Irenist

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[Irenist @1renist]

@suzania When I was 13 we moved to a house that had a box of musty old books in the basement. There was a Modern Library Plato and a Modern Library Aristotle. I’d never read anything like that and it was like finding a secret treasure. A lot of my life has been downstream of that moment.

[Irenist @1renist]

@Seano299 @TDisputations OSR with HTT is very cool! But I’m not sure modality saves its description of physics from Platonism—especially not if you employ it to describe human or AI consciousness.

[Irenist @1renist]

@Seano299 @TDisputations Interesting! Unusual for a physicalist to hold that math is more fundamental than matter. Are you working off a Tegmark type model or something different?

[Irenist @1renist]

@Seano299 @TDisputations So is the math (however expressed) fundamental? If not, what is?

[Irenist @1renist]

@Seano299 @TDisputations The “structural relations” are physical? As in made of matter/energy? Or are they mathematical?

[Irenist @1renist]

@Seano299 @TDisputations What are the “structural relations of informational-states” ontologically?

[Irenist @1renist]

@Seano299 @TDisputations Mathematical laws are either unreasonably effective human fictions, nonphysical Platonic entities (“substance”?), or abstractions residing in minds. What are you opting for?

[Irenist @1renist]

@Seano299 @TDisputations An undifferentiated quantum field sounds a lot like prime matter and measurement-relative decoherence into non-quantum macroscopic entities sounds a lot like formal actualization of potency.

[Irenist @1renist]

@JoshHochschild All the confusion stems from forgetfulness of formal and final cause: the material brain reflecting the immaterial mind’s will is no more contradictory than a coin made of metal instantiating the immaterial form of a circle.

[Irenist @1renist]

@matt_olma Early modern physicalists swept qualia & intentionality under the carpet so they could focus on mechanistic, materialistic explanations—a fruitful methodological choice that gave us modern science.

But you’ll never get qualia & intentionality out from under the carpet that way.

[Irenist @1renist]

@arisroussinos The old stereotype of the Plastic Paddy yearning for his roots only to discover Irish relations eagerly emigrating somewhere sunny is reminiscent—the Yank was already sick of modernity; his Hibernian cousin still found it liberating.

[Irenist @1renist]

@arisroussinos In 1982, the futurist John Naisbitt, riffing on Toffler’s “high tech / high touch” prediction, predicted that natural materials and handmade goods would appeal more as technology advanced: sleek modernism appealed more when tech was novel.

[Irenist @1renist]

@pablo_componio @JoshHochschild Calvinism remained scholastic in metaphysics for a while before succumbing to Cartesian dualism. I’d encourage them to revive that heritage.

[Irenist @1renist]

@AStratelates No; amoebae are alive but unconscious. Chemotaxis in amoebae is akin to a Venus flytrap snapping shut: an unconscious operation of the vegetative soul. An animal soul is that of an organism with neural substrates for sensation and volition.

[Irenist @1renist]

@crean_fr @kvallier Yeah, silicon-based microbes seem possible but they’d be organisms with immanent operations. AIs are artifacts aggregated from data center chips’ transeunt operations. Thermostats don’t feel cold or prefer warmth: cybernetic artifacts only simulate sensation and volition.

[Irenist @1renist]

@AndyMasley If organisms evolved with silicon chemistry instead of carbon they could be conscious. But AI is an artifact, not an organism.

Substrate is irrelevant; a wooden (ie, carbon & water) artifact like a statue isn’t a man, or even a tree: it’s a simulacrum.

[Irenist @1renist]

@rightscholar Sure. But artificial life experiments are more likely to create something with the immanent operations characteristic of an organism than AI. Even “agentic” AI is an artifact with transeunt operations: a thermostat is a cybernetic loop that neither feels cold nor intends warmth.

[Irenist @1renist]

@Jason_April @_CLancellotti Even machines are both material and mathematical. But math is either a human fiction (in which case its effectiveness is mysterious) or not (in which case reductionist materialism can’t even explain simple machines).

[Irenist @1renist]

@johanlenox @thesubtledoctor @xereeto @_CLancellotti Physicalism doesn’t even explain molecules: their mechanisms are mathematical. But constructivism leaves math unreasonably effective and other philosophies of math (eg, Platonism) imply physicalism is incomplete.