Physicalism or materialism. The idea that everything there is arises from physical matter. If true would mean there is no God or Free Will, no immortal soul either.
Seems to be what most of academia bases their world view on and the frame work in which most Science is done.
Often challenged by Dualism and Idealism but only by a loud fringe minority.
I’ve heard pan-psychicism is proving quite the challenge, but I hear that from people who believe crystals can cure autism
I hear that “Oh actually the science is moving away from materialism” as well, but that seems to be more crystal talk as well.
So lemme ask science instead of google.
Any reason to doubt physicalism? Is there anything in science that says “Huh well that seems to not have any basis in the physical at all and yet it exists”
Edit: I have heard of the Essentia Foundation and Bernado Kastrup but since it’s endorsed by Deepak Chopra I’m not sure I can trust it
Does an LLM have subjective experience? The characters in The Sims – or the game itself? A thermostat? An ant colony, collectively – separate from its individual ants? The entire country of, say, Honduras, collectively? A corporation? A database? Bacteria? A human skin cell? A tumor, independent of its host? A traffic jam? Grains of sand in an hour glass? A tree? A flea? A dog?
Why is my perception of the color red the way that it is? You can swap the red and blue components of an image around and things are just as recognizable, but the experience of it is noticeably different… Why does red look like red instead of red and blue being the other way around in my subjective experience? Is your experience of red the same as mine, or are red and blue swapped for you relative to my perception of them? We know from people with color blindness that not everyone experiences the color red the same way, but how can you probe whether the perception of the color wheel is rotated by, say, 90 degrees in hue between two people with otherwise compatible perception of color?
Why don’t I experience heat on my skin the same way that I experience vision? Or touch, for that matter? People with synesthesia can have radically different subjective experience; perhaps we’ll uncover some answers from probing that – since people can talk to us – but how can we ever probe the similarities and differences in the experience that bats and dolphins may have of echolocation? If bats and dolphins could talk to each other, would their differences in the experience of echolocation be like red-green color blindness, or like vision and touch?
There probably are answers to all those questions, but given that subjective experience can only be experienced by the subject, how would you test for it? Even if there are answers, I’m not sure if it’s possible for us to know them from our point of view in the universe.
You are asking questions that seem unanswerable. In order to know whether something is having an experience, you’d have to first define what an experience is. Is it possible to define something that fundamental like that from the perspective of a biological machine for everything including non biological machines and everything in between? It’s much easier to define particles than such fuzzy things.
Once you define them, you will have to conceive experiments to test whether those definitions are wrong.
You are different from other beings. You are an amalgamation of mutations of your parents, your environment, your upbringing, your place in time and space, the contents of body, and everything else. There is no need to invoke something extra-physicalist to explain that.
Yes! That is my point. I’m not sure that explaining qualia properly is possible from our limited vantage point in the universe – even though I think there probably are actually answers to the questions I’m asking.
I content that the questions I quoted in my first part of the response are logically not answerable. It’s not a matter of being unanswerable by physicalism.
There are other questions you posed in the second part that are answerable and they are answerable I the realm of physicalism without adding any other realms.