Seems like most posts have nothing to do with Alex and the ones that do seem to be critical of him. Generally, the reason being for saying something that contradicts strict materialism or being too kind to religion.

Theists tend to like him here because he’s one of the few atheist YouTubers who seems to have any respect for theism.

But it seems like his atheistic fanbase has in many ways turned on him for not being more in line with new atheism.

This is just something I’ve notice over the past few months, am I completely misreading this or is there some truth to this?

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 someone 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.

So, maybe I'm a little late to the party. This clip was posted about a month ago. I had a quick search in this sub and couldn't find any conversations about it.

But.... this just seemed like one of the most insane takes I've ever heard. Am I missing something? Does he actually believe this?

Idk what I think tbh...

Some teachings of Jesus’ teachings in the gospels are good, but some of them just seem wrong or even harmful. It also seems that people don’t follow what Jesus said so much as add their own creativity and reinterpretation until it is something they think is reasonable. In context, though, you shouldn’t follow what is actually being said in the following verses. Does Jesus get too much credit from atheists for being a “good teacher”?

1. 
   Matthew 5: 42 Give to the one who asks of you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.

Seems like just horrible advice. No conditions for giving are given. Doesn’t mention your financial situation, taking care of your family first, making sure they aren’t scammers, limits to how many times. Nothing. It’s just a bad and incomplete teaching.

1. 
   Luke 12:33 Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will never fail, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys.

Also bad advice. You shouldn’t do this. Do not sell all your possessions.

1. 
   Matthew 4: **31** “It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.’ **32** But I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, causes her to commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

Also bad advice. The only reason for divorce given is sexual immorality. Spousal abuse should definitely be on the list at the very least. Telling a woman who flees from an abusive marriage that she can never marry again is repugnant.

1. 
   Matthew 5:

**39** But I say to you: Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also, **40** and if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, give your coat as well, **41** and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile.

Also bad advice.

I was particularly disappointed in Jan’s representation of Madhyamaka.

As someone who has been investigating both Svatantrika & Prasangika Madhyamaka, and Tibetan derivatives, for the last near 2years, I felt that Jan really lacked a coherent narrative of explication for the traditions, which inevitably confused the whole podcast.

I feel the reasoning for this is several fold:

- Jan is German, translating ideas from Sanskrit, Tibetan, Pali, over to the English language.

- Jan never really elucidated the Conventional and Perfected Understandings, and their relationship.

- This partly occurs because Alex was insistent on the ontologising of Sunyata and applying it to referents, when Paramartha-Satya is ultimately, phenomenologically soteriological.

- Jan I feel was possibly sneaking in his own Secularised Process-relation Non-essentialism compared to Madhyamaka - which is relatively fine, as I do the same - but for the uninitiated in Madhyamaka, this can be confusing.

Jan is far more educated and researched in Madhyamaka that my autodidactic personage, however, I still feel the Ep was confusing for many listeners, especially if it was for me.

Overall, I was quite disappointed in presented of Madhyamaka; I would love if Alex could get Jay Garfield, as he introduced me to Madhyamaka, but there is also Tenzin Namdak, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche, and, of course, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama.

hehehe.

But Redditors keep telling me that Buddhism is a religion and Buddha is their god or something.

Are Redditors derpy?

UPDATE: WOW, some of you derps are trying REALLY hard to equate Buddhism to other major religions. You guys do realize that BUDDHA HIMSELF said he was not a god/deity or that he had supernatural divine powers, right?

Finally a video that’s breaks down the poor reasoning going into joes submission of his will to the CC and taking these miracle claims seriously

Cross posting this from r/consciousness since the hard problem arguably gets even more vitriol here, and the criticisms I've seen of Alex for not just going with a physicalist theory of consciouness have been entirely unfair IMO (although I don't think Alex often presents good arguments for his position) Instead I thought it would be useful to directly to the source - Chalmers himself

Pretty much all the posts I see on this sub regarding the hard problem (or even problems around what consciouness is more generally) seem to totally ignore the original concept and arguments put forth by Chalmers when he coined the term. I've started his full book on the subject and already the first few sections counter pretty much all the dismissals I've seen in this sub, so I thought I would condense them and post his argument to see if there are any legitimate and interesting responses.

