philochristos

I don't think people should use AI for writing their responses or getting AI to evaluate their opponents' arguments or their own. But I think it should be okay to look up sources/references or to use it the way you might use google. As far as not using it to write and evaluate posts, I think there should be an honor system because in most cases it's probably not provable, and it's not worth the effort to try to prove it. People who violate this ethos and are caught should be publicly shamed, and nobody should debate with them anymore.

I am Sam, I am.

I do think mental states cause behavior

How do you think that happens on your view?

Do you think mental states (e.g. beliefs, desires, motives, etc.) play a roll in the causal chain leading to behavior, or are they inert?

I'm not fully satisfied with my explanation myself, and I still don't think I 'know what consciousness is.

Well, I appreciate you chiming in. I like to hear other people's points of view on things I'm not sure about myself because maybe they'll think of something I hadn't thought of. Or maybe they'll inspire me to look at things from a different perspective. As Sidewalker said, this is a subject people have been debating for a long time without any definite resolution, so I didn't expect to get it all ironed out in one conversation. But I do appreciate your input.

Thank you for that well-thought out response. When you say you're a dualist, I assume you mean a substance dualist rather than a property dualist. I can understand wanting to reject physicalism because of its inability to account for conscious experience, which is incorrigible and undeniable. But it seems to me substance dualism has issues of its own when it comes to mental causation, one of which I was happy to see you brought up.

The so-called interaction problem is contrived, simply declaring the observed and experienced interaction between mind and physical reality is metaphysically impossible is not a coherent argument.

As I think I said before, we do have an intuition that our mental states, by virtue of their intentionality/aboutness, have some causal influence over our behavior. But what puzzles me is how that happens. I've already articulated why I think that's problematic on physicalism, but it seems to me to be problematic on dualism as well.

We have a fairly good understanding of how physical things can have causal influence over other physical things, but how does something that isn't physical have causal influence over something that is? For reductionists, they at least equate mental states with physical states, and that's how they explain it (though it doesn't solve the semantic issue). But how does it work if there's no physical component to mental states--if mental states are part of a non-physical substance of some sort?

Do you just accept that it does happen and leave it an open question as to how it happens? Or do you have some thoughts on the "how"?

>I'd argue 'concepts are analogous to shape/weight/attraction.

I can see how physical things can have causal influence over other physical things by way of their shape/weight/attraction. Those are just physical properties. What I'm having a hard time seeing is how a mental state can have causal influence over something physical, not merely by virtue of its tangible third person properties (e.g. size, weight, charge, etc.), but by virtue of its semantic content, i.e. what it is about. It could be that I'm not explaining myself very clearly.

Take my desire to eat ice cream. Allegedly, this desire has physical properties that can be expressed in teh language of physics and chemistry. There's a certain brain structure associated with that desire. It seems to me it's that brain structure and all its third person properties that affect my behavior, causing me to get up and get some ice cream. But how is it that the felt experience of wanting the ice cream affect my behavior by virtue of the first person subjective experience of it? Do you know what I mean?

Suppose, hypothetically, that there's some physical structure in my brain, some configuration of molecules, neurons, chemical reactions, etc. that cause me to get up and fetch some ice cream. How or why does it matter what the subjective experience associated with that physical structure is? Couldn't it be just anything? If it happened to be associated with the thought that triangles are not circles or that George is a nice name, but it still had the same underlying physical structure, wouldn't it still result in me getting up to get some ice cream?

Do you see what I'm asking? How do our mental states, by virtue of their "aboutness' or "intentionality," affect our behavior? Or does it?

Thanks for the response. I want to say something about the analogy you draw between computers and ourselves.

The ones and zeros in a computer behave independently of what those ones and zeros are about or what they represent. If our brains are analogous to computers in this way, then doesn't the problem of epiphenomenalism (at least in the semantic sense) remain? The chemicals in our brains fizz and react according to the laws of nature, independently of what they represent, what they are about, or what mental states are associated with them.

Besides that, computers don't experience mental states, so the analogy seems to break down. We have this intuition that our thoughts, beliefs, desires, and intentions have some bearing on our behavior by virtue of what they are about. Computers don't have thoughts, beliefs, desires, etc., so there's something missing in the analogy.

You make a good point about freezing bread.

I really want to make myself a grilled cheese sandwich. The problem is that I'd have to buy a whole loaf of bread and a whole stack of cheese. But I don't want to commit to a whole loaf of bread and a whole stack of cheese just so I can have one or two grilled cheese sandwiches. I hate to waste food, so I know if I got the loaf of bread and the cheese, I'd feel obligated to eat it all. I'd end up eating grilled cheese sandwiches after I didn't want them anymore. This wouldn't be a problem if I didn't live alone. I'm sure other people might like to have them. First World problem can really eat my lunch sometimes, which sucks because I make good lunches.

I asked ChatGPT, and it told me it has no mind at all, no consciousness, sensation, desire, belief, etc. I'm going to take its word for it.

Mental causation is a topic I've been interesting in for a few years now. There are different ways of accounting for it, depending on your perspective on the mind/body problem. It strikes me as being an especially difficult problem for people who take the emergent property view. Emergentism seems to lead to epiphenomenalism.

