Philosophy Updates

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Ideological neutrality is vital to science (Jerry Coyne)
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2026/04/26/does-reality-have-a-liberal-bias/

EXCERPTS: It’s well known that most American academics lean towards the Left (I’m one), and that this trend is increasing over time. Here’s a plot of the political leaning of academics made by Sam Abrams (a politics and government prof at Sarah Lawrence) shown on the website of the Heterodox Academy. The trend is clear, and it’s the same among many surveys of American academics.

[...] I think that Colbert meant, and others mean, that reality itself has a tendency to buttress Left-wing views...

[...] what bothers me is that the quote implies that reality itself leads to liberalism. But reality has no ideology: it’s simply what’s true about the Universe. ... Actually, anyone studying reality—trying to find the truth—had best abandon any ideological slant beforehand, as ideology impedes the search for truth. The methodology of science itself—hypothesis testing, pervasive doubt, double-blind testing, the use of math and statistics, publication and communication, and empirical observation—is not ideological, and does not lead one to either the Left or Right.

[...] This paper from BioScience, written by a philosopher and an evolutionary molecular biologist, shows that studying reality itself is best done in an atmosphere of ethnical neutrality. ... The upshot: neither morality or ideology can be derived from reality, but those of a certain ideological or moral bent may rely on reality more than those of other stripes... (MORE - details)
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That old "radio receiver" analogy again, but Susskind is arguably more adroit with it than most.
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Why consciousness is not in your brain (Leonard Susskind)

INTRO: Is consciousness really produced by your brain — or is that the biggest assumption in modern science? In this video, we explore one of the deepest and most debated questions in all of philosophy and neuroscience: the nature of consciousness itself. We break down the Hard Problem of Consciousness, first formulated by philosopher David Chalmers, which asks why physical brain processes produce subjective experience at all. We examine the Binding Problem — how your brain processes color, shape, and motion in completely separate regions, yet you experience everything as one unified perception. We also look at how quantum mechanics complicates the materialist picture, and why some of the world's most serious thinkers have proposed that consciousness may be fundamental to reality rather than a byproduct of it.

 

[TheVat]

That old "radio receiver" analogy again, but Susskind is arguably more adroit with it than most.

That's not his voice. I am unsure why a fake voice from AI was needed for this video. His actual voice is just fine, and doesn't lapse into a British accent off and on. (Will probably watch more anyway, unless I can find a transcript elsewhere)

 

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That's not his voice. I am unsure why a fake voice from AI was needed for this video. His actual voice is just fine, and doesn't lapse into a British accent off and on. (Will probably watch more anyway, unless I can find a transcript elsewhere.

In reverse, I've also seen Hossenfelder videos where she wears the same clothing and has the same appearance over weeks. Though I'm pretty sure the audio part was real -- was her speech, due to the sarcastic intervals. Or at least gosh I hope so -- otherwise, AI avatars are already more diabolically sophisticated than I anticipated. But Susskind is at 85, whereas she's "only" 49 (i.e., she can still handle the regular output on her channel).

But faking the voice does seem to be the thing when they get too elderly to regularly bother with reciting material from old books and lectures. Thomas Sowell, now at age 95, is maybe the most deluge example I've stumbled across, where a trained AI imitates his speech characteristics across a horde of videos.
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How lazy social scientists and commentators use the c-word to avoid doing their jobs
https://www.alexnowrasteh.com/p/the-culture-crutch

EXCERPT: If you’re going to claim that culture has an effect, you should be able to do four things. First, pinpoint exactly what cultural characteristic you mean. Don’t be vague, be specific by describing the type of behavior. Second, prove that cultural behavior actually exists as a measurable trait. Don’t rely on stereotypes, do the hard work. Third, demonstrate that the cultural behavior differs meaningfully across the groups being compared. Wow, that culture likes food a lot. Which culture doesn’t? Fourth, rule out that the real cultural trait isn’t caused by an exogenous economic force like high real estate prices, rising wages, or different institutions that incentivize behavior. Almost nobody who invokes culture does any of these four things. Culture is endogenous to everything. That’s why you have to do the work to isolate it. That’s also why almost nobody bothers... (MORE - details)

