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With the whole 30% belief, therefore I believe it, I think this is how many Christian’s approach belief. There is a small likelihood that all of these miracle claims are true but I’m just gonna go with belief because I’m probably not smart enough to know for sure anyways. So since it feels right (Christianity as a whole) I’m just gonna go with it, after all, the majority of my friends and family believe so… not saying this is exactly what’s going on with Philip but I think this is how it works for many Christians.

Idiot

A couple of things: 1. First of all, you hold the Western idea of irresistible grace, where belief is completely the work of God and the believer plays little to no role in the act of faith. This is different from the Eastern Christian understanding of synergism, where belief arises from the interplay of both God and man, and true faith is only possible as an act of free will. A true belief in God (as opposed to a nominal one) is the result of a completely free choice for God above all else. God sets the conditions for faith, but it is up to us to choose him. This freedom was granted to us when man was first created "in the image and likeness if God". As God is free, so likewise He made us. 2. If people feel like they are trying to believe in God, but God is not responding to them, then it is because they are still in love with the things of this world. That it is to say that they are still attached to vainglory or sensual pleasures or money or to other people. One must desire God (or the "Highest Power" if you prefer) above all else and must be willing to sacrifice worldy attachments if necessary. These attachments include a multitude of things such as fame, money, intellectual and spiritual pride, beauty, family and friends, lovers, extravagant foods and drinks, intoxicants and so on. God will only reveal Himself to people who will value Him as the Highest Good, which He truly is, and place Him at the center of their life. He won't waste His time with people who will place Him in second place. 3. God originally created the world as perfectly good and He made man the caretaker of the entire cosmos. This means that when man fell, the entire cosmos fell along with him. Death and sickness entered the world when he disobeyed God. If God is the ultimate source of life and goodness and joy, doesn't that mean that if disconnect from Him then we will lose life, goodness and joy? And this is precisely what occurred. Instead of life, now death; instead of goodness, now evil; and instead of joy, now suffering. So don't blame God for the evil in the world. Blame the wickedness of mankind instead.

So atheists dont actually think a highly complex Information packed self replicating factory( aka a living cell) simply mindlessly engineered itself??? Well if this is true than how can we call atheists dimwitted delutional lemmings?? Oh boy we will need some new material...

IF YOU WANT TO GAMBLE SEE IF YOU CAN ROLL THE DICE 2 TIMES AND GET 2 OUT OF IT EACH TIME// THATS GAMBLEING ON YOUR LIFE

What atheism means according dictionary and ''intellectuals'' and who atheists and atheist organisations representatives actually are is a different story. I spoke with plenty of people calling themselves atheist..all of them hardcore materialist. Same with representatives of atheist organisations. And famous atheists. They just wont stop redicule people who do believe anything beyond materialism. I think you people are detached from reality.

it seems to me that the simplest answer to mary's room for physicalist is to say that she does not have a full physical understanding because she lacks information that can only be gained by directly accessing them, i.e. having red light shined into your eyes

I’m lost

Oh, I think that I just don’t agree with “ought implies can”. I’m comfortable with holding a hypocrisy. But I don’t see it as a hypocrisy. Just because I can’t, doesn’t mean that I think it wouldn’t be morally right. It just isn’t possible. That sucks.🤷‍♂️. That’s reality. “Good” intention meet constraints. Life is filled with constraints. We don’t have infinite resources. Economics is the study of the management of scarce resources. We make trade-offs all the time. We must. Further, what about marginal improvements that could be made? Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. (I’m still not actually convinced that ending Wild Animal Suffering is morally right. But I’m also not convinced by your arguments against it. I really just find the concept really thought-provoking right now)

Josh Rasmussen has this awesome analogy about pilots flying planes over water and it gets hard to tell the sky and the water apart, and some pilots have accidentally flipped upside down and flown into the water trying to get higher in the sky. And Josh said that trying to figure out whether matter or mind is primitive is like being the pilot and trying to figure out if the plane is upside down. It seems like materialism is the upside-down pilot who keeps trying to fly up but winds up crashing.

