I find your position quite interesting but I feel like it still suffers the same issues I've seen in other "mind-first" arguments (I'm sorry for any ill-defined terms as I'm not a philosopher myself), such as p-zombies (how do you know other people are conscious as well?) and the origin of it.
I think both positions (physicalism vs mind-first) suffer from the same issue that is to reach the bottom of it all, except physicalism seems to have reached further. In the past we wondered what the world was made of and we observed it, coming to the idea of elements such as Aether, then later developed chemistry then physics, reaching layer below layer of rules that interact to the emergence of the layer above. Lots of rules that we can (apparently) reproduce and verify, cells emerging from molecules interacting emerging from atoms interacting emerging from quantum particles emeging from quantum fields... Maybe emerging from strings or a simulation? We don't know. It seems to me we also don't know how to tell we've finally reached the bottom of it, but what we have sounds pretty solid.
In a mind-first view it seems that this stack is upside-down, with a consciousness giving rise to a brain in a world with its objects which are made of molecules coming to existence upon observation (that is, chemistry would be a top layer after conscience further inspecting it), which are ruled by physics etc. Except this cause-and-consequence relation is not clear to me. Like you said:
> To me, it appears obvious to me that I am having a conscious experience from which the physical world and all its laws and processes, emerge.
How would this work if, from your perspective, I'm also conscious and not a p-zombie? Do I give rise to the world, or do you? Do we all collectively create a single world from our consciousness in a "Sandman's Dream of a Thousand Cats" way? And if we're all p-zombies except you, why bother arguing with us? (not throwing shade btw, I'm just interested in your point of view).
To me physicalism looks like a flame graph with physics at the bottom and minds at the tips of the flames, with less simpler things giving rise to multiple complex things, while mind-first looks like an icicle graph (assuming multiple consciousness) or an upside down triangle (assuming a single consciousness), with physics at the top (all "graphs" putting cause at the bottom and effect on top).
> I'm sorry for any ill-defined terms as I'm not a philosopher myself
Don't worry. You're in good company.
> How would this work if, from your perspective, I'm also conscious and not a p-zombie?
It's impossible for me to say that you are conscious. I only watch my own movie. In that movie, others appear to be watching their own movies. Their movies exist only as content in my movie. I cannot say for certain whether or not there really are conscious experiences like mine occurring. All I can say is that I am being given the impression that there are.
> Do I give rise to the world, or do you?
I do. Or at least, something impresses the world upon me. You are a feature of the world that is impressed upon me, and, disappointingly (for me at least), there's no way to confirm it through this movie that I am watching. I am left having to "make up my own mind" about whether or not I choose to believe you are anything but a p-zombie extra, in what is (as far as I can see of the conscious spectrum I am able to perceive), a single screen, single reel movie. But I'm just guessing, hoping, wishing, because that's all I can do from this limited vantage point.
> Do we all collectively create a single world from our consciousness in a "Sandman's Dream of a Thousand Cats" way?
It's a cute idea. Design by committee. Books/predictions of the future seem to have this annoying property of becoming true, lending to this idea. Who knows?
> And if we're all p-zombies except you, why bother arguing with us?
What else am I supposed to do? If you have unimaginable wealth, infinite time and the ability to conjure anything into existence, exactly what are you to do? Perhaps you might dream up what having the opposite of your existence might be, and set about convincing yourself that you are a time-ful, perishable human-being bound by physics and inevitably limited by the finite energy available in the universe, stumped by entropy. Perhaps you even role play as the puppets on the ends of your fingers, while convincing yourself that they're just as real as you are, so you can feel what it's like not to be the majesty of your own lonely empire. What else am I supposed to do, than to go along with it? If we destroy the illusion, we're back to square one - and then what?
Lots of comments here and lots of opinions! the Consciousness conference has been discussing this since 1994, will be in San Diego this October. It is where the actual Hard problem was first proposed by Chalmers, Rovelli was at the conference a few years ago too. https://cs2026.org/ It's a great conference, with lots of interesting people and conversations. Highly recommend
I see, thanks for your reply. I'm still with physicalism so far, but I see your point. It gave me more room for thought.
> You are a feature of the world that is impressed upon me.
I was disappointed here for a while thinking about my NPC nature and place in this world, then I realized *YOU* must be a (very persuasive I'll admit) feature of the world that is impressed upon *ME*. Now I'm fine again. Thanks to myself for giving rise to such an interesting p-zombie like you.
> I was disappointed here for a while thinking about my NPC nature and place in this world, then I realized YOU must be a (very persuasive I'll admit) feature of the world that is impressed upon ME.
Exactly. Now that we’re both aligned on having unreconcilable claims to being the one-true-consciousness, we can write competing holy books and argue about promised lands, and all that good jazz.