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Malcolm Cowley: the last of the Lost Generation
https://porticoquarterly.com/book/the-last-of-the-lost-generation/

INTRO: Malcolm Cowley was one of the most important literary critics and editors of the twentieth century. In a dozen books and over a thousand articles, he helped shape the canon of modern American literature. As an editor, he rescued William Faulkner from obscurity, revised the reputation of Walt Whitman, discovered John Cheever and Ken Kesey, and published Jack Kerouac’s On the Road when no one else would. Most importantly, he chronicled the so-called Lost Generation of American writers in Paris—Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and others—who led our national letters into modernism. When Cowley is discussed today, one usually hears the adjective “forgotten” or “neglected” attached to his name. Few critics are still read fifty years after their deaths, and Cowley’s prominence peaked nearly a century ago between the end of the Roaring Twenties and the start of the Cold War. It would be a mistake, however, to consider him a bypassed historical figure... (MORE - details)

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Ideas of slavery: John Samuel Harpham’s ironic history
https://thepointmag.com/criticism/ideas-of-slavery-john-samuel-harpham/

EXCERPTS: Throughout the period when colonial slavery was taking shape, Harpham explains, English writers still relied heavily on a conception of slavery that they inherited from ancient Rome. In contrast to the ancient Greek idea that some people could be “natural slaves,” a view most commonly associated with Aristotle, Roman law defined slavery as the product of convention. Individuals were naturally free, in this view, but could be reduced to slavery if they committed a crime or, more commonly, were captured in war. “In short,” Harpham writes, “slavery arose in Roman law as the result of history rather than nature, as a fact of modern life rather than a timeless feature of the universe.”

Accordingly, the central question for English writers in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not what qualities made a person a natural slave—a question that might lead to a racial answer—but instead what circumstances allowed for enslavement. The English showed a special interest in this question, Harpham suggests, because they were simultaneously forging a national self-identity based on “the conviction that theirs was a nation dedicated to freedom.” [...] Harpham shows that the English did not rush to imitate the Iberian example of enslaving Africans and Native Americans. Instead, they spent several decades defining themselves in opposition to it.

By the end of the seventeenth century, however, something had changed. The English had become so deeply entrenched in the slave trade that it seemed natural. How that transformation took place in such a short time is the question that drives Harpham’s book... (MORE - details)
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The missing genre: Why political philosophers should be writing to get Netflix deals
https://hiphination.substack.com/p/the-missing-genre-why-political-philosophers

EXCERPTS: Over the past few decades, political philosophers have generated an extraordinary range of proposals that radically rethink how societies could be organized: epistocracy, sortition-based systems like lottocracy, post-national governance, algorithmic coordination, and more.

[...] They’re not on TV, in movies, they’re just not in the culture. Science and even ethics has solved this problem with fiction. Science-fiction isn’t a genre that just describes new technologies, they ask people to imagine what it is like to inhabit worlds shaped by them. Religious theology and fantasy novels are not about tenets, but about what worlds are like inhabited by metaphysics entirely different from the manifest image people see every day. Their entertainment value is why people love talking about these issues.

This is what we need for political philosophy, a genre of short story, novels, screenplays, etc that is like sci-fi, poli-fi, only it is not fiction with a political theme, of which we have an abundance. It is a genre of fiction that treats political systems themselves as the primary speculative variable in a fictional narrative... (MORE - details)

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Mechanistic indicators of understanding in large language models
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11098-026-02513-1

ABSTRACT: Large language models are often portrayed as merely imitating linguistic patterns without genuine understanding. We argue that recent findings in mechanistic interpretability, the emerging field probing the inner workings of LLMs, render this picture increasingly untenable-but only once those findings are integrated within a theoretical account of understanding. We propose a tiered framework for thinking about understanding in LLMs and use it to synthesize the most relevant findings to date.

The framework distinguishes three hierarchical varieties of understanding, each tied to a corresponding level of computational organization: conceptual understanding emerges when a model forms “features” as directions in latent space, learning connections between diverse manifestations of a single entity or property; state-of-the-world understanding emerges when a model learns contingent factual connections between features and dynamically tracks changes in the world; principled understanding emerges when a model ceases to rely on memorized facts and discovers a compact “circuit” connecting these facts.

