>reality is all that which is extended in space and time
You are missing the fact that "space" and "time" are also illusions painted on consciousness.
You are missing the fact that "space" and "time" are also illusions painted on consciousness.
They're properties of the world which consciousness measures.
A mountain is painted in the ink of a photo, the mountain is not an illusion. You're focused only on the measurement, and not what is measured.
I understand your difficulty. It is hard to imagine the universe disappearing if all consciousness cease to exist the next second.
But is that really hard? Don't everything in your dreams disappear when you wake up?
Let me ask another question. Can you differentiate between a consciousness observing a universe, and a consciousness with a sensation of a whole universe, built in?
And the point of that is our subjective experiences only require consciousness, and not a universe that is independent of it.
Then if all conscious beings (lets say humans are the only ones for sake of argument) die, then existence ends. Simply put, this does not happen because consciousness occurs in a substrate.
Take the thought experiment of the boltzmann brain, it still requires the assembly of probabilistic entropy to occur, it is not nothing.
The starting idea is that there can be no definition of existence other than "something a consciousness can detect (directly or indirectly)". So if there is no consciousness, there is no existence.
But I think there could be a difference between death of all conscious beings, and consciousness itself disappearing. Consciousness could also be something that evolution found a way to tap into.
>Take the thought experiment of the boltzmann brain, it still requires the assembly of probabilistic entropy to occur, it is not nothing.
Yea, take that. I think the number of possible worlds where a simple life form spontaneously assembled and evolved to a human following the laws of that world, are enormously larger than a world where a full human brain spontaneously assembled all by itself. It is just statistics that we find ourselves in a world of the former kind and not a brain alone in an empty universe..
Yea, I don't subscribe to this line of thinking as consciousness had to happen before existence. Kinda messy when you think about it.
>Consciousness could also be something that evolution found a way to tap into.
This, at least how it's written makes consciousness something like the electromagnetic field that exists everywhere. For example if I said "If you want to fly, you need to oscillate the flying field". Most scientists are going to give you a hold up and state it doesn't work that way. They'll tell you that you need an atmosphere and a body capable of generating force to create lift. It's not like a magnet that jiggles a field that exists everywhere in spacetime.
Looking at flying is fun in itself... do fish fly in the water? At what viscosity does flying become swimming. Sorties paradox creates lot of issues in different places, especially the discussion of consciousness.
Concepts like "before", "happen" does not have a meaning in this context? Did the left part of a circle happened before the right part?
In a similar way, consciousness and existence could be part of the same structure that exists outside of time and space. It is not meaningful to say that one part existed before the other. It is not even meaningful to say that this structure had always existed.
You are, in some reality.
On the very last point: the conclusion that consciousness is thin, like a photograph, and the world thick -- follows from the most complete explanatory account of how consiousness works. The idea that there is no world, or that the world is a thin transcendental ego -- this abandons the project of offering an account of consiousness at all and ends up in incoherence.
Within consiousness I am presented with: what I cannot change (fixed perceptions), what I can change (eg., imagined perceptions). This duality is immanent to consiousness itself. The imagination can apprenend the fixed, ie., I can imagine scenarios that I could, in principle, see. So there is, immanent to consiousness already, a representational duality: I have both fixed perceptions that I cannot change, I have mutable perceptions (imaginations) that I can -- and my mutable perceptions are representations of my fixed perceptions.
All of the dynamics of the duality of the represented and representation, of the fixed/external and of the mutable/internal -- are already immanent to consiousness.
What remains to be explained is: why? The obvious answer is that the reason i have fixed perceptions is because they are caused by a world that they depict, and the reason I have variable/mutable perceptions is they are caused by me as I represent that world to myself. The duality immanent to consiousness is explained by the duality of the measured and measuring.
Even if you abandoned the world "external" and replace it with "fixed", you gain nothing. Everything which seems objectionable about this duality is already present. If you simply assert it, rather than explain it, your position is weaker because you've nothing to say.