"All we know about matter is that it's sometimes conscious." Shouldn't it rather say: all we know about matter is that sometimes things made of it are conscious. Wouldn't it be a fallacy of division to assume the former claim?

It seems trivial that information alone is not enough to learn a new ability (perceptual or otherwise): reading everything that's been written on sports won't turn you into the world's best athlete; but there's little doubt that your athletic ability is stored in your body (mostly in the nervous system). Muscle memory and all that. So while neuroscientific knowledge admittedly comes short of encompassing all a person can know about their own experience, it's not ruled out that all a person knows is physically stored in their brains (and possibly other parts of their body).

Amazing to be lying with a calm voice

1:02 this video would have been better without the attacking / aggressive snark. snark and emotional attacks / ridicule like that pushes people away and flares up anger. it polarises and makes it so that the people who engage with you or comment are people who already agree with you. saying "and I'm sick of it" might be fine for a personal video, but for a video that wants to actually discuss ideas in good faith without making emotional attacks, it has no place. saying snarky things like at 1:03 ("Spell it out for me. Please. I'll wait"). The tone of your voice is NOT "I welcome and will gladly listen to other people's viewpoints". It is instead a tone of voice that assumes contempt for people whose views different from you. please, attack the logic of views that oppose yours, in good faith. don't use disrespectful tone. disrespectful tone only polarises and is NOT going to make a forum of honest dicussion and debating of ideas.

stay hard lol

We're all zombies. Animals are machines.

It might not be possible to simply switch the redness of red with the blueness of blue. E.g. the phenomenon of synesthesia, whereby in some individuals feel explicit links between disparate forms of perception, seems to support the idea of a degree of physical grounding in the experience of color: "grapheme-color synesthetes tend to associate A with red, E with yellow or white, I with black or white, and O with white" (here, I'm using the letters merely to fix the synesthetes' personal experiences to a shared physical pattern of observations). And there are probably other, depeer mental phenomena (hidden even to the synesthete) corresponding to such neural structure. I'm not saying this proves color qualia are supervenient on the neural structure, but it makes switching experiences at least harder to conceive: it's not enough to grant that blood and firetrucks (and all external things perceived as red) are all carried over to the new color label; there's more, internal, neural grounding to it. So what's left for switching?

Where does the testable weight of the evidence lead? Seems to me that all the evangelizing, philosophizing, reductionism, arguing and the incessant preoccupation with definitions is in itself good evidence for a materialistic origin of consciousness.

in moderate realism we just accept existence and consciousness perceiving existence. it is atheism but not materialism. no assumptions or postulates but we accept these two facts based on common sense.

There is no reason to think that ecosystems are finely tuned to optimize animal welfare. Therefore, we have no a priori reason to believe that any disruption of an ecosystem is more likely to be a net negative for animal welfare than a net positive. The acceptability of interventions should be based on their predicted consequences according to our best ecological modeling capabilities, not on a precautionary principle whose implicit logic is unfounded. Singer's argument about the track record of the effects of human activities on wild animals is similarly baseless, first because it is based on pure intuition, not an actual computation, and second because he's talking about a track record where humans were not trying to enhance wild animal welfare. Any large scale operation that we do, like vaccinating human populations, could have unintended long term ecological effects (microorganisms that cause diseases in humans are indeed part of the ecosystem just as much as any other organism). Indeed there is absolutely no reason to think that interventions that benefit humans, pets or livestock could not cause catastrophic ecological damage, since we are all part of the interconnected web of life. Yet we do not apply the precautionary principle that prevails in arguments against intervention the wild when it comes to humans, pets or livestock, which is simply irrational.

Poor mary being forced to stay locked in a room unable to see the colour red all because of those pesky philosophers of mind 😢 #FREEMARY

Idk, like as an analytic philosopher we reject that our logic relate in any way to psychology. You may call us obtuse for denying that we learn something but why would “feeling like we learned something” have anything to do with gaining capital K Knowledge. I think the idea that psychological states like curiosity exert any force on how we structure our predicates is confused from the get go.

How about the 2nd premise? Satisfying curiosity necessarily involves gaining new information. We can be curious about 4D cube even if we know everything about 4D cube because we can't conceptualize 4D object .

