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it is a bit wild to me that the mind can experience so much more than what exists...explain the evolutionary reason for that, atheists
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@georgia the mind's world-model is a lossy compressionlossy compressions are effect amplifiers, such that changing one small thing can have an outsize effect on the result (e.g. change one number in a game engine and you can have people all be 10 times taller, whereas accomplishing the same in "real world" would require adding extra all this extra matter and figuring out a way to make a human who doesn't die from blood all pooling in feet despite being like 20 metres tall etc
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@georgia same reason we build lots of general purpose computers and save specialised hardware for only the most intensive tasks, because it's much cheaper to make hardware that can do anything kinda badly than a bunch of very efficient hardware specific to every task you want to accomplishbut because it can do anything, sometimes it does
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@georgia i build a model of the world around me, with objects in different locations, edges, 3d space, directional sounds etc. and importantly also more "abstract" associated attributes like valence (good-thing/bad-thing/loved-person-goshwhen i use drug it can make this model start bending and morphing in interesting ways. this is because the world-model in my head is a simplification. i don't have a 1-to-1 mapping between every atom or whatever bouncing around "out there" to an atom or whatever bouncing around "in here"; my head has to be smaller than the containing environment, and so to compress all that world into a small space it has to be a synthesis of abstraction layers (classic example is neuron that collates some retinal inputs to detect bright spot surrounded by dark -> several of these layer up to make a line / edge detector -> put together edges to form a closed shape, an object). this is just like what we do with a compressed image like a jpg, using only a few parameters to approximate a much more complicated image. and, just like jpg, this sort of compression is capable of representing *any* (rgb 256 colour or whatever) image this way, and if you mess with those parameters just a bit editing the chroma table you can get glitched out weird images that resemble nothing "naturally occurring in the "real world"
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@shmibs ngl that's a sophistic explanation that doesn't address my point at all. what is the mind compressing? its experience of reality, of sense-data? are "aberrations" of thought merely a failure of input to output? that's perverse. a loss of data or of precision doesn't explain the existence of novel dimensions of experience, which are often parsed sensorially as mutations of reality but in terms of consciousness can transcend them utterly. tell me when you've experienced that.
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@georgia yes, because our world model is made from few simplified components it can diverge quickly (effect amplifier) and needs constant inputs to synchronise with the outside
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@shmibs altered consciousness thrives in sensory deprivation
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@georgia (just like weather forecasts are less and less accurate the further into the future you project
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@georgia no idea what you're defining "consciousness" to mean?i know there is a something that it feels like to exists, but the hard problem is in principle unanswerable because it's equivalent to "where is the universe" / "what happened before time began" / "what is the unmoved mover"why that feeling takes the shape it does, however, and is able to take on other "aberrant" shapes, is relatively simple, because my brain is a computer, yes
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@shmibs i'm not talking about the world or about sensory data, i'm talking about consciousness itself. you have made this all about aberrations of perception because your argument is loaded with a denial of consciousness as its axiom. strong AI denies anything in the brain besides input and output, you believe mind is computer, so of course this is all you have to work with, alterations in consciousness as deviant internal-world-states and sense perceptions.
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@georgia the human brain is by definition a universal computer (it can emulate a turing machineand unless you have a counter to the church-turing thesis (e.g. can produce some future-telling oracle), there's no good reason to assume some human-designed computer couldn't do the same thing the naturally-occurant computer does, whatever that something may beand evolution comes into play because a general purpose machine is easier to make than a more specialised one, like mentioned above, so it will be both more likely to evolve and have a competitive advantageand dualism is incoherent. if it's impossible to even say what you mean without contradictions then can't really respond to it
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@shmibs i mean consciousness in many ways. as an emergent property of the animal brain (but not computers), as a mind brain dualism, as an effulgent and infinite universal network separate from and transcending its medium. latter is most fanciful ofc. your description doesn't use evolution, which is a well established theory wrt governing the human organism, it uses computer software, which is spuriously connected.
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@georgia i'm working from formal logic as a premise, and so a thing being both A and not A is incoherent. if you throw that out then we're just speaking different languagesand for here the "pool" is not larger than the world itself because it is a part of the world itself, again by definition, "the universe == stuff that is
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@shmibs dualism is entirely coherent in my worldview just as brain is just computer is in yours. faced with the limits of computers you say "there are theoretically no limits". because you don't believe in things not consistently demonstrably observed, and therefore assumed an inherent property of the world substrate, whose composition and movement you call truth. you call the brain general purpose where the specific is perception of observable, quantifiable, explicable reality, and useful emotions and states of consciousness. what then is the general purpose? why is there an epistemological pool larger than our world itself? have you considered that is not a degeneration but a world of its own? as for future telling oracles, this and other time/space/causality defying phenomena have been reported in varied cultures all over the world. but because it is not consistent you'd surely reject it.
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@georgia (also, if an oracle WAS to be found then that would just mean some magic new kind of machine, in which case we'd need to build that instead
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@georgia what you just said is: "i never said both A and not A. dualism means both A and not A"
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@shmibs i never said both A and not A dualism means a separateness. that is, consciousness is not matter.
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@georgia a thing can't be both "together" and "separate", both "in the world" and "not in the world", both "stuff" and "not stuff"so then if it's separate / not in the world / not stuff it cannot affect things that are together / in the world / stuff, because that is what together / in the world / stuff means (everything that interacts, exchanges information, is together, the stuff that composes the worldand not sure how else to say "complex, unpredictable, unbounded behaviours come from simple, concrete rulesets" other than just like "here are some books on chaos and complex dynamical systems":https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=4696AD9284EF5DD34E30EEEC87E15560https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=0ABB9007CEC7100850958F49A8A637DB or maybe just point at a fractal viewer
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@shmibs you're thinking of a hypostatic union
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@shmibs no it doesn't although many incidences of dualism resolve at a unity. literally just look it up
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@georgia it's the same conversation, and can't understand how anyone could disagreenor the emotional need for magical thinking when unbounded diversity, literally "endless forms most beautiful", are a necessary result of even the simplest rulesets. feels pretty magical and (limitlessly!) big to me
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@shmibs yes this is just the same conversation as "how can God be not a part of the universe and also affect the universe". you engage from such a tiny apportioning of common human artifacts, let alone your own... you should try dreaming..
