imply it's green."
Now you're coming out of nowhere with "prove it's a fucking apple then!"
It's asinine.

>>17048164
I don't know what your retarded mumbling is about, but the point still stands that there's no definable particle arrangement for consciousness, just flimflam and magical thinking.

>>17048165
>there's no definable particle arrangement for consciousness
If by "definable" you mean "testable" then sure. I never said nor implied otherwise.

>>17048168
I mean just what I wrote. You always arrive at the same absurdity of there being some magical particle element that randomly flips the situation, so you can't really explain what you mean when you claim consciousness arises from some arrangement of matter. If it does arise out of matter, it does not arise out of some arrangement of it.

>>17048170
>You always arrive at the same absurdity of there being some magical particle element that randomly flips the situation
Let's get really silly and say the "consciousness molecule" is water. It wouldn't matter if it's a hydrogen or oxygen you took away. It also wouldn't matter if you added an oxygen. The arrangement was changed and the consciousness dissolves as a result. So there's no "magic element," altering the minimum viable structure in any way alters the property.
You could take that absurd thought experiment way further than intended, of course. But the point stands that minimum viable is minimum viable.

>>17048176
>Let's get really silly and say ... "consciousness molecule"
Yeah, that's really the end logical conclusion of your position. If conscious molecules sound good to you, you can argue about that with someone who cares to argue with a retard.

>>17048177
Or you can retain some level of short-term memory and recognize that I said this earlier:
>>17048147
>It could require a particular arrangement of neurons. I had a conversation with someone who was quite confident it emerges from microtubules in the cytoskeleton of the cells.
>I personally am not arrogant enough to make specific claims about what causes a purely untestable phenomenon.

You know what? I'm curious. You described this version of emergentism as "naive." Could you teach me what a more "mature" version looks like?

>>17048178
>I said this earlier ...
Yes, retard. But I've already explained to you why it circles right back to the same problem.

>You described this version of emergentism as "naive." Could you teach me what a more "mature" version looks like?
Ok. One obvious alternative is to drop the "minimal viable arrangement of matter" cope and realize that once you get some complex dynamic process going, it's not necessarily reducible in those terms at all, even if matter is the fundamental substrate and even if you can disrupt the process by disrupting the arrangement of matter. What atoms you have to remove to make something conscious unconscious really is arbitrary because they're not what defines the process.

>>17048181
>once you get some complex dynamic process going, it's not necessarily reducible in those terms at all, even if matter is the fundamental substrate and even if you can disrupt the process by disrupting the arrangement of matter. What atoms you have to remove to make something conscious unconscious really is arbitrary because they're not what defines the process.
Fair. I actually used fire as an analogy for the same basic concept in the other thread arguing with the poster who I assume is the same retard OP.

>>17048183
Ok. Dualism and materialism are equally retarded, however.

>>17048204
I wouldn't say "equally" retarded. Materialism assumes one less thing. So if dualism is retarded to the nth degree, Materialism is, at most, n-1.
Do you have a preferred framework you'd like to share with the class?

>>17048207
>Materialism assumes one less thing
If that's your criterion, why stop at emergentist magical thinking? Optimize further and assume everything comes into being through God's grace.

>Do you have a preferred framework
No, I just hate cargo cult consciousness theories.

>>17048216
>Optimize further and assume everything comes into being through God's grace.
Or I can minmax and go full solipsism.

>No, I just hate cargo cult consciousness theories.
Fair. I just find it to be vaguely entertaining mental masturbation. More interested in the structure of the arguments than the actual substance desu.

>>17048218
Emergentist cope does have an interesting structure. A honest materialist's objective reality is the same as a mereological nihilist's: a material universe is happy with there being nothing but particles, because its laws are agnostic to the would-be wholes they govern and its constituents are agnostic to the would-be wholes they make up. You say materialism cuts down on assumptions, but every complex object you believe in is an assumption that physics won't back you up on. How can minds be emergent phenomena if emergent phenomena don't exist outside of minds? "Emergent phenomena" are purely a matter of perspective. They don't exist in a universe without perspectives.

OP here. Just to clarify:

>>17047921
and
>>17047927

Is not me. He was just a troll.

>>17047916
>>17047922
and
>>17047930

may have been him replying to himself but I can't really tell.

I seriously don't want to get misconstrued, so I will use a tripcode from now on ITT.

And for the record, no, I have no pretense of publishing anything anywhere nor would I consider my arguments as presented here well-stated enough to be publishable.

>>17048237
>How can minds be emergent phenomena if emergent phenomena don't exist outside of minds? "Emergent phenomena" are purely a matter of perspective. They don't exist in a universe without perspectives.
Idk man. Do fires exist without perspective? Maybe not in any objective sense but that doesn't stop them from having consequences.

For extra fun we could go full non-cog and posit that asking about the "essence" of consciousness is meaningless entirely. Anything we could try to say about it fundamentally devolves into a "just-so" story or definitions sperging at some level and nobody even agrees what the concept of "experience" would even mean or look/feel like in isolation from material sensory input.

