On that point I think that when atheists suggest the possibility of our Universe arising from “Nothing”, that they don’t actually use that single term. Say “essentially nothing” or “”virtually nothing” (anything but “nothing”).

Or simply explicate what you mean by nothing. But, yes.

But leave the term “nothing” to mean the thing that common people understand (or try to imagine) it to be.

The problem arises then that they have no coherent understanding of this. Nor any in common. Everyone conceptualizes nothing differently. Most think of it as just empty space, for example (which is not what theologians mean at all). And those who try to think of it as lacking even that, often go too far and conceptualize a state of nothing that is logically impossible (whereby no rules exist, but a rule exists that nothing can result; or whereby no actual things exist and yet no potential things exist, even though the absence of all actuals logically entails the presence of all potentials).

So it really isn’t possible to just leave the term to mean what “common people” understand. No one agrees on what it means, and many have unworkable ideas of what it means. Explication is therefore the only recourse.

I would say the same for the word “spiritual.” There simply is no functional way to use it except to explicate it (either explicitly or by provided context).

Theists will exploit this fact to quote people out of context, ignoring their explication, and falsely attribute some other meaning to their words than they stated. But that is their sin, for which they must be caught and called out. There is no way to “prevent” them doing this but by shaming and embarrassing them for doing it.

“So they shouldn’t be using words and phrases like “eliminativism” (no, you have not “eliminated” truth and propositions; you’ve simply redefined what you think they are, which is not the same thing) or “doesn’t exist” (no, you mean, the thing as traditionally conceived doesn’t exist; but that something does very much exist, it’s just a different thing than commonly thought). I’ve already explained this point before with respect to “truth” and “propositions” (and even “beliefs”) as claimed “not to exist” by the otherwise-excellent philosophers Paul and Patricia Churchland (see “Giving the Churchlands a Fairer Shake” in my Critical Review of Reppert). Tl;dr: they actually just argue these exist as different things than usually thought, not that they don’t exist “at all.” So, honestly, that’s what they should have frackin said.”

Agreed. And the reason is not only might it confuse experts in the field, but most certainly people that don’t have the background and expertise to grasp or have an understanding of what the person might really mean.

They are drawing on their limited knowledge/experise in that area and a standard (common) vocabulary.

On that point I think that when atheists suggest the possibility of our Universe arising from “Nothing”, that they don’t actually use that single term. Say “essentially nothing” or “”virtually nothing” (anything but “nothing”).

But leave the term “nothing” to mean the thing that common people understand (or try to imagine) it to be. Because if you start out calling it “nothing”, and then try to explain that you actually meant something different than that, it gives the appearance of a disengenious bait and switch, even if that wasn’t at all intended.

Another example which confused and then frustrated me was when Sam Harris would insists that atheist could have “spiritual” experiences. He admitted that many of his fellow atheists objected to that. And for good reason I would argue. Because despite what he actually means or his intentions with be his use of that word, most people (myself included), recognize that the root word of spiritual is “spirit”. Sam Harris has already clarified that he doesn’t believe such things as a spirit. His justification for use of that word is that there simply isn’t a better word to describe the experience. But in my mind the solution is so simple. He should refer to it as a “spiritual like” experience. Then his readers would quickly grasp that he isn’t describing an experience that is literally “spiritual”. Instead he creates a problem and confusion for everyone (including Christians), with his insistance that atheists can also have “spiritual” experiences.

That isn’t what people colloquially mean most of the time by color. They mean the experience. Yes, you can “redefine” the world to exclude the experience, but that won’t answer to what people experience, and thus is no longer referring to consciousness at all.

I’m going to speculate here, but maybe some confuse “hallucination’” with “illusion”. During a hallucination there’s no external counterpart to what one experiencing in their head, whereas during an illusion there is. So if one says, “consciousness is a hallucination”, that would mean that it literary doesn’t exist in any sense. I know that can’t be since one would need to have consciousness to hallucinate, but you get my point.

