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17th May 2018, 08:16 PM | #161 |
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When I see people make statements like this I wonder what exactly they think needs explaining, and what they would accept as a satisfactory explanation.
If it comes down to your strong hunch that mind and body are separate things, or that only mind really exists, well, OK. That's your hunch. I have a hunch that self-awareness is an artifact of a CPU. As to whether my computer is conscious - I don't know; I don't know what it feels like to be my computer. I don't know how I would go about proving that it is not self-aware. |
17th May 2018, 09:39 PM | #162 |
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re: the bolded How does consciousness arise from matter? Why does moving electrons across synapses (I'm obviously being very simplistic about how neurons function) produce conscious experience? We still don't have a clue. We can correlate brain states with mental states, but the causal explanation is as elusive as it's ever been.
I don't know if you remember the old JREF threads on this, but there would always be a derail into simulated consciousness, which was/is fascinating. Basically, assume you can simulate a working brain. Would the simulation be conscious? If a simulated working brain is conscious, here's the issue: the computer running the simulation is simply a collection of switches. To simulate a working brain the computer flips switches to "on" and "off" gazillions of times. For simplicty's sake, suppose the switch-pattern 10010101100110 simulates a working conscious brain. Well, what's so special about that pattern of switch-flipping? Why doesn't 11001010010 also produce a simulated conscious brain? Why doesn't every pattern? Why does any pattern? This problem also shows up if you build a functionally equivalent working brain out of, say, water, pumps, and valves (the substrate doesn't matter). Why would the collection of water, pumps, and valves be conscious when the water's moving a certain way, but not conscious when the water's moving in other ways? If a simulated working brain isn't conscious, then you didn't simulate a working brain, because, by the definition we're using, working brains are conscious. If simulated working brains aren't conscious, it would then follow that it's somehow impossible to simulate a working brain, which would be very strange, if materialism is true. This is just one of the many rabbit-holes materialists find themselves in on this topic. |
17th May 2018, 10:30 PM | #163 |
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Which doesn't matter, since we can still demonstrate that consciousness does arise from these configurations of matter, even if we don't know how or why.
There are only two options, as we know that consciousness has to do with the brain: brains are either the origin of or receivers for consciousness. Only one of these possibilities fits the evidence. No amount of "but you don't know why-" or "but that leads to computers-" can change this. |
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17th May 2018, 10:39 PM | #164 |
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That is not true. There is much evidence, relatively solid evidence in fact, that thoughts come from the brain. For instance you can cut parts of the brain out to tinker with different areas of thought. (Thankfully experiments like that aren't done like they used to be...) Compared to the zero evidence of thought existing without a brain it is relatively rock solid. So, no, it does not "cut both ways". Not even in the same ballpark. |
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17th May 2018, 11:23 PM | #165 |
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No, actually you have been repeatedly and constantly claiming that reality does not exist. You have done it many threads here for years now. And often using what are word-for-word the exact same sentences … here's is your latest one from just a few posts back - That sentence begins by very specifically stating that “you cannot touch anything outside your mind” … well that IS a direct claim where you are saying that when you think you are touching things, you are not actually touching that thing!, you say “you cannot touch it”! … and the reason why you say it cannot be touched is because you say it only exists “within your experience” … your actual words are claiming that the object only exists within your mind (your so-called “experience” of anything, is of course what you “experience” as the thoughts and awareness in your "mind”). If you wanted to say merely that we cannot prove that external objects are real, then that is all you have should have said. But instead you constantly try to cloud and confuse the statements by claiming that you actually cannot touch any object outside of your mind/"experience". And you have done that repeatedly with those exact same sentences, time-&-time again in numerous threads here for years. But as soon as you write something like that, that merely says we cannot actually "prove" that reality exists, then it instantly how shows how trivial and worthless your comments actually are, because we cannot literally "prove" anything in this world! We cannot prove that QM, GR, or Evolution are true as a matter of literal 100% certainty ... in fact afaik, we cannot even prove as absolute literal certainty that 1 + 1 = 2, at least not without making certain basic assumptions ...ie, for any explanation in this universe, we have to take at least some very basic elements on trust. But we feel justified in doing that, because nobody can show any good credible reason why the object should not exist. |
17th May 2018, 11:30 PM | #166 |
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17th May 2018, 11:49 PM | #167 |
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There is a great deal of scientifc research that shows that alterations of the brain cause changes in consciousness and mind. First the brain alteration, then the mental change. Don't you think so?
