But it is also not always or often the best to flit from one idea to the other, never going deep, chasing signs of validation that may never come unless you put in enough work.
Almost any reasonable idea that is not obviously bad (as in having some clearly insurmountable technical or market hurdles, etc) can be made to work.
What makes ideas work (and this is what separates those with a true entrepreneurs mindset from those just playing the lottery of "MVP"s) is the creation of what I call a viability field around them.
When a person decides to create an app, or some other product, or a certain business, they have not exhaustively considered all the possible things they could do and decided that this is the objectively most viable thing to pursue. They commit to a space they like ot be in, that feels like a good match for their skills and temperament, etc.
Then, within the general idea, the key I think is to begin creating a product, the development and marketing of which acts as a substrate for the learnings you need to succeed in that market. AI used judiciously can help you to cover ground more quickly, or at least be a bit more fearless about attempting that.
Basically you should build something that allows you to learn, to pivot, to adapt as necessary until you find product market fit. Rarely, you'd need to throw everything out, but even then I often argue it is matter of personal decision rather than any fundamental roadblock. If you you are really committed to an idea, and have developed it enough (not just a 1 week MVP) to deeply understand its context, there is almost always a tangent you can take that brings you to success without throwing out everything.
> Postgres ... is the right choice when you need higher availability, broader shared scalability, or other deployment properties that are better served by a network database. It is also the better fit when asynchronous replication to object storage is not the durability model you want...
Many workflow systems do not need that on day one and should not start with more infrastructure than their state actually demands.
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I see this kind of YAGNI thinking a lot, but in my view, it must be balanced against the effort you'd put into resolving any edge cases and adapting current architecture to your use case.
Imagine you deploy Sqlite, and thought it fine by itself, you keep running into some unforeseen challenges with the use to which you are putting. YOu'd need to sink valuable time and effort into addressing those. Then, when you have outgrown it, you'd beed to spend additional valuable times dping the same with Postgres.
This is why, when it comes to Architecture, I increasingly find my myself over-enigneering a bit. Assuming there is a good chance you might need to upgrade your architecture in the not too distant future, that approach is actually kind of very efficient. I find that I am able to uncover a lot of potential gotchas, which feeds back into the what the simplified current architecture should be, and helps me understand the roadmap I'm facing very well. I also avoid wasting too much time going too deep in directions that make sense now, but need a lot of plumbing to get right, when I can see that I'd likely have to throw it all out in a few years. Going from A -> B -C -> D, where each step is the optimal good-enough-for-now architecture but which requires a lot of work to stabilize and iron out the kinks of, is much less efficient than exploring D well enough to know whether you should build A, B, or C now.
Basically, some over-engineering, if done right, is not wasted. It cuts right to the heart of what you are dealing with, efficiently, and allows you to make (maybe) simpler but informed choices now as to how best to allocate your development resources now.
My version of this is the “N+1” principle. Build for one more foreseeable use case than you currently have. The domain model will click in when you need to generalize a solution, and you’ll gain the ability to see your particular solution as one of several to the problem, and thus evaluate fit and tradeoffs more clearly.
Don’t do N+2. The goal isn’t to predict the future, nobody can do that. The goal is a durable understanding of the domain and the best fit implementation you can get with that current understanding and resources.
That said, SQLite passes that bar for me in most use cases.
You do have a point that in the long run, the health and growth of the overall economy impacts the quality of life of individuals, but the interests of individuals must be balanced against the interests of a country as as a whole.
Consider that people immediately spending all their salary at the beginning of every month and being broke and hungry for the rest of the month is good for the economy, but is obviously not what we want if we care about human well-being.
But that is an argument for banning everything and forcing people into a Matrix style pod at birth, since some people otherwise will be irresponsible.
And if you're talking about people who go broke and hungry waiting for the next pay check, in most cases it is because they have to spend so much on their rent or mortgage. Being "house-poor", as they call it.
> If the square had consciousness, it’d be none the wiser.
This is exactly what don't know, and is interesting to explore.
> there is no separate “stuff” that minds are made out of, no privileged plane of existence specific to minds; minds are just patterns like everything else
So if your brain was somehow cloned, you'd exist in two places at the same time? It seems possible for two separate consciousness to have the same memories and be identical in all respects, and yet still not be the same.
To illustrate, two instances of a programs can share the exact same binary code (the "pattern") and yet they are separate instances.
> So if your brain was somehow cloned, you'd exist in two places at the same time?