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>>17048239
Thanks for clearing that up.
Btw, I'm mildly, but dispassionately, offended that you would accuse me of that sort of samefaggotry.

>>17048245

4chan won't let me post unabbreviated post numbers so bear with me.

For the record, I think it was >>17046901, ...7851, ...7867, ..7882 and ...7886 having a full-blown melt-down based on the fact that all of his replies contained some weird IQ obsession as a unifying theme and were also just fairly rude overall.

And no, I don't think that the "Dutch Book" argument is correct in general, only if someone is directly intimating that pleasure and pain simply aren't relevant. Which I felt like he came pretty close to saying. Then immediately tried to weasel out of. Then lost his shit completely over.

Maybe I should have clarified what I meant by "Dutch Book" better, or described the essential idea without using the term, which by itself might be considered nothing more than pompous technobabble. I left a Wikipedia link for a reason.

Game-theoretic decision theory crumbles into dust if there's nothing to maximize or minimize for to begin with. So, there is no conceivable reality where it makes sense to say that suffering doesn't matter, because the only reality where that is a true statement is one where you cannot benefit from believing in it.

See my argument here: >>17046718 my point was very similar. The only reality in which objective morality does not exist is one where dehumanizing people who don't accept it doesn't matter, because there's no morality to maximize or minimize for.

Even self-harm or self-benefit is a subset of total moral consideration. For example, Old Testament laws actually prohibit self-mutilation. Remove these considerations and I would legitimately have no reason not to stick my hand in a blender, gouge out my eyes, cut off my ears, or accept objectively false beliefs.

Of course I would never engage in these activities, nor would any sane human. But I'm also not contending for some strong variant of nihilism where even suffering, ugliness, and death is itself not meaningfully better or worse than joy, beauty, and life.

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>>17048273

I'm not saying you do or don't believe in anything like that, but I do think that you're engaging in some sort of evasion when you say that objective morality does not exist and then try to preserve concepts like good and bad.

And no, I would not really use that as a justification to dehumanize you IRL. Because I assume you don't actually believe it, and are merely posturing semantically for a multi-day internet argument.

Maybe it's because you seem to think that everything I say is an explicitly bad-faith rhetorical trap? You don't want to get pinned down and then rail-roaded into a prefabbed Judeo-Christian shaped debate hole. So, you just won't play along with basic premises.

Fine. But the fact that you were pretending not to believe in right and wrong frustrated me enough to write a reply trying to force the issue by (at least) pretending, myself, to dehumanize you for it. At least, I hope you were pretending. I certainly was.

Whether or not I can persuasively cross the is-ought gap to debunk nihilism directly, I can at least show that the motivation is self-negating on a game-theoretic basis, because it removes the presence of anything to be maximized or minimized for to begin with. This my "Dutch Book".

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>>17048273
>>17048274
I'm going to clarify again that I'm not actually married to any particular position and I'm not looking for a win (though I'd be lying if I said I didn't have an, at least methodological, materialist bias). I'm primarily interested in the structure of the arguments you're using to support your position. And I think they're bad.

>on morality
I never said morality "doesn't matter." What I said was that it's distinct, albeit related, to any definition of consciousness. We could even adopt the apparently absurd pseudo-materialist panpsychist view and still accept "objective morality" as a distinct, material, entity. Or we can go full spiritualist dualism and hold a strictly subjectivist view of morality. They're largely independent variables. Your demand for a "definition of consciousness that preserves objective morality" is a non-sequitur.

On a similar note: one can consistently view morality as a man-made tool subject to the end goals defined in the ethical framework. Min/max : pain/pleasure is a perfectly sensible goal and pretty much sums up Bentham's Utilitarianism (maybe Mills', it's been a decade since I took an ethics course). But that doesn't necessarily imply that no other viable goal exists (see: Kant) or that there exists at all a platonic form of "goodness" or "badness." One can talk about something being good or bad without reifying the concepts beyond a socially constructed paradigm.

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>>17048273
>>17048274
>the "Dutch Book"
This might be a little bit pedantic of me. But there's a reason I accused you of just learning the term shortly before evoking it. It's one of those things that might come up if you were to google something like "term for situation where I win either way." But you grossly misappropriated it.
Any situation where you evoke a Dutch book outside of an explicit probability theory context is a category error.
The kind of argument you're actually evoking here is basically a modified Pascal's Wager (if I'm right, I win; if you're right, who cares?). With a bit of workshopping it could also be treated as a performative contradiction or even a transcendental argument (you reject any framework where "should" has any objective value so why "should" I listen to you at all?).
I don't put much stock in those particular argumentative structures but it's simply bad form to misappropriate a term with a specific and well defined meaning to something that already has different specific and well defined terms to describe it.

As I said: this might be a tad pedantic but worth a mention.
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