We don't have a larger inherit tendency to make mistakes than we have to do shit right.

Of course there are plenty of times we do get things wrong, but more often than not, we get things right. It's unfair to claim that we are biased towards mistakes. We become more prone to mistakes when stakes are higher and challenges greater. But for what we are supposed to do, which is eating and fucking as much as possible, we're extremely well adapted.

Dogs have an astounding failure rate when it comes to them using telephones. Are they error-prone, or simply not people-canines, as it were?

Also, we're not random, we're probabilistic.

*ahem* to the inverse square of their distance.

See? I got that wrong, but every other word right. That's good stats. 

The problem with claiming that we are error-prone is...

who defines an error?

We do.

And we're the only ones who do. 

Following that argument, we're also the only ones who define being correct, and in which case there's no way to know objectively if we're right or wrong about anything, it's all just subjective interpretation, and therefore we should all just fuck off early from work and drink beer and fuck as many people as possible.

Maybe you should try telling that to your math professor next time he takes off marks because you made a mistake? 

First, you said:

we're also the only ones who define being correct,

Then, you said:

therefore we should all just fuck off early from work and drink beer and fuck as many people as possible.

Er, what?

How does that follow? Why is the behavior you described the logical default? It's not.

(This is what Nietzsche was destroying when he wrote about that whole �bermensch thing, AFAIK.) 

If people are the only ones who define what error is, then conversely we're the only ones who define what correct is. If that's true, then by your argument we can't objectively know what truth is, so there's really no point in trying to find out. Hence, the beer and fucking thing.

I may be wrong however. 

That was me trying to clarify RPG's point for you, not what I actually believe. 

yeah, I meant what Zwiffle said. If we cannot define error objectively, then we can't define anything objectively. In which case all arguments breaks down into "well you can't define it in objective terms". Suddenly you can't prove anything, suddenly your math homework is neither correct nor incorrect, and it is neither acceptable nor unacceptable to go to work (or at least it's impossible to know any of this, and all arguments break down into "nooo, but it's not defined that way!"). Everything we do is neither correct nor incorrect because we can't define it, and so any behavior is justified.

But you will still get a zero on the math assignment if you don't do it correctly, and you're going to be unemployed very quickly if you stop showing up for work.

And if you're fine with everything being subjective, then wtf did you bring it up in the first place? 

As I said a few posts ago, it's possible to keep on living and using logic regardless of our lack of knowledge about first philosophies.

The reason: assumptions. 

I thought it was just because roughly only 1 in 100000 people give a shit. 

Sometimes, "not giving a shit" and "making assumptions" are the same thing. 

from http://www.nwfdailynews.com/article/2277

...researchers at Berlin's Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience claim they have now, for the first time, identified people's decisions about how they would later do a high-level mental activity; in this case, adding versus subtracting.

"If you knew which thought signatures to look for, you could theoretically predict in more detail what people were going to do in the future," said Haynes.


This is awesome. And scary. 

.. is real life ?? 

Ok. We have a somewhat socialist bend on things here in Finland. It is reasoned that a child is not responsible what kind of parents he or she has. Hence the state tries to give equal chances to all kids. It starts from small babies, mothers get a "motherhood kit" with some clothes and equipment from the state. Education is free, universities too... etc etc.
It makes sense. There are many smart people who have bene born in poor families and have worked their way through the education system to good jobs.

Sick people are helped too. It is seen to that nobody has to starve to death here.

Now, this all is based more or less on the premises that "all men are born equal", and that some basic minimum level of living is maintained for all for humanitarian causes. But what happens when one goes to another country from Finland? Suddenly, other countries have very different systems. In many countries there are lots of poor people in hopeless situations, and not because of their own fault, all the while the rich in the same land don't just care.

But we can reason that "our jurisdiction doesn't reach over there", we can't do much about it etc... Give some help and that's it. They are not "our folks" so we spend considerably less resources (0.7% of GDP?) than to our own social programs.