There is not a single experience that shows that consciousness can happen without the brain. These two elementary observations imply that the brain is causally connected with the mind. At this point in our knowledge of the brain I don't know how you can deny this. Perhaps I have not understand your point of view correctly. |
18th May 2018, 12:32 AM | #168 |
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As everyone else has pointed out - there is actually a vast mass of scientific evidence showing that "conscious experience comes from our brain". Read that book that I linked to earlier (and check there the extensive references to actual published research). But apart from that - there is of course no evidence to the contrary. There is zero evidence that any consciousness exists either without a living functioning brain, and also no evidence of any so-called "consciousness" existing outside of the persons brain or body. That was something that was discussed to death in those earlier threads on Out of Body Experience (OBE) and Near Death Experiences (NDE), where people were claiming that such experiences are in fact evidence of consciousness persisting after death and persisting outside the body as some sort of disembodied universal intelligence. But it was shown in those threads that all those claims were, and are, completely bogus and untrue ... ... in fact the origin of those claims has turned out to be almost entirely a religious one, i.e. coming from people who were/are claiming that such reports of OBE and NDE are proof that conscious "souls" exist … their motivation was actually to claim that such disembodied consciousness is what people in earlier times knew as a “soul”, and hence that is claimed to be evidence of God and heaven. Again have a look at Dehaene's book, because although it's not specifically concerned with claims about NDE or OBE, iirc it does touch upon that. And the result is that people who have reported such experiences have often been tested to check if they really could see things that would only be visible if their "conscious awareness" was indeed floating 12ft in the air and looking down upon the reported scene ... and the result of that is that none of those people could ever identify any of the objects that would have been easily seen from that elevated floating position ... IOW, they most definitely were not ever floating in the air as any sort of "consciousness outside the body/brain". |
18th May 2018, 01:01 AM | #169 |
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I've asked it once a couple of pages ago, but I didn't get an answer, so I'll try again.
Fudbucker and LarryS claim that materialism should be rejected because (they feel) it doesn't have a rigorous explanation for consciousness, and that idealism is a better theory. But how does idealism explain that everything outside of our own minds seems to act consistently and objectively and independently from any subjective human experience? What causes this division between 'subjective mind' and 'objective or intersubjective mind'? Like Myriad said, why does only one 'experience of water' have all the properties associated with water, that our internal representations of water lack? Seems to me that you've rejected materialism because you don't want to believe that consciousness does not transcend the everyday world, but the axiom you've put in its place raises even more unanswerable questions. By your own metric, you should reject idealism too. |
18th May 2018, 01:10 AM | #170 |
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How does nonliving matter produce living matter? That's at least as big of a mystery to me.
Is it though? One factor is changed; thoughts change. After enough of this kind of research I think "causal" can certainly be established. How would we know? How would we know the simulation isn't conscious? Maybe I'm taking this on faith, but I believe there was an Earth before consciousness developed on Earth. Then single-celled organisms etc. How do we know when that life became conscious? How do we know plants aren't conscious? When and how did material become infused with something else? If you want to say consciousness was there all along, fine. If not, where did it come from? What would be a nonmaterialistic explanation look like? I hung out with some Roger Penrose types, in fact Penrose himself briefly and for a longer period with one of his sidekicks, an ex-boyfriend of mine. I kept asking my friend, why would the collapse of the quantum wave function produce consciousness? (I can't swear I'm getting the lingo right, but pretty close). One answer I got was, "Well, something's got to cause consciousness." And I think it could just be that a sophisticated neural network produces the phenomenon - that self-awareness is an artifact of a constantly self-monitoring CPU. One of these days I might try to tackle Penrose's work, but I know for a fact his sidekick did not have strong foundations in physics or math. His reasoning seemed to be "quantum mechanics is weird, and consciousness is weird, so they're probably related." I'm not in love with materialism, but I see no reason to dismiss it just because it doesn't explain my subjective experience. Yes, it may seem to me that my thinking is not algorithmic; but how would I really know? |
18th May 2018, 01:30 AM | #171 |
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And it needs to explain of course why semiconductors work, predict the orbit of Mercury, increase the efficiency of a compression algorithm and how to make food taste delicious... If it doesn't then we are replacing one system that "works" very well in every area we can think of with one that doesn't work in any situations we can think of!