The causal origin of our fixed perceptions is the world, which impacts our sensory organs, interacts with our bodies, and produces a thin perceptual surface to us which causally-directly depicts the world that we are in. These fixed perceptions are constructed by our bodies thru this process of activation, which we can call "measurement with post processing" ie., a kind of digital camera rather than a chemical one.
But in any case, to answer your final question: yes, the difference is that "consiousness" with this duality of the fixed and the variable, and their representational relationship, only makes sense if part of consciousness isnt being determined by consciousness. The need to say what determine it means the "consiousness is complete" option incoherent, if "consciouness" as a term comes to adopt all the properties it needs to explain the fixed perceptions, then you'll find consiousness becomes both the material and the mental -- and all you have done is empty the word of all its meaning
See, you have this observation of subjective experience. One hypothesis for wher this come from, require only consciousness, and the second requires consciousness as well as a whole universe. And the second hypothesis brings up even more questions. Where did this universe come from? Who created it? Why was it created?
The simple answer is that only consciousness really exists and everything is painted on top of that.
that is, reality exists and consciousness is "painted" on top of that?
IMO, anti-materialists are merely uncomfortable with the degree to which they understand neuroscience and related topics (including, btw, capabilities and limits of LLMs). Chalmers, for instance, basically insists that the Hard Problem is Hard simply because he finds it hard.
Because it brings along more questions like "Why does the reality exist"? "Why does the reality looks like this, and not like something else"?
Any answer that brings up more questions that it answers is not a very good answer IMHO...
You cannot ask why consciousness exist. That would be like asking why a circle exist. To elaborate if we consider that our reality is computable from a set of physical laws and a set of random events, then it implies that the consciousness inside that reality is also computable.
The next question is whether the subjective experience those consciousness, or those consciousness themselves can exist without something actually doing the computation.
Does a circle exist before someone draw it? It does, right? and thus, if a world with consciousness is definable, then the subjective experiences inside those consciousness will happen without something actually computing it.
So all such possible worlds exist. By "exist" I don't mean the classical meaning of it. Just that there are subjective experiences going on "inside" them.
I think quantum mechanics also converge on the same idea with the multi-world interpretation of quantum events. At every point when there is a random event, the universe is split and all possibilities is realized in disjoint universes.
And I think this is the same thing as I have described above. Actually multi-world interpretation would be the final nail in the coffin for physicalism. How can material world split infinitely at every infinitely small instance ! But evidence shows that something like that is happening.
So it has to be something like what have been described above.
Why consciousness exists? Here I just asked it.
>How can material world split infinitely at every infinitely small instance !
It does so by continuous motion described by a differential equation. I don't see any problem. If it did something else you would still ask why it does what it does.
This kind of simplicity isn't simplicity at all, it is to abandon saying anything. It is in the nature of consciousness to inexplicably have all the properties which are needed so as to seem the way it does, sure.
And what is this "consiousness" in the end, which has in its nature, the production of all material reality to serve as a fixed causal basis for perception? to generate perceptions of the brain and bodies of animals; of our death, and of a world which is describabl without any of its own properties? What is the nature of a consciousness which deliveries to us a world that requires none of it?
What is it that when I move the muscles of my eye, and what i see changes? What is it that i require a light in a room to see at all? That i require it to be the case that whatever I perceive, my fixed perceptions must always be as-if the laws of physics were true? What is it to say, "consiousness has the property of seeming as if when I see, I see because light scatters off a surface into my eye, and I can control the image genrated by moving the muscles of my eye?" and yet all of that sentence be false without the word 'seeming' ?
What madness to is it to say that mercury in a thermometer not only acts as-if it is in coffe, but in its nature, acts as if there is an entire world that it is moving through -- and its motion up and down is always according to laws and principles as if such a world existed?
This is no longer consciousness at all. When the nature of mercury in a thermometer is to act as if coffee exists, it is no longer mercury. When "consciousness" is taken to have all the features needed to provide the material world, it is no longer anything in a mind -- but has within it, the whole of the external, fixed, material -- and so it is itself now alike those things. When "consciousness" has finally been modified to produce everything within it, the term means nothing at all.
