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2nd January 2018, 03:30 PM | #241 |
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2nd January 2018, 03:32 PM | #242 |
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Totally, dude!
Woah! |
2nd January 2018, 04:05 PM | #243 |
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bovine feces. I'd rather use the colloquial expression but somehow this is considered offensive. My closest friend teaches physics at UW. Your understanding of quantum mechanics is nonsense and I don't care how many times you suggest that you are backed up etc by some line is an esoteric textbook. Also, I have never been arguing materialism from the original concept of that word.
I have no idea what this means. What makes reality fundamental? I don't believe almost anyone shares your view on this. I seriously doubt he wants your pity. Have you ever thought that perhaps arrogance isn't a particularly likable trait in a human being? |
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2nd January 2018, 04:25 PM | #244 |
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2nd January 2018, 06:16 PM | #245 |
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2nd January 2018, 07:06 PM | #246 |
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No, he pities you because you don't understand that the solidity of rock is illusory if a neutrino can pass right through it.
Or if a sledgehammer can crack it. Or if heat can conduct right through it. Or if a diamond drill can bore a hole right into it. Or if atmospheric gases can permeate right through it (though this might take thousands of years). Or if sonic vibrations pass right through it. Or if high-energy gamma rays pass right through it. Or if gravitational fields pass right through it. Because apparently "solid" actually means "invulnerable and totally opaque to all physical effects." Who knew? |
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2nd January 2018, 07:17 PM | #247 |
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2nd January 2018, 08:06 PM | #248 |
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There is a lot to understand about quantum mechanics and since Baron's posts, I've read a few articles that seem to argue his position. But ONLY at a micro level and even that is questionable with noted physicists Steven Hawking and Lawrence Krause strongly dismissing this argument.
I am trying to understand the argument but it seems like bull to me. It also reeks of an attempt to introduce some kind of silly mysticism and for that reason I can't help but roll my eyes. But maybe the 5th or 6th time I read this it might make sense to me. But I doubt it. |
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3rd January 2018, 12:56 AM | #249 |
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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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3rd January 2018, 05:22 AM | #250 | ||
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That's odd, because you've just spent three pages stating that everything I posted is "bull ****" and that I know "nothing" about quantum physics (apparently having a friend who works at a university qualifies you to make that judgement). "Hey, I'm a bit bored of talking about something I know literally nothing about, I guess I'll read an article... oh hang on, what's this?" Pathetic.
That would be Krauss, then. Yes, some scientists tend towards materialism. Many more do not. Of course, when I post quotes from the pioneers of quantum mechanics that undermine your faith - sorry, position - on materialism you ignore them. Perhaps one day you'll read a book and deem the acquisition of knowledge more important than arguing for the sake of it from a position of ignorance. You and several others on this thread. I doubt it too.
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3rd January 2018, 05:32 AM | #251 |
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Still want to know what it is that science can't explain about consciousness, and the actual definition for consciousness that's associated with the claim.
Strongly suspect folk don't even know what they really mean when they say "Science can't explain consciousness", akin to those that say "You can't say god doesn't exist" but then when asked can't give a definition for "god". |
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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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3rd January 2018, 05:33 AM | #252 |
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Yeah, reminds me of how you handled the wiki article on matter, eh?
Quote:
What's that? Matter and materialism have nothing to do with one another? Again, you should take that up with baron. |
3rd January 2018, 07:16 AM | #253 |
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The idea that physical reality is mind independent cannot be demonstrated because all experiences are mind dependent. This though does
not mean physical reality is not mind independent and indeed everyone apart from solipsists and idealists takes it to be so. The reason for this is because different minds can reach intersubjective consensus about the reality they experience. If it was mind dependent each mind would have a different interpretation of reality yet they do not. If ten minds observe an object they can reach consensus on the properties of that object even if they are viewing it independently of the other minds. Now that does not prove that external reality is definitely mind independent but does indicate that it is more likely than not on the balance of probabilities to be so. But either way the mind is an internal reality generator par excellence given that all experience and knowledge comes from within it and nowhere else. As one cannot experience or think outside of their own mind. For that is simply physically impossible |
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3rd January 2018, 07:29 AM | #254 |
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3rd January 2018, 07:43 AM | #255 |
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Solipsism is a warm out battle cry-how does solipsism even follow from that post?
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3rd January 2018, 07:48 AM | #256 |
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Solipsism is the idea that physical reality is dependent on the mind. The poster speaks of physical reality being impossible to demonstrate to be independant from the mind.