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18th May 2018, 01:33 AM | #172 |
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Using that reasoning we don't know "why" anything is anything at all!
You demonstrate why I think concerns with philosophies like materialism and idealism and so on are a waste of time, they do not do anything i.e. they do not work at explaining the world around us at all, we cannot use them in any useful way. |
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18th May 2018, 04:00 AM | #173 |
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The God of the Gaps must be a lot easier when you just respond to any explanation that there is no gap with loud, angry incredulity.
"Tide goes in, tide goes out. Can't explain that." "Well no tidal motion has been well established as caused by the gravitational pull of the moon on water..." "NO! Your *spits* precious science can't explain it! I can't even come close! It's a total mystery!" |
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18th May 2018, 04:14 AM | #174 |
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And I still say that no, you don't actually need any trust, because whether it's really real or simulated real is fully irrelevant, as long as it obeys the same rules. It's just an extra entity that makes no difference whatsoever, so it can be just ignored. Hence, your or his trust or distrust in it is neither required nor even relevant.
Whethere it's really real or a holographic simulation or a god's dream or whatever, there are parts of it that are shared with everyone else, and they don't disappear or change if you stop having trust in them, and they behave consistently according to the laws of physics. We can call that the physical world. If nothing else, because it behaves or is simulated or whatever, according to the rules of physics. And in that physical world, those physical interactions are what explains what is happening and why. Again, it doesn't matter for example if God is dreaming a geostationary satellite, or we're all sharing a dream that includes one, or we have the great Programmer in the sky simulating a world with one. At the end of the day, that orbit will still be fully predicted by gravity equalling the centripetal force, for an angular velocity of one rotation per day. So that extra layer of navel gazing about whether it's really real, or simulated, or dreamt by God, or whatever is making no difference whatsoever. You don't have to trust it, and you don't have to disprove it, because it's an irrelevant extra set of entities that make no difference. You can exclude it from the model by virtue of Occam, but really, even that is giving too much thought to an extra layer that makes no difference whatsoever. It's not even an extra entity that interacts with anything in the model. It's just an extra layer that makes no differene. And especially in idealism's case it's an extra layer about how you OBSERVE it, so it has even less reason to influence the observed phenomenon. And that makes just about as much difference as "ah, but what if I watch that satellite with a reflector telescope instead of a refractor one? or what if I watch it on a computer screen? Or what if I track it with RADAR instead of seeing it?" Well, so what? The orbit will still be the same. Ditto for the brain or, really, everything else. The data we have strongly supports causality there, and that wouldn't change with or without a God dreaming it all, or the other Fudbucker and LarryS nonsense. If God is dreaming this whole thing, then he is dreaming some bunches of neurons that do the thinking for you. (I'd say "and for Fudbucker", but obviously that dreaming God isn't doing a very good job in his case) IMHO rather than insisting on disproving a fully irrelevant extra layer, the effort is better spent on pointing out that it is just that: fully irrelevant. Unless someone can prove that they can change reality by disbelieving it (e.g., walk through a wall by pretending it's not there), then the physical part of our shared reality is still ruled by physics either way. So using it as an excuse to not learn the rules of reality and believe in magical thinking instead is still stupid, even if it WERE a shared dream or anything else. |
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18th May 2018, 04:28 AM | #175 |
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Well put.
