It means that something is being asserted as true, when it is not known to be true.
ETA Well, it does mean a little more than that. It means that the basis of the assertion is coming from faith in a comprehensive belief system, rather than from any scrutiny of relevant facts; in this case the belief system is “everything reduces to physics”, with no indication that “physics” meant anything other than “physics as it is presently formulated and conceived”.
If I were to use the sequences as my guide, then on this site, the default approach for explaining all forms of experience should be “that’s how it feels to be physical system X”. So the facts about reality are 1) a lot of strictly physical facts, and 2) “what-it’s-like-to-be-an-X” facts. In the first class of facts, I include complex physical facts that can be obtained from the elementary physical facts, like facts about temperature, which are really facts about average energies of large ensembles of particles. Occasionally it’s said that the “feeling” facts are of this type—complex but strictly physical facts—but then that was the point of my question: I was daring the reader to make such a claim and to be specific about how it works. I was careful to stipulate that the explanation should be non-behavioristic; thus iDante’s later comment, about replicative behaviors, doesn’t qualify, and indeed iDante takes care to add that the property described may not actually be the same thing as love, even if it has something to do with the functional consequences and adaptive role of love. Descriptions in terms of function, adaptive value, or physical composition do not say anything about “experience” or “how it feels”, and I think people generally recognize this.
So occasionally it’s said that there are no feeling facts; for example, that seems to be the point of Stephen Diamond’s recent post. That post was strongly downvoted, so I guess people don’t like that option either. But they also aren’t willing to be psychophysical property dualists, and say that there are physical facts, and there are psychological facts, and that the latter are distinct from the former but nonetheless correlated with them.
So we are left with the schizophrenic situation in which people assert their faith in materialism, but also admit the obvious fact that experiences do exist. I’ve made my pitch for a new nondualistic ontology, but that wasn’t very well-received either, and I concede that it’s not easy to understand. Eventually I’ll produce a proper exposition. Meanwhile, I can at least point out the problem, because it’s not going away.
I would downvote just about any comment that used the below claim as if it meant something:
It means that something is being asserted as true, when it is not known to be true.
ETA Well, it does mean a little more than that. It means that the basis of the assertion is coming from faith in a comprehensive belief system, rather than from any scrutiny of relevant facts; in this case the belief system is “everything reduces to physics”, with no indication that “physics” meant anything other than “physics as it is presently formulated and conceived”.
If I were to use the sequences as my guide, then on this site, the default approach for explaining all forms of experience should be “that’s how it feels to be physical system X”. So the facts about reality are 1) a lot of strictly physical facts, and 2) “what-it’s-like-to-be-an-X” facts. In the first class of facts, I include complex physical facts that can be obtained from the elementary physical facts, like facts about temperature, which are really facts about average energies of large ensembles of particles. Occasionally it’s said that the “feeling” facts are of this type—complex but strictly physical facts—but then that was the point of my question: I was daring the reader to make such a claim and to be specific about how it works. I was careful to stipulate that the explanation should be non-behavioristic; thus iDante’s later comment, about replicative behaviors, doesn’t qualify, and indeed iDante takes care to add that the property described may not actually be the same thing as love, even if it has something to do with the functional consequences and adaptive role of love. Descriptions in terms of function, adaptive value, or physical composition do not say anything about “experience” or “how it feels”, and I think people generally recognize this.
So occasionally it’s said that there are no feeling facts; for example, that seems to be the point of Stephen Diamond’s recent post. That post was strongly downvoted, so I guess people don’t like that option either. But they also aren’t willing to be psychophysical property dualists, and say that there are physical facts, and there are psychological facts, and that the latter are distinct from the former but nonetheless correlated with them.
So we are left with the schizophrenic situation in which people assert their faith in materialism, but also admit the obvious fact that experiences do exist. I’ve made my pitch for a new nondualistic ontology, but that wasn’t very well-received either, and I concede that it’s not easy to understand. Eventually I’ll produce a proper exposition. Meanwhile, I can at least point out the problem, because it’s not going away.