This isn't rocket science. |
3rd January 2018, 07:49 AM | #257 |
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3rd January 2018, 07:52 AM | #258 |
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3rd January 2018, 07:56 AM | #259 |
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3rd January 2018, 07:56 AM | #260 |
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There is no useful conversation/discussion to be had. There is no evidence for one side (soul/equivalent) and plenty for the other (no soul just brain doing what it evolved to do and still evolving.
An animating spirit (soul) is just an explanation of primitives wanting to explain things prior to any science and thinking past their pay grade. Just like current religion. |
3rd January 2018, 09:14 AM | #261 |
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3rd January 2018, 09:19 AM | #262 |
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I was not advocating solipsism. I am not a solipsist or an idealist. I do not think that physical reality is mind dependent. I was
simply saying that it cannot be demonstrated to be mind independent. If all knowledge and experience comes from within the mind then mind independence cannot be demonstrated. But not being able to demonstrate it does not mean it cannot be true |
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3rd January 2018, 09:21 AM | #263 |
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3rd January 2018, 09:29 AM | #264 |
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3rd January 2018, 09:46 AM | #265 |
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That's entirely irrelevant. I'm sure you think you're making a clever point, but this is one that was made centuries ago and that we realised was actually pretty weak.
Sure, you can harp on the idea that we'll never be 100% sure, but 100% certainty is not only not required, it's impossible. So why bring it up? And if we discount the necessity for 100% certainty, then we can sure point out the overwhelming preponderance of evidence that objective reality exists and persists despite the absense of minds. For all practical purposes, we know it exists. Don't try to get me into an existential philosophy argument. I despise philosophy of this sort specifically because it's nothing more than mental masturbation: it has no purpose or use in the real world (whatever you think that is). |
3rd January 2018, 10:15 AM | #266 |
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3rd January 2018, 10:32 AM | #267 |
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Back to the main topic of explaining consciousness.
This is an excellent and thought-provoking post. I personally think we can go a little farther in specifying what it is the brain does that constitutes consciousness. It might be helpful to consider a system of external signals, neurochemical reaction to those signals, and an adaptive motor (muscle) response, that doesn't involve what most of us would typically regard as consciousness. Consider a filter-feeding jellyfish whose prey lives predominantly in water of a certain temperature range. The jellyfish thus thrives best when it's in water of that temperature range. In the ocean, deeper water is almost always colder, and shallower water is almost always warmer. So when the jellyfish senses a temperature lower than the optimum range, it swims upward, and when higher, it swims downward. It's sensing and responding to its environment, but its responses have don't require "understanding" anything about its environment. It has to sense temperature and it has to have at least two different motor responses, one of which reliably moves it upward and one downward. But it does not have to "know" what temperature, water, up, down, food, swimming, or "itself" are as concepts. Contrast that with higher animals that, in order to hunt, evade threats, care for their young and so forth have to be able to recognize not just environmental signals but the presence and positions of objects, both as types ("a tree") and specific individuals ("the tree where my nest is"), rather than just specific patterns of sensory input. Of course, patterns of sensory input are how objects are recognized, but the more processing of the raw sensory input is involved, the more abstract the relationship can be and the more reliably the thing or type of thing can be recognized even if it is e.g. facing a different way, under unusual lighting conditions, viewed from an unusual angle, contorted into an unusual shape, partially or mostly concealed, and so forth. Once objects and other basic situations (e.g. darkness; or being at a height) are perceived and recognized, there are several ways a nervous system might react to them. Some reactions are instinctive (flee, freeze, attempt to mate). Other reactions can be learned associatively and once learned, function much like instinct. An animal once burned by fire that then shies away from fire does not necessarily need to remember the specific past experience of being burned by the fire as a narrative, in order to have a learned aversion to the fire. (In humans, accidental and counterproductive associative learning early in life has been a popular idea in psychology, as an explanation for some phobias and paraphilias, where the experiences that created the association aren't remembered. It's debatable how much of a role that actually plays, but it might have a role in for example food taste preferences, where one theory holds that unusual flavors that happen to have been eaten just before an illness become disliked long afterward.) There is far more benefit (and more metabolic cost as well) in more advanced neural processing, that recognizes, remembers, and learns narratives. By narratives I mean descriptions of agents acting in the world with volition and cause and effect, that are highly compressed and abstracted relative to the raw sensory input from which they're constructed. "The wolf is hunting but doesn't see the baby behind the bushes." Constructed narrative can become remembered narrative, which is a more advanced and far more versatile form of learning. Instead of the "fire, aaaah, bad!" of mere associative