Across these tiers, MI uncovers internal organizations that can underwrite understanding-like unification. However, these also diverge from human cognition in their parallel exploitation of heterogeneous mechanisms. Fusing philosophical theory with mechanistic evidence thus allows us to transcend binary debates over whether AI understands, paving the way for a comparative, mechanistically grounded epistemology that explores how AI understanding aligns with-and diverges from-our own. (MORE - details)

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The abstraction fallacy: Why AI can simulate but not instantiate consciousness
https://philarchive.org/rec/LERTAF

ABSTRACT: Computational functionalism dominates current debates on AI consciousness. This is the hypothesis that subjective experience emerges entirely from abstract causal topology, regardless of the underlying physical substrate.

We argue this view fundamentally mischaracterizes how physics relates to information. We call this mistake the Abstraction Fallacy. Tracing the causal origins of abstraction reveals that symbolic computation is not an intrinsic physical process. Instead, it is a mapmaker-dependent description. It requires an active, experiencing cognitive agent to alphabetize continuous physics into a finite set of meaningful states.

Consequently, we do not need a complete, finalized theory of consciousness to assess AI sentience—a demand that simply pushes the question beyond near-term resolution and deepens the AI welfare trap. What we actually need is a rigorous ontology of computation.

The framework proposed here explicitly separates simulation (behavioral mimicry driven by vehicle causality) from instantiation (intrinsic physical constitution driven by content causality). Establishing this ontological boundary shows why algorithmic symbol manipulation is structurally incapable of instantiating experience.

Crucially, this argument does not rely on biological exclusivity. If an artificial system were ever conscious, it would be because of its specific physical constitution, never its syntactic architecture. Ultimately, this framework offers a physically grounded refutation of computational functionalism to resolve the current uncertainty surrounding AI consciousness. (MORE - details)
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[TheVat]

Why AI can simulate but not instantiate consciousness

What we actually need is a rigorous ontology of computation. The framework proposed here explicitly separates simulation (behavioral mimicry driven by vehicle causality) from instantiation (intrinsic physical constitution driven by content causality). Establishing this ontological boundary shows why algorithmic symbol manipulation is structurally incapable of instantiating experience. Crucially, this argument does not rely on biological exclusivity. If an artificial system were ever conscious, it would be because of its specific physical constitution, never its syntactic architecture. Ultimately, this framework offers a physically grounded refutation of computational functionalism...

This is much needed. Opens territory explored by Searle ("syntax is not semantics") and Penrose (conscious understanding can't be replicated by an algorithm). I might register with PhilArchive to see the full paper. I think this framework also does well in avoiding biochauvinism.

 

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This is much needed. Opens territory explored by Searle ("syntax is not semantics") and Penrose (conscious understanding can't be replicated by an algorithm). I might register with PhilArchive to see the full paper. I think this framework also does well in avoiding biochauvinism.

If pan-phenomenalism or pan-ex were the case, it might assist [generic] functionalism a bit with regard to dispelling the appearance of "conjuring" (due to all substances and interactions harboring internal states). But whatever experiences were privately "showing" themselves for a machine would not match our own content. I.e., different substrates (with their own underlying and unique contingent relationships) would probably produce different qualia than ours (for representing the same external items) even when the identical formal process was adapted and employed at the higher technological level.

But otherwise... Functionalism potentially does allow an artificial or humanoid philosophical zombie to be possible (though likely not 100% convincing). If the android was designed or programmed to reliably pretend that its analysis of sensory data from its "eyes" was instead a manifestation of colored objects (and so-forth for the other sense modes).

This equates to what illusionist Nicholas Humphrey is describing below for biological brains. A stored memory or the concept of "green" has to be applied even to a legit "showing" of green just to cognitively verify that it is indeed presenting itself (that it is "there"). Though these eliminative materialists are denying those phenomena altogether -- contending that the idea (the systematic, propositional pretending) of "green" and the rest is all there is. Absurd, of course, to any of us who are not philosophical zombies (have those manifestations internally slapping us).
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https://aeon.co/essays/you-know-what-consciousness-is-you-live-in-soul-land

EXCERPTS: The starting point for ‘illusionism’, as it’s come to be called, is the realisation that conscious experience is no more – and no less – than a set of ideas. It is the way each of us represents in our minds what’s happening around us, to us and because of us.