There’d be two Mes – two instantiations of the Me pattern co-occurring. And that would likely be confusing for both of us!
> To illustrate, two instances of a programs can share the exact same binary code (the "pattern") and yet they are separate instances.
Exactly! If we suspend a Docker image, transfer it to a new compatible host machine, and fire it up, we consider it a resumption of the same process (pattern) in a different instance.
Likewise, say we found a mathematical function that would compute the entire state of that Docker image at that moment, and then wiped the image – such that there was no current physical instantiation of it anywhere, on any machine – and subsequently used the function to regenerate it bit for bit.
A dualist would say there’s something fundamentally different about the human analogue of that; that the Mind has a separate existence Elsewhere – and not just in the mathematical sense of patterns not requiring instantiation to still be patterns, since that would apply to all patterns, Minds or not.
You're making a fundimental mistake here on understanding substrates.
If I take a hard drive an copy it, is it the same hard drive? Well, no, we'd both agree they are two different hard drives, that's pretty easy to see.
But what if we are executing data off the hard drive. Initially it would operate as if it were the same, the data on the hard drive would have zero ability or knowledge that it was copied. As the execution continued in two different places in physical reality the state of the hard drives would change.
Coming back to people, you are never the same unless you can start taking snapshots at the plank scale. You are always changing at the chemical level. Cells die, new ones are created, organs spurt out chemicals in varying amounts that alter your mental state, you 'remember' memories and by doing so rewrite them, new information enters from your senses and changes the physical makeup of the structure of our brain via re-enforcement/de-enforcement. Simply put this idea of you is an ethereal moving target. Copying that doesn't change it, each one of them will still think they are the you that has lived up till this point. When looking at both, you'll see their lives diverge, but unless they learn about each other, each you will never know that's the case.
> you are never the same unless you can start taking snapshots at the plank scale. You are always changing at the chemical level.
And yet there is a sense of continuity. Are you saying the if your are killed and replaced by an immortal being with your same memories, thought patterns, and body, that'd be an acceptable continuation of you? You'd be ok with that as a form of attaining immortality?
In that case you don't exist, since there is no such thing as "current". Every moment in time is either past or future, assuming time is continuous. The reals are infinitely infinite.
Hey, looks like you're finally starting to catch on to the trick the consciousness plays on you.
consciousness always exists in the past of reality around you. It is a physical process with an execution time. Light takes nanoseconds to get to your eyes. The chemical reactions in your eyes take milliseconds. Then you have that signal getting to your visual cortex. Then your brain takes a while and shoves a bunch of shit it assumes is there from pattern matching taking its own number of milliseconds. Eventually this is passed up to your consciousness to interpret 'long' after it actually happened.
But you can make it even more screwy from that point that totally screw with your perception of time. Even more fun are drugs that keep you conscious but keep you from recording short term memories so it's like that time never existed.
Consciousness the the fundamental reality; it is the only thing we know for sure.
I know for sure what I am perceiving. Forget about if it is a simulation or not: it is still what I am perceiving. There is nothing else I can be sure of.
So you are correct that it is, in some sense, un-explorable. However, if the above is the reason, then nothing else is explorable also; you cannot prove that we are not in a simulation, and in a sense it does not matter.
If you accept that we assume we are not in a simulation and the knowledge we have matters, then consciousness is also open to exploration, and it is not only a philosophical thing. There are several hard questions about consciousness that are meaningful in this frame:
- Why do some things appear to be conscious and other not so?
- Is there only one consciousness in the universe, or multiple?
- Is consciousness local and embodied, or not?
- Would restoring the physical substrate of consciousness (if possible) lead to the same consciousness, or an identical one? Does this distinction between "same" and "identical" consciousnesses even make sense?
> Consciousness the the fundamental reality; it is the only thing we know for sure.
These statements conflate, as idealists do, epistemology and ontology.
What we know "for sure" has no bearing on what's real. These are entirely separate questions.
What an ape might, or might not, feel certain (or any which way about) says nothing about where an ape finds itself. Of course, this is a great injury to our ego, and sense of power to determine the nature of the world by our mind alone -- but such is life.
The world is not human, not at all like a human, and nothing about it follows from us at all. The world is not made in our image. Consciousness is a derivative, secondary phenomenon which is a measurement process occurring in the body of an ape, and whatever it manages to measure with any clarity, has no impact on the nature of that world.
