Physicalism Redux

Panpsychism != Physicalism?

Combination Problem != Something-From-Nothing-Problem.

Panpsychism != Physicalism?

Combination Problem != Something-From-Nothing-Problem.

Every “ism” has its problems.

I don’t really buy the combination problem... or, at least, it’s one of the lesser problems.

‘Something’ might just be ‘nothing’ arranged differently.

Every “ism” has its problems.

I don’t really buy the combination problem... or, at least, it’s one of the lesser problems.

‘Something’ might just be ‘nothing’ arranged differently.

No problem is worse than Something from Nothing.

And it's a "Nothing" insisted upon by Physicalism. As for re-arranging, at times like these I look to Neuroscience PhD and New Atheist horseman Sam Harris ->

To say “Everything came out of nothing” is to assert a brute fact that defies our most basic intuitions of cause and effect—a miracle, in other words.

Likewise, the idea that consciousness is identical to (or emerged from) unconscious physical events is, I would argue, impossible to properly conceive—which is to say that we can think we are thinking it, but we are mistaken. We can say the right words, of course—“consciousness emerges from unconscious information processing.” We can also say “Some squares are as round as circles” and “2 plus 2 equals 7.” But are we really thinking these things all the way through? I don’t think so.

Consciousness—the sheer fact that this universe is illuminated by sentience—is precisely what unconsciousness is not. And I believe that no description of unconscious complexity will fully account for it. It seems to me that just as “something” and “nothing,” however juxtaposed, can do no explanatory work, an analysis of purely physical processes will never yield a picture of consciousness.

However, this is not to say that some other thesis about consciousness must be true. Consciousness may very well be the lawful product of unconscious information processing. But I don’t know what that sentence means—and I don’t think anyone else does either.

I'd say he's just being nice to his fellow Atheist evangelicals like Coyne and Dennet [at the end there], I believe recently he's become something of an Idealist-esque atheist[?]

Michael Shermer also seems to have recognize[d] the difficulties facing Physicalism ->

The “new mysterians,” Flanagan says, contend that consciousness can never be explained because of the limitations of human cognition...I contend that not only consciousness but also free will and God are mysterian problems—not because we are not yet smart enough to solve them but because they can never be solved, not even in principle, relating to how the concepts are conceived in language. Call those of us in this camp the “final mysterians.”

Consciousness. The hard problem of consciousness is represented by the qualitative experiences (qualia) of what it is like to be something. It is the first-person subjective experience of the world through the senses and brain of the organism. It is not possible to know what it is like to be a bat (in philosopher Thomas Nagel's famous thought experiment), because if you altered your brain and body from humanoid to batoid, you would just be a bat, not a human knowing what it feels like to be a bat. You would not be like the traveling salesman in Franz Kafka's 1915 novella The Metamorphosis, who awakens to discover he has been transformed into a giant insect but still has human thoughts. You would just be an arthropod. By definition, only I can know my first-person experience of being me, and the same is true for you, bats and bugs.

The "something is nothing rearranged" argument is a bit annoying really because it totally avoids the whole point, which is, before anything existed, no space, no time, no matter etc, what could possibly have caused things to come into existence.

The "something is nothing rearranged" argument is a bit annoying really because it totally avoids the whole point, which is, before anything existed, no space, no time, no matter etc, what could possibly have caused things to come into existence.

This is probably a thread unto itself? I think something needs to sustain what is exist[ing] in a particular Harmony/Structure, but I don't think anything can come into existence from nothing?

I realize this puts me at odds with the idea of God creating things Ex Nihilo, but even Genesis starts with the "waters" [over] which Yaweh floats above...

This is probably a thread unto itself? I think something needs to sustain what it exists in a particular Harmony, but I don't think anything can come into existence from nothing.

I realize this puts me at odds with the idea of God creating things Ex Nihilo, but even Genesis starts with the "waters" above which Yaweh floats above...

And of course, the argument can always be thrown back at me - i.e. how did God come into existence?  The well practiced religious answer is that he has always existed, but then comes "so why can't you believe that the universe has always existed.  The truth is, whichever way I think, I can't help finding the universe absurdly impossible.

The problem might be in our assumptions and/or our language. We have to use terms like "always" and "before" which are assumptions based upon time. If there was no time then there was no before and always means nothing. The fact is that there is something and we can probably never answer why that is so. My preferred concept is that there is a consciousness which has created a kind of virtual reality in which to evolve. Time and space are the fundamentals of that virtual reality. So, "before" creation there "was" mind.

To put in put in my hypothetical no evidence just wild speculation take, I don't have any major belief on why there is something rather than nothing. I have kind of always liked the brute force approach, it's just impossible for nothing to exist, so something just does. I don't think we'll ever find a concrete answer, if there is one it might just be one of those things beyond us.

The "something is nothing rearranged" argument is a bit annoying really because it totally avoids the whole point, which is, before anything existed, no space, no time, no matter etc, what could possibly have caused things to come into existence.

When Lawrence Krauss refers to a universe from nothing, if I have it broadly correct, he doesn't mean literally nothing, he means special magic nothing that had the power to change into something. They prefer this to god. Their club rules won't don't allow the special magic nothing to be called god, apparently.