Now then, if a person from that kind of country comes to my country. We suddenly start giving them money and apartments. Pretty much like our own people.

Now, what I find of great interest is this discontinuity that happens at the border. Is the person worthless while he or she is abroad, and suddenly gains value when he or she crosses the border into our land? Isn't that absurd?

I haven't yet said much, but thought that this could perhaps start some discussion. 

I thought about saying something about Schrodinger's cat, but considering how much of a literalist interpretation inertia put on my last comments, now I think it would be better to save the poor lad the confusion. 

am quite interested in Schrodinger's cat. 

there is socialism, but it's not all entirely good. While I agree with the idea of a minimum standard of living (I even think there should be a maximum), a significant-enough-to-bug-me amount of tax money goes towards pacifying political correct crusaders in their endless quest for "equality." There needs to be some affirmative action and grants for artists and so forth, but it's kinda ridiculous when you're living in a country where 70+% of the people speak English only, and every phone call I've ever had answered when I've called a federal department has been by someone with a thick accent, usually French (not picking on anyone that's just how it is). Also, while writer's grants and so forth are nice it would be nice if they didn't all go to lesbians and cripples. Lately a court just decided that Canadian Pension Plan money can now go to the survivors of gay couples (I mean when one partner dies), which opens another can of worms because gay marriage hasn't been legally decided yet.

While I don't intend to come across as a nazi (or a bigot, the favoured term of feminists), it would be nice of the social spending in our country was more enlightened and less ideological. Subjective ideology is never a good basis for government. 

if they invent teleports that measure you exactly when you go in, destroying you in the process, then transmit the information by light, and then do a reassembly at the other end... would you go into such a teleport?

I know I wouldn't! It would destroy me. That guy who would come out at the other end would claim to be me, but it wouldn't be me... I would be dead!

Still, that other, post-tele person would surely think it was me.

Now, what happens every night when you go to sleep? What if the guy who is reading func right now, you, is just a copy of the previous day's guy, reassembled from brain structures in the morning when he wakes up? And not the original? There's no way to know. It's funny to think about the continuity... and the importance of memory for the image of self. :)

Well, death is like sleeping but never waking up. 

so you aren't a feminist? :) 

heh, we have a lot of the same here in finland (although not the french part). You have to be a lesbian or write about gays at least to get the Finlandia book prize. Not that the books weren't decent, just kinda sticks out... 

according to most of the people in here, the guy who came out of the teleporter would be you, becuase there is no more to the "self" than physical body and brain. 

the question of what is "you" is actually fuzzy. 

 

and wake up, the only proof you have that you were not killed and reassembled during sleep is your memories, which can be fabricated (if we believe in complete physicalism). So you have no way of knowing. :)

In an extremely physicalist sense, in the teleport example, when your physical expression is killed and transferred through fiber optics, it is you who is travelling as light in the fibers.

How would that feel afterwards, after the assembly?

Now, what if this light can be split and two copies created? Interesting thought. What would happen at the split? Or if the original wasn't destroyed in the teleport?

Of course one can run away and propose that quantum mechanics prohibits making a copy of the brain without destroying it, and same would be with the photons, the information is "untouchable". It's like how one can't make money by cutting bank notes in half.

Quantum mechanics, some say, is the only basis behind randomness and enables unpredictability of the brain and ultimately, free will. But most researchers say that the brain mechanisms are macroscopic and quantum effects have no say. That would mean that it'd be in theory possible to copy it atom by atom. (A few mistakes here and there wouldn't matter.) 

I think the strongest argument for physicalism or what you call it, is the absurdity of the other alternatives.

