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1st January 2018, 01:52 PM | #161 |
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1st January 2018, 01:53 PM | #162 |
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1st January 2018, 01:58 PM | #163 |
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I have no problem, and I was not debating science, I was debating acbytesla.
For the record, materialism is not a scientific term nor is it a scientific concept. It sits squarely in the realms of philosophy. Scientists who declare themselves materialists (an increasingly small number) are simply defining the framework in which they view the world, not aligning themselves with a particular scientific theory. |
1st January 2018, 02:00 PM | #164 |
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That second paragraph directly contradicts the first. Quantum mechanics is part of the fabricated mental model made of electrical impulses from which we extrapolate the external universe. If our minds are too feeble to process a complete or accurate description of the universe as your first paragraph claims, then we either cannot fully process quantum mechanics either, or quantum mechanics is not a complete and accurate description. Either way, your claim that quantum mechanics tells us what reality is fundamentally like contradicts your premises. |
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1st January 2018, 02:03 PM | #165 |
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I know the answer to this. Its the game of trying to keep the argument going.
If you keep changing the meaning of what is being debated, you can keep your options open by redefining the debate... that way, you can avoid ever being pinned down to a position. This is called the "slippery eel" technique, something that solipsists and other airy-fairy types are really good at. |
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1st January 2018, 02:05 PM | #166 |
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And this one directly contradicts yours.
I don't know what that means. You're getting confused. We cannot directly perceive quantum events. We can build machines to do so and read their output. We can also do the maths that predict aggregate quantum outputs and compare them with experimental results. We can perceive macro events. None of these points contradict any of the others. |
1st January 2018, 02:27 PM | #167 |
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1st January 2018, 02:36 PM | #168 |
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1st January 2018, 02:38 PM | #169 |
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I've never been a materialist so for me it ain't even about letting go a childhood favourite, it's just about being pragmatic. What materialism refers to of course changes over time, but that is indeed its strength. I've often thought materialism would be better named stuffism I. e. the stuff that exists regardless of what that stuff is.
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1st January 2018, 02:41 PM | #170 |
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“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago |
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1st January 2018, 02:43 PM | #171 |
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1st January 2018, 02:50 PM | #172 |
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I think what you have here (is as ever) folk using different definitions for "materialism". Some are using the classical philosophy definition, some are using the modern useage which is not really a philosophical position in the same way. That means we seem to be disagreeing with one another whereas if we each reread our exchanges with the definition the poster was using I suspect we would have less disagreement about "materialism".
I'm happy to agree that classical materialism was disproved by science a long time ago, the world truly isn't made of little solid particles. |
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“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago |
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1st January 2018, 03:04 PM | #173 |
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1st January 2018, 03:11 PM | #174 |
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'Stuff exists' is probably as far as you can take it, although even then I wouldn't hang my hat on it (literally or conceptually). For day to day parlance it is of course useful to acknowledge that stuff exists, but in the quantum realm I'm not sure it even has meaning. After all, can something with no size be considered stuff? What about something with no mass? What about something with no directly observed attributes whatsoever? Is gravity stuff? Is an electromagnetic field stuff? Is time stuff? That's the thing with the quantum world, none of the attributes of 'stuff' is applicable to the mathematics which describe it.
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1st January 2018, 03:15 PM | #175 |
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That extends the bolding to "the world as we observe it." Are we not observing the world and/or "fabricating mental models" using our limited faculties when we do these things:
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You are clearly implying (whether you mean to or not) that while all other observations and mental models of the world are unreliable and incomplete due to our limited faculties, quantum mechanics is somehow not subject to those same limitations. But you've presented no justification for such a view. |
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1st January 2018, 03:24 PM | #176 |
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Yes, of course.
I didn't say our direct observations were unreliable in terms of their limited scope, I said they are unreliable (more accurately, useless) in describing fundamental reality. Quantum mechanical processes cannot be directly observed by humans, only their aggregates, and those tell us nothing about the fundamentals. |
1st January 2018, 03:39 PM | #177 |
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He's definitely engaged in special pleading where the understanding of quantum mechanics is the exception to his perception rule. He also seems to be arguing The Matrix phenomenon of solipsism which I consider to be the most useless concept.
Somebody, please, please take the bong away from him. |
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1st January 2018, 03:50 PM | #178 |
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1st January 2018, 04:00 PM | #179 |
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That's just silly, words mean things. If your preferred ontology changes then you use a new name for it. It's what everyone else does...
Besides, having materialism be some ever moving target means that by now you have to consider asserting the existence of the universal wavefunction as materialism, that's like completely on the other side of the ontological spectrum as the standard form of materialism. No wonder you get confusions. |
1st January 2018, 04:02 PM | #180 |
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Science is only as good as those using it
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1st January 2018, 04:18 PM | #181 |
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Well then, perhaps you should be more clear.
