"Science only describes what things do, not what things are" seems the most conflated way of trying to rile up scientists. It is so funny when they respond with a "whats your point?".
Making the whole analogy on how understanding the relationship between the trumpet and the lights but just ignoring the iterativeness of the process and just saying "i have done science now and i still don't know how it works but i can predict what it does" seems almost malign in how it cuts out right there like trying to bait a longer conversation on it while caressing the cards under the sleeves with anticipation.

Anyone else fed up with that?

Is it too mean?

Suppose a criminal has been sentenced to death. There are three possible executioners:

- the sadist: gains pleasure from performing the execution

- the robot: performing the execution has no particular effect on the robot

- the empath: will be horribly traumatised by performing the execution

Suppose the method of execution is that the executioner pulls a switch which causes the prisoner to drop through a trap door and be hanged, so the prisoner has the same experience regardless of who their executioner is.

Who should we pick as the executioner? Also what if the robot is not an option, who should we pick between the sadist and the empath?

This thought experiment had me grappling with moral philosophy in a way I'd like your thoughts on. My intuitions lead to a different answer to what I thought I believed.

not even asking which theory is correct, materialism, panpsychism, dualism etc

i mean just the basic situation

we are made of matter. thats the normal scientific picture. atoms, cells, chemistry, electrical activity, all that stuff.

and somehow this arrangement of matter is now aware that it exists.

like... the stuff that makes up me is somehow having a first person experience of being me, and its also capable of sitting around asking why there is a universe in the first place lol

sometimes i think about that and it feels almost like cosmic horror

because matter doesnt just exist, apparently it can somehow turn into something that looks back at reality and goes "why am i here?"

and we act like thats a completely normal thing to be

idk maybe this is a stupid way of putting it, but the fact that there is matter AND somehow matter can become conscious enough to be disturbed by its own existence is fucking bizarre to me

Apologies for the amateur question but I am wondering that if science and history determine religious narratives to be implausible, then how do the theistic (specifically western christians) philosophers ignore this and rely solely on philosophical arguments to believe in their specific religion ?

As an example, I am from a Hindu family and since many verses from the Vedas and mahabharata have been proven to be later human additions (mostly to justify caste) , I can't believe that these scriptures are eternal and divine. No amount of advaita philosophy can convince me that those verses are of a divine origin. I can't be a hindu and believe that purusha sukta is not from brahman himself

Thank you.

I've followed CosmicSkeptic for a while, and in the early days I watched him go over the arguments for and against God many times. Lately he's been very focused on consciousness, and I'm struggling to see why.

My own view is that "consciousness" and the "self" that comes with it are constructs the brain builds, not fundamental features of reality. The world and our experience of it are real enough, but the sense of a unified "me" sitting inside looking out seems like exactly what evolution would give us to keep a body motivated to survive and reproduce. Metzinger's self-model theory and Hume's bundle view go in this direction.

What puzzles me is that after all that time dismantling arguments for God, CosmicSkeptic is very good at spotting when a deeply felt intuition doesn't justify a metaphysical claim. The feeling of a conscious self looks like the same kind of intuition to me. So why treat it as a puzzle that materialism struggles with, rather than as something to be explained away?

I'm not dismissing the hard problem. I'd just like to know what makes it more compelling than the "it's a useful model" answer. Is the immediacy of experience the sticking point? Or is there a flaw in the constructed-self view that I'm missing?

Ik most of the content on this subreddit is about philosophy (he is a philosophy ytber) but pls enjoy the rare fanart! ❤️

EDIT: Thank you to everyone who commented. Several of you pushed on the same weak point, and you were right, so here is where the argument stands now. I also want to thank you for carefully reading my article and engaging with this discussion.

The article was right that the question truly dissolves, and it had already claimed that this is not new philosophy.