The entire system of properties and objects which are external to consciousness, narrowly defined, are still external within consciousness broadly defined. And with this broad definition comes all the laws of physics, all the properties of materiality, all of everything which mentions nothing of sensation. And the word "consciousness" has to bare all these properties? And you call this simple?
It is much simpler to answer the question: why does the mercurary in the thermometer move? is it because in its own nature is a simulation of an entire universe? No, its nature is simple. It is that there is such a universe it is inside.
And our consciousness is likewise simple.
It is. It is the theory of everything.
> what is this "consiousness" in the end, which has in its nature, the production of all material reality to serve as a fixed causal basis for perception?
If you haven't already came acrosss M.U.H, I would just direct you to https://arxiv.org/pdf/0704.0646
>What madness to is it to say that mercury in a thermometer not only acts as-if it is in coffe, but in its nature, acts as if there is an entire world that it is moving through -- and its motion up and down is always according to laws and principles as if such a world existed?
Yes, that is exactly what is being proposed. Causality is an illusion. But how? Imagine an idea of a "definable world". Imagine that all definable worlds "exist", but imagine consciousness appearing only in "regular" worlds, with uniform laws and behaviors..
That's kinda DoA. Isn't there a proof that uncomputable things exist in mathematics, so if mathematics is true, why hypothesize that they don't exist even if we know that they exist?
>but imagine consciousness appearing only in "regular" worlds, with uniform laws and behaviors..
Why this limitation? Irregular worlds with appearing consciousness are mathematically definable just fine, easily even.
This is not a limitation. The basis of this idea is that there is consciousness in this (our) world. So we know that consciousness can result from our set of physical laws and the set of all random events in this world . That is the only thing we know for sure, and the only place we can start reasoning..
We don't know if it is possible for consciousness to exist in a world where everything is random, or less regular..
Both of these can be measured. They are not illusions.
Money is an illusion made up by people and agreed upon for basically the whole of the world economy, but not real. Space between me and the lamp on my desk is very real. The age of the world and the age of the universe is very real.
That you can measure it does not change the fact.
>Money is an illusion
Money is a number. Brain does not create an illusion for money, at least not in the sense we are considering here.
the reality-is-illusion meme is self-consistent (panpsychism, simulationism, dream-of-god-ism, whatever). merely being self-consistent isn't good enough.
the alternative (and there is only one) is physicalism and its epistemology, science. the main appeal of this is parsimony, often referred to as Occam's Razor.
Oh it is useful. It answers questions like "why do reality exist". "who created it", "What was before it"...Or may be I should say it does not really answer them but makes the questions irrelevant.
Just like how earth centric hypothesis posed questions like "Why is everything circling the earth and why is earth special", and heliocentric hypothesis made that irrelevant by proving that it is just an illusion caused by observing from the earth.
This isnt a benefit, it's a sign that the semantics you're giving language fail to actually model its meaning.
The position isnt self-consistent, unless you engage in the typical idealist peformance of pretending not to know what these questions mean.
In the end, idealism is defeated by the very implausibility of this performance. The idealist, is implicated in the rich ontology of the real world by the very use of language itself. Presupposed is this ontology, and the ordinary truth of ordinary propositions requires it.
If the question, "what was here before I existed?" is meaningful, then idealism is wrong. And it is meaningful, therefore it is wrong.
This is no longer meaningful. It would be like a thing inside a painting on a paper asking "what was here on this paper, before this paper existed"?
Space and time are illusions of consciousness. It does not make sense to ask "where", when there is no space, and "when", when there is no time.
It's like if someone said, "what's the radius of this circle?" and you had defined "circle" and "radius" such that circles could never possess such a property, so the quesiton itslef is incherent, just as, "what's the flavour of this circle?"
But my confidence that the question, "what was here before i existed?" has meaning, is greater than my confidence that it is completely incoherent. It plainly and obviously has meaning. Thus anyone selling a semantics for language which makes this question incomprehensible, despite it being perfectly comprehensible, is selling a defective system.
