Mr. Meat, the (silicon-based) computer you are using has you as the user. You tell us that the computer (meat-based) that you are is its own user. Do you believe there are no unsolved philosophical problems with this statement?
I don’t think I used those words, or any much like them, but I’ll have a go at answering your question anyway. I can tell my silicon computer to do things, and sometimes it does them: I use it. Sometimes it doesn’t, because I’ve told it to do something it can’t, or something it doesn’t understand, or something which causes some kind of conflict within its base software or hardware (and noting that a program can always act as hardware per Turing).
Someone else can ask me to so something. If I do, are they using me? They can ask me impossible things, or nonsensical things, or things I just don’t feel like, dammit. And, unlike the silicon computer, I haven’t got a monitor. You can’t “see my thinking” because I’m following a unique protocol in an analogue system: the only you can have any kind of “access” to my memories is via a “high level” protocol which assumes that you’ve seen or experienced similar things to me, which we can agree on a symbol or sound to reference, ie. language.
There are so many important differences between silicon computers and biological computers that many feel that calling the brain a “biological computer” at all is rather misleading. I certainly wouldn’t claim I’ve got all the philosophical problems “worked out”: that is the very challenge of the millennium.
But one can still see which direction a bridge will take you even if you see a few gaps in it (and I happen to think that all the gaps at least have some tentative ropes thrown across). I consider that the mind has a physical basis. I’ll try and put together an OP which sets forth my position soon.
Hoodoo Ulove, that’s a cool point, and other-wise has also mentioned how dualism is seeming to crop up here as a concern. I remain unclear, personally, as to how I accept dualism. I mean to what degree, because I don’t think it can be outright eliminated, but that needn’t imply that I believe there is a metaphysical dualism in re: the mind-body kind of way. But otherness abounds in all kinds of ways from deep philosophy to everyday speech. Take, for example, a sentence I said the other day to a friend, “I like to see what kinds of pleasures my body can give me.” Perfectly intelligible sentence, but if we take it philosophically we seem to run right into a mind-body split. As I indicated earlier, however, while I do think an examination of everyday speech can be illuminitating, I don’t believe it necessarily implies any metaphysical position (though it can often show us why metaphysical questions don’t make a lot of sense in the first place so we can pass on answering them).
What I think is interesting about the monistic/physicalistic perspective is that it attempts to grant the same ontological status to all conceptual entities by what I still feel is a sleight-of-hand, this matter “supervienient” properties. It is like a reworking of immanent realism WRT the topic of universals. That’s ok in itself, I guess, I go between immanent and transcendental realism now and again as being more sensible than nominalism or conceptualism. Still, when all the cards are on the table, I am more of an anti-realist than anything. Instead of heading towards a realism, I head towards an idealism which seems to keep explanatory entities to a minimum and reduces phenomena to behavior rather than further underlying entities (I often get the “turtles all the way down” feeling from “fundamental particle” explanations).
But back to the question at hand. One thing I’ve been pondering lately is how to keep realism (in the realism/idealism sense, not the realism/nominalism sense, yay philosophy) (which I think is more reasonable, but ironically less defensible), keep subjectivity, but loose dualism. In my readings, I’ve worked towards a phenomenological approach by trying to make a personal synthesis between Wittgenstein and Husserl. The question that bothers me is how to collapse “out there” and “in here” into a smooth, or at least piecewise continuous (to borrow a mathematical term), continuum. The supervenience of physicalism, while it seems to achieve this, is mind-bogglingly confusing for me. I’m not sure it actually makes any sense.
But let me town down the rhetoric a bit.
What I like about monism in general is that it is a nice, simple assumption. With it, and with the demonstration of any particular thing that is real, you get a massive implication that everything is real–including stuff we don’t know yet. With dualism, you don’t get that. You’ve got to prove things are real twice in two different ways (if they could be proved in the same way then they wouldn’t be two different things, now, would they?). I find it no wonder that Descartes resorted to God to get his philosophy up and running (as far as appeals to God go, I like Berkeley better anyway). Descartes is like, “I’ll take care of myself, God takes care of the rest.” Which, in a way, is pretty much a good look at faith, but that’s neither here nor there.
The Searle article linked to earlier is something I can actually get a little bit behind, even though I hate his Chinese Room with a passion reserved only for “Philosophy I Don’t Like.” One thing other-wise and I like to bring up now and again is how contextual so much is. For instance, SentientMeat asks the question, “Did dinosaurs exist?” How are we to interpret this question? It sounds simple, but its simplicity is highly deceiving. What we want to do is find an equivalent question that gets a little closer to the heart of the matter. Note the questions I asked him about “love,” for example–he said they were all the same thing. So to him, “Did dinosaurs exist?” is a simple question, and includes every normal interpretation of the terms. To me, you can look at a question like that and find it isn’t so easy. “Do you mean, if we could go back in time, would we find creatures we call ‘dinosaurs’?” I fear I sometimes annoy people with my emphasis on semantics, but I try not to do so in a nitpicky way (I hope I don’t). I think it is important to see how much, well, stage-setting is required for a question like “Does X exist?” to make sense. I want to be clear that this isn’t strictly because of the philosophical questions surrounding existence. We ask existence questions in a variety of situations. It could mean, “Has someone made X?” when we know X is possible, like shopping for a food combination. It could mean, “Has someone found out X?” when we know there is an investigation, say if an ambiguous death could be suicide or homicide. It could mean, “Is there a pure article X?” like if we are reflecting on true love, or happiness. All these are existence-questions, but it is fair to say that their respective uses are not all getting to any particular heart-of-the-matter of some fundamental property “existence.” This is what I mean when I suggest that language isn’t suggestive of metaphysics. A simply phrased question often forgets the hosts of contexts necessary for it to make sense, and when we consider them, we are no longer necessarily puzzled about the problem.