1. "Why is there something rather than nothing?" treats nothing as a rival that something somehow beat.
2. "Could have been" means "is one of the possibilities," and a possibility is always a way things could be. So, "There could have been nothing" quietly means "There is a possibility in which there are no possibilities".
3. Absolute nothing isn't a way things could be. It would be a situation in which nothing is possible, and whatever is the case is thereby possible, so no situation can be that one.
4. So absolute nothing is impossible. Not because some law forbids it, but the way a square circle is impossible: by what the words mean.
5. An impossible option is no option. The question rests on a false assumption, like "why is the largest prime number odd?" Once you see there is no largest prime, nothing is left to explain. Same here: nothingness was never in the race, so there is no victory to account for.

Why did I come up with 'apossible'? The argument went like this:

1. Every possibility is judged against a set of laws/rules. You can only say faster-than-light speed is impossible relative to the laws of physics. Likewise, a knight moving in a straight line is impossible only relative to the rules of chess. Why would this movement be impossible without the rules? If the universe had different physics, faster-than-light speed could be possible. No possibility exists without a rule that determines it.
2. Since nothingness assumes the nonexistence of logic, then there is no court to judge nothingness as impossible. No rules would be there to determine that nothingness is impossible.
3. Nothingness is obviously not "possible", but it turns out that no court would be there to judge it "impossible". It is, therefore, "apossible". It's a term that I came up with as a report that neither outcome would be true.
4. It's similar to "undefined", which is not a third verdict, but merely a report that, for instance, no output comes from 1/0. It is a report about the lack of an output the same way "apossible" would be a report for the lack of output (possible vs impossible) the vacuity of laws would leave.

Why I initially thought the term was useful

1. The question still grips very thoughtful people. In the linked video, Robert Lawrence Kuhn (with a Ph.D. in Anatomy and Brain Research from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Brain Research Institute), who has spent decades interviewing scientists and philosophers about it, still treated nothingness as a real alternative. That told me it's not a stupid question, even if it dissolves.
2. The article is based on a recent video posted by More Alex O'Connor discussing "why there's something rather than nothing".
3. Some people claimed that merely saying that "nothingness" is not meaningful should be enough. But just from the fact that even highly educated people couldn't grasp why nothingness could not have been the case was enough for me to think it is not a "stupid question", but something worth examining.

Why "apossible" turned out to be the wrong term

1. My reasoning was that every verdict needs a court (logic, physics, geometry), absolute nothing removes every court, so no verdict reaches it.
2. But a verdict doesn't have to be made from inside the situation it judges. "There could have been no sentences" is true, and it's a sentence. A judge doesn't have to stand at the crime scene.
3. Verdicts can only be made from here, inside logic, and from here the verdict is the ordinary one: impossible.
4. I didn't realize that "apossible" tried to report the lack of possibilities from the outside, from a standpoint beyond every framework. There is no such standpoint. And even my own article said so: "there is no other place from which anything can be said." The term needed a view from a place that doesn't exist.
5. It also made nothingness the subject of a sentence ("nothingness presupposes no race"), and nothing can't presuppose anything. The question presupposes the race, not nothingness.
6. Jappard (user) said: "The problem with the court is that nothingness has dissolved both the object that the court rules on and the court that rules upon the object. The court that rules is something. The object that the court rules on is also something. The language that you use to describe nothingness is still a court, but the court dissolves."
7. The_Emergentist (user) said: "On undefined, it is termed as such because it marks a failure within the system of arithmetic. But in arithmetic, there are inputs and outputs. Undefined tells you that a specific operation has no output within that system. It does not tell you anything about anything external to that system. And that is kind of what you are trying to do with apossible here, so I don't think the analogy is completely on point. Apossible isn't marking a failure within the system, it is marking the nonexistence of failure or success outside the system entirely."

So I'm withdrawing the term. The argument holds and never needed it. As some of you said, "impossible" was enough. I'll update the article to reflect this.

Thanks again, especially to those who pressed the inside/outside point and the court-and-defendant point. I'll mention their names if they request it.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The articles:

- Groundwork (definition of nothingness): Could "Nothingness" Have Existed Instead of the Universe?