Yes. Though i think you're committing the gentic fallacy here, which is the core fallacy at the heart of idealism and much 19th C. german philosophy.
The properties of the origin of somethign imply nothing about the properties of the product. That a bread factory is made of metal, does not mean bread is.
That in my statement of things in language I am conscious of what I state, says nothing about the truth (or other such properties) of what I say.
A photographic plate is made of metal, the mountain it photographs, of mud.
I am conscious, but when I say, "reality is all that which is extended in space and time" -- the truth of that proposition has nothing to do with my being consiouss -- it is a loaf of bread, a photograph, a product of a process invovling consiousness but in none of its properties, depends upon it.
Every relevant thing we do requires consciousness -- just as everythign a thermometer does requires, say, its own mercury -- but in measuring coffee's temperature, coffee is in no way mercury. And when we measre the world, by photographing it with consciousness, it is in no way conscious.
The point is that all existence is built on top of consciousness.
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.
>The point is that all existence is built on top of consciousness.
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.
>Then if all conscious beings (lets say humans are the only ones for sake of argument) die, then existence ends.
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..
>The starting idea is that there can be no definition of existence
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.
I think that gets us closer to the right way of thinking about it. Somehow existence and consciousness are the same "thing", or two opposing aspects of the same "thing", where "thing" stands for something for which we cannot have a word, because it's beyond (or previous to) the distinction between object and subject. I think using the word "being" instead of "existence" makes things a bit more clear. Beings are almost by definition conscious. A stone (or a thermostat) is not a being, but an animal is.
I've been an idealist. I understand all the arguments. The base fallacy at the heart of all this is the one I mentioned.
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.
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.
>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.
It's not a simple answer, because its not an answer to any question. It is "simpler" to assume the thermometer readings exist without any thing to cause them, then they move up and down, and its "simpler" to assert: it is the nature of thermometers to move up and down.
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.
> 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?
>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..
>I hypothesize that only computable and decidable (in Godel's sense) structures exist
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..
It's easy to define: a world the same as our world, but has an additional random phenomenon, humans would still exist. Mathematics is fantasy, you can postulate anything you want there.
> You are missing the fact that "space" and "time" are also illusions painted on consciousness.
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.
Just like the sensation of hearing a voice is an illusion created by your brain from the vibrations in the air, the perception of depth is an illusion created from the parallax between your eyes. We seem to have an easy time understanding that sound is an illusion, but have a really hard time considering that space and time are similar illusions...They are just some number (like the number of vibrations) that the brain creates a perception for you.
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.
we need to distinguish accounts that are merely self-consistent, and those that are more useful.
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.
Yes, so your semantics of langauge make such questions incomprhensible.
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 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...
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.
If we take the video game example literally, we establish a fictional context for the language in question, so we read all questions as in-game.. the answer to the character's question is: the world the character is in. A skyrim NPC character who asks that question, is (fictionally) correct to say 'skyrim', and so on.
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.
I said nothing about the nature of reality. All that I said is: all my knowledge of the reality (whether it exists independently or me or not) comes from my perception.
There could be an objective reality, or reality could be something created by our consciousness. I don't know. The one thing I do know, however, is what my consciousness perceives. It is in that sense that is is fundamental
Largely I find your points reductionist and insulting to the very sacred experience that is unfolding for you and me. Consciousness is a primary or even a priori phenomenon from which all of your surmisals stem. You have got it backwards. The fact someone once saw an ape, or saw a nebula, or made a measurement of brain waves, these all had to happen within human-experience. The experiencing itself is irreducible. Consciousness as a byproduct or secondary phenomenon as you claim, is to be expected for someone brought up in the modern era where religion and spirituality were so vehemently eschewed that men leaned too far into the other extreme and became physicalist-materialists claiming the lived experience is but a mere symphony of neurological interactions without consequence. This is a disastrous view. This is basically a swift ticket to a hell-realm. The basic posture is all wrong - you must return to the fundamental facts, namely those of your lived experience. What you claim as primary evidence are in fact secondary observations. And then you use the secondary observations to make claims about a primary nature "out there" and "distinct from" human-experiencing. This is simply not the case. This view is logically untenable. One does not study consciousness by looking at pictures and drawings and photos, just like how one does not study what music sounds like by inspecting the buttons of a saxaphone unblown. The fluid nature of the energetic capacity of mind is very difficult to discern - it's not an everyday occurence, sages spend their whole lives pursuing prayer and meditation in order to catch a mere glimpse at the primal nature of experience. Everything else flows from this. Your mind is the root of all things, it is the common denominator in all moments of your experience.