So when you get a question like, “Did dinosaurs exist 35 million years ago?” or whatever, a person keen on fleshing out the question could ask, “Do you mean, did the creatures whose bones we’ve discovered live 35 million years ago? Or do you mean, do the creatures we’ve thought of as dinosaurs live 35 million years ago?” The first question is undoubtedly answered “Yes,” but the second question is a bit more tricky because it relies on how much we know about ‘dinosaurs’. We might have some conceptions off due to lack of evidence, so it is entirely plausible that the answer is “No, such beings didn’t exist, if you went back in time you’d find the creatures that eventually left these bones but our conception is off.”
This is not a trivial issue I might make it sound like. Take the conception of the atom as it was in ancient Greece, and again as it was with Bohr, and then again as it was just a decade later, and then again as it is now. “Do atoms exist?” totally glosses over the rather critical conceptual matter: how do we conceive this conceptual entity ‘atom’? Sometimes I feel like SentientMeat finds the question ultimately uninteresting, it is something that we’ll just work out over time, but in any case atoms do exist independent of our conception of them. I find this a remarkably perplexing position, and often I’m even unsure of how to approach the problem to clear it up for myself.
It is as if we have two variables here. One variable is reality, what it is. The other variable is our conception of reality, what we consider ‘real’, and so on. The universe is unarguably real in the second sense. It is the frustrating mapping of the second sense to the first sense that wears us down. If you accept the objectivity of the former variable, your quest is to tweak the second. That’s ok, but my problem here is what I just mentioned in the previous paragraph: it seems, then, that it is perfectly sound to assert what may turn out to be factually incorrect! That’s fine if we’ve not settled on any answer about what reality is independent of our perceptions, but when we’ve already answered the question… it is just perplexing to me. I don’t know what to make of it, what to do with it, how to support it, et cetera.
I just wanted to apologize for not responding to replies from my earlierpost. The weekend was a lot more involved than I anticipated. I’ve read the rest of the thread and will try to reply soon. (Not that this thread isn’t going along fine without me.) 
There’s a helluva lot to explore in that one paragraph; let me take a piece at a time.
You said: “I am my memories: the atoms of the hardware change over more or less continually”. Are you, metaphorically, software? That is, are you information encoded in/on a (continually-changing) physical medium?
Also, there’s a gap for me in your claim that “I am my memories”. Specifically, it seems to leave out experience, i.e., what the memories are memories of.
If memories are memories of experience, what is “your” relationship to those experiences? If the experiences aren’t “you”, what are they?
Hoodoo Ulove brought up an interesting point. In your response, you used the analogy of other people “using” you, and I was wondering if you’d expand on that. My initial (and again, knee jerk) reaction was:
A computer that’s not computing isn’t a computer; it’s a paperweight. If your “user” is reality (or reality in the form of other people), it seems to create an insanity loop with reality using reality to compute reality to output reality which uses reality to compute reality…
It seems it can not be demonstrated to someone other than myself due to the limitations of communication. There will always be something subjective or something that relies on conventions of thought or language.
So it seems like the only person I could prove this to is myself, but even this is in question because a proof requires thought.
Clearly the debate is well past this point, but I don’t understand how it can be.
Anyone care to help me understand how we can be discussing anything other than the basic groundrules? Or is that what we are debating? HELP!
erislover, a great, rich post that I’ll be mining for quite awhile (“stage-setting”. heh.).
I’m juggling as fast as I can with Sentient and Lib, so I can’t begin to ask all the questions that I’m dying to. For now, I’ll settle for this one:
Why do you want to keep subjectivity? The reason I ask is because I’ve been trying hard (and unsuccessfully) to get rid of it.
Everything I’ve read in the cognitive and neuro sciences almost universally holds the existence of subjectivity, of a “self”, as a chimera. It’s at best an illusion, at worst a mistake. Plus, as you pointed out in your first paragraph, even perfectly intelligible sentences like “* I like to see what kinds of pleasures my body can give me.*” twist bizarrely with self-reference.
And yet, no one can read my mind. My experience seems singular and private, and I cannot imagine experience without an experiencer.
So… when I talk to myself, who the hell am I talking to?
SentientMeat, forgive me for putting my words into your mouth. It seems that others read it the same way though.