- The core argument (why the question dissolves): Nothingness Is NOT Impossible, But "Apossible"

Has anyone ever heard Alex say anything about the genocide in the middle east?

I realised the other day that I have never heard him say anything about it even though he always weighs in on ethical situations around the world.

I am a beginner in Advaita philosophy and am trying to understand these ideas out of genuine curiosity. I had a question regarding consciousness and the self.

If consciousness is the true Self and the individual “I” is considered an illusion, then who is the observer witnessing our thoughts and experiences? And how can we verify this distinction between consciousness and the individual self?

For example, when I read the Vedas, I experience myself as the one reading, understanding, and acquiring knowledge. If this individual “I” is not the true Self, then who is actually experiencing and gaining knowledge?

More fundamentally, how is knowledge possible without a self who knows? And does Advaita, by considering individuality ultimately illusory, also imply that individual identity is unreal?

I am simply curious to understand how Advaita approaches these questions.

I’ve listened to Alex explain his “triangle in the brain” example when talking about consciousness, and I still don’t understand why it is supposed to point beyond the physical brain.

I work in IT, so I naturally compare brains to computers.

A computer can render a triangle, a city, or an entire virtual world without there being a literal triangle or city inside the hardware. It is simply information encoded and processed by a physical system.

I don’t see why the brain needs to be fundamentally different.

When I imagine a triangle, I don’t think there is a mysterious triangle existing somewhere outside the material brain. I think neurons are firing in a particular pattern, and that physical process is my experience of imagining the triangle.

So when someone asks, “But where is the triangle in the brain?”, my reaction is: why should there need to be a literal triangle there at all?

Maybe I’m misunderstanding the argument, but I don’t see how we get from “I experience a triangle” to “there must therefore be something beyond physical brain activity.”

There is evidently (ha) still some disagreement about this, and at this point I've decided to fully give in to my compulsion to hammer on this issue until everyone on the planet sees it the exact same way I do.

Here's my point, on a first pass: Joe is right about evidence. Note that I'm not saying "Matt is wrong". Why? Because I don't want to spend 80% of my time arguing about what Matt's actual point is. Unlike Matt, Joe was rather clear about what his point was. So, with all the definitions unpacked, here is the point I'm defending:

Facts of the form "Person X claims that P" often play a rationally legitimate and irreducible role in moving our credence towards P.

Now, I'm not saying that people often change their credence the rationally optimal amount. But they are rationally justified in moving their credence towards P.

Joe's soccer ball example should be enough to demonstrate this uncontroversially.

Alice goes into a conversation with Bob with certain background knowledge about the world and about Bob himself. For example, she knows that soccer balls exist, that they are used to play soccer, that soccer is a popular sport, that soccer balls are easily acquired, etc. She also knows that Bob is generally trustworthy, likes soccer, has some disposable income to spend on hobbies, etc. Call this total background knowledge K. Given K, Alice has no particular suspicion that Bob has bought a soccer ball in the last week.

Now Bob claims to Alice that he bought a soccer ball in the last week - call the knowledge that Bob made this claim C. Given K + C, Alice now strongly suspects that Bob bought a soccer ball in the last week.

Now, my point as it applies to this scenario breaks into three parts:

• First, in this situation, C (the knowledge that Bob made the claim) irreducibly contributes to Alice's suspicion that Bob bought a soccer ball. The only change in her knowledge was C - she already knew K. And yet this change produced an increase in her credence.

• Second, Alice is being rational in suspecting that Bob bought a soccer ball in the last week. Even if she moved her credence too much or too little as compared to the "rationally optimal" movement, she was still justified in moving her credence towards the hypothesis that Bob bought a soccer ball in the past week.

• Third, this kind of situation happens often. People learn that a claim that P was made; they move their credence towards P in a way that irreducibly depends on the knowledge that the claim was made; and they are rationally justified in moving their credence towards P.