I am not sure what point you mean to make here.

I can say that switching the word to “hallucinate” does have some utility. It would be an example of using forced perspective to better understand something.

We actually can objectively define the difference between a real experience and a hallucinated one. In a real experience, the construct is built out of, and trying to reliably interpret, actual sensory data; and a hallucinated experience is when that happens without actual sensory data.

So turn this onto the mind itself: would it make sense to say there is a difference between constructing a self absent any relevant data, and making a good effort at constructing one out of real data?

Here it becomes clear consciousness cannot be a hallucination, because it is literally a construct from real data (that’s the only way it can even exist). This is why anything you ask about yourself is usually (not always, but more often than not) true. Real memories. Real desires. Real point of view (both in its vantage and its blinds). Even the stuff that is more frequently false than the rest—like beliefs about your character or abilities—is still being built out of real data (your computer is just drawing the wrong conclusions from that data).

When someone completely fantasizes a self, we get personal delusions (“I am Napoleon”), which we recognize as mental illness and not the normal mode of anyone’s brain. Everyone else has the ability to fact-check and correct-towards-actual their beliefs about themselves, and thus become more self-aware and more self-actualized. That that is possible (and that there is a difference between being that and not) proves consciousness is real and thus not a hallucination.

But it is still an illusion in various respects, for the reasons explained in this article.

Moreover, do you think “I think therefore I am” was meant to be taken as a deduction or an intuition? There’s a debate in philosophy on this issue and apparently Descartes meant it as an intuition.

I can’t speak to what Descartes himself thought (that is a question for experts in the history of Enlightenment philosophy or even in Descartes specifically). For example, Charles Miceli has a piece on this. And Wikipedia has a detailed article.

But as a philosopher asking the question on his own, I believe this is a false dichotomy. Insofar as an intuition is any direct apprehension without further ground (a basic belief), obviously the premises of his argument (“I think” and “thinking is a kind of existing”) are intuitions. But insofar as the argument is formally framed, obviously the conclusion is a deduction (if “I think” and “thinking is a kind of existing” are both true, then it is deductively necessary that “I exist”). So it’s both.

Indeed, the argument is, like all deductions, simply an articulated tautology: insofar as we define existing a certain way, then everything that is thinking by definition is existing.

I don’t find this dispute useful or productive, however. It doesn’t matter what is or isn’t an intuition or a deduction. That’s a semantic distinction of no relevance to anything significant in itself. Because both intuitions and deductions can be false or true. And what matters is what is or isn’t true, and what can or can’t be known. And my take based on that framework is covered in Epistemological End Game.

Meanwhile my take on intuition more broadly is covered in Sense and Goodness without God (see the index; my inspiration there is a syncretism of the intuitionist epistemology of Polanyi and the analytical epistemology of Ayer) and my take on deductionism more broadly (I don’t consider it all that reliable; we need it but it has severe limitations) was recently articulated in Why Syllogisms Usually Suck.

This cannot be overstated and I find it very frustrating. And it’s really embarrassing when it applies to experts, such as professional philosophers.

I’m going to speculate here, but maybe some confuse “hallucination'” with “illusion”. During a hallucination there’s no external counterpart to what one experiencing in their head, whereas during an illusion there is. So if one says, “consciousness is a hallucination”, that would mean that it literary doesn’t exist in any sense. I know that can’t be since one would need to have consciousness to hallucinate, but you get my point.

Moreover, do you think “I think therefore I am” was meant to be taken as a deduction or an intuition? There’s a debate in philosophy on this issue and apparently Descartes meant it as an intuition.

What matters to me is that it’s a valid deduction (and I think it clearly is).

1) Isn’t it circular to frame our moral sense of what is harmful in terms of consciousness?

