I would bump the origin of the universe to the top, because no matter what universe-generating physics you come up with I can always ask, "but what set things up to work that way?" I'd also put consciousness up there, because it's fundamentally distinct from measurable things. Consciousness and the origin of the universe get place 0, and the others all get place 1 because they're solvable but we don't know in which order.
I very much share that sentiment, in that I rate "the nature of consciousness" and "why does the universe, why does anything at all even exist" as fundamental questions of a completely different class, perhaps even unsolvable.
"I would bump the origin of the universe to the top, because no matter what universe-generating physics you come up with I can always ask, "but what set things up to work that way?""
Except that it might not be possible to get outside of consciousness to have any testable way of explaining what set it up to be that way.
It seems that we are hard-limited by our consciousness, and have no way of going outside of it to peek at "the universe" beyond.
> I'd also put consciousness up there, because it's fundamentally distinct from measurable things.
No one knows that it is not measurable. Is love measurable? is hunger? happiness? they seem to be as measurable as consciousness, that is to say we can at least measure them in binary as either present or not.
How do you know everyone else is not a "p-zombie", indistinguishable in any external way from a human such as yourself, but devoid of internal "consciousness"/"subjective experience". Even the mere logical possibility of p-zombies indicates that consciousness is unmeasurable.
Solipsism is basically the only defense against the conclusions from the evidence of the "real" world. But if you argue for solipsism then I say you have much bigger problems than consciousness because you basically rejected everything that has ever been "known" or experienced.
If you reject our "shared reality" then anything is possible, including paradoxically, the "shared reality".
If you accept the shared reality on the other hand, consciousness is measurable to some degree. So the real question is do you or do you not accept we share experiences?
As an addendum, if it is all up to me as you suggested, I just made consciousness measurable so there is no need to keep arguing about it.
"Solipsism is basically the only defense against the conclusions from the evidence of the "real" world."
Far from it. There could very well be an external world, and one populated by plenty of other and fully real human beings even, but your own personal view or understanding of it could be distorted or false.
This could be simply because you're hallucinating, or insane, or your brain could be injured, or could be living in a virtual reality (which itself exists in some other "real" reality), or you could be the proverbial brain in a vat, or aliens (or god or a demon/devil) could be deceiving you, etc.
All those options are the same: they are either part of a shared experience or they are not. Nothing is preventing a demon from deceiving me right now, in fact one can come anytime I'd love to meet him, preferably her.
If experiencing something that's not shared is the only qualification for solipsism, then we're all solipsists, as (arguably barring the possibility of telepathy) our experiences are all private.
But that's not what solipsism typically means. Solipsism usually refers to the position that only you (or perhaps only your own mind) exist. By that commonly accepted definition, one could be mistaken or deceived in any of the ways I laid out earlier without them entailing solipsism.
Even if there is some sort of "shared context" (more commonly known as "objective reality") your view or understanding of it could still be deceived, hallucinating, simply mistaken, insane, etc. These are not solipsism. What they are are possible obstacles to your connection to any shared context or objective reality.
"Nature of Life (we are still nowhere near understanding how it arose or how living organisms work in all their intricate detail)."
Not only that, but do you have an existence before you are born?
This might be a religious question to some, or perhaps involve a religious answer, but religion need not be involved. It's possible that in some not yet understood way an individual might exist before they're born and are somehow incarnated or embodied in to matter or the world as we know it when they're born.
Sure, it might sound kooky or something that science might never be able to answer (or maybe it could, who knows?). But the point is that that's all part of the mystery of life, and the answer could be a metaphysical or ontological one, not necessarily a religious one.
Another question regarding the nature of life is what exactly does it take to go from a non-living substance to a living one. In some way this is a question of definitions (which is difficult enough and controversial enough on its own), but even given an agreed-upon definition of life, it might not be clear how exactly the process from non-living to living take place, or at which point the non-living becomes living.
It says a lot that you felt the need to hedge against the assumption that you were talking about religious beliefs. These days it seems like there’s a materialist mindset that assumes anyone who questions certain assumptions about consciousness (e.g. that it is a creation of the brain that begins and ends when the brain does) has ventured into the terrain of religion, the supernatural, or “magic” (whatever that’s supposed to mean). It doesn’t seem to occur to people that consciousness itself is completely inexplicable and therefore all bets are off regarding its true nature. These assumptions people have are based on faith (yes, faith) in a hypothetical explanation that has yet to materialize. Until scientists cross the Explanatory Gap (which is more like a chasm), nobody has the right to tell anyone that their speculation about consciousness is kooky or unscientific or whatever. The only thing that’s unscientific is letting one’s thought be constrained by rigid dogma regarding what is and isn’t possible.