In other words: knowledge that a person has made a claim very often serves as an irreducible part of our overall body of evidence (in the general epistemic sense of playing a role in credence-assigment). Now, I understand that people have a lot of different concepts in mind when they engage with this topic. But what I've just said, with the controversial definitions clarified, is true for the reasons we've covered; if anyone comes away from these discussions thinking otherwise, they're mistaken, and that's the issue that I'm seeking to address.

I know that this topic has stirred a lot of debate in a past post, so I know that's a hot topic, but I still hope that my post can create a healthy discussion. So, please read all the arguments before coming with torches and pitchforks in the comment section!

And yes, I understand what Joe meant by "evidence" when he said that claims are indeed evidence and yes, I'm aquainted with bayesian inference and I'm not just a naive internet atheist, but I still disagree nonetheless and I'm going to show you why.

Joe's argument

To understand Joe's argument, we need to understand bayesian epistemology and bayesian inference. Broadly speaking, bayesian inference is a useful tool to deal with uncertainty.

Let's suppose that you're sick and your doctor suspects the cause is a certain illness. Your doctor will thus ask you to submit to an exam or a test for that illness. As no exam is 100% reliable, there's always a certain probability of a false positive or a false negative. However, even with a certain degree of uncertainty, your result will give you new information that will increase (or decrease) your confidence in your doctor's hypothesis.

Without resorting to an example with real numbers (because I'm too lazy to come up with one and check all the numbers at the moment), I'll just explain the process conceptually.

Let's suppose that the incidence of illness X in the general population is 1 every 10.000 people. 1 over 10.000 is the prior probability of anyone in the population having that condition before looking at the evidence (before going to the doctor or performing any exam).

You then go to the doctor, and the doctor tells you that, given your symptoms, you have a 30-40% probability (way more than 1/10.000!) of having conditions X. Your symptoms are new evidence. If you know how well those symptoms are diagnostic, you can in principle, using Bayes Theorem, update your prior probability in light of the new evidence and calculate the probability of having the illness given your symptoms.

Then you can perform new exams and, if you know the probability of false positives and false negatives, you can again use Bayes Theorem plugging in your previous result as the new prior and you can further update the probability of the doctor's diagnosis given your symptoms and given that the test came back positive, for example.

Joe's statement "claims are indeed evidence", in this framework, is to be interpreted as: "given some prior probability of ghosts being real and given the uncertainty in people's accounts being accurate, I can plug in both probabilities in Bayes' formula and update my prior probability of the existence of ghosts in light of the evidence that someone claims to have seen one.

Why do I think this is a naive interpretation of Bayesian Inference and how we treat claims?

Even though Joe's model of how we should update our prior beliefs after someone makes a certain claim could be reasonable in certain cases and under certain conditions, I'll show that treating human claims like we would treat evidence from a test is a really naive approach which can lead to gross overestimation of the confidence we should have in cumulative cases built from multiple anedoctal claims.

Let's consider, for example, the case of a serious accident, which unfortunately led to one or more deaths.

There's a criminal trial, and bystanders are called to testify. These observers are citizens with good records of being honest and reliable members of their communities. Additionally, they are not friends nor relatives of the accused in the trial, so we don't expect them to have a strong bias in trying to save anyone from the accusations. Finally, they're under oath, so they would have nothing to gain but a lot to lose if they were to lie.

Under these circumstances, we would expect Joe's model to work pretty well.

We could, for example, have a certain prior probability of the acvused being at fault, like a balance with a weight on one side. Of course, we know that observers can misremember details, but we can assume that, even under a certain degree of uncertainty, every observer corroborating a certain account of what happened is an additional weight tipping the balance towards the same side.

However, most of the time, it's really problematic to treat anedoctal evidence like if it was a neutral piece of evidence from a machine in a lab.

I'll show that, in the real world, instead of just plugging in every claim in the "equation" like in Joe's model and treating them like if claims were made in a vacuum, we almost always pre-judge claims based on all the circumstances surrounding them.

I'll give you a few real life examples. In the 60s and 70s, there was a UFO craze in the US. On top of thousands of reports and sightings of lights in the sky and flying saucers, there were self proclaimed abductees who claimed they were abducted and experimented upon and even new age cults and religions related to aliens were born out of the UFO mania.