You seem to be arguing that human's shared reality is an illusion and no more than electrical pulses. And what we experience is merely an illusion. And perhaps you are right. But you will never know from inside the matrix. You also seem to be arguing that quantum mechanics proves this. But from my perspective, that is just special pleading. Feel free to clarify. |
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1st January 2018, 04:32 PM | #182 |
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1st January 2018, 04:35 PM | #183 |
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1st January 2018, 04:38 PM | #184 |
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And I wasn't talking to you, I was answering Donn
Oh, I can invoke Ocham's Razor to support and explain my position too If I can see it, touch it, smell it, hear it or taste it, or any combinations of these, or if I can see, or perceive or be shown its effects, e.g. quantum physics, gravity, etc, then its real. The simplest answer is that what we perceive is real; these things impact on my everyday life, so really, they are the only things that matter to me. Anything else is, e.g., solipsism, matrixism, universal minds etc, are AFAIC, meaningless philosobabble. As SG Collins would put it, "it demands a deep and abiding faith in things you can never know" |
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1st January 2018, 04:46 PM | #185 |
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1st January 2018, 05:05 PM | #186 |
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What our mere senses and internal electrical impulses appear from all available evidence to be very capable of doing is to create a "chunked" understanding of the external world in terms of an ongoing narrative of objects, beings (with intentions), and events.
Regardless of what it's ultimately made of, an apple tree is in every sense just as real as quantum fields. In fact, quantum fields are far from an adequate description of the nature of an apple tree. The quantum equations for even a single molecule of the cellulose of the wood of the tree are far too complex to calculate their outcomes directly. If our understanding of the external world were limited to direct perception of quantum fields and events, we'd be unable to even perceive the tree; branches, leaves, roots, germination, mitosis, transpiration, seeding, and evolution would all be unfathomable abstractions. I'd say that "a bunch of quantum wavefunctions interacting in complex ways" is a far, far less meaningful or informative explanation for the nature of a tree than "a bunch of electrical impulses interacting in complex ways" is for the generation of consciousness in the brain. We do not experience any external material thing directly. But even so, only in a bizarre quantum version of mereological nihilism could quantum wave functions of the particles and fields that make up the tree be regarded as real, while the leaves, roots, wood, DNA, and apples are regarded as illusory. |
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1st January 2018, 05:44 PM | #187 |
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Perhaps tomorrow I will, as I haven't got the time right now.
However, I don't need much time to deal with this: I was not debating science. Thank you. Thanks for posting a link to the Wiki entry on 'matter' when the word under discussion was 'materialism'. That's what happens when you argue for the sake of it, you post rubbish like that. |
1st January 2018, 05:56 PM | #188 |
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No you can't. Suppose we let go off an object (L) and observe it to fall down (F) then some data we could have would be: LFLFLFLF. We get a law of gravity: L -> LF and can compress the data to:
"L -> LF, LLLL" So far for the science. Now any ontology you're going to assert here is going to make this compressed data larger, such as: "L -> LF, LLLL, and L is a really real thing" (ie materialism) but also "L -> LF, LLLL, and L is a simulated thing" (ie matrixism) or "L -> LF, LLLL, and L is a product of my mind" (ie solipsism) and so on
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1st January 2018, 06:13 PM | #189 |
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It doesn't "lead" to consciousness. Instead what I'm suggesting (it's only a suggestion), is that, that is what consciousness actually is. That is ... ... what we call "consciousness" is just that continuous rapidly updating set of sensations and responses that we experience/undergo as a result of the chemical, electrical and physical changes from the sensory input, to reactions in the brain, to signals going back from the brain to the muscles and other organs and back to the sensory system in a continuous cycle ... the effect of that is what we call "consciousness". If you don't understand how that could be what you think of as consciousness as you perceive it in your own daily life, then that may simply be because the effect has become so refined and so efficient in humans after billions of years of evolution, that to us as functioning apes, it now seems like “magic” … as if there must be some other reason different from the purely physical/chemical reactions that define how all living things function … … but since all known evidence is against such “magic”, I expect the explanation for the effect that we call “consciousness”, is indeed just a highly evolved and very efficient (seemingly “very efficient” on out time scale at least, and where we are unaware of the underlying chemical, electrical processes that go on all the time in our cells and nerves etc.) sequence of perfectly natural chemical and electrical changes that occur in all “living things” (they occur to different extents, and with more or less complexity going from simple organisms such as plants, to the most complex such as mammals inc. apes and humans). You could think about it another way – if you were able to travel back to the time when the first living things appeared on the Earth (e.g. you are the only human alive, but you actually know nothing about modern science or the modern world … all you can detect is what your senses see, hear, smell etc., and what your thinking human mind says to you about the single-celled “life” before you and the landscape of the planet that you perceive), then you would probably think it was impossible, even completely unimaginable, that a process of evolution would lead eventually (after billions of years) to humans that could make aircraft, computers, discover quantum field theory, develop language etc., or indeed experience an effect that we call “consciousness” … … but the explanation for how humans came to have all those characteristics & abilities today (inc. “consciousness”), is certainly that it has been the inevitable result of 3 billion years of evolving life becoming more and more highly developed, more sophisticated, refined and more capable in everything associated with our life and existence. |
1st January 2018, 06:19 PM | #190 |
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You mean as in "the wavefunction exists"? I meant that as "the universal wavefunction exists", like in asserting the Everett interpretation applied to the universe as a whole. Not sure how you get nihilism from that. And it's not about the other stuff being illusory but about it not being fundamental, just like a classical materialist wouldn't call a car illusory merely because it reduces to more fundamental atoms.