learning, you can have "I saw Joe get hurt when he got too close to fire, but when it's cold a fire can keep me warm." Consider, though, the formidability of the computational task of constructing an ongoing stream of narrative, in close to real time, from a stream of raw sensory input plus a potentially huge store of memories. Especially when even the types of "actors" and "props" that occur in the narrative aren't implicitly known at the outset but themselves have to be learned by observation. Computer AI is now at approximately the stage AI researches in the 1960s were expecting to be at by the 70s, where visual object recognition works reasonably well, but I don't think any computer AI is close to being able to e.g. "examine this video and briefly summarize what's happening." That takes what we think of as basic animal intelligence, which we're not close to yet even though nothing about it seems fundamentally impossible for AI. (Now, suppose you have brains that get really good at understanding the world on a summarized narrative level. Good enough for thinks like, "If Janice sees Joe with that banana she'll think it's one of hers and that Joe took it, even though it's not," such as might be advantageous in passing on ones genes a highly social species. This might lead to language, which is another way of encoding narrative. You have to already be able to perceiving the world in narrative terms in order to use it, but language in turn facilities that ability. That might help explain the question of how full-blown grammatical language can be so relatively newly evolved in our species, and yet also be so well-developed that it seems effortless, like object perception and muscle coordination that have existed many many times longer.) Where does consciousness come in? Earlier on. It's part of the result of the process of constructing narrative in real time from sensory input and memory. I mentioned a hypothetical AI that observed a video and describes what's happening. Would that AI have to be conscious to accomplish that task? I don't believe so. But, that version of a narrative-recognition system would never evolve in the wild. Because passive spectatorship is of far too limited use to be worth the metabolic cost. What makes the ability useful to a competing individual in an evolving species is the inclusion of the self, the organism doing the processing, as an actor, and often the primary actor of concern, in the narrative. The result and purpose of generating a narrative understanding isn't to sit and watch events unfold; it's to make better decisions about what to do in complicated and dynamically changing circumstances. "The wolf is hunting, but it doesn't see me behind these bushes." It's the inclusion of the self in the ongoing narrative constructed from sensory input and memory that causes, or constitutes, consciousness. The usual reaction I get to this idea is something to the effect of, "there has to be more to it than that." That reaction is understandable. It seems like something is left hanging, or some illicit bootstrap effect is being snuck in. If the constructed narrative is what experience is, who is experiencing that experience? The answer is, it's not; the process of constructing the narrative is what experience is, and your brain is both constructing and experiencing that narrative. (How could it evolve otherwise? What good would it be to construct the narrative and then ignore it instead?) Okay, maybe, but if you are a "character" in that constructed narrative, how can you also be the experiencer? Isn't that like saying Harry Potter is experiencing the story he's in? I don't think it is. The reason it's different is because your physical (and thinking) organism actually materially exists. It exists in addition to the self-character in your mental narrative. And furthermore, you normally make no distinction between the two, any more than you normally make a distinction between the wolf that's out there near you in the world and the wolf you re-construct inside your head in order to recognize and react to it. (At least, until a philosopher comes along and claims that one or the other of them doesn't really exist.) Roughly, your brain experiences the world via the process of creating a narrative from its sensory view of it, and experiences itself experiencing in the process of including its own part (including memories of thinking, deciding, and acting) as an important element of that (real) world and as a participant in that narrative. Hofstadter and others describe this as a self-referential "strange loop," because they're looking at it on the level of how it actually works, of signals going here to there and back again between different parts of the brain. I don't try to evaluate it on that level and I don't think it's necessary in order to intuit how consciousness comes about. As with so many processes in biology, it's quite a bit easer to think about it in terms of what it accomplishes instead of how it works in detail. Either way, there's no actual contradiction or paradox in it. |
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3rd January 2018, 11:21 AM | #268 |
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Originally Posted by baron
But is not all reality merely on a spectrum with no absolute division? The notion of fundamental you are using is arbitrary and subjective |
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3rd January 2018, 11:37 AM | #269 |
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Yes.
If reality is dependant on mind, then how did reality get on before mind even existed, say, 4 billion years ago on this planet? I have an object on my desk. Here is a photo I have just taken of it I have not mentioned what it is so that people can't claim I have planted a suggestion of what it is. If reality is dependent on mind, then everyone looking at this photo will see something different. I am 100% certain that everyone looking at this photo will see |
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3rd January 2018, 11:55 AM | #270 |
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Is it an invisible photo, 'cause I don't see nuffin! Very twisty Mr Cooky.