You can read my other comment. You're also committing the genetic fallacy.
Yes, a hand can measure itself. Yes, consciousness as a measurement process of reality can expose to the conscious agent that its own consciousness is a merely a process in the world.
Just as a camera, in photographing a mirror, discovers that it is only a camera located at some point in space and time.
The "back to basics" pov you're talkign about is one which actually abandons everything consciousness tells you about the world, because you're afraid of what you've found.
An ape without a mirror thinks, of course, it is god. What an insult to find the face of this god is only that of an ape.
No, the genetic fallacy is not germane here. You are conflating the derivation of knowledge and direct knowing, which are distinct. You conflate the ingredients on the back of the label for the taste of the sweets in the pouch. The taste of sweetness is what I am indicating, not the list of ingredients. Also, you are suggesting that there is an impersonal objective spacetime irrespective of observer which is false. There is a generalized case that works for the figures projected for measuring the distances to solar bodies from other solar bodies. But you are basing your analysis on the hidden assumption that the material reality is first. This is an unchallenged assumption in modern science which leads you astray.
>discovers that it is only a camera located at some point in space and time.
It discovers no such thing. It can only measure the signals coming from the sensors. That is its ground truth. If a sensor can produce a signal without having an image fall on it, then that would be what the camera sees.
So in this case, it would perceive the image of a camera in a mirror, but that would not be the reality.
It doesnt perceive the image of a camera, it's sensor is that image. What it means to perceive is for that image to form. This is the second great fallacies of idealism: (1) the genetic fallacy above that the origin/product of a process must share properties and (2) this fallacy of ambiguity on the word 'see'/perceive (between the mental act of drawing attention to an aspect of a perception, and the physiological act of forming that perception).
When I open my eye, light hits it, striking off the object which I am seeing. What it means to see is for that object to cause my perception. I am NOT seeing my perception, that doesn't make any sense -- it's incoherent because it's an infinite regress.
When I open my eyes and see the coffee, my body changes to have the perception of that coffee as part of my structure -- I am the photographic plate. Just as the photographic plate isnt taking a picture of itself, neither is my eye or mind.
To see is, akin to the photographic plate, to be changed by the world so that you have an impression of it. You do not see seeing, you see objects.
>To see is, akin to the photographic plate, to be changed by the world so that you have an impression of it
And the point is that you don't need the "world" aka reality to make that change. It can come from within, for example a faulty sensor creating an image of a cloud that does not exist.
And the implication that follows is that just because you percieve something does not mean that it is "real".
This can be made more clear if you understand that every "real" object is made up of pixe dust aka fields. When you see a particle at some point, say an electron, there is actually nothing there...but the space at that location behaves, for some reason, as if there is an electron there...
And that is another problem with the physical idea. What happens if you continuously split an object? If it is really physical, then it should remain physical no matter how many times it is split. But we see that it is not the case.
Yip, but once you have to explain law-following fixed perceptual fields (ie., that it always seems as if my fixed visual perceptions follow the laws of physics, and so on; that my audial/touch/visual percetions follow geometry exacvtly; that my actions to intervene on the world are causally deterministic; ...) --- then you've a real difficulty.
The mind doesnt have the right kind of properties to explain that. If you modify "consiousness" to include those properties then it's no longer consiousness at all.
Whatever generates law-like fixed perceptions of the objective has to be as if all of material reality exists in its law-like way.
Yes, P(Material Reality Does Not Exist) > 0 BUT whatever confidence you give to that, say p_illusion,
P(Material Reality Exists as it seems to | the fixed background of law-like perceptions) >>>>> p_illusion
You dont escape the need for the objective, the law-like, the fixed, the external.. just because you locate what generates this in "the mind" (redefined to include this). At that point the "mental origin" of this background is material. You arent making any difference to call it mental or physical.
The assumption that you made earlier , that reality is material first and perceptual second , continues unchallenged in your experience. Your certainty is based on the words of others who also don't know. You should really examine this more carefully. Screening of direct-experience through words is an obstacle that must be overcome.