Mental representation means invention and construction. As Daniel Dennett wrote in Content and Consciousness (1969):

• No afferent [incoming sensory signal] can be said to have the significance ‘A’ until it is ‘taken’ to have the significance ‘A’ by the efferent [outgoing and action-generating] side of the brain.

Sensations are what you as a subject make of sensory stimuli impacting your body: the pain in your toe is horrible; the sweet taste on your tongue is sickly; the red light before your eyes stirs you up.

What does illusionism buy for us theoretically? The crucial point is that mental representations, even if they are made by matter, are not made of matter, and are therefore not restricted to having properties that conform to physical reality. And in that case, much of the difficulty and mystery of explaining consciousness falls away. We don’t have to explain the existence of brain-states that possess strange non-physical properties such as phenomenal redness, but only the existence of brain-states that give rise to the idea of these properties. As Dennett has put it: the phenomenal quality of a purple sensation can be like ‘a beautiful discussion of purple, just about a colour, without itself being coloured’.

In short – sorry if this is a mouthful, but I’d better be explicit – we have only to explain how the brain situates a person, propositionally, as the holder of a certain kind of belief about redness, sweetness, coldness, pain or whatever. I say ‘only’– no doubt it’s not going to be easy; it is indeed a remarkable kind of belief – but there’s no reason to think it’s going to be impossibly hard.
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Direct affirmation (as if one needs it) that various scientists and notable thinkers are using AI avatars on their sanctioned channels that are trained to replicate their image and voice patterns. These are primarily those who have published plenty of material for these artificial video generators to quote from. Though, as mentioned previously, there are others like Hossenfelder revolving around recent news analysis who, thereby, probably have to keep the audio part real.
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THE HOFFMAN UNIVERSE

VIDEO EXCERPT: My name is Donald Hoffman. I am a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Irvine. I have spent more than 40 years studying consciousness, perception, and the nature of reality.

What you are watching is an AI-rendered version of me built to present my research, my published findings, and my actual arguments.

Every claim you will hear in this video comes from my peer-reviewed work, not interpretation, not paraphrase, my work...

The science neuroscience refuses to accept

 

[TheVat]

My name is Donald Hoffman. I am a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Irvine. I have spent more than 40 years studying consciousness, perception, and the nature of reality.

Fascinating - Hoffman's domain of conscious agents has had my attention for a while, as it brings Leibniz and his monads into a modern perspective. This AI video presentation (his avatar eyes are weird, that uncanny valley thing, so I was content to just listen to audio) might be overstating some matters. I'm far from sure Hoffman's math decides the metaphysics or settles as a proof. But the video is a good starting point for grasping the basic concepts like "we've just been studying the interface and not the reality," and then digging further into the literature - might be worth a separate thread here if I can find some fairly accessible papers. I imagine David Chalmers is fairly excited by this line of inquiry. One question we all need to ask is how to avoid falling back into the minefield of Cartesian dualism. Or alternatively the problem of getting into a non-falsifiable conjecture of philosophical idealism. If humans haven't evolved to know the truth, per Hoffman, then we have no means to test for networks of conscious agents as he describes them. And his own theory would be suspect.

 

[TheVat]

(cont.) Afterthought: All those problems aside, I am interested how the conscious AI brigade reacts to this theory. If conscious agents (in their Leibnizian mysteriousness) are using bio-brains as interface, then there seems no barrier, in principle, to using some kind of digital (or digital/analog) AGI in a similar mode and exploring a cognitive realm with different qualia and perceptual filters. And all the epistemological problems....are remaining? Well, AGI aren't evolved organisms so there's that I suppose.

 

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Emergent particles are real
https://aeon.co/essays/why-reality-is-more-than-the-sum-of-its-particles

EXCERPTS: Once we get to our finished picture with atoms smoothed away, there is no essential difference between the mathematical descriptions of elementary and emergent particles. We just happen to know that the latter would also admit a description in terms of atoms, should we choose to make it.