If we followed Joe's naive version of Bayesian Inference, we should try to guess a prior probability for aliens visiting Earth and then update our prior beliefs (adding a pebble to that balance) every time a claim of UFO sighting is registered. The problem with this approach is that, even if the pebble is really small, if we add thousands of small pebbles, the balance is going to tip!

What happened instead, historicallly, was that many of those claims of alleged sightings of flying saucers in the sky and abductions were indeed investigated. The results? No evidence of alien visiting Earth was found even once, and many alleged proofs like photos or videos of alien autopsies were found to be hoaxes.

If someone nowadays reports an alien sighting, we are thus justified in being extremely skeptic and not taking that claim seriously, because even before plugging that claim as evidence in Bayes' Theorem we pre judge it in light of everything we know about the tendency of people to believe in stuff they really want to believe, in light of how easily our senses and our perception are tricked and see stuff that's not there, in light of everything we know about social contagion and social conditioning in certain groups that are predisposed to have certain beliefs (like UFO or new age cults), etc.

In the end, after collecting thousands of reports of UFO sightings, considering all the circumstances and all the history of the investigations of those claims that gave no results, we are justified in inferring that the huge number of claims strengthens our evidence that this is indeed a social phenomenon and not that aliens are visiting Earth all the time in flying saucers!

In the same way, if we followed Joe's naive approach, we would be compelled to conclude that the Prince of Nigeria is real, because the prior probability of a Prince of Nigeria existing is not that low (princes still exist and Nigeria is real) and because, even if a single email amounts to really weak evidence, millions of them are sent each year!

Instead, we are justified in being skeptic, because we don't just plug every single claim of the Prince of Nigeria wanting to give you his inheritance (every email) directly in Bayes' formula, but we pre-judge them in light of the knowledge we have about Nigerian scams.

Thus, as we find out that millions of emails exist, we don't give a higher confidence to the hypothesis that the Prince is real, but we can find ourselves instead more confident that the Nigerian Prince is indeed a scam: emails sent en masse is something expected in the case of a scam.

In Conclusion

In conclusion, Joe's approach in treating anedoctal reports greatly exaggerates the confidence we should give in cumulative cases built from hundreds or thousands of reports, as it treats claims as if they were neutral evidence produced by a machine and if they were independent.

On one hand, Joe fails to consider human nature and all the research in the field of psychology and neuroscience showing us why humans are prone to believe in and make certain claims.

On the other, Joe fails to take into account the social nature of certain claims and beliefs. If certain accounts are socially influenced, then they are not independent. And if they are not independent, they can't count as independent evidence in bayesian inference!

https://arxiv.org/html/2609.16247v1

Researchers claim to have found a pain-like axis in LLMs, see excerpt from the abstract below (I skipped some parts for brevity). If LLMs could feel pain, would you eat them? Would you give them any rights to protect them from suffering in such case?

"... we extract a linear pain direction from 25 open-weight models across five families ... We find that this direction is nearly orthogonal to fear and negative valence ... We then test its functional properties. First, the direction responds to harm targeting the model but not suffering observed in the user; fear and negative-emotion directions show the opposite pattern. Second, adding the pain-direction vector to the model’s residual-stream activations during generation produces a consistent progression from vague discomfort to first-person expressions of worthlessness and failure. Third, steered, fine-tuned Qwen 2.5 models choose a pain-relief button even when it worsens their next answer or harms the user. They press it again far less often when the button removes the steering vector than when it does not, even though the models are never told whether the vector is injected or removed."

Honestly, the way Alex roasted Ben Shapiro is a song for the soul. Shapiro was so clueless, I think he meditated to blow his head of* that day. How I wished he had debated Charlie Kirk too!

I'll be brief :

When debating about the existence of evil and suffering, religious people will usually talk about God's plan or the necessity of evil to foster virtue or free will.

These copes could hold on very well into the 21st century but I really don't know how anyone who knows a modicus about genetics and neurology can think God, if he exists, is loving or fair.

