Disagreeable Me

Huzzah!

My first publication: Quantum Immortality Notes on a paper accepted to Synthese

I’m officially no longer just a crank who just argues about philosophy on the Internet. I’m now a crank who has had a paper accepted to Synthese! Here’s a post about it.
open.substack.com/pub/disagree...

If physics really were substrate independent, and we're embedded in the physics, then we wouldn't have any evidence about the substrate. But panpsychists think we do have evidence about the substrate. So I think that the analogy to hardware/software is misleading.

Eh, kinda. But I think that's misleading. Core to the idea of hardware/software is the idea that software is substrate independent. You can run any software on any (Turing-complete) substrate, within time/memory constraints. I don't think that really fits well with panpsychism.

I would answer "meaningless" to both.

I am a fan. After much deliberation I have decided it should come back.

I've just submitted a complete book manuscript to the publisher. A liberal and mystical reimagining of the traditional religions of the West. Hardest thing I've ever done. I shouldn't complain, though, because it's going to be a bestseller.

I reckon illusionists have got to be on the list somewhere. That's why I post anonymously!

Saying that the term "consciousness" is not useful is not quite the same as saying that consciousness does not exist.

People talk about free will and experience in non-philosophical contexts, and the patterns identified by this usage are real, so for me that justifies keeping them around. Lance Bush argues also that it's not so clear that ordinary people have the metaphysical commitments you assume.

It isn't either. Or it's both. It's not a question with a determinate answer. I've come around to thinking that the best way of thinking about what words mean is by looking at usage rather than metaphysics, and there is a phenomenon that is picked out by usage in both cases.

I used to feel that way about free will but I've come around to compatibilism. There is a lot more to free will and experience than a particular metaphysical story about what it is. But I respect where you're coming from too.

I think it's also distracting to say that experience doesn't exist. It seems absurd and impossible to accept, so you get dismissed as crazy. Better, I think, to affirm the explanandum but to say it isn't what you think it is.

Me too. But can you not just identify whatever is happening when we think we've genuinely experienced the smell of a rose with genuinely experiencing the scent of a rose? Like, telling yourself that story just is what genuine experience is.

I think this might be my clearest articulation of it IMHO

You might think from the name that panpsychism is the belief that bread is conscious. And you’d be right.

The Persuaders: Overture YouTube video by Keith Frankish

Join me and @petemandik.bsky.social live at 6.15 UK time today for something indescribable
youtube.com/live/0T77EDc...

It's clearly a ridiculous comparison, but I think you're going too far. His intent is to say GPT5 is as awesome as a PhD, not to say PhDs are as mechanical as GPT5. He wants to boost GPT5, not denigrate PHDs.

[Me too]

I think you're kind of onto something but you're drawing the wrong conclusion. We are just patterns. But patterns are real. I think the whole universe is just a pattern. Even fundamental particles are patterns.

I think they exist in pretty much the same way. The charges only exist as ways to talk about electrons moving about in your computer. Yeah, that's a cheap shot, because you mean from the perspective of the simulation. But I think multiple perspectives are possible.

The problem here, from my POV, is to say that only fundamental properties exist. Your sensations exist and can be mapped onto higher level emergent structures, which exist.

Some of this hinges on what we mean by "true probability". In our chats I was mentioning some work by Peter Lewis, not endorsing it. I don't really think it's determinate if there is true probability. As long as we can account for how things seem, I think further questions are dubious.

But, as Wallace argues, that's not really adding anything you don't already need for any sort of inference or reasoning project. The axioms of rationality he relies on are pretty much givens regardless of quantum mechanics. So it's not fair to count them as additional postulates.

You don't need to get true probability out. There is no true probability. What you need to get out is a derivation of the Born rule. There has been plenty of good work on that, most notably by David Wallace. What you need to add to get the Born rule is axioms about rationality.

Too Weird Thought Experiments Are Too Weird You Don't Have to Get Too Weird

Latest philosophy post up at the StanStack. I don't post these very often, driving scarcity & value.
#philsky #philosophy

open.substack.com/pub/stanpatt...

Are there good independent reasons to watch it or is it just for Liamologists?

Scientists can rely on math and experiment. The only way to test a philosophical hypothesis is to subject it to scrutiny by considering counter-arguments.

Can confirm.