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submitted 3 months ago by Vampire@hexbear.net to c/philosophy@hexbear.net

Are most people here epiphenomenalists? Physicalists?

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[-] nat_turner_overdrive@hexbear.net 38 points 3 months ago

she qualia on my physical brain till I perceive it

[-] coeliacmccarthy@hexbear.net 29 points 3 months ago

what's this got to do with pussy

[-] WhyEssEff@hexbear.net 24 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Epiphenomenalism? Physicalism? I just wanna grill for god's sake grillman

[-] Zoift@hexbear.net 23 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Skill issue, get you a partner who can do both.

[-] Dolores@hexbear.net 22 points 3 months ago

it is a problem that i can't get that rockin body off of my mind screm-cool

[-] Gorillatactics@hexbear.net 20 points 3 months ago

Anything that implies humans have an eternal soul that comes from a nonmaterial plane is idealist to me.

[-] BountifulEggnog@hexbear.net 15 points 3 months ago

I don't understand the problem, the mind is emergant from the physical. The physical little wires in my brain make the "mind". So of course it can influence my body, and my body can influence my mind, because the mind is part of the body.

[-] Maoo@hexbear.net 9 points 3 months ago

That's physicalism just using different words for mind and body, but acknowledging that both are really the same thing: the physical.

[-] BountifulEggnog@hexbear.net 8 points 3 months ago

Yea, I suppose it would be.

Sometimes I prefer just laying my thoughts out and letting other people label them as they want to. There are too many dang labels these days yells-at-cloud

[-] Philosoraptor@hexbear.net 2 points 3 months ago

just using different words for mind and body, but acknowledging that both are really the same thing: the physical

Anomalous monism

[-] Vampire@hexbear.net 6 points 3 months ago

That's begging the question

[-] BountifulEggnog@hexbear.net 10 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

It's the only conclusion I can make from the evidence I have seen. I didn't intend for it to be my full reasoning.

[-] jack@hexbear.net 14 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

The body is a big complex set of biological processes intertwined with many external processes; one of the emergent results of this is consciousness

Free will is real because I am the cohesion of the processes and whatever that cohesion does is the expression of my/its will

Also there's no such thing as the self or the individual and all difference is illusory (but in a totally material sense)

[-] nohaybanda@hexbear.net 9 points 3 months ago

I’ll go further and say free will as a concept is idealist nonsense. Historical materialism offers a much more grounded and meaningful perspective on freedom as a political-economic process.

Slavery (chattel or wage), capitalist exploitation, cishet patriarchal oppression - there are so many real illiberties plaguing humanity right now. Free will is the liberal version of counting angels on a needle

[-] SSJ2Marx@hexbear.net 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I don't think that free will and historical materialism are necessarily at odds. An individual has free will, just like an individual can go against their class interests - but most of the time, most people will do what they think is the most rational thing to do, which is how you get large groups of people spontaneously working towards the same goals because they share economic interests.

[-] nohaybanda@hexbear.net 5 points 3 months ago

I don’t see how introducing the concept of free will adds any clarity to the examples you gave. Worse, I maintain it serves as a way to smuggle in idealism in analysis which is clearer and more powerful without it.

Is the righteous anger of the hungry masses rising up in revolution an expression of free will or a symptom of a lack of it? Does a bourgeois class traitor driven by empathy and visceral disgust at the injustice of it all have free will? Or one motivated by fear of the rising proletarians?

How many free wills can dance on the edge of a guillotine?

[-] QueerCommie@hexbear.net 4 points 3 months ago

That has nothing to do with free will. People don’t choose whether to follow their interests like they’re flipping a coin. They are influenced by many things including empathy and interests to make whatever decisions, but you could call is “free” will whatever decision they make even if it’s determined. I do think there is a need to fight economism, the thinking that simple things like class are purely responsible for certain decisions.

[-] jack@hexbear.net 4 points 3 months ago

A materialist conception of free will is very compatible with all that - the potential expressions of will are bound by historical realities, but free will within those bounds is legitimate and real.

[-] nohaybanda@hexbear.net 5 points 3 months ago

As I wrote elsewhere I don’t see how introducing the concept adds anything to a materialist analysis of choices and why we make them.

[-] jack@hexbear.net 2 points 3 months ago

It's the placement of where choices are made - a non-free will perspective places them purely on external factors. A free will perspective places some portion of choice within the individual.

[-] QueerCommie@hexbear.net 2 points 3 months ago

The thing is I don’t see how there can be potentialities beyond what happened already. It’s impossible to predict the future, but the amalgamation of all the material factors is purely responsible for the future.

[-] jack@hexbear.net 1 points 3 months ago

I don't really see how that contradicts my position

[-] QueerCommie@hexbear.net 1 points 3 months ago

I agree with what you wrote, but it could be interpreted as more libertarian

[-] LocalMaxima@hexbear.net 14 points 3 months ago

I wish I could mind my body but I’ve got this problem called dysmorphia

[-] betelgeuse@hexbear.net 13 points 3 months ago

My consciousness depends on the physical processes of my body and my environment. Physical processes are selected and changed in my body and my environment due to my consciousness.

[-] Vampire@hexbear.net 9 points 3 months ago

We got a Cartesian dualist here

[-] betelgeuse@hexbear.net 9 points 3 months ago

My life is pretty plane.

[-] Philosoraptor@hexbear.net 11 points 3 months ago

Non-reductive naturalist

[-] Dessa@hexbear.net 11 points 3 months ago

The mind is the definition of a subjective experience. Since science is the study of observable phenomenon, and it cannot be observed in others, it's beyond science to study. All the resy is just speculation.