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3rd January 2018, 12:00 PM | #271 |
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Originally Posted by smartcooky;12133277
I am 100% certain that everyone looking at this photo will see[SPOILER |
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3rd January 2018, 01:15 PM | #272 |
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Solipsism, it is!
First off, this is not a problem of metaphysics, ontology or existence. It is an epistemological problem and it goes to show that there is no evidence or if you like knowledge about the mind-independent reality. Part 1: Are you a Boltzmann brain? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain The problem of knowing the probability of being a Boltzmann brain is that it assumes that reality is "fair" and that you are not a Boltzmann brain. In other words you are begging the question or doing circular reasoning if you assume that you can trust your experience of reading this on a mind-independent screen and thus come up with a knowable probability of being a Boltzmann brain or not. Part 2: Do you accept cause and effect? If you believe that reality was there before you, you can't rule out that reality "created" you as a Boltzmann brain. The problem you face is that if you accept that reality is outside your mind and that reality causes your mind and experiences, you can't know if reality is "fair" or if you are a Boltzmann brain. Part 3: Science is a belief system, but not a religious one. What you believe if you believe in some form of realism/naturalism/and so on, is that you can fundamentally trust your experience and what you claim about evidence about reality rests on this belief. Part 4: Certainty and magical thinking. If you are a Boltzmann brain and certain that you are not, then you are in a reality, where you as a Boltzmann brain are 100% certainty that you are not a Boltzmann brain. In other words to think that your 100% certainty is what causes you not to be a Boltzmann brain, is to believe that your thinking that you are not a Boltzmann, is what causes you not to be a Boltzmann brain. Part 5: Metaphysics and "das Ding an sich". You don't do philosophy by starting with metaphysics and ontology. You start with epistemology and figure out how the word "knowledge" works. It is a belief, that you are certain of, but that doesn't make it certain that you are reading this on a screen. It only makes it certain, that you are certain in your belief. What the rest of reality is other than being independent of your mind is unknown, hence "das Ding an sich". Part 6: Evidence and being a skeptic. If you are a skeptic, you know that you can't avoid Agrippa's trilemma and thus have evidence without beliefs. What you do, is that you state your beliefs and notice that other humans in some cases believe differently. But you know, that your belief if you hold this one, namely that reality is "fair, is not dependent on you believing it. Rather if you believe in a mind independent part of reality and that you are caused be the rest of reality, then you can't know whether you are a Boltzmann brain or not. Part 7. The word "I" and "I think, therefore I am". The problem is that word "I" is empty, because all it says is that "something is thinking, therefore something is going on", but it doesn't say anything else about reality, hence it is empty for the rest of reality. It is similar to a tautology like "A is A". "A is A" is so, but empty otherwise because it says nothing about the rest of reality. Certainty works in a similar manner, if you are certain, all that it means, is that you are certain and it says nothing about that which you are certain of. Off course you can go the foundational route in epistemology and try to salvage Descartes's project of getting from "I think, therefore I am" to the rest of reality, but then you run into Agrippa's trilemma. Part 8: I can't help you! If this frightens you or otherwise give you bad feelings, that is your problem to solve, not something I can do for you. If you need the crotch of believing the you know/have evidence for that fact that reality is "fair", then that is something you do/need, but not something which is known. The words "knowledge" and "evidence " are mind dependent. |
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3rd January 2018, 01:49 PM | #273 |
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3rd January 2018, 02:09 PM | #274 |
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3rd January 2018, 02:17 PM | #275 |
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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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3rd January 2018, 02:23 PM | #276 |
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I don't believe in God and all the rest outside of methodological naturalism But I am a cognitive and ethical relativist/subjectivist and skeptic. #JeSuisAhmed |
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3rd January 2018, 02:24 PM | #277 |
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3rd January 2018, 02:34 PM | #278 |
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Solipsism is humans believing they’re a more important piece of reality than they really are.
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3rd January 2018, 02:47 PM | #279 |
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It actually makes no difference whether reality is as we experience it or we are brains in vats or in a matrix or something
else because we have no choice in the matter but to exist within it and treat it as if it were real. Even if it could be shown to be something else we could do absolutely nothing about it and so in this respect what it actually is is entirely academic |
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3rd January 2018, 02:54 PM | #280 |
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I don't believe in God and all the rest outside of methodological naturalism But I am a cognitive and ethical relativist/subjectivist and skeptic. #JeSuisAhmed |
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