Every night Fido has the same dream of the most exquisite intriguing smell which the dog can't quite place.


PairTheBoard

Give the dog a sniff of your foot. Andy can't get enough of mine.

Please refer to the scientist who proved this causal relationship.

Assuming it solves the hard problem of consciousness.

He can't. Outside of dictionary definitions and philosophy nobody knows what consciousness is.

No one knows inside of those either.

Some people like to confuse it with cognition, which is fun.

People are pretty crap on cognition as well

I agree with what I interpret masque de Z to be saying.

I do think that consciousness is scientifically (weakly) emergent from the underlying fundamentals, namely physics and evolution. However, my pet theory is that it will not be proved so because of the self interactivity of those fundamental networks.

This is simply my interpretation of Roger Penrose’s discussions on what he considers to be non-computable physical systems that can not even be fully calculated even in theory.

Also, Dan Dennett’s ‘beneficial bag of tricks’ explanation is very compelling in my opinion.

You're correct. I should've worded it more carefully to acknowledge the disagreements.

this thread doesn't exist

If this thread doesn't exist, then what thread does exist?

The late, great W.V.O. Quine defined Ontology as the branch of Philosophy that endeavours to answer the question, What is there? (or perhaps What exists?) And Quine noted that the answer to either question was quite simple: Everything!

You sure?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_commitment

This thread exists because I allow it to.

At some point philosophy just turns into wordplay. This is that point. But, he is right.

A better question than "what exists" is "how do we know what exists." Epistemology has to be determined first.

Hoffman is claiming that the universal acid of evolution eats through our knowledge of objective reality; fitness trumps reality as a determinant of our perceptions.

One thing has always bothered me - why do we see objects and not the component parts? When I see a dog I do not see the atomic structure. So in a sense, we have been fooled by poor vision until we discovered better ways of seeing. We know some animals see colors we do not. The next leap is spacetime - could the way we interact with the world be determined by fitness? I don't see why not. Evidence is lacking but then evidence is lacking that the world as we see it exists as we see it.

We know through interaction. Everything that interacts with you, you know exists.

For that same reason you see and feel the table, not its individual atoms. You couldnt even interact with them if you wanted and as such they are not part of your reality.

In that sense consciousness and senses are what makes reality. There could be everything happening at the same place at the same time but no one will ever notice because we lack the senses to interact with parallel universes.

Curious how you would adjust your view when adding in AR/VR and how we can interact with those 'illusions'?

You can and do see and feel the items. They properly trigger your senses and consciousness and are getting better at it all the time.

In the conscious realism hypothesis VR is a metaphor for our reality. Consciousness is what's real. VR is real as agents are aware through it.

OK, so as an answer to the question I posed to Ronny in response to his view 'if you can interact with it, you know it exists... you know it is real', you are saying your view is 'yes, what you interact with in VR (a table, etc) is every bit as real as what you interact with in the 'real' world'. 'The reality you are engaging with in both instances are equivalent'. Is that right?

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles...014.00577/full

Natural selection results in cognitive biases, but that doesn't mean they're not biases. Logic and rationality are real things, right?

No you don't know what is real exactly. I think it's real but we don't perceive its totality. However it is possible it's in our head but I'm not an idealist because of personal biases with that view. Something is out there. Do we know it's true nature through touch and sight? No.

Must be the pandemic supply chain shortages because everywhere I've looked for a compendia of subjective probabilities they've been out of them. Maybe I'll have better luck after a good nights sleep.


PairTheBoard

Maybe neither you nor this thread exists.

Yes, I am sure:

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_What_There_Is

A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put in three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: ‘What is there?’ It can be answered, moreover, in a word—‘Everything’—and everyone will accept this answer as true. However, this is merely to say that there is what there is. There remains room for disagreement over cases; and so the issue has stayed alive down the centuries.

Sure I would agree that we have evolved past the simple premise of 'seeing is believing' and now even 'touching is believing', and further 'interaction with, is believing' due to VR.

Our senses are no where near complete in their ability to communicate to us many scene and unseen, heard and unheard, touched and untouched, realities.