In other words, the world may never know. Count me agnostic

[-] QueerCommie@hexbear.net 2 points 3 months ago

Can’t argue with that.

[-] SSJ2Marx@hexbear.net 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I wouldn't call myself a physicalist, but I wouldn't say that what happens in the mind is totally separate from the physical realm either. I'm not a philosophy guy so I assume there's jargon that I just don't know that explains what I believe already, but it's something like this:

The self is an emergent phenomenon of many different things - your brain and its structures, your hormones and how they interact with it, your interactions with others and your perceived place in society, etc. Free will may or may not be part of the phenomenon of the self, but if it does exist then it forms a base-superstructure relationship with the things that created it - so your free will is constrained by, but also has the capacity to change, those aspects.

edit: after skimming wikipedia's article on mind-body-dualism, maybe I do lean towards physicalism actually, because I don't think that the mind is some extra special metaphysical thing.

edit2: oh here's my word of the day: Emergentism

edit3: okay I've seen a dozen variants of this graphic and I wanted to draw my own

I hope this clarifies things.M1 is your starting mental state, M2 is your ending mental state. P1, PA, and PI are your starting physical states, and P2, PB, and PII are your ending physical states. All mental states are emergent from their parallel physical states, and are effected by previous mental and physical states. All physical states must follow from previous physical states, but are effected by previous mental states. The degree to which the mental effects the physical varies depending upon which physical process you're talking about, with some processes being purely deterministic.

[-] GunslingerSky@hexbear.net 3 points 3 months ago

That's graph but its several different ways of making PPB

[-] CarbonScored@hexbear.net 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Insofar as we've proved anything objectively, or anything in regards to our shared reality, I'm a physicalist. The laws of physics seem to determine, quite conclusively, everything, including mental states.

Insofar as my own subjective, singular, personal experience of being alive goes, I don't know. I'm sure I'm as susceptible to physical influence as anyone, but currently I struggle to imagine how we could physically measure what I currently experience as 'being alive', though I certainly couldn't assert it as impossible. I suspect that "don't know" is the definitively correct answer, but I'm not certain on that yet.

[-] Mickmacduffin@hexbear.net 9 points 3 months ago

Our bodies and minds are excellent, but thanks for checking in

[-] autism_2@hexbear.net 8 points 3 months ago

I'm partial to epiphepenomenamalism. I didn't choose to skip my homework to watch speedrun analysis videos, it was the result of ungovernable physical processes phoenix-smug

[-] LesbianLiberty@hexbear.net 8 points 3 months ago

Whatever gets the job done I guess

[-] AOCapitulator@hexbear.net 8 points 3 months ago
[-] Maoo@hexbear.net 8 points 3 months ago

I'm a contradiction by necessity and I think most materialists are.

[-] LesbianLiberty@hexbear.net 5 points 3 months ago

One of my favorite book series, the new Netflix adaptation was mid though

[-] iridaniotter@hexbear.net 5 points 3 months ago

Probably something having to do with dialectics. IDK I haven't read Vygotsky yet so ask me again in a few months

[-] anarchoilluminati@hexbear.net 5 points 3 months ago

The concept of "flesh" Merleau-Ponty was developing in his later writings seems pretty based.

[-] AssortedBiscuits@hexbear.net 5 points 3 months ago

These days, I don't think it's particularly relevant. It seems like the mind-body problem is a stemlord's attempt to understand the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity. (I see the concept of qualia as a similar attempt). Physicalism is just an attempt at saying that since the mind ultimately stems from interaction with physical and chemical processes, we can develop scientific instruments to measure those processes, and if we can measure those processes, we can finally determine what a person's thinking and reproduce those subjective processes. In other words, we can crack open a person's subjectivity and bring it forth to the realm of objectivity. You see this a lot with stemlords who think that once neuroscience is sufficiently developed, we can basically clone people's personalities. This is their desire behind physicalism.

But an individual's subjectivity can never be breached. It will always be a black box. At a basic level, if you believe only the physical is real, how would you go about physically measuring the stew of chemicals in a person's body without have said measurements physically interfering with the interaction among the stew? It's like if there's an opaque container with volatile fluids of various colors interacting with one another. Cracking open the container to see what colors the volatile fluids are while inside the container is impossible because the act of cracking open the container itself means the volatile fluids are not longer inside a container but exposed to the outside world that would have unattended effects on the colors.

This means calling a person's subjectivity "the soul" or "idiosyncratic stew of chemicals" is mostly a semantic issue. I would use "soul" because it gets the message across and you don't sound like a cringey Reddit atheist.

[-] QueerCommie@hexbear.net 4 points 3 months ago

I tend to think nothing can exist outside the material world and humans aren’t really special, but I saw some things recently that claim to debunk that and I’m not sure what to think of it. I’m an emergentist.

[-] niph@hexbear.net 4 points 3 months ago

Unlike others here I personally don’t see the need for contradiction between nonduality and communism. I am somewhere around “consciousness is what negates entropy and causes the collapse of the wave function” but I’m not really that well read in the field yet so that’s subject to change

[-] Vampire@hexbear.net 4 points 3 months ago

Look uo the von Neumann-Wigner interpretation

[-] niph@hexbear.net 3 points 3 months ago

Will do. I think I may have heard about it before but it’s all kind of fuzzy. Isn’t Everett multiverse the hip new hotness right now?

[-] Vampire@hexbear.net 5 points 3 months ago

It's gaining popularity yes

[-] niph@hexbear.net 3 points 3 months ago

What are your thoughts on the different interpretations?

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this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2024
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