You see, once we begin playing the game, a whole host of worldly distractions crop up to occupy us. Wait until I show you this game called “having a career”, or “chasing wealth”. Spoiler alert - your body dies at the end, and you get to keep none of it, but it was fun, or at least it was supposed to be.
> So every restaurant you go to, you head to the back to run a purity test on the political beliefs and “happiness” of the people making your food to make sure they line up exactly with what you believe?
Does their argument gets invalidated if they don't verify *every* restaurant ever? Nobody has the time nor the resources to follow their moral standards with 100% precision, but if we're doing our best I'd argue we can still take that moral stance.
Recently a slave labour scheme was dismantled in my country in which some wineries were keeping slaves to produce grape juice. The companies were on the news, and although I do love some grape juice I will never ever buy from them again. Do I check *every* single source of the products I consume? Of course no. Can they eventually do some marketing tricks and fool me into buying from them again? Maybe. But I do my best and I feel like this is sufficient to claim this is a good moral stance nonetheless.
You mentioned experience, but it's not clear to me if you mean that it's a requirement for "actual understanding." Is this what you're saying? If so, does that mean a male gynecologist doesn't have an "actual understanding" of menstrual cycles and menopause?
I think about astronomers and the things they know about stars that are impossible to experience even from afar, like sizes and temperatures. No one has ever seen a black hole with their own eyes, but they read a lot about it, collected data, made calculations, and now they can have meaningful discussions with their peers and come to new conclusions from "processing and correlating" new data with all this information in their minds. That's "actual understanding" to me.
One could say they are experiencing this information exchange, but I'd argue we can say the same about the translator in the chinese room. He does not have the same understanding of chinese as us humans, associating words to memories and feelings and other human experiences, but he does know that a given symbol evokes the use of other specific symbols. Some sequences require the usage of lots of symbols, some are somewhat ambiguous, and some require him to fetch a symbol that he hasn't used in a long time, maybe doesn't even know where he stored it. To me this looks a lot like the processes that happen inside our minds, with the exception that his form of "understanding" and the experiences that this evokes to him are completely alien to us. Just like an AGI would possibly be.
I'm not confortable looking at the translator's point of view as if he's the analogous to a mind. To me he's the correlator, the process inside our minds that makes these associations. This is not us, it's not under our conscious control, from our perspectives it just happens, and we know today it's a result of our neural networks. We emerge somehow from this process. Similarly, it seems to me that the experience of knowing chinese belongs to the whole room, not the guy handling symbols. It's a weird conclusion, I still don't know what to think of it though...
When I say "experience," I mean a sufficient grounding of certainty about what a word means, which includes how it's used, how it relates to the world that I'm experiencing, but also the mood or valence the word carries. I can't feel your pain, or maybe you've been to a country that I haven't been to and you're conveying that experience to me. Maybe you've been to outer space. I'm not saying to understand you I need to literally have had the exact experience as you, but I should be able to sufficiently relate to the words you are saying in order to understand what you are saying. If I can't sufficiently relate, I say I don't understand. You can see how this differs from what an AI is doing. The AI is drawing on relationships between symbols, but it doesn't really have a self, or experience, etc etc.
The process of fetching symbols, as you put it, doesn't feel at all like what I do when somebody asks me what it was like to listen to the Beatles for the first time and I form a description.
I had the same experience with Java and its looong lines of AbstractFactoryFactoryBuilders. Tabs + spaces offered the best of both worlds, and enabling whitespace visibility.
In the end it doesn't matter what's my preferred way of indenting code, the hardest part is always making people agree on it. So whenever a new project starts and the team needs to define code styling, we go with the language/IDE defaults. Anything else requires IDE setup and attention to indentation, which is too much to ask for when people barely pay attention to code quality.
This is not about protecting the files you share, it's about spammers abusing the file sharing mechanism to send you notifications. THEY share a file with you in order to trigger a notification and there's no way to block this.
I also have been receiving lots of these lately. I don't understand why "blocking everyone that's not in your contact list" is not a feature.
This thread below on Google Drive Help Center was closed with a response that you can now block a specific user — which is useless against a horde of bots.
Yep, I even tried to ask a very similar question with the very first sentence outlining I was aware you could block singular users but it's useless against hordes of bots, same response: https://support.google.com/drive/thread/142587006?hl=en
Are you more interested in fixing a process or fixing the problem?
Sending in-product feedback certainly could work because it's more likely to be seen by product management as it continues to roll in.
Support-driven product change requests are well intentioned but generally break down as a process internally. The working knowledge base and incentives are not properly aligned.
