I just want a coherent explanation of their belief. They’re the ones positing something non material, not me. I just what you know what it is they mean by that. Absent that, I don’t see how they can claim their belief is coherent.

I’m not especially well versed, but as I understand it they believe we don’t know the essence of the non material part and in fact it being unknowable is sort of the point.

This sort of reminds me of the people who claim the Big Bang is incoherent because we don’t know what came before it. Why is I don’t know not good enough?

I suppose that’s fair to a point. It’s just disappointing.

The thing is this non material whatever can’t have properties. If it stores information, has state and has consistent behaviour then really it’s just a form of material (in the philosophical sense that it’s a part of the world), so it can’t have any of those. At which point, how does it even interact with the world at all? I mean if it influences the brain, then that mechanism of influence makes it part of the world, right? It makes it material.

That’s where I find the idea incoherent. I don’t see how it can be both immaterial but also have material effects. Doing so makes it material, I think by definition. It means it must be part of material reality in that sense. Or at least I’d like to hear an argument why it doesn’t.

What is the material evidence for numbers? What is the material evidence for logic? What is the material evidence for persistence of identity over time? What is the material evidence for math? What is the material evidence for categories? What is the material evidence for grammar? What is the material evidence for a mayor (not the mayor qua person, but the mayor qua office)? What is the material evidence for marriage? According to empirical evidence, which knife is the best knife? There is no "best" without purpose. And materialism has nothing to say about purposes. Empiricism can only work when an agent in the world has a specific purpose. There are vast swathes of human experience that don't fit tidily in the box of materialism or empiricism.

Those things are behaviours and information that can be encoded in matter. If the non material thing in dualism is just emergent behaviour, then it’s not adding anything beyond what we already have in materialism.

Numbers aren't emergent behavior. Numbers are a metaphysical category. Categories are metaphysical. There's no empirical evidence for order vs. randomness. The concept of "order" doesn't make sense empirically. There has to be a separate, metaphysical value structure that determines whether the data aligns to the value structure or not. Just because you haven't been clear in your thinking doesn't mean metaphysics aren't real or essential to dealing with the physical world.

I accept that. Metaphysics is real in a useful way, but I think that metaphysics itself is an emergent behaviour. Emergent behaviours are behaviours of mater, and matter is real, therefore emergent behaviours are real.

"Emergent behavior" is handwavium materialists use to avoid cognitive dissonance.

We observe them, categorise them, and engineer them all the time.

If the "non-material" is required to explain material phenomena, then it must be causally related to the "material"...but at that point what exactly makes it "non-material" at all?

"Non-material" just sounds like a bad label for material things we don't understand.

We don't understand how our cognition or consciousness works, but it seems silly to assume that because we don't understand we fundamentally can't understand.

People who push the mysterious interpretation of dualism are just trying to find a place for the divine that is separate from the material but in doing so they baselessly seek to circumscribe our capacity to understand.

Imagine an Apple. Is that Apple material?

Those neurons firing while imagining are material, yes.

But where is the apple? That is, where is the emergent phenomenon of the apple?

The emergent phenomenon is a pattern in my brain, just as a running a computer program is an emergent phenomenon in a computer.

If the extra thing dualism adds is just behaviours of matter, how is that different from materialism?

Who is reading the Apple?

I'm not sure what you mean by reading.

We say that we can experience thinking about an Apple, or imagining an Apple. I see no reason why a computer, or other physically implemented AGI system, could not do that. I suspect the act of imagination is just generating, processing and transforming a computational model abstracting the thing being imagined.

I believe brains are physical objects, so therefore physical objects can imagine Apples.

The plane of imagination isn’t physical, else you could touch it.

I don't know what a plane is in this context.

You can't touch fourier transforms either, but a human brain or a microchip can compute them.

Sure you can, its done currently for Deep Brain Stimulation. What you're proposing is "The plane of Quake isn't physical", which is nonsense.

I can make the computer imagine Quake for me, then fiddle with its plane of imagination for some sweet wallhacks.

If you create a device that can insert objects into the plane of someone’s imagination, that would be awesome :)

That's a side effect of DBI today. It's a random and crude method today, but arguing that we we'll hit some ineffable wall that will prevent more fine-grained control is.. well let's just say that the gaps for gods grow ever smaller.

Who is it that fetched this comment from the internet for you?

Using vaguely-defined words to support a deist position is a time-honored tradition, but isn't particularly interesting or convincing.

There isn't a platonic ideal "Apple" if that's what you mean by emergent phenomenon.

A collection of neurons can build a model of the world that includes its experience of apples, and from that, dedicate some neurons to representing a particular instance of an apple. This model isn't the reality of "Apples", though, and is physically located in the brain.

“ There isn't a platonic ideal "Apple" if that's what you mean by emergent phenomenon.”

Sure there is, that’s what DeepMind showed us with how to find cats in images :)

That's exactly my point. DeepMind has an idea of what a cat is based on its experiences, just as you or I do. Each of our models are woefully incomplete, based on very limited sensory information. These models all disagree with each other and reality to various degrees.

There exist many things many humans have lumped together under a single label such as "cat". Those categories are all wrong, but sometimes they're useful. Machines can also get in on the fun, just as well as humans, as you point out. There's no magic there, humans aren't special.

The humans aren’t special bit really comes down to whether you believe in free will (which by any meaningful definition is quite special).

Free will is another one of those things that people love to trot out because it's so ill-defined. To cut through all the crap though, it's very simple: "free will" === "unpredictable behavior". This inherently means that it's observer-dependent.

This has the benefit that it empirically fits how people think about it. Nobody thinks a rock has free will. Some people think animals have free will. Lots of people think humans have free will. This is everybody trying to smush a vague concept into the very simple, intuitive definition above.

Which is all to say that free will is about as relevant to any conversation as say astrology is: not one bit.

As much as a cloud of atoms doth protest that free will is irrelevant, reality has a way of not caring :)

Funny, I'd say reality has a way of existing despite all of the comforting woo people like to make up about it.

can't describe the system from inside the system, boss