Not in any pertinent sense. All definitions are circular, so that can be no fault of them. It just so happens that pain and pleasure, satisfaction and dissatisfaction, the only reasons to ever do or care about anything (and thus the only basis any moral system could have), are fundamental products of consciousness. That’s not a circular argument; it’s a statement of empirical and ontological fact. If consciousness didn’t exist, neither could moral facts. Moral facts are facts about consciousness. Although I don’t frame this in that vocabulary in my chapter on moral theory in The End of Christianity<, I do demonstrate it there. So that may be a place to start in analyzing this point.

It’s possible you are confusing consciousness with qualia here. I can’t tell, but if that’s what’s happening, then I should note that my moral system is not dependent on qualia, but on consciousness (the awareness and understanding of things). I do happen to believe these are logically inseparable, but we haven’t formally proved that yet, so it is at least conceptually possible they are separable and there could have been a world without qualia but with conscious understanding and satisfaction and dissatisfaction states and the like. If such a world exists, my moral theory would still follow there. Because it follows from the ability to comprehend and care about things. If no such ability exists, neither could any moral propositions be true.

Suppose someone doesn’t accept that premise. Can you convince them?

What would that even mean? Someone who insists an entity incapable of caring about anything should care about something? That would be a self-contradictory position to maintain. Perhaps you need to read The Objective Value Cascade.

If instead you mean “someone who cares about something different than the rest of us and insists everyone else should care about it too” then we’re back in metaethical theory, asking what is true. And all moral truth really follows from reasons to care about a thing, reasons every individual must share for it to be true that everyone should care about that thing. Those reasons have to be factually true, or arrived at without fallacy from premises that are factually true. Otherwise, by definition, you can have nothing factually true to say about morality (or any imperatives at all).

That again I prove (even by formal syllogism) in the chapter I just referenced above. If someone wants to prove some other moral conclusion should be reached about, say, stones or plants or animals or certain animals etc., they have to do it the same way as anyone else: present factually true premises, and derive their conclusion from them without fallacy. If they can do that, they will persuade me. If they can’t, they have nothing capable of legitimately persuading anyone.

Remember knowledge, including moral knowledge, is justified true belief. So if you can’t even get the “justified” part to work, you can’t claim to know anything about what’s actually moral or not.

(And as for the “true” part, this is a digression here, but that ultimately has to be an empirical case to a probability, i.e. the only truths we really have access to as knowledge are the approximate epistemic probability of a belief’s truth given the information available to us, which still has to be proved without fallacy, which gets us back to the “justified” part.)

2) Isn’t it a problem for you that consciousness is, as you argue here, an emergent property, an imperfect model of the world, and can exist in degrees?

Not at all. Emergent properties are real properties and have real effects on the world, which could thus include effects on what is morally true or not. And imperfect modeling is merely an epistemic issue, the same as all moral theories must cope with, and indeed all knowledge of anything whatever. (And degrees of consciousness are an ontological fact, and different physical facts should be expected to make differences in moral facts, not the other way around.)

No one has absolute certain knowledge—not even a God could, as even a God could be tricked by a Cartesian demon into falsely believing he is infallibly omniscient. Thus, all knowledge, hence moral knowledge as well, exists only by degrees of epistemic probability. This is true of all moral theories and systems. Therefore, it can be no peculiar defect of any. Just as with all other domains of knowledge.

“I can only have a high degree of confidence x is moral” does not entail “therefore no moral facts exist” nor that “therefore no moral knowledge is accessible to us.” Any more than the same would follow for any other knowledge. For example, that I can be wrong about what city I am in right now (however unlikely) does not make for there being no fact of the matter where I am, nor does it make for my having no knowledge whatever as to where I am. Ditto all moral facts. Imperfect modeling is just one way this spectrum of epistemic probability has to be navigated, one more fact to account for in epistemic equations regarding what we can or can’t be confident of. Which is a fact in every possible epistemology. Hence it can be no peculiar fault of any.

Dogs may not be self-aware, but in their actions they exhibit a desire to live and they can feel it when they suffer or prosper. Why should their moral status depend to a significant degree on whether or not they are fully aware of themselves?