> Sending in-product feedback certainly could work
If it could work, we would have seen that happening. We have not, so we must assume it can't. Thus, asking to "send feedback in-product" is just a way to waste everyone's time. You avoid the negative stigma that is associated with knowing a problem exists and ignoring it, without having to undertake any concrete action. Corporate spin at it's finest.
I'm getting these recently too as Android notifications. It's very annoying and could be very unprofessional or hard-to-explain if one came in at the wrong time.
Me too, although FWIW on Android I opened Drive, then to "Settings" under the hamburger menu, then "Notification Settings", then I unchecked the "Shared items" notifications.
That may not work for you if you want shared item notifications, but I already get bombarded by a million different notifications for everything (sometimes I hate the modern world) and I sure as hell don't want shared item notifications - if something is important enough that I should read it, the person who shared it to me will email me about it.
I've been asking blocking feature since Gmail started inviting for beta testing. I'm one of the early Gmail testers. From day 1 I registered, I started received spams and I asked again and again, the response had always been non-sense like "our spam filters are good enough, you don't need to block anyone yourself". Really? So I never used Gmail as my primary email address. And this thing should be based on the exactly the same sh*tty logic. Never mind, I'm on the verge to ditch Google.
That's usually the case, but I was pleasantly surprised to read this book on my Kindle. The A5 format is quite readable, if you don't mind some of the tiny font size (I actually like it).
You're trying to convert the 3D world as we know it to 2D, but there's no such restriction. There are other constructs in 2D that can be used for the same purposes.
Take Game of life for example. It doesn't matter that you cannot make circuits without crossing wires in 2D, Game of Life is turing complete anyways. A computer based on GoL is totally unlike our 3D computers, but can have the same capabilities. There's no reason to think that it would be any different with biology.
Or you can try comparing our 3D world with a hypothetical higher dimension. Our intestines are hollow cilinders, stable in 3D but not suited for 4D — in 4D you can look inside a 3D cilinder just like we can look inside a 2D-sphere (a circle) from our 3D perspective. A 4D creature would probably have a very different, more efficient, structure for this use case (food containment and nutrient absorption), which they probably wouldn't be able to just translate to 3D.
Or you could just count the number of times their names are mentioned... Except neither approach really represents character importance accurately. Why just go the naive route when you can extract more information from your data by using a more complex approach?
The article actually counters your point exactly:
"For example, Arya Stark, Sansa’s younger sister, has the third most chapters with 34, but ranks behind Sansa in terms of network importance."
I don't think the naive approach is too far off in this case. Arya's importance is reflected in the sheer amount of exposition devoted to her. She's pretty clearly being set up to make a major return at some point, just as it is with Daenerys. The characters with a lot of network connections, on the other hand, are easy to kill off because they're ultimately redundant.
Welcome to the people who want to participate in serious discussions. You still have threads, and whole subreddits for that matter, with jokes. But before this tag, people who wanted a joke-free discussion were unable to do so on Reddit, and had to dig through piles of puns and jokes to get some thoughtful comments. Now we have space for both groups.
I think both positions (physicalism vs mind-first) suffer from the same issue that is to reach the bottom of it all, except physicalism seems to have reached further. In the past we wondered what the world was made of and we observed it, coming to the idea of elements such as Aether, then later developed chemistry then physics, reaching layer below layer of rules that interact to the emergence of the layer above. Lots of rules that we can (apparently) reproduce and verify, cells emerging from molecules interacting emerging from atoms interacting emerging from quantum particles emeging from quantum fields... Maybe emerging from strings or a simulation? We don't know. It seems to me we also don't know how to tell we've finally reached the bottom of it, but what we have sounds pretty solid.
In a mind-first view it seems that this stack is upside-down, with a consciousness giving rise to a brain in a world with its objects which are made of molecules coming to existence upon observation (that is, chemistry would be a top layer after conscience further inspecting it), which are ruled by physics etc. Except this cause-and-consequence relation is not clear to me. Like you said:
> To me, it appears obvious to me that I am having a conscious experience from which the physical world and all its laws and processes, emerge.
How would this work if, from your perspective, I'm also conscious and not a p-zombie? Do I give rise to the world, or do you? Do we all collectively create a single world from our consciousness in a "Sandman's Dream of a Thousand Cats" way? And if we're all p-zombies except you, why bother arguing with us? (not throwing shade btw, I'm just interested in your point of view).
To me physicalism looks like a flame graph with physics at the bottom and minds at the tips of the flames, with less simpler things giving rise to multiple complex things, while mind-first looks like an icicle graph (assuming multiple consciousness) or an upside down triangle (assuming a single consciousness), with physics at the top (all "graphs" putting cause at the bottom and effect on top).