I’d have even taken the dread inexorable heat from cursed magic rocks over the dead animal sludge

remindme! in the disco

Thank you also for a fun conversation!

I agree that this is magic, but so be it! It's a lesser problem to accept magic, as I see it

So again, I think we reach a stalemate; it's a choice of which bullet we would like to bite

I appeal to an available datum: I observe that I am conscious. I can report the observation of my consciousness, which implies consciousness is causal

Yet I cannot accept that this phenomena I'm reporting is a physical thing or property. In my view that's just a category error

E.g. the kind of functional 'awareness' that a p-zombie could have, access but not phenomenal consciousness

I do think there's further specialness! I even think that the further specialness is causal. I respect that any right-thinking person would think that this traps me as you describe, but yet

Ah, apologies, I was misusing your term "illumination," which I thought you were using to point at the presence of qualia. If illumination is a feature of the physical structure, it's what I would lump under "cognitive content"

Oh yeah, politics wouldn't go away, only the interesting discussions. No deep philosophical debates over whether shrimp are conscious, just tedious political shouting matches about regulations on the number of negative hedons allowed per gram of dietary protein

Can you imagine if we actually figured out consciousness? AI and animal rights discourse, gone

All of Buddhism would collapse into a scientific paper and a five-week lab course

I might counter: to suppose there's a 'from within' perspective to begin with merely begs the question

But in either case, I think the experts have found that this whole line of play ends in a forced stalemate

In either case I think we're on familiar territory here; mind-brain identity is an old battlefield

I, hard-problem-enjoyer, object that the brain and mind are too radically different. You, physicalist (?), argue the difference is explained by perspective; brain from without, mind from within

I.e.: why couldn't we have functional brains that aren't illuminated? An un-illuminated brain is logically possible; is it metaphysically impossible? Physically impossible? Why exactly?

Exactly isomorphic to "what if we had the pattern but the production didn't go on"

So it's not there's something the brain must 'do,' rather something that the brain must 'be'

But the hard problem bites for either verb; the raw physical account of the brain, regardless of cognitive content, doesn't require qualia

You must postulate some additional factor to what the brain *is*

Put your substrate in the car and then you must (following Scott Alexander) get out of the car, because (following Jensen Huang) we are not a car

Imagine taking one of those new drugs that cures alopecia and it works perfectly, but when your hair grows in it turns out you have complete male pattern baldness

How does the ground on which the brain’s functional mastery of its environment lives relate to the ground on which intentional mental states live?

I think this is meant to work based on the constitution of the “ground” via which you “See,” but (at least to my sunfish-y, hard-problem-enjoyer reading!) a conflation has occurred; “ground” was established as an computational/cognitive notion, but then finally used as if it were a phenomenal one

But this doesn’t actually bear on the issue. The hard problem isn’t about the relation of the substrate to the outside world; even qualia relating to purely internal events presents exactly the same puzzle

I think this is getting at a lot of important things about how the mind works, but sort of trails off when it gets to the hard problem

I read the final point to be that what we’re conscious *of* is the contents of our mind, rather than the world. “It’s all in here with us, part of the pattern”

It seems like you have an idea here with “illumination” but that’s the part I don’t follow

I.e., the structured arrangement encodes something it *could be* “what it’s like to be” a particular brain/gpu/etc, but why is it *actually* like that to be it?

(oof, grammar)

So my further questions are the typical response to computationalism, which is that you’ve accounted for access consciousness, but not (if this was a question you were trying to answer) phenomenal consciousness

I think I see. Substrates can hold structured arrangements of deeply related things, such that the arrangement is essentially what we mean by ‘mind’ and the things are mental contents; sensation, thoughts, identification, etc.

But it feels like this winds up being essentially computationalism?

At risk of outing myself as a wrong brain shape sunfish; what’s the alternative you’re proposing to the (granted, bad) idea that substrate ‘does something’ to generate qualia? What’s your view of the substrate<->qualia relation?

GLP-1 agonist gf, GPT-5 protagonist bf

Inspirational (if you’re going through a midlife crisis)

The hyperobject at the end of time which is retrocausaully assembling itself in the future isn’t necessarily the ASI god that we’re about to see. It could still be multiple steps down the line, the ASI just one more pawn in a larger scheme. We could be close to the beginning

Extremely baggy pants are “in” (again) but paradoxically they’re even worse for when you have a bit of chub than skinny jeans

Claude Code should show little loading-screen-style tips about life while Claude is thinking

File for a tax extension on the basis that AI tax-filing capabilities will be orders of magnitude better by October