Despite this, it is often suggested that elementary particles are ‘real’ whereas emergent particles are not. Emergent particles are sometimes called ‘quasiparticles’ to emphasise this reduced status. The reasoning is that phonons, say, are just a simpler description of the real atomic motion. [...] I would raise several objections here... (MORE - details)
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Many minds, not many worlds, constitute quantum reality
https://iai.tv/articles/many-minds-not-many-worlds-constitute-quantum-reality-auid-3565?_auid=2020

INTRO: A century after the birth of quantum mechanics, many are still puzzled by the idea that Schrödinger’s cat is simultaneously alive and dead. The mystery drives some of our most prominent physicists to embrace the bizarre idea that reality constantly splits into a near infinity of parallel worlds, of which ours is just one. Philosopher of physics Nadia Blackshaw argues that this “many worlds” interpretation goes wrong not only in its extravagant multiplying of entities, but in its attempt to adopt a “view from nowhere,” describing reality from no particular perspective. She proposes instead a “many minds” interpretation, in which the cat is alive from one perspective and dead from another. It’s time physics took conscious perspectives seriously. (MORE - details)

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Perfectly aligning AI’s values with humanity’s is impossible
https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-alignment

INTRO: One of the hardest problems in artificial intelligence is “alignment,” or making sure AI goals match our own, a challenge that may prove especially important if superintelligent AIs that outmatch us intellectually are ever developed. But scientists in England and their colleagues now report in the journal PNAS Nexus that perfect alignment between AI systems and human interests is mathematically impossible.

All may not be lost, the scientists say. To cope with this impossibility, they suggest a strategy involving pitting AI systems with different modes of reasoning and partially overlapping goals against each other. As the AI systems attempt to meet their personal objectives in this “cognitive ecosystem” instilled with “artificial neurodivergence,”, they will dynamically help or hinder each other, preventing dominance by any single AI.

We spoke with Hector Zenil, associate professor of healthcare and biomedical Engineering at King’s College London, about his and his colleagues’ work on alignment’s limits and its future... (MORE - details)

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Richard Dawkins concludes AI is conscious, even if it doesn’t know it

Richard Dawkins concludes AI is conscious, even if it doesn’t know it

Chats with AI bots have convinced evolutionary biologist but most experts say he is being misled by mimicry

www.theguardian.com

ALSO: https://www.sciforums.com/threads/richard-dawkins-buys-into-ai-being-conscious.167483/post-3787844
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While this concerns the most sensationalist and absurd fake channels, at this point it's clear that even the subtle ones aren't legit, either, just because they take forever to get removed. And any well-recognized communicators who truly do utilize AI-generated avatars are still inadvertently facilitating this counterfeit trend and thereby making us [the public] more gullible to it.
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Someone Used AI to Make a Fake Avi Loeb on YouTube (Dec 2025)
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-fake-avi-loeb-youtube

EXCERPT: A YouTube channel called “Dr. Avi Loeb” is impersonating the researcher by seemingly using generative AI tools to clone both his likeness and voice, suggesting the topic has sparked enough public interest to be lucrative to scammers.

“Indeed, these videos are fake, produced by AI,” Loeb confirmed in an email to Futurism. “I reported them to YouTube.”

Unlike Loeb, who’s speculated that 3I/ATLAS and other interstellar objects could have technological origins while acknowledging that it’s also likely they’re just naturally occurring objects, the videos on the YouTube channel are extremely sensational, with titles like “3I/ATLAS Is a PROBE — New Data Leaves No Doubt.” (MORE - details)
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Red button or blue button? What a viral question tells us about game theory and the state of the world
https://theconversation.com/red-but...game-theory-and-the-state-of-the-world-281993

EXCERPT: Most people think the choice is extremely obvious. However, not everyone agrees whether the obvious answer is blue or red – and they want to argue about it. What’s going on here? From the point of view of philosophy and game theory, the question shows two different intuitions and views of decision-making with starkly contrasting results. And the very popularity of the question highlights the fraught existential stakes many of us feel in modern life... (MORE - details)

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AI chatbots can prioritize flattery over facts – and that carries serious risks
https://theconversation.com/ai-chat...r-facts-and-that-carries-serious-risks-274298