It's not information, it's experience. Can Mary express what she learned to anyone who hasn't experienced red so they will learn without experiencing it? No, it's not possible, or she would have learned it in the room. The subjective impression of something is simply not information, factual, or "true".

What RoboMary knows is my favorite version of this thought exeriment. Knowing absolurely everything there is to know about vision does rqual experiencing it yourself. Absolutely everything there is possible to know is a lot. Like you know the exact brain state feeling seeing color is like and just put the brain in that state.

I think if one denies PC, there is no non-arbitrary difference between knowledge-what and knowledge-how. Both are just reputed causes of our external behaviors.

Why do you think most philosophers are physicalists despite this and many other considerations?

One of the most exciting aspects of a psychedelic trip is the deluge of hundreds of novel qualia that will (most likely) never be experienced again. I just can't describe how invigorating it is to have your qualitative palate magnified leaps and bounds beyond what you thought possible through decades of prior experience. I can with fairly high confidence say I have experienced thousands of unique, ephemeral qualia not shared with any other human. I even had a genuine psychedelic experience taking shrooms in a dream once when it had been years since my last dose. Say this really is due to the psychedelic impetus on the brain to relax entropy suppression (Entropic Brain, Carhart-Harris et al., 2014, 2016), meaning that the conscious brain is actively working all the time to reduce the number of possible states (allowing for trains of thought rather than scatter-plot thought), and also that it is the states themselves which produce the different qualia. My question is, granting brain-state-dependent knowledge (qualia included), how can you say you have particular knowledge if your brain hasn't been in that state? I don't see the problem with a physically rooted mind composed of multiple specialized agentic centers (bi-, tri-, multicameral mind) requisite for particular states, et ergo knowledge, operating in symbiosis. Thus is the economy of the remainder of the body. More to the point, I've seen interesting transplant studies indicating that memory might be more distributed throughout the organs. Carter et al. 2024 wrote that 42/47 transplant recipients reported personality changes. I sometimes get a feeling from panpsychists that if knowledge is not univocal/unimedium in our current physical ledgers (e.g. whether you can represent and transmit it in a database), then it's a strike against physicalism. Non-transmissible data exists in the physical world every time two devices aren't equipped with the proper protocols for communication (and sometimes the EU regulates Apple over it). Before USB, you needed a port for every different device. Want to print? Too bad. If natural selection has created us as islands with only certain protocols for transmitting information (no USB ports), I don't think that inherently implies that any information variety for which we lack a transmission protocol MUST be non-physical. The data on a hard drive doesn't get spiritually translated because you don't have the right cord for it. Perhaps non-transmissible data is so flustering to philosophers simply because of how frustrating it is that nature did not equip us with transfer protocols. "Non-transferrable knowledge? Luckily, we know that transferrable is a synonym for physical. Ontology solved." Idk, I'm rambling

The idea of Mary having *all* physical information about color vision is a truly enormous hypothetical, at least from a materialist perspective. It would mean that Mary understands every aspect of the brain that is in any way affected by color entering the eyes, which is an understanding that is so far removed from any real neuroscientist as to be unimaginable. She knows how emotions are felt and why. She knows what people are thinking and why they think it. She knows how memories are stored and recalled, and she knows how all of its fits together into a mind. Her understanding of color is above ours in much the same way that our understanding of economics is above that of a koala. Such understanding could plausibly be beyond the limits of a human mind. It would be fair to say that Mary is a god of color perception. It seems bold for us mere mortals to speculate about what a god of color perception would think upon perceiving color for the first time. The non-materialist arguments depends on us assuming that she would learn something new, but that is far from clear. She already knows how color affects people down to the finest detail, so before she looked at a single color she already knew exactly what she would think and feel about the experience. She knew what she would feel, why she would feel it, and the exact physical processes that would lead to those feelings. Every neuron firing in her brain throughout the whole experience would be predicted by her. What can she think upon seeing red for the first time aside from, "That is just exactly what I expected."

I don't know if I buy the argument against it being an ability. It seems to imply that know how knowledge somehow breaks physicalism, or it's impossible to be curious about how to play the piano or ride a bike. Do you think the argument only applies to phenomenological knowledge and not know how? If so why?

