Little late to the thread but really enjoying your posts. Curious on your thoughts if you don't mind:
As a philosophy newbie myself, could it be a lot of this discussion/debate is due to people having no exposure to the metaphysical concepts of objectivity/subjectivity? It seems a bit portion of your argument is that people who believe we can achieve ai sentience are already committed to a (leap of faith) absolute belief in the "physicalist" model/understanding of the universe?
Also regarding the idea of a "Unified Theory of Everything", do you believe in this as a possibility? Is having that as a goal or destination in of itself a representation of a particularly misguided "physicalist" way of thinking that many people are already committed to/trapped within?
i don't think its about a lack of exposure to the concept of subjectivity and objectivity as much as it is a fundamental disbelief in anything approaching metaphysics whatsoever, which yes, stems from the absolute belief in a purely physicalist understanding of the universe. the difference between physicalists and myself is similar to the difference between an atheist and an agnostic. the atheist assumes that there is and can be no god or gods, whereas the agnostic makes no assumptions whatsoever regarding this. the physicalist assumes the ability of their belief system to be refined into perfection without much in the way of fundamental revision, assumes the nonexistence of any phenomena that cannot be described by physics, whereas i believe that one or several paradigm shifts in philosophy and science and the philosophy of science are necessary to improve our understanding of reality, i do not assume that the physicalist model of the universe is correct or able to be trivially modified to be correct. and when analysis in fact shows the inability of physicalism to explain a phenomena we all experience every waking moment of our lives like subjectivity or qualia, i take that as evidence against the model, instead of ignoring it in the hope that someday the model might be trivially revised somehow to account for this fundamental explanatory gap.
a 'unified theory of everything' may or may not be possible, but it should be especially possible under physicalism - if everything is indeed reducible to physical matter and physcial processes, then surely we should eventually be able to describe matter and related physical processes in sufficient detail to describe all of reality, including subjectivity. but i don't think its necessarily physicalist to believe humans can comprehensively understand existence, for example if subjectivity is fundamental to reality in a way similar to matter, then understanding subjectivity and matter both, and their relationship to one another or to whatever reality they both refer to, could help us understand existence in a more coherent sense.
Little late to the thread but really enjoying your posts. Curious on your thoughts if you don't mind:
As a philosophy newbie myself, could it be a lot of this discussion/debate is due to people having no exposure to the metaphysical concepts of objectivity/subjectivity? It seems a bit portion of your argument is that people who believe we can achieve ai sentience are already committed to a (leap of faith) absolute belief in the "physicalist" model/understanding of the universe?
Also regarding the idea of a "Unified Theory of Everything", do you believe in this as a possibility? Is having that as a goal or destination in of itself a representation of a particularly misguided "physicalist" way of thinking that many people are already committed to/trapped within?
i don't think its about a lack of exposure to the concept of subjectivity and objectivity as much as it is a fundamental disbelief in anything approaching metaphysics whatsoever, which yes, stems from the absolute belief in a purely physicalist understanding of the universe. the difference between physicalists and myself is similar to the difference between an atheist and an agnostic. the atheist assumes that there is and can be no god or gods, whereas the agnostic makes no assumptions whatsoever regarding this. the physicalist assumes the ability of their belief system to be refined into perfection without much in the way of fundamental revision, assumes the nonexistence of any phenomena that cannot be described by physics, whereas i believe that one or several paradigm shifts in philosophy and science and the philosophy of science are necessary to improve our understanding of reality, i do not assume that the physicalist model of the universe is correct or able to be trivially modified to be correct. and when analysis in fact shows the inability of physicalism to explain a phenomena we all experience every waking moment of our lives like subjectivity or qualia, i take that as evidence against the model, instead of ignoring it in the hope that someday the model might be trivially revised somehow to account for this fundamental explanatory gap.
a 'unified theory of everything' may or may not be possible, but it should be especially possible under physicalism - if everything is indeed reducible to physical matter and physcial processes, then surely we should eventually be able to describe matter and related physical processes in sufficient detail to describe all of reality, including subjectivity. but i don't think its necessarily physicalist to believe humans can comprehensively understand existence, for example if subjectivity is fundamental to reality in a way similar to matter, then understanding subjectivity and matter both, and their relationship to one another or to whatever reality they both refer to, could help us understand existence in a more coherent sense.