Proving What We Already "Know"

[bennyboy]

If we're wrong for giving a victim machine rights because it -seems like- it's conscious...if that's a potential negative consequence we may wish to avoid...then we're wrong now for giving people rights because they -seem like- they're conscious.  If we need a better understanding than that to give robots rights, we actually need a better understanding now to make the same case for ourselves.  The whole thing gives up the game, though, in that it's a direct rejection of how things seem.  

Well, we once talked about that-- how would you go from solipsism to anything beyond it? It's not easy to do.

I have no rational reason for accepting you or anyone else as real. I've grown up feeling and believing that people are real, and that makes life meaningful in some sense. So right off the bat, literally everything I believe is limited by that context: "In a world where anything is real beyond my experience of it, TGN is this and that kind of person who expresses ideas in this or that way."

And this is not a trivial nitpick. Once I've decided that senses are intrinsically untrustworthy as a method of sourcing themselves, then I'm never really sure if I'm a BIaJ, or in a sim, or the Matrix, of the Mind of God, or a material monism.

Well - I'm not a botanist - and knowing where to trim a plant isn't actually botany to begin with.  That'll be specific to a production method and equipment and market.  Agronomy.  Secondly, a physicist is far more likely than me to understand what I don't about the process of photosynthesis (or, for that matter, describe the missing bit of photosynthesis that we don't know) - botanists aren't our obi-wan on that count.

You and I are both in that same boat with respect to brains, minds, and nueroscientists - but knowing how the brain works doesn't make a person an ethicist, so....it seems odd to object to some fact of botany, of agronomy, or the brain with "but how does that tell me how to live my life?"  Don't you think?

My ignorance of your life and of the various branches of plant science notwithstanding, I think this is a pretty fair place to examine the idea of context. Let's say that all those things are separate bodies of knowledge-- certain truths are specific to say botany, agronomy, neurology, or physics.

If you say, "Science is the best tool for learning about things," and all those things are branches of science, then that implies that there's a main branch, big-S science, which provides a context for all those various branches.

I suppose a material monist view, then could be that bigger context-- it is the one ring which binds them all. But I'm not so sure that there IS such a big-S science, or that there really IS any context which allows QM to say useful things about botany-- or agronomy-- let alone the nature of what-things-are-like, or of moral or artistic truths.

My attempt to provide that bigger context is to define Science and the material world as a subset of experience-- they are unlike dreams, unlike abstract thoughts, but they certainly are things which can be experienced.

Your attempt, I think, is to define mind as a natural feature of material, specifically of brains and possibly anything that acts sufficiently like a brain. But "mind as material" is an assertion that's hard to prove, while "material as experience" is true by definition (as literally everything I can know about must be known through experience)-- with the weakness of my view being that it doesn't even really draw useful inferences about where experiences come from.