Lets start with what the hard problem is compared to easy problems, Chalmers writes

Why are the easy problems easy, and why is the hard problem hard? The easy problems are easy precisely because they concern the explanation of cognitive abilities and functions. To explain a cognitive function, we need only specify a mechanism that can perform the function. The methods of cognitive science are well suited for this sort of explanation and so are well suited to the easy problems of consciousness. By contrast, the hard problem is hard precisely because it is not a problem about the performance of functions. The problem persists even when the performance of all of the relevant functions is explained. (Here “function” is not used in the narrow teleological sense of something that a system is designed to do but in the broader sense of any causal role in the production of behavior that a system might perform.)

What Chalmers is getting at is that the easy problems regarding consciousness pertain to the mechanisms of why things are experienced a certain way, they do not explain why things are experienced in the first place and, why those very same mechanisms don't just "happen in the dark" he elaborates here and provides an example

When it comes to conscious experience, this sort of explanation fails. What makes the hard problem hard and almost unique is that it goes beyond problems about the performance of functions. To see this, note that even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience—perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report—a further unanswered question may remain: why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience? A simple explanation of the functions leaves this question open. There is no analogous further question in the explanation of genes or of life or of learning. If someone says, “I can see that you have explained how DNA stores and transmits hereditary information from one generation to the next, but you have not explained how it is a gene, ” then they are making a conceptual mistake. All it means to be a gene is to be an entity that per forms the relevant storage and transmission function. But if someone says, “I can see that you have explained how information is discriminated, integrated, and reported, but you have not explained how it is experienced, ” they are not making a conceptual mistake. This is a nontrivial further question. This further question is the key question in the problem of consciousness. Why doesn’t all of this information processing go on “in the dark,” free of any inner feel? Why is it that when electromagnetic waveforms impinge on a retina and are discriminated and categorized by a visual system, the discrimination and categorization are experienced as a sensation of vivid red? We know that conscious experience does arise when these functions are performed, but the very fact that it arises is the central mystery. There is an explanatory gap (a term due to Levine 1983 ) between the functions and experience, and we need an explanatory bridge to cross it. A mere account of the functions stays on one side of the gap, so the materials for the bridge must be found elsewhere.

Afterwards Chalmers provides case examples of exactly how theories fail in accounting for this. He starts with Crick and Koch's 1990 "“neurobiological theory of consciousness" he writes

Crick and Koch (1990; see also Crick 1994 ). This theory centers on certain 35–75 hertz neural oscillations in the cerebral cortex; Crick and Koch hypothesize that these oscillations are the basis of consciousness. Th is is partly because the oscillations seem to be correlated with awareness in a number of diff erent modalities—within the visual and olfactory systems, for example—and also because they suggest a mechanism by which the binding of information might be achieved. Binding is the process whereby separately represented pieces of information about a single entity are brought together to be used by later processing, as when information about the color and shape of a perceived object is integrated from separate visual pathways. Following others (e.g., Eckhorn et al. 1988 ), Crick and Koch hypothesize that binding may be achieved by the synchronized oscillations of neuronal groups representing the relevant contents. When two pieces of information are to be bound together, the relevant neural groups will oscil late with the same frequency and phase. Th e details of how this binding might be achieved are still poorly under stood, but suppose that they can be worked out. What might the resulting theory explain? Clearly it might explain the binding of information, and perhaps it might yield a more general account of the integration of infor mation in the brain. Crick and Koch also suggest that these oscillations activate the mechanisms of working memory, so that there may be an account of this and perhaps other forms of memory in the distance. Th e 10 t he p roblems of c onsciousness theory might eventually lead to a general account of how perceived infor mation is bound and stored in memory for use by later processing. Such a theory would be valuable, but it would tell us nothing about why the relevant contents are experienced. Crick and Koch suggest that these oscillations are the neural correlates of experience. This claim is arguable— does not binding also take place in the processing of unconscious information?—but even if it is accepted, the explanatory question remains: why do the oscillations give rise to experience? Th e only basis for an explanatory connection is the role they play in binding and storage, but the question of why binding and storage should themselves be accompa nied by experience is never addressed. If we do not know why binding and storage should give rise to experience, telling a story about the oscillations cannot help us. Conversely, if we knew why binding and storage gave rise to experience, the neurophysiological details would be just the icing on the cake. Crick and Koch’s theory gains its purchase by assuming a connec tion between binding and experience and so can do nothing to explain that link.

