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Has there ever been a viable alternative to the phsycialist model of the universe? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by QueenHawlSera@sh.itjust.works to c/askscience@lemmy.world

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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

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[–] e0qdk@reddthat.com 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Consider being shown a video feed of people talking on your monitor. You're told that the feed is being live streamed -- but in fact it's actually a recording, and everyone whose behavior you're observing actually died a week ago. If you want to know what's really going on, how would you tell the difference between a live stream and a recording with just the video feed on the monitor? Going further, how would you tell the difference between a recording of actual people and a really good generative AI clip? If all you have is the video feed without access to the source, it seems impossible to distinguish those cases -- but there really are different things going on in all three scenarios.

p-zombies are a thought experiment along those lines. All we have are observations of someone's behavior; how can we tell if that person really has subjective experience? An LLM can claim it has the same subjective experiences as us, but the mechanisms by which it produces those claims are very different to how a human being does it and likely do not include anything remotely similar to our experience of colors, taste, etc. even if they claim they do...

Hope that helps a bit.

[–] flying_sheep@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 weeks ago

Thanks, I get all that. I'm just saying that if something really observably behaves like a human when interacted with – complete with behavior that's consistent with an internal world model, long term planning, and so on – that's a sapient real being in my book.

That's my point – if something is an “imitation” good enough that it behaves like the actual thing, is it still only an imitation, or is that just prejudice?

Of course if something is just an inferior knock-off, that's something else.