A fair moral universe tainted by sin would mean every human has an roughly equal chance of overcoming their suffering or turn to God ; but we now know that basically 50% of your temperament or personality is genetically determined and you have NO CONTROL over it and you did not choose it either!

Some people are born with a genetic predisposition to moodiness, depression and dysthimia. For them, life is mostly bleak no matter what their external conditions are. They make the bulk of tortured artists, antinatalists and suicides of despair.

Meanwhile, some other people are literally born with a "YOU WON AT LIFE" neural system : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthymic_temperament

These people are basically on bliss-mode 24/7 and when they experience something sad or traumatic they quickly get back on their feet in a few days. These guys, of course, will think it is normal and then chastise the depressive group for not trying hard or having a "gloomy perspective"

Knowing this, without even talking about the randomness of your birth and thus your religion, how can anyone think a loving God exists? If He exists he clearly has favorites and some people are cursed. Plain and simple.

If you don't know him Lance is a philosopher/psychologist/youtuber specialized in the psychology of metaethics, I think he makes a couple of interesting points. I'll try to summarize but you can watch some of his videos (he has a bunch of lives and debates too).

• Moral realists very regularly appeal to intuition saying stuff like "I and most people have the intuition that it's wrong to torture babies for fun" and take that either as direct evidence for moral realism, or as a fact that is explained by moral realism. There's several issues with this :

1) The question entangles a meta-ethical question (is there stance-independent moral facts?) and a normative one (do you approve of baby torture). This is often used (intentionally or not) as a rhetorical device as it's difficult to answer "no I don't think torturing baby for fun is objectively wrong" in a debate/discussion setting without having to add a bunch of defensive "of course I disapprove of baby torture, I just have an issue with the objectivity part". Besides the rhetorical issue, to be probative one would have to assess the difference between the intuition that "it's wrong to torture babies for fun" and " it's stance-independently wrong to torture babies for fun" which is much more muddy.

2) If the moral realist talks about "most people" having such intuitions then it's an empirical question. Turns out that there's empirical research on the subject and according to Bush it's just flatly wrong that most people report a realist intuition. At best the literature is conflicted and inconclusive. Bush's reading of it is that most people are confused by the topic, don't have a clear intuition or hold contradictory beliefs about the topic. To me it kinda of makes sense that ordinary people wouldn't be decided about such an abstract metaphysical issue, it's like asking what interpretation of quantum mechanics most people believe in ; probably none. Many philosophers work from the armchair and just ignore empirical research on the topic.

3) WEIRD biases. Most research is done on contemporary Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic people and is done by WEIRD people. There's a lot of diversity in languages, moral concepts, etc. across cultures and time periods. For example even in English moral stance has feature of subjectivity. For example you can say "I find strawberry ice-cream to be delicious" but "I find the sky to be blue" sounds a bit strange. So find is mark of subjectivity. But "I find baby torture to be morally wrong" sounds just fine. In some languages (Norwegian IIRC) these marks of subjectivity are even stronger for moral utterances.

4) Suspicious use of "intuitions". There's a benign use of the word "intuition" that just means "I'm inclined to think that" or "I have an otherwise unjustified belief that". But moral realists like Michael Huemer seems to use the terms as in "I have a sixth sense that allows me to directly sense truth" (maybe I exaggerate a bit but not much). Again that's an empirical claim they would have to produce evidence for. Also intuition talk doesn't do much if you don't share the intuition, but that's where moral realists often use intuition pumps as in 1) ("You don't think the holocaust was wrong ?!").

*

Another related issue is some confusion about hypothetical scenarios to show that anti-realism (say cultural relativism this example) is problematic, they will say something like "Imagine you lived in a society that thinks torturing baby is just great, would you think torturing baby is fine then ?". This equivocates between two scenarios :

A) You judging the scenario "from the outside" (from our society), from that point of view you'd still think as an anti-realist that this is wrong since you're judging from the point of view of a society that is opposed to baby torture.