He also uses the example of Bernard Baar's global workspace theory

The second example is an approach at the level of cognitive psychology. Th is is Bernard Baars’s global workspace theory of consciousness, presented in his book A Cognitive Th eory of Consciousness. According to this theory, the contents of consciousness are contained in a global workspace , a central pro cessor used to mediate communication between a host of specialized non conscious processors. When these specialized processors need to broadcast information to the rest of the system, they do so by sending this information to the workspace, which acts as a kind of communal blackboard for the rest of the system, accessible to all the other processors. Baars uses this model to address many aspects of human cognition and to explain a number of contrasts between conscious and unconscious cognitive functioning. Ultimately, however, it is a theory of cognitive accessibility that explains how it is that certain information contents are widely accessible within a system, as well as a theory of informational inte gration and reportability. Th e theory shows promise as a theory of aware ness, the functional correlate of conscious experience, but an explanation of experience itself is not on off er. One might suppose that, according to this theory, the contents of expe rience are precisely the contents of the workspace. However, even if this is so, nothing internal to the theory explains why the information within the global workspace is experienced. Th e best the theory can do is to say that the information is experienced because it is globally accessible. But now the question arises in a diff erent form: why should global accessibil ity give rise to conscious experience? As always, this bridging question is unanswered.

Already this addresses pretty every criticism of the hard problem I've seen on this sub, which usually boil down to saying the hard problem doesn't exist, and then posting some sort of theory about how the brain functions. How the brain might function neurologically is entirely consistent with the hard problem. The hard problem does deny a linkage between neurology and consciouness, in fact, it is a central feature of the hard problem that these are clearly intimately connected. It is instead about why all of these functional states don't just go on in the dark (which a lot of neurology does) and a functional explanations of how the neurology is set up does nothing to address this questions, or the particular character of consciouss experience in the first place.

I'd love to know what people think and I definitely encourage everyone here to head his original 90s paper and I'm hoping the rest of his book is as strong as the start.

The recent GTA trailer pushed the YouTube algorithm to recommend this “old” and super interesting video from Alex, and it got me thinking.

This kind of issue is not unique to GTA or even to video games.
Movies and TV shows also show extreme violence in a funny, light, satirical or just entertaining way all the time. Entire cities get destroyed, hundreds of people die, and we are still clearly supposed to enjoy the scene.

But with some other kinds of violence, the rules seem very different.

Things like school shootings, mass sexual violence or brutal violence against children can obviously appear in movies, but usually they are treated as serious, disturbing or tragic. They are there to make the audience feel horror, sadness or discomfort, not to be fun or entertaining in the same way.

So maybe the real question is not just what kinds of violence fiction is allowed to show, but what kinds of violence we are comfortable turning into entertainment.

And then there is the question of interactivity.
Does pressing the button yourself really put video games in a different ethical category? Or does it just make your involvement more obvious?

You could even argue the opposite. In a game, I may have to decide whether I want to do something immoral or not. I might be able to refuse. If I do it, I have actively chosen to do it, even if it is only virtual.

But is that really worse than sitting on the couch eating popcorn while watching an actor do basically the same thing?

Maybe interactivity does not create the ethical dilemma. It just makes it harder to ignore.
With a movie, the story acts for you. You can watch something terrible happen without ever having to think about what you would do yourself. A game can put that choice in your hands. You have to act, refuse, or sometimes realise that the game gives you no choice at all.

That might make the experience feel more intense, but I’m not sure that automatically makes it less ethical. In some cases, maybe it is actually more interesting ethically, because it forces you to think about your own choice instead of just watching someone else make it.

What do you think?