The issue is even more severe for idealists, because it isnt that question alone which becomes incoherent, but vast swathes of language that implicate even idealism itself. Meaninglessness is a kind of virus, which in the end, makes even idealism itself incoherent (since even to state the very terms it is stated in presuppose an objective background for these terms to refer to).
In any case, teenagers of the 1910s/20s thought it was a great thing to go around telling people ordinary questions with obvious meaninings were, in the end, completely meaningless and we were fooled by them all along. This didnt go well for them, as above, these positions themselves by their own critirea ended up meanignless too.
And in any case, the idea that it is a good thing that propositions whose meanings we readily understand should turn out to be meaningless is now correctly seen as a defect of any system proposed.
The obligations on these grand philosophical system are to answer to the meaningful, to take as a given the wide variety of propositions which are obbviously meaningful. Systems which "answer to nothing", and instead, in an adolescent way, delete knowledge and understanding in order to save themselves, are philosophically bankrupt.
Philosophy explains and answers the meaningful. It is only a technnique of analysis and argument, it has no power to determine what is true; only why, in some very narrow cases, what is true, could be so.
But that question is meaning less given the context. It is like some character in a 3d computer game looking at the simulated world around them, and wondering "What was here before?". They are actually asking what was there before the game started, or before the computer was turned on. There is no "here" before the computer turned on, or before the game started running in the computer and initialized the 3d space inhabited by the character.
Now, dropping that fictional context, we have to ask: what context is giving the words meaning now? If we take a physical/material context, then the answer is 'nothing' in virtue of there being no such person, no such space, etc. because by 'here' in the material context, we know 'here' refers to a point in space and time that the character does not exist at.
When I ask, "what was here before me?" you have to give me how you're assigning meanings to words. To tell me I'm operating in a fictional context when i say, "the earth" -- is fine, so be it, materialism is a kind of fiction which preserves the ordinary meaning of words.
But for that to be plausible, there has to be a context in which those meanings make sense at all.
Kant, and similar idealists, tried to give them a "categorical context" such that "here" refers to something like an implied geometrical aspect of perception; and "before" an implied temporal aspect; and so on, which constitute the fixed law-liuke background of perception.
So that this background treats materialist meanings as fictional, and idealist meanings as the literal ones -- OK, but that's still a meaningful question -- because "me" in the idealist context doesnt refer to the transcendental ego, it refers to the apparent body in apparent space and time. And the right answer is the fictional one, because in the literal context, there is no "me". In any case, this fictional context in which the question still makes complete sense, we call "materalist".
The onus is on you to make plausible why the insanity of a "fixed law-like perceptual background of the generation of perceptions as-if materialism were true" is the principle literal context vs., it being the fictional one.
everything is explained if the law-like features of fixed perceptiosn are derivative fictions that give rise to a fictional mental space of pretend objects, and their actual apparent structure is just in the world. Nothign is explained if its the reverse, indeed, you now have a very very veyr large number of problems on your hand explaining anything at all.
The only reason we find it plausible to treat an NPC as operating in a fictional context is because we have the material context to langauge to give the words literal meanings, and literaly, we find them false. There really isnt any such idealist context for ordinary langauge.
"What was here before me?" becomes meaningless in a pathological way: we cannot even say what it oculd me, if it were true.
For an NPC, we can say very easily, this is how we know its fictional: we know what it would mean for skyrim to exist, and it does not.
Non-kantian idealists who deny the meaningfulness of these questions arent saying "we know what it would mean for there to be a place before you existed, and its false" -- theyre saying the veyr words youre using never had, nor could even have, any meaning at all. This is plainly false. We know very well what it would mean for the proposition to be true: that space and time exist, that physical objects exist, that you are one, and you are located at some time in some point in space, and prior to that, something else was.
This is very simple, ordinary, obvious, language which is meaningful. Even if its meanignful in a fictional context, ie., it is all literally false, it is still meanignful. This means that this kind of radical anti-meaningfulness idealism is false, because there is a coherent system of meaning in which these propositions could be true, even if they arent.
What remains is to decide whether they are true. And given their truth explains everything, by abduction, we suppose -- as a category -- they are true.