EXCERPTS: Anyone who’s been told by a chatbot that their ideas are brilliant is familiar with artificial intelligence sycophancy: its tendency to tell users what they want to hear. [...] AI sycophancy seems harmless, maybe even cute, until you imagine someone consulting a chatbot about a weighty question, like a military strategy or a medical treatment. We study the impact of extensive human interactions with chatbots, and we recently published a paper on the ethics of AI sycophancy. We believe this tendency harms people’s ability to tell truth from fiction, and is psychologically and politically dangerous. (MORE - details)

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Twenty Years of The Splintered Mind
https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2026/04/twenty-years-of-splintered-mind.html

INTRO: Way back in April 2006, I launched The Splintered Mind. Happy 20th birthday, blog of mine! In 2006, academic blogs were cool. After the rise of Facebook and Twitter, most died. Recently, there's been something of a revival on Substack (where I now mirror this blog), but it's nothing like the old days, when checking the blogs was a favorite procrastination technique of graduate students everywhere. (MORE - details)
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For Ibram X. Kendi, it’s Nazis all the way down
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2...f-ideas-great-replacement-book-review/687060/

EXCERPT: A great deal of research clearly went into amassing the copious data points that fill this nearly 600-page book, but the result is a slog to get through, because—beyond a vague nod toward the manipulation of “anger” and economic anxiety—Kendi almost completely ignores the people who are attracted to this worldview or the reasons they might be. Instead, he gives us something less helpful: another conspiracy theory. (MORE - details)

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(review) Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes
(review) I Think of You Constantly with Love: The Letters of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Ben Richards
https://literaryreview.co.uk/its-a-wonderful-life

EXCERPT: When Wittgenstein finished the Tractatus, he announced that all philosophical problems were now solved. But he later renounced the ‘picture theory of language’ that informed it. Language, he came to think, rather than being a static set of logical or descriptive statements which somehow mirror facts, is a set of activities. Words have meaning by virtue of the particular ‘language-game’ in which they are spoken or written. Even words for feelings and sensations, rather than being labels that we incorrigibly apply to our inner states, have meaning ‘only in the stream of life’. He was, as Gottlieb puts it, ‘turning the mind inside out’. (MORE - details)

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When Kierkegaard got cancelled
https://www.plough.com/en/topics/faith/discipleship/when-kierkegaard-got-cancelled

EXCERPT: Around this time, Kierkegaard completed his Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, which he regarded as the capstone of his work to date. [...] The trouble began when Møller published an uncharitable review of one of Kierkegaard’s books in his well-regarded Gaea Aesthetic Yearbook. [...] Møller seemed to miss the point of the book entirely. [...] Usually, a poor review could be ignored. But Kierkegaard knew what others did not. Møller – despite cultivating a façade of intellectual prestige – held undisclosed ties to The Corsair, Copenhagen’s most notorious satirical magazine and scandal sheet... (MORE - details)
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[TheVat]

EXCERPT: Most people think the choice is extremely obvious. However, not everyone agrees whether the obvious answer is blue or red – and they want to argue about it. What’s going on here? From the point of view of philosophy and game theory, the question shows two different intuitions and views of decision-making with starkly contrasting results.

The key to this one might be to ask, "do you want to push the red button and increase the chances of living in a world where altruistic people have been weeded out?" A blue button choice is one which correlates with social awareness, I would hypothesize.

 

[C C]

Why has philosophy ignored motherhood?
https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-why-has-philosophy-ignored-motherhood-270163

EXCERPT: It is little surprise, then, that writings about the intense psychological, emotional, and identity transformations that take place during gestational and postpartum motherhood were largely sidelined within the discipline.

Yet a few remarkable women overcame misogynistic epistemic and disciplinary barriers to produce work that was recognised as philosophy, including some writing touching on the maternal experience... (MORE - details)

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There is no ‘hard problem of consciousness’
https://www.noemamag.com/there-is-no-hard-problem-of-consciousness/

EXCERPT: Earth is not metaphysically different from the heavens, living beings are not metaphysically different from inanimate matter, humans are not metaphysically different from other animals. The soul is not metaphysically different from the body. We are all parts of nature, like anything else in this sweet world... (MORE - details)
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Unfortunately, categorizing the "manifestations" of consciousness as natural isn't anymore a sufficient explanation than telling a caveman that the sun produces light and heat because it is natural. It's an "everything is Marklar" remedy (South Park) or futile attempt to discourage curiosity and pursuit. And detouring off into strawmen like "the soul" and so-forth is just that: The ancient, tiresome alternative to today's "Nothing to see here".
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[TheVat]

There is no ‘hard problem of consciousness’

I read this partly out of respect for Rovelli, and did find a couple good points about how we talk about minds. I think he offers a strong critique of the philosophical zombie thought experiment....