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@georgia "why is there something rather than nothing" is in principle impossible to answer. to explain something is to give context, but any context would just be another part of "something"and mmm, the universe to me is everything that's part of this contiguous something. which means maybe there is a magical ghost world of spirits out there or something, but if it exists then it's just more universe, with new physics to discover. until there's reason to believe something like that exists, though, i won't ┐('＿`;)┌
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@shmibs initial difference can be reconciled by clarifying the meaning of universe... i assert the existence and precedence of the unmanifest apart from the manifest cosmological object. perhaps you call everything real the universe which is true, but you don't know its implications. strict materialism is emotional as is magical thinking, and they are both rooted in pattern-seeking.i am familiar with chaos theory and find it beautiful... a promise of infinite becomingness... why do you think there is beauty in the mundane? why is there something instead of nothing?
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@georgia if you have a conscious thing and no other universe then how is that conscious thing not itself the universe? in which case same "why is there something?" applies..
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@shmibs the idea is that consciousness alone remains without a universe, whether you call the universe the gross or both the gross and subtle ... that there is a thing that can involute and the universe would cease to exist to observers because everything would be in it and nothing out, only subject would exist and there would be no objects. only intention can adequately justify there being a something, because only consciousness can possess will. its unfalsifiable and fundamentally unprovable by its nature. but so are many other things...
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@georgia when physicists talk about "universe beginning with a big bang" what "beginning" means is "the point in time past which we can't trace back / predict using the information and models we have". it's not an actual "beginning" of anything really; just "beyond that point GR stops being useful and everything is hot dense soup we can only say generalised things about". similarly, "heat death" is "the universe is still there and evolving; just nothing macroscopically very interesting is happening except in the very very rare case of some boltzmann-style self assembly we can't predict". and even when talking about "multiple universes", that's only within the context of a "multiverse", which takes on the meaning universe usually hasin every case universe is "all the stuff that is" or else "all the stuff we can see / that's contiguous with and affects us"....and then if you want to get into continua that's an entire discussion on it's own that i'll go on for too long not shutting up about, but tersely it's another self-contradiction. zeno still applies, bounded infinities cannot be instantiated, pi is not a number but a digit-producing function, and this is a hundreds-of-years set-back that modern maths is only just starting to get over
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@shmibs it's just a matter of semantics, if you redefine a word to mean what you want then you can assert anything. but i don't think that is how most people would use the term "universe"... we speak of the universe beginning with a big bang, of multiple universes, of the heat death of the universe, of the holographic universe. even if you define the term as "everything that is" universe is a limiting term for traditional understanding of god-consciousness (monad/brahman) which is not a circumscribed thing consisting of discrete objects, it is a singularity of complete fullness itself, and void in perfect stasis but containing infinite potential. according to some schools of thought it is the only real thing, and the world itself, the universe, is like a dream.
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@georgia i don't believe either that the universe is mindless or that is mindful; that's (for me) beyond the scope of meaningful discussion. my personal cosmology is "formal logic seems reasonable", which is admittedly an unjustifiable starting point like any must be, and working to maintain consistency from there
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@shmibs i'm entirely aware of cosmogeny and cosmology as understood by modern physics lol. hence my usage of the terms substratum and universal medium. (which is as broad as your use of "universe" and also frontloads my personal cosmology as you do yours) "universe" itself is a word attaching itself with facility to numerous ontological and epistemological objects (over thousands of years). by referring to its usage i was clearly speaking of how the word universe is used in contemporary english, hence it being a semanticist's folly. as for your prescription that one definition be used, you deem yourself tautologically correct when you supply your own principles to start with. for example saying the universe is mindless, that consciousness is an emergent property of it and not the opposite. ultimately you'd prioritize object over subject, because to you subject is an object, hence appealing to science which describes the things unified in its consistent observation by different consciousness and in doing so purports to also describe consciousness. my intention in providing these examples of "universe" was that universe is always a bounded term, as you noted, whether boundedness is attributed accurately or inaccurately... the universe is everything that manifestly is and nothing that isn't. and since you presume to know what is, and science is what is and everything real is science, of course you arrive at your desired end where the universe is equivalent to everything science determines or can determine is real (by observation/effect)-- it is ultimately circular. you don't understand why anyone would disagree with you because you are agreeing with yourself.could the monad be called the universe? as i said earlier, sure, but it shouldn't. i think nuance is important, and so i would personally refrain from using words at such a linguistic register where they are subject to the whims of popular descriptive variation and prescriptive complexity as "universe". as for the appeal to mathematical objects such as ratio pi, i'm not sure if you're trying to describe a property of the universe or a property of god or both i guess?? as boundedly infinite??? is this the sort of philosophy under the guise of metamathematics lending itself to mathematical platonism? it reminds me of how cantor thought set theory was divinely revealed while others reviled it as blasphemy... anyway it is just as irrelevant as then and just as sophistic as describing the human brain as a graphical rendering engine. you agree with yourself and are self-satisfied, thinking it free of emotion (which is impossible to pry from human thought in actuality)... but it is not...
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@shmibs hmmm well it's meaningful to me... consciousness. it's a trope but experiencing certain altered states makes you believe in foolish things. which is also an unjustifiable starting point but it was the premise of OP...
georgia
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