I feel your pain (if I’m understanding you correctly, that is). It sucks to be trapped in a no-man’s-land between scientific dogma and religious dogma. We need a better way forward.
The problem is one of humility. If you admit that something is at this point inexplicable then that is where you should stop explaining it. Sometimes I don't know is the only real answer. Because if you want to make this statement:
> It doesn’t seem to occur to people that consciousness itself is completely inexplicable and therefore all bets are off regarding its true nature.
Sure, but the problem is that many people don’t demonstrate this humility when they act like it’s ridiculous to wonder if consciousness exists prior to conception or after death. Ruling these out requires an unwarranted assumption about the relationship between consciousness and the brain.
I agree that people should show some humility and admit that we have no idea if or when consciousness begins and ends. Anyone who makes definitive claims about the temporal limits of consciousness should, as you said, provide an explanation of how they know this.
It goes both ways. If you claim there is an unwarranted assumption about the relationship between consciousness and the brain you have to prove it. All I see is consciousness is highly correlated with having a brain.
> I agree that people should show some humility and admit that we have no idea if or when consciousness begins and ends.
I think our understanding of it is not as vague as you claim. We can see consciousness develop in all kind of animals; infants are less conscious than adults and elders show a higher degree of loss of consciousness. Furthermore, it is linked with brain activity somehow, as damaged brains show erratic consciousness related behavior. There is a lot more to learn, a lot, but to say that we know nothing is very dishonest in my opinion.
That is assuming we are talking about the same kind of consciousness you and I. But I've got a feeling we are not.
> Not only that, but do you have an existence before you are born?
If you are inventing mysteries out of thin air why stop there? What if you will yourself into existence? What if it is you that is making "time" perceivable for the rest of us? Do your half-existing-yet-unborn-brother dies every time you are reborn into this plane but not if you will yourself to be born into another parallel universe?
I didn't invent that question. It's a been a question that people have had for millenia.
Some people believe that one has a soul that exists before one is born in to a body. So in a way that's an answer to this question -- an answer that's been around for thousands of years. Clearly many people are concerned about it. I'm far from the only one, much less the first one.
I was talking about the royal you: we. But more importantly, "when" the question was first asked doesn't change the nature of the question. Sure, you (we) can ask it, but it is no more insightful that the myriad of other metaphysical questions that have been asked through history that will never be answered because they lack a fundamental grounding in the shared experience we call "reality". Are there any blue reds? We can spend a millennia thinking about it.
"Are there any blue reds? We can spend a millennia thinking about it."
It's pretty obvious that you can have blue reds: they're called purples or violets. Just squeeze some blue out of a tube of paint, and then some red, mix them together and you get a blue red. You can also have a black white: it's called gray.
Anyway, I'd agree that one could ask any number of metaphysical questions, but it could be argued that only some of them would be considered "great". One (arguable) measure to use for the greatness of questions is how many people do they occupy, and how critical do they consider those questions. Whether one exists before birth or after death would be considered "great" by this measure, whether there's a blue red would not.
Violet is not blue and it is also not red. I'm not asking for a bluish red but for a 100% blue color that it is also red.
You are misusing the language, or rather I am in this case, to ask a paradoxical question. Where are all the cat dogs? This is a never ending game because we don't agree on the language. This is exactly the realm of metaphysics.
And greatness is in the eye of the beholder. To me greatness could be quantified by how much progress has been made in answering the question. After a thousand years and possibly millions of lives wasted trying to answer "is there existence before this life?" we are not one single iota closer to an answer. That implies a pretty bad question that is not grounded in reality, or at the very least not "grammatically" grounded in reality.
"Violet is not blue and it is also not red. I'm not asking for a bluish red but for a 100% blue color that it is also red."
If you're asking if there exists something that's 100% X at the same time as being 100% not-X, I'm not sure there's much to debate about it, as there clearly isn't (at least not in this world, where things can't seem to be themselves and not themselves at the same time).
"You are misusing the language, or rather I am in this case, to ask a paradoxical question. Where are all the cat dogs? This is a never ending game because we don't agree on the language. This is exactly the realm of metaphysics."