Let's say the soul resides on some other "plane" that can not be measured by nature's forces like electromagnetism, gravity, the weak or strong force. Hence, our measuring equipment can't see it (and we can't see or touch it), since it doesn't interact with ordinary matter.
Now, it has to effect the brain somehow somewhere, because it has to interact with ordinary matter to cause decisions etc... And ordinary matter has to give feedback to the soul, otherwise we couldn't observe anything. What is the proposal for this mechanism? Descartes thought it was the pineal gland.
But even this is not the killer problem - it's the notion that it's just another dodge!
What is the soul like in the astral reality then? What is it and what is it not? Why do people die? Does it explain anything? What happens when people sleep? What happens when people are born? Are the souls ready made, waiting in the wings? What about growth? Can the astral soul switch between physical people? etc...

I'm baiting a little controversy here, but what are the nonphysicalist arguments you find the most convincing? 

...I've been contemplating your post #34 and some of those that directly preceded same. I'm not sure we need to ditch the discussion of the ontology of mind/consciousness just yet. Your robot example demonstrates that, as it stands, physicalism will only take us just thus far. Yes, Mary the Super Scientist "knows" red until she steps outside the room and upon experiencing her first Jonathan realises that she hadn't all along...and there's nothing in our experience that can ever replace hers (I might need to clarify at this point that I'm not making an epistemological point here, which is another reason why the 'know' is in scare quotes).

The more I look into this debate, the less I am convinced by the argument from science. Maybe science will eventually help us to discover the "mind", but at this stage that "mind" will be a highly generalised, rather impoverished thing. The phenomenological dangler argument is only convincing if you believe that science "as it stands" (not the growing body of "knowledge" attributed to science, but rather the discourse - in the Foucauldean sense - of science) will be able to bring the "mind" into the fold. That science struggles so hard and fails to explain away the "mind" and "mindstuff" might be an indicator that treating human "consciousness" (that special act of being aware of being aware of) might not be an extension of - or even emergent property of complex enough - simple consciousness (e.g. my housemate's cat leaps the top of the living room sofa and stares out the window when it becomes conscious of the sound of its owner's Volvo approaching) but might actually be of a different order. This is not to say that science (or even physicalism) won't be crucial in understanding human consciousness, but rather that neither is sufficient as they stand. The route to the "mind" might involve the next Copernican Revolution...and wouldn't that be thing to live through?!?

The point regarding "consciousness continuum" is relatively mundane if (as you point out) one accepts "consciousness" in the physicalist sensed used by the majority of those responding to this thread. Panpsychism takes that discussion to a far more radical/enjoyable, if somewhat hysterical/pointless, end. The nexus of meditation for me has been the conjunction between your last statement in the "consciousness continuum" point and the "consciousness defined by nature of input" point. The reason being that it seems that:

1. Human brains continue to develop from a less complex to a more complex state following birth.
2. Human senses continue to develop from a less discerning to a more discerning state following birth.
3. The sense data that these developing brains receive over time remains constant in "nature".
4. There are distinct moments in the life of a human where 1, 2 and 3 hold such that consciousness alters (one might point to the Lacanian "mirror stage" at this point, at which it might be argued that one begins to develop a "self/mind" capable of being aware of being aware of).

The upshot seems to be that consciousness is not (for humans at least) defined by nature of input alone but more importantly by nature/mode of reception...as well.

I continue to find Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, especially the discussion of the 'Child's Relations to Others' and of the chiasmus, inspiring on this point. And, I recommend that particular volume.

At this stage the physicalists will be pointing and announcing with glee that if I hold 4 to be true then I must accept that science will out. Not so good friends, even with 1 through 4 the physicalist cannot explain away (or in-corporate) the "mind". Further, even if I grant that 1 and 2 are time dependant and 3 is true, at no stage can I point to a part of Mary's brain and say, "Yes, there it is...red". Yeah, that might be "Red for Mary on this occasion" but little else. Adding a phenomenological accent ("phenomenological" as developed from Husserl, not the other type used in para 2 of this rant) to the physicalist discussion of the mind by the likes of Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson might be very useful.

We live in hope!