Most people I've pressed on this issue who subscribe to some form of physicalism tend to want to equate mental states with brain states. They're just different ways of talking about the same thing, or they are different levels of abstraction. That does avoid some of the problems with emergentism, but it doesn't resolve the issue to my satisfaction.

The reason is because if mental states are the same things as brain states, then sure, you could say there's mental causation since there is physical causation. But it seems to me that in that case, it wouldn't matter what the mental states were about. All that would matter would be the physical structure of the mental states, as far as causation is concerned. So you'd still be left with semantic epiphenomenalism.

I'm just curious about your point of view. I'd like for you to tell me what your point of view is on the mind/body problem (e.g. property dualism, substance dualism, emergentism, reductionism, etc.), and tell me how you explain (or deny) mental causation on your view.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, check out this article on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-causation/

Thanks,

Sam

I'm okay with debates on broad subjects. Part of the fun of debating for me is the challenge of making your points as forcefully as you can in as few words as you can. The broader the topic is, the more difficult that challenge is. For example, it would be a bigger challenge to defend the claim that "Christianity is true" than it would be to debate the claim that "God exists" or "Jesus rose from the dead." After all, for Christianity to be true, you'd have to defend BOTH of those statements about God and Jesus. That would be hard to do in one debate. But that's part of the fun.

Lack of clarity is the only issue I ever seen with debate topics. I've always been mindful of whether I make the topic a question or a statement. If it's a question, it needs to be a yes/no question, and question-type debates assume a shared burden of proof. If it's a statement, it needs to be stated as succinctly and clearly as possible. In the case of topics as statements, I think pro generally has the burden of proof unless they stipulate otherwise in the description of their debate. The description needs to explain the meaning of the topic so there's as little confusion as possible. They should define their terms unless the meaning of terms is part of what they want the debate to be about. They should also list a few rules. Rules I've put in debate have always been based on the ways I've seen things go wrong in debate set-ups. For example, if two people are arguing whether this or that is the moral thing to do, it kind of destroys the purpose of the debate if somebody accepts the challenge only to say, "There's no such thing as morality." So I include a rule to avoid that happening.

I think when most people use the word, "Karma," they aren't using it in the same sense that Hindus and Buddhists use it. They're using in a broader sense to just mean "what goes around comes around" or "you reap what you sow." Reaping what you sow is very much a Christian idea. It comes from passages like Galatians 6:7-8. It's a very modest claim that there are consequences to your actions. Good actions generally have good consequences, and bad actions generally have bad consequences. I think that's all people usually mean when they talk about karma. They aren't talking about reincarnation, or having to pay for what you did in a previous life.

Why aren't onion rings an option?

I made a burger yesterday. Does that count, or do I have to buy one? I bought the ingredients.

I think Molinism and epiphenomenalism are both interesting, but I don't subscribe to either one. Actually, I think the whole subject of mental causation, whether you think it happens or not, is an interesting subject.

I don't think "religion" has a tidy definition that everybody would agree to. Most of the time, we just know it when we see it. In the case of Confucianism, I don't see it, but it's always listed among the major world religions for some reason. So what do I know?

I think every religion should have its own hat and that people who follow a religion should wear that hat. That way we'd all know where each other stands, and we wouldn't have to talk to each other.

Even if an atheist has metaphysical beliefs that amount to religious beliefs, unless those metaphysical beliefs are somehow part of what it means to be an atheist, the fact that they are religious in nature doesn't mean atheism is religious in nature. What metaphysical beliefs are both religious and entailed by atheism?

>Are there any questions?

I just have one question. What does the following statement mean?

>But because of the nature of error, you do error not knowing with the display of assumption not speaking on what you know.

Why not just say there are some atheists who treat their atheism in a religious way rather than making the broader claim that atheism is a religion? Not all atheists are "religious" about their atheism, are they?

I wasn't sure whether to post this under philosophy or technology, but this is where I ended up.

The way large language models work is by predicting the next character or word in a string of characters or words, and this is based on being trained on a large amount of text. They do this without the need to think or be conscious. It's interesting because it's getting so good it could probably pass a Turring test. It generates words and ideas as if it were conscious.

Do you think it's possible for something to evolve in nature that could do the same thing? The only obstacle I can see to that possibility is that LLM's have to be trained on already existing text. But if it gets better, you'd think it should be able to mix and match already existing text in order to come up with fresh ideas. With that being the case, I don't see why something similar couldn't happen in nature. Natural selection could select for behavior that's conducive to survival and reproduction without anything conscious being behind the behavior. This behavior could eventually evolve into speech and response to speech, all without being conscious.

Basically, you could have a whole species that's essentially made up of philosophical zombies.

Can anybody think of why that wouldn't be possible?

Hey Airmax! Long time no see!

Hi! I am Sam, I am, but you can call me philochristos. I used to debate on debate.org back in the day. I had an account at debateart.com, but by then I was burned out on debating and didn't participate in any debates. After being absent a few years, I checked in on it tonight and saw that it was shutting down and was told to come here. So here I am. I don't know if I'll debate or not, but I wanted to see what's what.