You say "you don't see seeing, you see objects" ... Seeing itself is an irreducible fundamental of the universe in the human perspective, that's the point. If it could be reduced and you could split the act of seeing into components, you could say there's the eye [sense faculty], the focal object, and the visual consciousness. You're conflating the three and saying objects are both the eye and the visual consciousness, which is imprecise and unhelpful. A mirror doesn't show you yourself, it shows you a reflection of your external appearance. To say you can see yourself in a mirror is akin to saying you can see a sun in the shadow of a tree.
> you cannot prove that we are not in a simulation, and in a sense it does not matter
I'd consider myself a materialist (in the philosophical sense) and this is why (and I agree with the rest of your comment to)
We can not know, but in the absence of evidence to the contrary (e.g. someone metaphorically popping their head in from "outside" and revealing another layer to us), while it is important to understand that we do not know, it is more productive to assume in the absence of evidence, whether it is "real" or subjective or a simulation.
As long as it appears to us to follow consistent rules, we can explore those rules, and explore our apparent material reality.
It is knowable isn’t it? We know our brains play a variety of tricks to get a cohesive view out of two wildly complicated but deeply flawed meat sensors.
Not into modern philosophy at all, but I do believe, simulated or not, that this is indeed mostly quibbling.
An engineer would ask what a simulation would simulate. This is the core of the meaning behind that word. And if the answer is reality and it hints to the fact you cannot perceive everything and you conscience tries to construct a cohesive understanding from limited perception, than I would dispute the fact. The only one who tries to do that are philosophers. Going back to my objective, not-simulated ignorance now.
Simulations are systems which have various rules built into them which govern (entirely) the behavior of the components of the system (at whatever levels the rules apply).
A given simulation may have rules that are believed or are intended to generate behavior within it which are similar to some other system (e.g. what we experience as "reality"). But it may just as well have an entirely different set of rules intended to create entirely different, even unknown and unpredictable, behaviors.
Any similarity between a given simulation and what we experience as reality is a property of that particular simulation. There is absolutely no reason why a simulation that is utterly different from our reality could not exist (and indeed, almost certainly already does).
Simulation in abstract implies to imitate something. Further abstracted to a system of rules removes the reference and it become equivalent to a lot of concepts. It is true that the meaning evolved, but that is probably just an effect because we try to understand reality. And creating a simulation is the test for that understanding. That in best cases fit perceived reality if developed to that goal.
A simulation does not have to model reality and multiple simulations trivially exist. But I don't see why that would imply anything for reality as well from that.
I apologize. I misread your comment that I was replying to as stating that (to paraphrase) the simulation is always modelling reality. Total misread on my part. Very sorry about that.
Part of the argument is that you can only know what you experience. But, if this is a simulation, "you" could be a program running on a computer and your every experience is just piped directly into your consciousness without any underlying physical reality. You might even not be interacting with other people in the simulation, it could be just you and everything else is simulated without being similar to whatever existence you have.
I don't agree with this argument, but it circulates occasionally.
If you are in a sim, then the sim execution is an expensive process, it produces heat and consumes energy. If you are in reality, a material body, then keeping alive also consumes energy. The debates about consciousness often assume a cost-free regime, a platonic perspective. I think this is wrong. We have much to gain thinking about how a process provides its own energy, or how it balances costs and gains. Maybe we can find answers about consciousness too if we chase down the cost recursion path.
>If you are in a sim, then the sim execution is an expensive process, it produces heat and consumes energy.
If simulation theory (or similar ideas) are real, it's entirely possible that the "real world" running the simulation operates on completely different physical laws than the simulation.
Again, this is unknowable if the creator of the simulation doesn't want you to figure out it's a simulation. Simulation or not, this is our reality, and our consciousness would be a simulation inside that simulation. Instead of a weird wobbly space universe, we'd just have an execution platform universe.
I agree completely, and I think most debates/arguments around simulation theory and similar ideas are largely pointless, though they can at least be fun sometimes.
Correct in the sense if we are able to determine that we are in a simulation. That would at least hold the promise that we could escape the VM and play with a deeper reality, though at that point the best chance is we are in nested VMs and reality is a long way away.
What's unknowable is whether or not there are real stars that correspond with what you seem to observe; not whether or not your observations themselves are the real stars.
Didn’t we already work out they are similar in their spectral output to the Sun, enough to conclude they are the same kind of thing? And observing their movements makes them far away. Do each of us have to do the experiments again to validate that we know what they are?
Something could only appear to be similar to the Sun. We have to trust in observation at some level for all of those experiments to be valid, basically, which means first believing that you're conscious and second believing that you can experience reality and so on from there.