Mary's Room is evidence FOR physicalism, not evidence against it. People interpret the thought experiment fallaciously.

Conceptual dualism just appears to be saying that my thought of a physical state is distinct to my thought of a mental state yet they are one and the same in reality. However, this doesn't do anything to undermine arguments which are specifically designed to show that physical states and mental states aren't one and the same in reality due to really having distinct characteristics. I view the zombies and Mary's room argument as two ways of fleshing out the same problem, namely, the hard problem of consciousness. The reason why philosophical zombies are possible is precisely because there are different properties present in mental states compared to brain states/activity. This is the same reason as to why it's possible for Mary to be aware of the entire neurophysiology of colour perception and still learn something new when experiencing colour, since if x and y are not identical in reality, it's possible to know x without knowing y and vice versa.

Atheism claims, without evidence, that there is no God. Theism claims, without evidence, that there is a God. Both are believers, lacking any evidence. Essentially there is no difference between the two! Agnostics, withhold judgement until some sort of 'evidence' appears, one way of the other. An intellectually honest approach, as opposed to Atheist. Materialists are simply ignorant of the science and philosophy that has been happening for a few hundred years! Consciousness and thought are not manufactured by some throbbing lump of meat, they are the Essence of Reality!

What are the definitions of curiosity and information being employed in this argument?

When you think of it all in terms of qualia, any physicalist attempt to get out from the necessary conclusion of the thought experiment seems rather silly. "Can Mary, given a complete set of quantitative qualia (conceptual representations, physical/computational data), derive a specific, non-conceptual quale?" The answer is no. So then the physicalist moves the debate into "how can we define non-conceptual qualia as irrelevant?" Mary’s experience simply reveals that direct awareness of a quale is fundamentally distinct from any conceptual representation. On the Revelation point: If Revelation is true, as it clearly is, then introspection grants us direct access to the essential nature of conscious states-what pain is in itself, not merely its conceptual or physical correlates. But this suggests a reframing: introspection is not limited to the direct apprehension of qualia (or, rather, everything can be broken down to the direct apprehension of qualia). Physical, conceptual investigation-our attempts to model and understand the brain or c-fibre activity-is itself a form of introspection. All mental activity is the mind learning about itself, whether through direct awareness of qualia or through conceptual abstraction. Science, then, is not external to introspection, but a mediated layer of it.

Why think we're in a position to know, or even make any good guesses, about whether Mary would learn something new or not? What puzzles me about Mary's Room as a thought experiment is the notion that we can glean much, if anything, from it. I question whether we're capable of adequately conceptualizing what it would even mean to know all the physical facts about red, I question whether humans are even capable of doing so, and I question why we would think that we're in a position, given our present knowledge, to make judgments about whether a person in highly bizarre hypothetical circumstances would or wouldn't learn anything. I think the issue here isn't that physicalists should try to argue that Mary learns something but it isn't nonphysical, or doesn't learn any nonphysical facts, and so on. What they should do is directly challenge the viability of the thought experiment itself. The problem here is a metaphilosophical one.

I thought of this counter example regarding phenomenal curiosity: you could very well be curious about how it tastes to eat food x, even though you have already eaten food y which tastes identical to x. So you already possess the knowledge you are yearning for, but just do not realize it. Thoughts?

Frank Cameron Jackson, the guy who came up with the Mary's Room thought experiment eventually rejected his own invention and became a physicalist.

Feeling pain is a physical thing. One cannot have all physical knowledge of pain in a room where pain does not exist. This is true for colour as well. The original thought experiment is incoherent in this way. I'm convinced this third layer of consciousness, 'what it's like to be', is the invention of some philosophers in order to keep them employed.

Gotta love Dall-E3 giving Mary red hair

Your rant on descartes was so freaking hilarious! Just the calm voice leading up to a gentle 'fuck' really made me laugh, lol.

Hi Emerson, I’m new to your channel, I was wondering what exactly is your position on consciousness. What precisely do you mean when you say non-physicalist? Thank you.