Mindlessness

I can't help but wonder: are we not a kind of "brain-in-a-vat" - given that our brain is lodged in our skull (a vat made of minerals) surrounded by a thin layer of liquid; and our bran just IS a kind of "super-computer" which does create all sorts of (mostly) coherent illusions that acts as an interface to what we call the "external world" - to which we have no direct access - but whose interactions we have various ways of explaining and predicting? If you are willing to believe something along those lines (and I think I am to some extent) then the skeptical argument has less force and feels less compelling and less worrisome. But it does come at the expense of having to re-cast our "existential" situation to begin with.

Seems like this position is inconsistent with properly basic beliefs

I think philosophical arguments like this one are the best evidence we have that there are indeed philosophical zombies out there.

Cyclical thought until principle is separated from phrasing; doublespeak in essence.

I don't see what difference it makes if I'm in a vat, or not.

If philosophical zombies can't be real, then the argument falls apart. Since philosophical zombies are an unfalsifiable hypithesis, the no minds hypothesis doesn't get us anywhere.

The only thing the discussion proves is that the lack of evidence for an argument is an existential threat to the modern mind.

Don't know whether one can be mindless or not but I've surely met heartless people.

From now on when asking people for support of Your channel you should each time casually mention some argument for you definitely NOT being a philosophical zombie.

Jokes aside, this hypothesis touches some yet more interesting aspect of practical significance. Since we now may not be able to tell whether we talk or listen to a bot or not, and the Turing test turns out to be literally powerless in the face of recent advancements, and the discussion about AI gaining some analogue of consciousness suddenly has got wind in the sails, a disturbing collateral problem emerges: how can we know that some living brains don't turn into philosophical zombies e.g. due to some kind of psychological stress or physical or mental illness? If we start talking seriously about the potentially sentient systems, shouldn't we also take very seriously the possibility that human brain may become subjectively dead before it dies physically, still mimicking its basic observable functions, communicative ones including? The complexity of the human brain and that of the neurological correlates of its knowledge should make us accept the plausibility of such horrific occurences.

Can I be mindless well how can I know I am mindless if I am mindless hmmmmmmmm

I think "I'm seeing a red ball" might be a belief that enters your mind irresistibly and isnt an evidence-based conclusion. Seeing something forces your mind to believe that it is (at least seemingly to you) there. These are the brute facts that your not-abstract beliefs would be based on I think.

mindless self indulgence-core

It's unclear what 'mind' is supposed to refer to in this argument. Under what I believe to be the common notion of mind, things like visual experience, beliefs, taste, knowledge, etc are mental objects and would be defacto proof of mind.

Been questioning similar ideas here all week, love it!

You know, thinking about it. Clearly the writer of this whole thing must have had a an extreme case of Aphantasia. Where they had no internal world of any kind. No sound recollection, no recollection of smell or taste nor touch, pain or pleasure or any internal monologue to speak of. Truly they must have been empty inside to conceive of these hypothesis about others to claim and assert outright that others lack these all as well.

What a horrible and sad existence that must be.

What are we getting at? Endless theories never resolve themselves as actual reality.
Maybe all theories are wrong.
Including what i just proposed.

This is a reaction image and a forum weapon.

"I have no time fro private tutoring" == you are sorted? If so, congrats!

As a lister of You Tube which aligns to philosophy of mind but only partially to You Tube given it has a filmic dimension that correlates to vision as philosophical phenomenology then to this niche of philosophical voice centric methodological realism its important to arguably highlight that audio frequency ( sound wave into electrical signals) so it aligns to voice and ostensible a theory of mind. Therefore if human voice is the criterion to be captured along the full audio spectrum. To this I tend to sense the audio capture for this channel is on a dynamic microphone (clipping of phonetics) rather than a Condenser mic, also known as ‘capacitor microphones’ which capture a greater dynamic range of sound and so maybe more suited for a philosophy channel given philosophers medium is sound give Socrates did not write text did not leave a textual legacy, although through Plato is known to have been engaged in public oratory in the city state of Athens, and given Aristotle purportedly spoke in lecture halls then audio wave are significant correlation for the field of philosophy to which this channel ascribes.

I have become convinced of Eliminative Materialism

A sexy new way to respond to those anthropic principle dorks.

Zoning out tangential similarities?

This is dumb, as a conscious being i know for a fact i am conscious at this moment. I can not 100% know this about other beings, so this is where the mindlessness argument becomes relevant, but i can know i am not a philosophical zombie.

why was solipsism not even mentioned once?

This seems obviously false.
A rat must have a mental model of the world if it is able to find its way through a maze. But at least that mental model must constitute a mental process for the rat. A mental process implies an "internal" experience separate from the external world. Ergo the rat is not mindless, and neither are we.

Philosophers never get to answers, they just go round and round. Otherwise, they lose their jobs.

