Westworld was my #1 for so many years until Foundation pipped it.

I actually find it difficult to recommend it anymore because of how complex the plot got in later seasons. You need to be very familiar with every sci-fi concept to even stand a chance of keeping up with what’s going on.

Fair enough, I personally see the changes as a benefit as the source material is pretty dated although still incredible for sci-fi written in the 50s.

I might even go as far as to say it’s the best book-to-film adaptation I’ve seen for that very reason, as you say it kept the high points of the books and it’s aim was clearly not to faithfully recreate them for reasons that become somewhat obvious at the end of Season 3.

Definitely agree on Pace, Birn and Mann, rarely do you see such good acting in a sci-fi series.

Foundation is the best sci-fi I’ve watched and I’ve seen a lot. The way they adapted it from Asimov’s books is so well done, just enough changes to modernise is and keep people who read the books guessing.

Season 2 is a bit weak but 3 was great and the scope for future seasons is huge.

​You argue that philosophy is like maths because it is rigorous, uses logic, and isn’t empirical science. However, mathematics operates on universally agreed upon axioms. Because the axioms are agreed upon, the proofs are definitive. In philosophy, the axioms are exactly what is being debated so it isn’t as rigorous.

​Formal logic only guarantees that if the premises are true, the conclusion logically follows, it doesn’t guarantee that the premises are actually true in reality.

I don’t know why you keep citing “pattern matching” here, it’s the wrong term to use. My complaint that “Anyone can claim anything which can’t be proved” is a complaint about soundness. You can use flawless first-order logic to mathematically manipulate absolute nonsense, but it doesn’t make the conclusion sound.

It is a mistake to treat materialism as a scientific theory… it is a background assumption of science.

I’m not doing that, I’m just citing more evidence for it being the case and employing Occam’s Razor.

​If we look at the cosmological timeline, the universe existed for billions of years before biological organisms evolved. If reality requires the “collective perception of many agents” to exist, how did the universe exist before agents evolved to perceive it? You fail to explain how non-physical “agents” can exist prior to the physical organisms they supposedly conjure into reality.

The rock would exist because the crowd is there to have that perception or the potential for that perception.

​If a rock exists in the dark on an uninhabited planet purely because it has the potential to be perceived if someone were there, then the rock possesses objective, independent existence outside of any actual observer’s mind. This directly contradicts your earlier premise that experience/perception must come first.

I am not stretching the definition… In idealism, consciousness and all of your other definitions are left intact, except the order of operations is reversed like this.

This is literally changing the definition. In biology and common parlance, consciousness is defined as an emergent property or function of a biological brain. By redefining it as an independent, pre-existing, reality-generating force that creates biology, you have entirely changed the ontological nature of the word.

I appreciate philosophy has value, helps us form hypotheses and that we all hold unquestioned background assumptions but I’m afraid you’re not going to be able to convince me of idealism without strong evidence. This argument has been going on for centuries with no resolution so we might as well agree to disagree. At the end of the day, it’s empirical science vs. untestable speculation.

This is I think where the fundamental disagreement lies. Bsit was making a philosophical claim, so the apparatus of science doesn’t really work here. We can’t really prove or disprove the idea using experiments, we can only discuss how coherent the idea is. In this sense philosophy is more like math than science.

And this is why I mentioned it feels like a waste of time. Anyone can claim anything which can’t be proved or disproved so what’s the point in discussing it? I could come up with any old nonsense about the origins of the universe as many religions have done in the past and we could argue for centuries about it getting nowhere.

Consciousness is like a giant container that contains everything else within it. Consciousness is like a canvas, and the material world is like the paint on that canvas. We construct stories about how the changes in the brain cause changes in consciousness, and those stories are true (there are clear correlations here), but they themselves are happening on the canvas.

So I addressed this in an admittedly rather tongue-in-cheek way with my universe-is-a-brain comment. You are stretching the definition consciousness to mean the universe itself, widening an already poorly defined concept in order to fit the idealist theory.

When most people say “consciousness,” they mean the subjective inner experience of a biological organism which simply doesn’t fit your definition.

If we replace the term “consciousness” with “the universe” in bsit’s very first sentence it makes a lot more sense, but it’s also not controversial in the slightest: “The universe is fundamental to reality.”

Well this is a shame as we seemed to be in agreement on the comment thread above. I didn’t even pick you up of the fact that none of the papers you linked were evidence for panpsychism, just exploring where consciousness is located in the brain and potential mathematical frameworks for it.

bsit wasn’t making coherent arguments, they were putting out unfalsifiable theories and then linking things like the Hard Problem of Consciousness which doesn’t support their point, it’s just an ongoing problem yet to be explained by science. You mentioned yourself that one possible way to do this would be via further research into IIT.

I see no paths to evidence for idealism myself and asked for some but received none. So yes, I’m afraid I will dismiss a theory which doesn’t make any predictions and can’t be proved/disproved. Doubly so if the advocate starts comparing my scientific understanding to the Bible then starts abusing logical fallacies.

To address your extremely charitable interpretation… What does matter being an interpretation of consciousness even mean to you? To me it would mean that we are some kind of Boltzmann brain imagining the universe into existence. If that’s the the case then it’s basically solipsism which bsit flat out rejected multiple times.

I didn’t use the word anti-intellectual but if we can’t agree on definitions and the fundamental axioms of a shared reality then we really are in Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Agreed, we can’t even rigorously define consciousness, so to claim it’s the only thing that exists is a stretch too far for me.

Panpsychism is interesting but gonna need a lot more evidence including an explanation of the Combination Problem before I’m convinced.

Evidence for IIT, which we don’t have, does not prove idealism and the person you are defending is arguing for idealism.

The things you posit are falsifiable, the claims they have been putting forward are not. Hence my initial questions surrounding panpsychism to them before they started trying to use logical fallacies against a mainstream scientific position.

Fair enough it’s controversial I’ll give them that.

But so is my goldfish’s belief that the grass is blue and the sky is green.

Well I described it as best I could but to be frank their position was pretty incoherent and changed over the course of the thread in an attempt to avoid scrutiny.

Are we on the same page now?