You can never really disprove that some malicious entity is just making you think you're seeing the stars and talking to people, if you want to go back to philosophy about it. There's a bit of assumed faith
> Consciousness the the fundamental reality; it is the only thing we know for sure.
Who invented the words "consciousness" "reality" "fundamental" that you are now using? you are using language invented elsewhere while claiming you can't be sure of its reality.
Are you also claiming you can't be sure someone had to create and raise you to get to the point of asking such questions? We are downstream from parents and society.
The whole discussion here is anchored on individual level, but we are not viable outside society. It's like extracting one cell from one organ and saying it is mysterious why it is like that, while ignoring the organism and the evolution.
If society fails, human die too. If a human makes a fatal mistake, the cells in their body die too. We depend on top level doing its job to keep the lower layers viable.
> You are using language invented elsewhere while claiming you can't be sure of its reality.
Your senses are the only thing on which this statement rests. Your don't know anything like "language", "invented" etc. All you know is what your mind and your senses tell you.
And, yes, engaging with you on this topic, and my argument, is also included in what I refer to as my perception. I have no way to prove that you are even conscious, or that anything like language or invention actually are real, whatever real means.
> Are you also claiming you can't be sure someone had to create and raise you to get to the point of asking such questions? We are downstream from parents and society.
Yes exactly. You are sure of nothing except the fact this now exists. The simulation could collapse in the next second. I could awake from this dream.
> Consciousness the the fundamental reality; it is the only thing we know for sure.
> I know for sure what I am perceiving
This reflects my view. And I’ve always found it mildly amusing that beings I cannot prove to myself are perceiving attempt to convince me that I’m not perceiving, when that’s exactly what I’m maximally sure of. Imagine arguing with an LLM designed to convince you that you’re not real. It would be weird, wouldn’t it?
That depends how it tried and what influences the LLM had on the outside world.
For example if the LLM could drug you, either by convincing you to take drugs, or trick you into doing it, then convincing you that you're not real becomes monumentally easy. Derealization can be a monumentally profound/terrifying experience to your psyche.
> Is there only one consciousness in the universe, or multiple?
This sounds similar to the "how do you know you're not dreaming?" question.
When you are in a dream, you really are the only single conciousness of that world. Any other person you interact with inside your dream is not performing any thinking of their own. Instead, dream interactions are just your single consciousness interacting with itself.
I think it is obvious there are multiple consciousness in the universe and not just one. Unless you're in a dream right now ;)
Only if we abandon reason while simultaneously claiming objectivity.
I cannot know objectively whether I am in a simulation or not. I can, however, reason about my experience, the experiences of others (as I perceive them), and the systems that facilitate perception. All of that information is logically coherent, so I can "know" it. My knowledge may not be objectively proven, but it is the most subjectively relevant conclusion.
> After their stints in jail, the brothers worked their way back into the tech world. In 2023, Muneeb got a job with a Washington, DC, firm that sold software and services to 45 federal clients; Sohaib got a job at the same company a year later.
How were they able to to easily work their way back into somewhat sensitive job, considering how much US companies make a big deal out of employing people with a criminal past?
> The plaintext password of an individual who submitted a complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Public Portal, which was maintained by the Akhters’ employer...Sohaib Akhter conducted a database query on the EEOC database and then provided the password to Muneeb Akhter.
Almost any reasonable idea that is not obviously bad (as in having some clearly insurmountable technical or market hurdles, etc) can be made to work.
What makes ideas work (and this is what separates those with a true entrepreneurs mindset from those just playing the lottery of "MVP"s) is the creation of what I call a viability field around them.
When a person decides to create an app, or some other product, or a certain business, they have not exhaustively considered all the possible things they could do and decided that this is the objectively most viable thing to pursue. They commit to a space they like ot be in, that feels like a good match for their skills and temperament, etc.
Then, within the general idea, the key I think is to begin creating a product, the development and marketing of which acts as a substrate for the learnings you need to succeed in that market. AI used judiciously can help you to cover ground more quickly, or at least be a bit more fearless about attempting that.
Basically you should build something that allows you to learn, to pivot, to adapt as necessary until you find product market fit. Rarely, you'd need to throw everything out, but even then I often argue it is matter of personal decision rather than any fundamental roadblock. If you you are really committed to an idea, and have developed it enough (not just a 1 week MVP) to deeply understand its context, there is almost always a tangent you can take that brings you to success without throwing out everything.
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