It's the realm of semantics (ie. definitions), but I'm not convinced that every metaphysical question could be reduced to a semantic one.
If you take the question of whether one has some sort of existence (like, say, as a "soul") before birth, I think that question would still exist even after we'd agreed on the constituent definitions. Also, I don't see anything paradoxical in that question. Even were it paradoxical, its paradoxical quality would in no way disqualify it for me. Perhaps I'd be even more interested in examining it, as examining paradoxes has been a very fruitful approach throughout human history.
"To me greatness could be quantified by how much progress has been made in answering the question. After a thousand years and possibly millions of lives wasted trying to answer "is there existence before this life?" we are not one single iota closer to an answer."
There have been answers, they just haven't satisfied everyone. The same could be said of pretty much every other great question, no matter whether the answers come from science, religion, philosophy, intuition, or elsewhere.
> If you're asking if there exists something that's 100% X at the same time as being 100% not-X, I'm not sure there's much to debate about it, as there clearly isn't (at least not in this world, where things can't seem to be themselves and not themselves at the same time).
You found the loophole! Sad to see you abandoned so swiftly your own logic when the time came to evaluate your own statement. This is exactly why the metaphysical deals in the realm of ambiguity: once you define it in a clear and concise manner all the mystery disappears, and that to some, is no fun.
That is also why a question like “is there life after death?” is uninteresting: by definition life comes before death.
"a question like "is there life after death?" is uninteresting: by definition life comes before death."
You're not being charitable to the questioner by interpreting it as a paradox.
Clearly, what most people intend to ask by that question is whether one can exist in some form (as a "spirit" or as "soul", or maybe come out of the VR that is the world, or in heaven even in a body like the present one or a more perfect one, or in hell, or maybe reincarnated in as another lifeform, etc) after your physical body stops functioning. There is no paradox in that.
Not so clear, because you see, that is another question. This is why we need to define things very explicitly and then accept the implications of those definitions or we’ll never get anywhere.
Now that you accepted that there is a paradox in the original question (“is there life after death?”) you reformulated it in a way the paradox is no longer present and your meaning is less ambiguous:
“Is there something not physical that continues to exists even after the physical body no longer does?”
And that is a very interesting question, but first we have to acknowledge that it is a different question and because you asked it in a non paradoxical way it opens up avenues for exploration unavailable to the original question. I would personally start simply by asking “is there something not physical, ie. a soul, “in” a being?” That is in itself is own can of worms because even if there are “souls” they might “die” when the body does so it is not as clear cut as one might initially think, but at least is a start. I’m sure there are other approaches, but at least we should all agree: it is a different question.
My point is only unparadoxical questions can have a shot at being answered. Most of the “great questions” are paradoxes; “what came before the beginning?” sounds very profound but it will never lead anywhere, as centuries pondering it have already proven.
Then you could argue that question P (and all "metaphysical" questions) amounts to or really has the structure of something like question Q, and that it's therefore paradoxical, trivial, or uninteresting because the answer is obviously "no" ("by definition", as you point out).
I would disagree for the following reasons:
First, if you interrogate people who ask question P what they mean by it, you're likely to find out that they're not asking anything like question Q, but rather something like the following question:
R: "Can one continue to exist in some form after your physical body stops functioning?"
Now, it's true that question P and R are different on the surface, but when most people ask P what they mean by that question is R. So underneath the surface, at the meaning level, they intend to ask R. Question R is not paradoxical, trivial, or uninteresting, and it has no obvious answer that could be arrived at "by definition".
Second, I believe even trivial-seeming questions and paradoxes are frequently much deeper and more interesting than they appear. Careful study and analysis of them could yield profound insights and areas of future research. Witness all the progress in logic from studying paradoxes and other "trivial" corner cases (like the Liar's Paradox[1], Russell's Paradox[2], etc). From such study you get things like Paraconsistent logics[3] and dialetheism,[4] which can fruitfully deal with contradictions.
Third, even things that are "true by definition" can be useful and interesting. Wittgenstein argued that all logical truths are tautologies. Well, if so, they're still worthy of study and have proven to be interesting and useful.
Finally, I am not convinced that all, most, or even many "metaphysical" questions can be charitably reduced to paradoxes, nor that they are trivially answerable "by definition".
