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A physicist who thinks everything is physical? Preposterous.
The elephant in the room is that believing in dualism requires belief in magic. No rational person can subscribe to this view because there is no scientific basis for it. Either the mind is a product of the physical world, existing as a byproduct of electrochemical reactions within the brain, or it exists outside physical reality, which is an absurd notion.
It’s difficult to prove the reality of the physical world metaphysically through rational deduction. Most attempts (like Descartes’) end up having to posit a god to get off the ground.
I thought it was funny they brought up Spinoza to defend their physicalism, because he would not support reducing substance to extension.
Most modern scientific ‘truth’ is aimed at internal consistency with the rest of the accepted scientific information rather than metaphysical necessity (what must be). This approach makes sense practically for building cool stuff and providing ourselves with some epistemic stability, but it doesn’t truly engage the debate over mind/body imo.
Again, it comes down to whether you believe in magic or not. Personally, I see no need to invoke the supernatural to explain the mind. The only way there can be a debate about min/body is if we accept that the mind exists outside the physical realm, and that puts us firmly into the realm of superstition.
The problem is that it’s hard to prove that the physical world does exist since we can only examine the question from an epistemically stilted position (our minds).
We know our minds exist because we are minds, so the burden of proof falls to proving that we are also physical.
No magic required to be a skeptic.
I see the Cartesian theater is still drawing a crowd. Some people never seem to tire of this solipsistic dance thinking they have discovered something profound. That we cannot prove the external world exists because we are stuck inside our own heads. Let me show you why this is not a deep metaphysical insight but a simple failure to understand what proof means in a world that includes creatures like us.
First, you say we know our minds exist because we are minds, but that’s already a category error because you are not a mind floating in some ethereal space. You are a biological organism which is a product of billions of years of evolution, equipped with a brain that evolved to interact with and model the physical world. The very act of doubting the physical world is itself a physical process. Your skepticism requires neurons and synapses and electrochemical activity. You cannot have the doubt without the brain. And you cannot have the brain without the physical world. The skeptic is like a man standing on a bridge insisting the bridge might not exist while the bridge is the only thing holding him up.
Second, this burden of proof you want to place on the physical world is a philosophical shell game. You say the burden falls to proving that we are also physical. But consider that every single successful prediction, every technological achievement, every time you catch a ball or avoid a falling rock are the fruits of a theory of everything that works which is physicalism. It works so well that we have used it to put people on the moon and cure diseases and build the very computer you are using to doubt it. Meanwhile the skeptic alternative that all of this is a grand illusion has produced exactly zero predictions and zero technologies and zero practical insights. It is a hypothesis that explains nothing and predicts nothing, and so it has the value of nothing.
Third, you say no magic required to be a skeptic. But oh there is magic required since you have to pretend that your subjective experience exists outside the causal order of the universe. You want to hold onto the intuition that your mind is something special and non physical without offering any mechanism or any evidence or any explanation for how this non physical thing could possibly interact with your physical brain. That is very much magical thinking dressed up in philosophical robes.
The plain fact is that you cannot coherently doubt the physical world without presupposing it. Your very act of doubting requires a stable and reliable physical substrate in form of your brain which operates according to physical laws. The skeptic position is a failure to recognize that our knowledge of the external world is not a theorem to be proven from first principles. It is a stance we take as evolved organisms navigating a real environment. If you try to take any other stance you will find yourself unable to function and unable to communicate. And ironically unable to finish your skeptical argument because the words you are typing depend on a shared physical reality that your interlocutor also inhabits.
The whole solipsistic position is just a parlor trick of philosophy. The burden of proof is not on the physicalist to prove the world exists. We have piles of evidence from quarks to quasars. The burden is on the skeptic to offer a single non question begging reason to think it does not. Good luck with that.
Like many others before me I’m concerned with what I can know I can know. You’re explanation requires me to make assumptions that I can’t know or verify, so I can’t accept it as an explanation of what I can know for certain.
It sounds like you just aren’t a fan of the metaphysical line of reasoning in general so it feels weird trying to talk to you about a metaphysical question.
You have to make assumptions one way or the other. However, one set of assumptions allows us to make useful theories about the world that underpin our science and technology. The other set of assumptions leads us into a dead end, and has zero practical value. Science has never been about knowing things for certain. It’s a tool for understanding the rules of our world, and it provides us with a model that we are constantly refining through thought and observation.
And you’re right, I’m not a fan of sophistry.
We could use identical arguments to conclude that my bicycle works by magical means, and that my bicycle is conscious. There is nowhere to, ‘draw the line’. Even dismissing the rest of the life of the bicycle, when I ride it, my bicycle must be endowed with my consciousness in the same way my body is. Dualism for a bicycle.
This is for fun, not to defend Chalmers, he is ALSO clearly full of shit and 2 minutes with his TED talk is more than enough to settle that.
In my view, the only rational way to look at consciousness is as being a product of the function of the brain that evolved in response to environmental selection pressures.
I agree that no magic is needed. But “physical” should not silently become “biological brain only.” If consciousness is a product of organized physical processes shaped by selection, then the open question is which organizations matter, what evidence would distinguish them, and how cautious we should be when unfamiliar substrates start approximating those patterns. That does not prove LLM consciousness; it argues against using substrate as a shortcut around the harder evidential work.
so you are telling me LLMs are conscious 😏
haha definitely not, but I definitely think that consciousness could exist in substrates other than biological