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1st January 2018, 06:42 PM | #191 |
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Of course you are. You mentioned science several times during the discussion.
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...because apparently he thinks that one has to do with the other. Materialism is about matter, something science quite assuredly concludes exists. Ergo, science espouses the materialist philosophy.
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1st January 2018, 07:13 PM | #192 |
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1st January 2018, 08:41 PM | #193 |
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1st January 2018, 09:09 PM | #194 |
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If you're not a scientist but you think you've destroyed the foundation of a vast scientific edifice with 10 minutes of Googling, you might want to consider the possibility that you're wrong. Its TRE45ON season... convict the F45CIST!! |
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2nd January 2018, 02:17 AM | #195 |
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2nd January 2018, 02:19 AM | #196 |
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“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago |
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2nd January 2018, 02:28 AM | #197 |
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“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago |
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2nd January 2018, 02:31 AM | #198 |
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Gay - once meant happy, now means homosexual.
Egregious - Once meant distinguished or eminent, now means conspicuously bad. Terrible - originally meant inspiring great fear, now means harsh or excessive. Naughty - originally meant you had nothing, then it came to mean evil, now it means badly behaved. |
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2nd January 2018, 02:51 AM | #199 |
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Why do we need to talk now about how we can become unconscious? I thought we were asking how it could be possible to experience the effect that we call "consciousness", i.e. being intellectually aware of our surroundings etc., and having the ability to think in a useful way about that, so as to make decisions on how we act etc. ... I thought we were looking for a possible explanation for how that might be occurring, not just in humans because it clearly occurs not just in other apes but in pet cat's and dogs as well ... why do we now have to change the problem to ask also for an explanation of what it means to say we are "unconscious"? But if by "unconscious" you are thinking of humans who are, say, in a vegetative state after major brain injury (as opposed to, say, plants that also react in a very obvious way to their surroundings, and they also do that through a fundamentally similar use of sensory cells (afaik)), then afaik all that has happened to make us "unconscious" is that the brain has stopped processing the input data from the sensory organs (sight, hearing, smell etc.) ... so why is that difficult to understand? Incidentally, a better/clearer example than my previous off-the-cuff scenario of a human observer watching the first life-forms appear 3 billion years ago, might be just to think about the human eye and think about how we could possibly experience the sensation of what we call “vision”, such that we form a very clear and rapidly updating really accurate picture of the world around us (so clear that we can react very quickly to changes such as objects that we might collide with etc.) … how could that possibly happen? … the eye might react to light in complicated ways with different specialised cells, but that alone would not explain how we then instantly experience a very accurate “vision” of what is actually all around us … so how could that occur without some magical mystical explanation of “conscious awareness”? … I think the answer is just the same one that I already described before about that constant exchange of impulses and reactions between the input from the eyes to the brain, and back to the eyes and other organs etc., in a continuous rapidly updating cycle .. … I'm not trying to give a total full explanation of exactly how all of that occurs and exactly why that inevitably leads to an effect that we call “consciousness”, that would probably require decades or even centuries of research on every aspect of the way our sensory system interacts with the brain. But I think it should be fairly easy to understand how it may all be occurring in that way, simply as a result of the sensory system interacting with the brain and with all the other associated organs of the body (without the need for anything mystical, and certainly without the need for, or any evidence for any supernatural ideas such as a “soul” placed into us by an intelligent God). Anyway, that's my suggestion. And I do not think it is a big mystery, and certainly not what philosophers like to present as what they call "the hard problem of consciousness", as if to imply that science cannot explain it ... well, one thing is for sure - neither philosophy or religion is likely to adequately explain either consciousness or anything else ... but science is very likely to explain it, and in fact science clearly has already produced a very considerable understanding of such things as "consciousness". |
2nd January 2018, 02:57 AM | #200 |
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