This is why I don't call myself a "materialist" or an "idealist" or any of those ists because it doesn't make one iota of a difference what reality is actually "made of" (indeed the question itself may not be answerable by humans). I simply want a way to navigate myself through the reality I do find myself in, so I use what works. I want to make someone "experience" the smell of a rose? Whether I do that by shoving a rose under their nose or open their skull and apply an electrical stimulus to a small clump of neurons in their brain they will experience the same thing. We know 100% that thoughts/experiences/I can be altered/edited/removed/changed reliably and repeatedly by direct and indirect electrical stimulus to the brain, by ingesting certain chemicals, by physical damage to a person's body, that's what works. If you want to hold there is something more to "thoughts/experiences/I" the onus is on the person making that claim. At the moment the only theory/idea that works at predicting "thoughts/experiences/I" is the one that holds that ""thoughts/experiences/I" are what the brain* does. *Just a note - of course the entire body is enmeshed into what the brain does but I think for the sake of this type of discussion simplifying to "the brain" is fine. |
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18th May 2018, 07:04 AM | #176 |
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Consciousness is a process. Consciousness is not an object or a fixed patten. If I flash freeze a brain it won't be in a state of perpetual consciousness. Consciousness stops when brain activity stops.
The same goes with your binary state example. Any individual state isn't concious, any more than a screen capture is the same as a video game. |
18th May 2018, 07:32 AM | #177 |
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Fundamentally, I’m with Darat on this; I exist in whatever form of reality I exist in and I’d like to know what actually works in this reality.
I don’t mind participating in these kinds of discussions because it’s a fun mental exercise. I enjoy argument and debate. But when we start getting into the more esoteric things that have no real debate meat on them… I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s all just mental masturbation and it’s best to stay out of each other splash zone‘s. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk |
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18th May 2018, 08:59 AM | #178 |
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18th May 2018, 10:19 AM | #179 |
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That's all it is. A desire to have an on call "Science doesn't know everything neiner neiner neiner" argument readily available at all times.
Others have already pointed out how meaningless the distinction really is and how the alternative, which again functionally translates to "I get to invoke magic whenever I feel like it" doesn't answer any of the questions people claim to think "materialism" can't answer. And by (sadly rather successfully at this point) PRing "The very concept of a based shared reality" into the almost slur like "Oh so you're a materalist!" (aided by the Philosophy Fan Club's desire to have every argument be nothing but assigning everybody to various philosophical fan clubs and the general group-think tribalism that's taken over all discussions) they've created a perfect argumentative black hole. |
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18th May 2018, 12:36 PM | #180 |
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I hazard a guess that a central cognitive trait of materialist realists is to adopt a predominantly verbal approach to knowledge whereby the meaning of language is considered to rest more upon habits of rule-following, and to be less related to or irreducible to first-person experience.
I suspect that materialist cognitive tendencies are more likely among males and extroverts who pay less attention to the correlation of their personal experiences with their use of language. This less introspective approach to relating to the world has both psychological advantages and disadvantages compared to the meta-cognitive style of idealism. Neuro-psychology ought to reveal a significant correlation between philosophical beliefs and personality traits. |
18th May 2018, 12:47 PM | #181 |
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Not sure why it would be less related to first-person experience. Those connections in the brain are exactly formed whenever you experience an association, whether first hand, or hearing about it, or even talking about it.