It seems to me you are more interested in the question than in the answer. You agree with me, and then spend two paragraphs justifying why you don't want to agree with me because somehow asking the wrong question still has value. It may have historical value, poetical value, emotional value, and that of course is valuable. But as to the question itself, when everyone means something else either the question is malformed or the language is useless.
And it is not so obvious what they actually mean as everyone interprets it in a different way. Some people mean still existing in this "plane", some in some other reality, some mean to be reborn, some mean to trascend, some to reincarnate, some a mix of two, or of all.
If we keep pretending the question is right when it obviously lacks meaning and all the information necessary to be able to answer it we are never gonna find out.
But again, that is what some people want, for some things to always remain a mystery, so they ask paradoxical questions.
I'm not quite sure if it works for blue and red or only certain color combinations, but it's possible to create images where an item in the scene is obviously one color, yet the light hitting the eye is another color. The brain automatically adjusts for "that's what a red object would look like in that environment," when the light coming from the photograph is actually blue.
In that way you can have a picture that's "blue red" due to perspective rather than semantics. E.g. the car in the picture is really red and the color of the ink depicting it is really blue. The red is blue.
That is interesting, but it is also an answer to a different question. The question is "are there any blue reds?" not "can we see in some circumstances reds as blue?".
Not true, what we call the color red is an electromagnetic wave with a wavelength between, according to wikipedia, 625 and 740 nanometers.
And if you are looking at a picture on a computer, the computer will call red a pixel with an rgb value of (255, 0, 0) even if nobody is looking at it.
The light coming from the car in that image would be concentrated around 450-500 nm, not 625-740 nm. Viewed in isolation, that's blue, but in the context of the rest of the image, it is red. The "redness" of the car exists only in the brain of the viewer, which has evolved to produce stablility of color in a variety of lighting conditions.
That's also why RGB monitors display more than three distinct colors. The colors are synthesized in the brain. If we were orbiting a brown dwarf, we might talk about colors within the infrared part of the spectrum as if they were intrinsic properties of light.
i would add morality to this -- at least problems in physics have a scientific framework within which they can be investigated. but why should we care? why should we be nice? of course there is plenty of rich philosophy on the subjcet
Also, what exactly is it that we mean by "free will"? Even just that question can get ugly, fast. I think I've only ever heard one definition of the concept sufficiently precise to even have a meaningful answer.
(In short, it was this: If we our model of the material universe is essentially correct, and if we assume that it is closed and that the material that we see is all there is, or at least all that can ever influence us, then suppose we define free will as the inability of any real external predictor to ever perfectly predict our actions in advance. I emphasize the word real to highlight that we are emphatically not talking about some abstract god, or something vaguely sitting outside of time, but the ability of a real device constructed out of real materials in real spacetime to predict your actions. We assumed away hypothetical infinite beings or math games at the beginning. In that case, it can be mathematically shown that you are simply too complicated to be fully correctly simulated by any system that attempts to build a model of your actions simply by external observation of you; you do not produce enough bits in your external actions to uniquely identify the state space of the inside of your head, not even if you turn the entire rest of the universe to the task (literally!). By this definition, it can be concretely answered: Yes, you have free will. Interestingly, this turns out to be true even if the universe is 100% deterministic, which definitely conflicts with most people's ideas about "free will"... but then, there's another demonstration of how rare it is for anyone to carefully define it before endlessly pontificating about it.
Also, while I consider this a valuable contribution to the field that any interested philosopher should ruminate on, I am not claiming that I 100% believe it, nor that it "solves" the problem. It is simply as I said at the beginning, the only sufficiently careful treatment of the problem that one can actually say it has an answer. Personally I find the presuppositions it is based on to be highly questionable. But it is at least worth pondering for a bit.)
> In that case, it can be mathematically shown that you are simply too complicated to be fully correctly simulated by any system that attempts to build a model of your actions simply by external observation of you; you do not produce enough bits in your external actions to uniquely identify the state space of the inside of your head, not even if you turn the entire rest of the universe to the task (literally!).
Really? Which mathematical result is this?
Do scanning techniques such as fMRI and EEG count as external?
1. Nature of Life (we are still nowhere near understanding how it arose or how living organisms work in all their intricate detail).
2. Nature of Consciousness - what is consciousness, how can living matter instantiate it, how can we quantify it, etc?
3. Origin of the Universe
4. Why do we seem so alone in the Universe?
5. Resolving Quantum Mechanics / Gravity
6. Understanding Time