Good question. Can you answer that question? Without fallacy or falsehood? If no, then you have no reason to believe the answer is anything other than I have arrived at myself. If yes, then you should be able to outperform Paul Bali, who despite ample opportunity, failed to produce any such case. By contrast, I provided an ample case there for my answer to this question, as to why dogs don’t have comparable moral standing, because we have less reason to care about their lives than we do fully sentient beings. All of the reasons we have to care about people the way we distinctively do, simply aren’t factually true about dogs. That’s where things stand. Until someone can change that state of affairs with a sounder case than Bali. The failure to ever produce such a case, after thousands of years of trying, stands so far as evidence no such case can be made. If you want to change that state of affairs, you have to actually do it. Possibly never gets you to probably. And knowledge only exists in the probable.

And 3) If consciousness is so important to you, why doesn’t the potential to become conscious matter more in your ethics?

Because by logic potential persons can only have potential rights, not actual rights. There is a reason burning my blueprint of a house yet to be made is not prosecutable as the crime of burning down my house. Potential things have potential, not actual, properties. Hence, I cannot ruin or destroy the satisfaction state of someone who doesn’t exist yet (like Mark Twain said, “I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it”). There have to actually be satisfaction states to ruin or destroy, or a future certainty of them. Not merely hypothetical ones whose possibility of existence is itself being decided.

If you want to argue otherwise, again, you need a non-fallacious conclusion derived from factually true premises. It’s been thousands of years of trying, again, and still no one has ever come up with such a case for first-trimester fetuses. That doesn’t bode well for the thesis. It certainly gives us no confidence in it.

This is distinct from the fact that a first-trimester fetus can have personal value (e.g. a mother and father can value it and its potentials). That is not moral value. Moral value is a value everyone logically and evidentially should share (which means, they would share it, if adequately informed and reasoning without fallacy). But personal choices as to whether to care about a particular possibility do not make for universal imperatives. A mother and father can just as readily and justifiably not value their own fetus and its potentials, or value more the waiting for a better time to raise a child or the support of others doing so instead (and thus choosing which hypothetical children should come to actually exist). There is no case to be made that they “should” value anything about a hypothetical person; until the future existence of that person is a certainty.

Hence one can make a case for valuing future populations, because they will always exist (to a high degree of certainty), so your choices today will actually (not just potentially) affect them; but that case does not commute to specific hypothetical individuals, because almost all of them will not exist (by far most logically possible fetuses never even get made in the first place, and most that do miscarry naturally), and deciding that one shall not exist does not commute back into deciding to kill the entirety of future humanity, precisely because of variance in personal value and circumstances across the population (e.g. everyone who aborts a fetus is correct in their knowledge that millions of babies will still be born and raised). This may lead to bizarre life boat cases where one can debate whether, say, the last woman alive should abort their child or not, but such cases do not track reality (no one today is in that scenario, so what one would conclude in it is irrelevant).

That’s true about academia.edu but they are a bit too shady for me to confidently recommend. Yes, I maintain a page there. But their manipulative marketing tactics and money grubbing (and poor back-end design) incline me to avoid them as much as humanly possible. I would rather we had a replacement. JPASS is at least honest, competent, reasonable, and straightforward.

It’s true pansychism is a bit like god as an explanation, a kind of theoretical Mary Sue that actually doesn’t explain anything at all, but allows someone to stop having to ask why anything works the way it does and pretend they already answered that question when they haven’t.

I agree with you, it´s much more likely the case that at a certain level of complexity, computers/brains will start to generate internal computations. Indeed, I would have just thought it´s simple probability that if someone has the same physical makeup as you more or less that they probably experience qualia more or less as you do.

I think another issue with panpsychism is that when you look at humans versus animals, they clearly have very different mental abilities, and different levels of consciousness, and panpsychism doesn´t really have an answer to this in my view. It seems evidently clear that matter arranged in different ways produces different levels of mind and I think panpsychism has no decent answer to the question as to why a human child can think but not a stone.