E.g., stuff like the difference between ordinary, unusual, minimally counter-intuitive, and maximally counter-intuitive, and how well you remember them, turns out to be a really good way of classifying information by the brain. Nobody says it's based on not actually experiencing an MCI. In fact it says that a LOT was an MCI when you were a kid, and you refined your mental model based on that. E.g., stuff like the yes/no voting that you can watch on an MRI happening in the brain when you take a decision. Nobody says it's not based on previous experiences. In fact, quite the opposite, it's based on the current strength of the associations to various outcomes, which in turn are based on how often you encountered those associations one way or another. At the end of the day you're still formed by what you've experienced, heard, read, thought about, etc. We just have some idea about how that happened, and why you're, say, more prone to form an association based on an MCI than an MXCI. |
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18th May 2018, 01:47 PM | #182 |
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My mum/mom says those that are brain-wanking should stop or they might go blind
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18th May 2018, 02:03 PM | #183 |
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Yes, certainly a self-professed materialist would verbally agree with this in a rational and factual sense. What i mean to say is that this doesn't imply that the materialist would be meta-cognitively aware of the empirical relation between his own use of language and his own experiences.
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18th May 2018, 02:51 PM | #184 |
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This is basically just the question: How does a state or process arise from a given set of rules and conditions? And then arbitrarily deciding that a state/process that consists of asking "where do states and processes come from" is somehow in special need of a special explanation.
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18th May 2018, 03:06 PM | #185 |
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the brain seems to have something to do with the generation and storage of the content of consciousness (images / thoughts / etc) - and with the communication of this content.
If you watch this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vq1KJJ_l_ZM&t=303s by Stanislas Dehaene - - He fully admits he's limiting his definition of conscioiusness to fit his model. |
18th May 2018, 10:52 PM | #186 |
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Well obviously what I meant by saying that there are some things that we do have to take on trust (and I did explain that), is that we cannot literally prove things as 100% certainty ... and therefore its' entirely unreasonable if people here are insisting that science must produce anything approaching an unarguable proof to show that everything that might called "consciousness" is created entirely by the "matter" of the brain. Whether or not scientists would like complete proof of things is another matter entirely. As indeed is the questions of whether it might ever be possible to provide 100% certainty (or "proof") for anything in this universe. All that we can ever really have (apparently), for anything, is evidence which we think is convincing. In the case of scientific theories it would be unreasonable in the extreme (to put it mildly) for people to reject those theories saying the evidence was not convincing to them ... though in fact there are still many millions of people in this world who do reject the evidence for things like evolution (or even quantum theory). At present the scientific explanations that we have for so-called "consciousness" are far short of what we have for things like GR, QM, or evolution etc. Though there is still a huge amount of evidence to show that what we call "consciousness" is an effect produced by the normal chemical functioning of the brain in conjunction with the sensory system and the rest of the body. And it's really quite absurd for people to claim that science has no idea for how consciousness is produced. But having said that – science (and individual scientists) do not of course take the view that “we don't need any trust” in the sense of saying that we are entirely content with our present level of understanding about consciousness and the working of the human brain/mind … on the contrary, scientist are never content just to say we do not need any more evidence or that we already know everything we need to know and that hence we are not going to bother attempting to minimise any of the more questionable or debatable things that we do at present need to “take on trust” … science is always trying to minimise areas of doubt like that. |
18th May 2018, 11:49 PM | #187 |
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I have no idea what you thought you heard there as any support for what you have been saying in these threads, but what Dehaene very clearly says is that his research and that of others shows why we should reject the typical beliefs of ancient philosophical that claim some sort of “mind body duality”, i.e. the idea that consciousness is somehow more than merely what the brain does, and he actually describes some of the evidence for why we should reject philosophical ideas like that (see the film from 17min 50 sec onwards in the section labelled on-screen as Mind & Brain) … … in fact throughout that entire interview he is describing so-called “consciousness” as an entirely physical process produced by the “material” structure that we call the brain. And actually, much of what he says fits very closely with the far more specific explanation which I suggested here about 1 or 2 years ago in those NDE/OBE threads, and which I offered to repeat for Larry a few posts back (but where he passed over that offer as if he had no need to hear any possible explanations for why he is wrong). |
19th May 2018, 01:03 AM | #188 |
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The idea that consciousness alone of our behaviour requires something special is of course nothing but special pleading.