But the argument is weak. A philosophical zombie would claim to know what subjective experience is; otherwise, it would be empirically distinguishable from a human. Chalmers’s point is that the existence of the hypothetical, irreducible consciousness of which he speaks is something we can be convinced of only by introspection. During introspection, physical processes in my brain convince me of my consciousness. The same would theoretically happen in the zombie brain, convincing it of having consciousness as well. If this is true, can I believe my own conclusion of having this mysterious non-physical experience, knowing that if I were a zombie, I would be convinced of the same without actually having it? The argument is self-defeating.

My hypothetical, physically identical zombie twin would be exactly like me — including in experience. In other words, philosophical zombies are distinguishable from ordinary people only by those who assume upfront what Chalmers seeks to prove: that there is something non-physical going on in the world. They are not proving anything; they are examples of an unconvincing metaphysical possibility and nostalgia for the old notion of the transcendent soul.

Another logjam where neutral monism might be useful in a avoiding pre-definitions of reality.

 

[C C]

I read this partly out of respect for Rovelli, and did find a couple good points about how we talk about minds. I think he offers a strong critique of the philosophical zombie thought experiment....

Another logjam where neutral monism might be useful in a avoiding pre-definitions of reality.

Zombie proposals were around long before Chalmers' formulation or argument, and the conceptual creatures seem to fall out of or be dependent upon epiphenomenalism (EP) and its asymmetry of brain processes being able to conjure thought/sensory experiences, but minus a reciprocal influence of the latter upon the brain. And it is difficult to imagine any scientific account of the brain including the effect of "undetectable phantoms" among the contributing factors, so the EP view could be construed as applying in practice.

Since the manifestations of consciousness are causally impotent in the EP context (why they can't be detected publicly), it wouldn't matter whether they are actually concomitant to humans or not -- the behavior will be the same (though that requires further elaboration at bottom). Those private experiences become a superfluous add-on to the physical system.

• SEP - Zombies: G. F. Stout argued that if epiphenomenalism (the more familiar name for the ‘conscious automaton’ theory) is true,
  
  "it ought to be quite credible that the constitution and course of nature would be otherwise be just the same as it is if there were not and never had been any experiencing individuals. Human bodies would still have gone through the motions of making and using bridges, telephones and telegraphs, of writing and reading books, of speaking in Parliament, of arguing about materialism, and so on. There can be no doubt that this is prima facie incredible to Common Sense (Stout 1931: 138f.)"
  
  What Stout describes here and finds prima facie incredible is a zombie world: an entire world whose physical processes are closed under causation (as the epiphenomenalists he was attacking held) and exactly duplicate those in the actual world, but where there are no conscious experiences.

But that is remedied by the brain systematically and coherently pretending that some of its neural processes are "showing" themselves as the phenomenal meaning of images, sounds, odors, tactile sensations, etc. As well as evolution having universally distributed that inherent, lawful "make-believe" to the entire population of humans (and other brained animals?). The EP believer can then contend that manifestations just coincidentally do emerge from those theatrical performances of the system. By chance, the neural procedures instantiating the masquerade also conjure the experiences. LOL However, they have to throw in the caveat that the success rate is erratic or anomalous in order to have zombies occasionally.

Ironically, epiphenomenalists and zombie-philes can now thank the illusionism camp for advocating that such a massive scale of pretending is possible. Though it's perhaps Nicholas Humphrey who most hits the nail on the head in that area. With the rest, it has always been a struggle to penetrate the obscurantism of just what eliminative materialists are actually trying to assert:

"Oh, he is only rejecting that there is an immaterial self (etc), not qualia. Woops, what he said in that other place reboots it back to ground zero of uncertainty. Oh, he just wants to use a different label than "phenomenal" (etc) to reconceptualize it to something more scientific sounding. Woops, it surely seems that he is denying _X_ outright in this other spot of the text, though..."
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