I remember Descartes making an argument in the third meditation that his thoughts about God must come from a source outside his mind (likely God). He argued that, in regards to thoughts about seeminly objective phenomenon, it is fairly easy to doubt that they have a source originating from outside his mind, and this is especially true for imaginative thoughts like those of unicorns. The critique of Byrne's mind transparency model seems similar; the most likely explanation for our "experience" of unicorns is that we form thoughts about them which originate from our imagination, which is seemingly a part of the mind, and taking it for granted that these apparent "thoughts" originate from outside the mind is a bit strange at best and arbitrarily limits what the meaning of "mind" is at worst. If you argue that mental images do originate from outside the mind and that there is no mind to interpret or think about them, that there are neurons firing in such a way so as to have retina fire in a certain way, but there is no "mind" to interpret the mental images that result from this process, then it seems like you are arbitrarily cutting off the properties that make the mind what it is (e.g. imagination, if one could call those physical processes such a thing). The argument dissolves into a sort of physicalism with the cherry on top that the mind cannot involve physical processes and so does not exist.

When everything is undefined, how can morality weigh us down? Enlightening.

These videos always start with him introucing a way of think he's not intimately familiar with ,and certaintly doesn't agree with, untill he rebuttals with his own opinion ,while framing the whole process as if he's giveing both sides a fair examination .

I hate to be anti-philosophical but there enough real problems in the world that we don't need to add invented ones that admit of no ready solution. Perhaps this is a bit of fun, but that's all it is.

I'm not different....but all my friends are ❤

Long ago, my response to Descartes' I THINK, THEREFORE I AM, was HOW DO YOU 'KNOW" THAT YOUR THOUGHTS ARE YRULY YOUR OWN, KNOW THAT YOUR THOUGHTS ARE ANY MORE REAL THAN YOUR OTHER SENSATIONS?

I mean I guess good for him for getting to do philosophy and get paid for it. Stable jobs where you get to work on your passion ain't easy to get these days, but, like...who funded this trash?

For me, my instinctual response came at the chocolate tasting example. There are people who put chocolate into their mouths and have a different experience to me. They have all the same organs, they look the same as I do in the a mirror, they speak in the same way, we can reproduce and make offspring that look like a combination of us both, I can question them on any different aspect of the situation, their life and their response to the chocolate and not once do I get a response that makes me question whether they're 'really doing' the same thing as me when eating the chocolate. They assuredly are, but their subjective experience is different. They don't like it, they prefer another kind of chocolate, it's too sweet, bad texture, they're not hungry right now, it goes on... I can only explain any of this by reference to some unique internal state that I call 'a mind'.

As for the first example with hands, a brain in a vat is indeed perfectly POSSIBLE but is it also PROBABLE?
I'd apply the Occam's razor principle: if our experience of the world is fully consistent with having bodies, why introduce a redundant layer of a brain in a vat? In that scenario, what's the point of even having a brain in a vat if all your sensory inputs are replaced with virtual reality. It would be easier to simulate our minds in the same virtual reality rather than having to deal with brains in vats. Overall, a brain in a vat seems like the LEAST probable of those options 😅

If you were really in doubt about whether there is a cat, you could use more than one kind of evidence to figure this out (call its name, pet it, listen to it, open up a bag of treats, ask others if they see it). You can’t prove the cat is there, but you can use multiple kinds of inquiry to improve confidence. There are ways to interrogate subjectivity, too, like creating/appreciating art, meditating, traveling and meeting new people, or whatever you want to do to discover yourself. Like the cat, there’s no way to absolutely prove anything about your mind, but you can use multiple avenues of inquiry and collect as much evidence as possible. That’s the best we can do.

Isn't this just a restatement of "I think, therefore I am"? I cannot prove that anyone else isn't a philosophical zombie, but I can be certain of my own mind because I experience it.

I heard once that there were monks so enlightened, they no longer used full sentences, nor engaged in any form of personal decision making, outside of basic survival, and meditation. It's been rumored that many ancient texts of wisdom were not written by enlightened individuals, but written by the people surrounding them, fascinated by the contentment they observed. These average folk would study them, and listen and take note of every detail, eventually filling up pages and pages. Enlightenment, translated literally, means to be unburdened. Free, or even detached. Content with nothing more than the existence of each waking moment.

Scepticism of the external world isn’t scepticism that we have an experience as if there is an external world. Same with the mind.

The inference is that there is a cat on the mat from the experience of there being a cat in the mat.

The evidence that I am having an experience of a cat is the fact that I am having an experience of a cat; it is not that there is a cat there.

I’ve always thought the existence of illusions is actual evidence against illusionism :)

The fact you can’t infer the mind from the external world isn’t an argument against the mind, it’s the hard problem, an argument against physicalism.

Just reject the first premise and the argument falls apart

is the discord server gone?

I agree with the argument of this video but it has led me to think there’s something impossible about philosophical zombies. Philosophical zombies, being physically identical to us, ponder the mysteries of consciousness, they write intense poetry, they attend conferences on “the hard problem” and when you ask a P-zombie how he knows he’s conscious he says “I know directly, nothing could be more certain.” That an entity could be so radically mistaken about its direct experience seems way too counterintuitive to me.

This is so dumb I can’t even sugar coat it