If we look at other behaviours, for example running no one postulates that there is some extra "whatsit" involved even though if you were to freeze someone instantaneously whilst they were running the "run" disappears. It seems only for consciousness do we have to add in this extra whatsit. Quite serious question for those that know /believe/think consciousness can't be explained in principle (if not yet to the nth degree) by our best current understandings of how the world works, where is the "run" when I am running? |
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19th May 2018, 05:05 AM | #189 |
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That is essentially what I argued during the "Soul" argument we had, which this is of course just another version of, that it's the equivalent of somebody taking a grandfather clock apart, carefully and precisely laying out every individual piece on a big workbench, and then demanding I show them in this pile of parts where "the ticking" is at and when I can't saying that proves all the parts aren't really there.
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19th May 2018, 08:54 AM | #190 |
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19th May 2018, 09:12 AM | #191 |
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That's literal gibberish.
You understand damn well what a "process" is. When you blow out a candle you don't have an existential crisis over where the fire went. When you stop at a red light you don't suffer a crisis of faith over where the "act of moving" went. But apply this very simple concept to a functioning neurosystem and people suddenly act like 2 year olds having string theory explained to them in Latin. "You" are a process created by your brain. Processes can stop. This is not some new crazy idea. I now patiently await several dozen paragraphs of Jabbian "But it's not the saaaaaammmeee" special pleading. |
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19th May 2018, 10:55 AM | #192 |
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Larry you are making the same mistake yet again. You have a huge problem in what is called "Comprehension in English Language". That is not a deliberate insult or anything like that at all. What it means is that you fail to realise or "comprehend" what the written words say (in this case you fail to realise or comprehend what your own written words actually say!) ... look at your very first sentence which says "The run doesn't exist except as a concept appreciated by a mind." ... ... there you are stating as absolute fact (you express no caution at all) that there is actually no such thing as anyone actually running, and that instead all that exists is a "concept" in your mind ... that is a claim of non-reality ... it's a very direct claim of solipsism, which says there is no person ever doing any running ... but you most definitely cannot say that, because you do not know that there is no such person running ... if you claim that you do know that no such person is actually running, then you will have to produce an absolute proof of that claim ... ... so where is your proof that no running ever really occurred? The problem here is that you have absolutely no comprehension at all of what you are actual saying/writing! |
19th May 2018, 01:48 PM | #193 |
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19th May 2018, 09:31 PM | #194 |
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OK, so consciousness is a process. So instead of 110101010101 being the switch combination for simulating a conscious working brain, it's a process of switching actions that simulates a conscious working brain 1010101010->10010101010->10100101010->...
The same problem arises. Why does one particular sequence of switching operations lead to consciousness while others don't? |
19th May 2018, 09:39 PM | #195 |
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That's only half the problem. Materialism not only can't explain consciousness, all the attempts to explain consciousness fall prey to reducto absurdums, like conscious collections of toilets, and the "real" possibility that we're all being simulated by a person moving rocks around on an endless plain.
If materialism entails those possibilities are taken to be considered "live" possibilities (things that can actually happen), then the theory itself is absurd. I take it you don't think there's a chance in hell your conscious existence if a result of a person moving rocks around? That's absurd right? I can show you the chain of logic that commits materialists to asserting just that possibility. And we used to have materialists here who defended "rock-consciousness" vociferously. It was an interesting time in the forum's history. |
19th May 2018, 10:05 PM | #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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19th May 2018, 10:41 PM | #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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20th May 2018, 12:19 AM | #198 |
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Generating, storing and communicating something is to cause of something.
If x is ever previous to y and y never happens without x, you can say that x is the cause of y or an essential part of the cause of y. A different thing is that you cannot explain how the cause produces y. They are two different questions. Can you say the moment where Dehaene says what you quote? I have not time to see the whole video. Materialism affirm that x is the cause of y, even if it cannot be perfectly explain "how". |
20th May 2018, 12:25 AM | #199 |
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20th May 2018, 03:54 AM | #200 |
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Even if "X can't explain Y" the alternative can't be "Magic diddit."
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"If everyone in the room says water is wet and I say it's dry that makes me smart because at least I'm thinking for myself!" - The Proudly Wrong. |
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