Erislover, we all slip into dualistic-sounding talk when we discuss this stuff. We must fight it! As regards monisms, you seem to be favoring the idealist over the physicalist sort, as does brain researcher Donald Hoffman, cited in post 86. This view, as you point out, has the advantage of crossing one entity of the list of what must be accounted for. It has the serious disadvantage that it may be meaningless. I much prefer the more judicious assessment of V. S. Ramachandran. Your post has introduced this casual student of philosophy to a host of new terms, which I will now hasten off to research. Thanks so much!
Eris, what bothers me most about the supervenience theories is that determination is left undefined. I think undefined terms are fine when they are words with practically universal comprehension, like Peano’s “successor”. But when you make the statement that X supervenes on Y at the moment that Y determines X, you damned well better define “determines” precisely. Otherwise, I don’t know how you solve the epistemic problem of the classic example: two men, each looking at a thing. One is looking at a red disc, and the other is looking at a picture of a red disc. They can sense nothing else and know nothing else. If the strong supervenience postulate is true (a,b with identical Y properties have identical X properties) then how is one to account for the fact that both men believe they have seen red disks, but one of them is wrong? It would seem to me that somehow b determined differently from a. Also, what is the mechanism by which supervenience occurs? How does it take no time? The bizarre answer that it happens “during” the zero seconds between the past and the present just pisses me off.
As the OP, let me give you official notice that you’ve been missed, Larry. I even made reference to the Borgian model, or something like that. 
Yes. (Or at least, to pre-empt another some/all merry-go-round, I am my memories and other stuff besides, such as my right arm.)
Well, we’re now squarely in an ‘Ask the Physicalist’ mode which I had hoped to frame a bit more formally with a well-considered OP, but what I’d suggest an experience is is sensory input committed to different levels of memory, as moderated by chemical emotion and cross-referenced via language. A human memory is not just a photograph incident on retinal CMOS sensors and stored in a hard drive - there’s a whole load of other neuropsychological stuff going on besides which turn simple memory-formation into ‘experience-having’.
Like a dead or unconscious human, I’d suggest (and to pre-empt again, I accept that a fully sevofluraned anaesthete might still have a few basest-level subroutines running which mean that it’s consciousness is not quite zero.)
Sounds about right, although I don’t see what’s ‘insane’ about it. Sensory apparatus forming new memories willy-nilly, seemingly almost without limit, and inputting that information into decisions and expressing them via language, thus providing sensory input to another apparatus. If reality is just the configuration of atoms and the like, then a dead human is just as real as a conscious one - they’re just doing different stuff.
Red=EM radiation of wavelength around 700 nm. Disc = Geon having circular cross section and thickness smaller than breadth. Three-dimensionality of ‘real’ red disc accessed by depth-perception modules (picking up clues from differences in image from each eye, shading/texture and fact that further things are smaller). Two-dimensionality of photographic red disc similarly accessed. Y and X do not have identical properties.
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How does it take no time?
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Cognition does not take “no time”. Again, I’m not sure I’m interpreting the question correctly.
Presently, several matters are under discussion: the differences between existentialism and essentialism and what they imply, how a thing may be both existent and essential, how the noumenal relates to the phenomenal, whether physicalism couches reality in a reasonable way, and what is the nature of God. With respect to your search for a proof, I would approach it this way: begin with the premise that the universe IS contingent on subjectivity and conventions of thought or language, and then prove that premise false.
That’ right, they don’t. But recall the conditions of the test. There are no further things to compare as clues. No depth perception. There is only darkness, puntuated by small red circles, one an actual disk and one not. But both men believe they have seen the same thing.
Not cognition. Supervenience. It’s reminiscent of old theories of gravity, where if the sun were to disappear, the earth would immediately fly out of its orbit.
In a debate on whether or not the universe is real, I would have thought we’d see someone drag in phenomenology/nihilism. But I guess I wouldn’t be giving the intelligent people on this board enough credit. That’s a good thing.
And so your question is “How can a man believe wrong things?”, then?
I’ve completed my OP - I hope it might explore the issue a little better.
I’ll certainly visit your thread, but no, that’s not the question.
The question is, if it is the case that when A and B have identical properties from the Y group, they also have identical properties from the X group, then how is it that one of the men is in the mental state of perceiving a red disk while the other man is not in that state but thinks he is?
I’d say they’re both in the same mental state, since they’re both only privy to identical information which their cognitive modules cannot distinguish the source of.
So would I, but then actuality did not supervene.
Just as it did not for billions of years, and still might not.
I’m sorry, Sentient, but I consider that to be nonresponsive. It’s okay if you’re moving your attention to the other thread. I wouldn’t blame you. It’s a new seedling that you need to nurture. But I’m not asking the question in this thread about whether you’re a biological computer, and the question I asked you wasn’t about whether the two men were living in a simulation. It wasn’t even a question about simulation, but about supervenience. If you are suggesting that illusions are as real as non-illusions, then you are defining “physical” no differently than the panentheist defines “God”. The physical is merely everything that can be conceived plus everything that can’t.