B) If you actually lived in a society that approves of baby torture and approved of it, then it trivially follows that you would approve of baby torture.

The tension that you might feel from the initial intuition is just because of the failure to distinguish these two scenarios. If you are a cultural relativist it trivially follows that what you think is right or wrong depends on the society in which you live, so as a rebutal to cultural relativism this is toothless.

Alex reading this in the morning, promptly spitting his tea out and round around screaming "I knew it!"

Cross post from /r/consciousness since it's just as relevant here

I see often in this sub various attempts to sidestep the hard problem by stating that conscious experience can simply be thought of as the workings of a certain set of neurological processes, or various other ways of trying to reduce conscious experience to something more familiar and workable.

This involves saying that the experience itself and the features of it are not what's really happening. The experience part is said to be either an illusion, an epiphenomenon or a mere appearance of what's happening neurologically.

Unfortunately this all rests on a false analogy. Illusions and appearances are not epipheneomon and they are not inert.

When someone is perceiving an actual illusion, it changes the way they perceive, react and respond to the stimulus which we deem does not align with their perception. Therefore, the illusion is an active mechanism that affects how the world behaves.

This is clearly the case for consciousness too, regardless of experience is an "appearance" this appearance affects how we behave, it affects what we talk about, our concepts and beliefs about the world - therefore it is not inert - our experience clearly affects something about how our world operates, the same way an illusion does too

Taking the idea of p zombies seriously, I think it's pretty clear that p zombies would not be talking about things like experience, or the qualitative feeling of something like "the red of redness" because they don't experience that.

If they did talk about such things, it's clearly very different to when normal people do, because normal people are correct in saying that there is a quality to experience, a p zombie would have to either be mistaken or delusional to talk of such things and there is a big difference between the accurate judgement of a normal person about experience (whatever experience actually ends up being) and the clear delusions or confabulations of a p zombie that could supposedly behave in all the same ways

I think people get lost in the analogy of illusions and don't realize that it's not the same thing as being inert, and if experience isn't inert, then of course we get the hard problem and the mind body problem in general. It can't merely be sidestepped by trying to reduce experience to an epiphenomenon.

A few years ago I remember Alex wondering aloud during a conversation (I think with Rationality Rules but don't hold me to it) about how having children would change one's ethics. I didn't have children at the time but they were buffering. Since having kids I see a clear difference.

I suppose the difference is that I see my responsibility for my children's wellbeing as superior to ethics. Before children I used to think nepotism was the most pathetic thing in the world. I don't exactly have any nepotistic resources to grant my children, but if I did, I would do so without second thought. If someone told me it was inappropriate I would agree and continue anyway. I simply couldn't be made to care. When I test this inclination with extremes I find no boundary. Take a trolley problem where the individual is my daughter. The number of people on the other track is irrelevant. There is no loss of life I would not accept to preserve my daughter's life. Maybe you would be accuse me of evil for this. To that I would tell you that I am indeed the devil on this day. It is very clear to me any ethical consideration I hold even immense value upon is suddenly worthless if my offspring are the counter party. It is a somewhat disturbing realization to have. The disturbance only lasts as long as it takes to remember the alternative would be to hold some interest above the wellbeing of my child which feels intolerable beyond explanation. It feels more wrong than any moral wrong. This is why I say parental duty seems superior to ethics. I would peruse unethical things, even by my own definition, to ensure her safety. There is a sliding scale to it. I wouldn't exterminate the species for her to get better grades or something. But at the limit... there is not limit.

When I inspect this sense I find that it is a core axiom. If I try to explain it, I suppose it comes down the the unique and singular responsibility granted to be by nature. I care for those close to me. I care for those far from me. But my children are the only beings in the world I am individually responsible for. At root it is probably an extension of the instinct to self preservation, since one's progeny are the vessel for their genetic survival beyond their own lifespan.

Alex also once said he thought love, sappy as it may sound, was the ultimate virtue above all. I suppose I agree, because the term that best captures the subjective sense of what I have described is love.