I challenge you: your best argument for materialism

[Brainache]

If I'm following all this, the Idealists are saying that the material world is a figment of the mind of God (for want of a better word). That all there is, was, or ever will be exists in some kind of universal consciousness and that we as human consciousnesses are a subset of the Universal Mind... Is that right?

If so, it seems less parsimonious than a mindless Universe in which consciousness evolved over time. IMO.

 

[PixyMisa]

If I'm following all this, the Idealists are saying that the material world is a figment of the mind of God (for want of a better word). That all there is, was, or ever will be exists in some kind of universal consciousness and that we as human consciousnesses are a subset of the Universal Mind... Is that right?

If so, it seems less parsimonious than a mindless Universe in which consciousness evolved over time. IMO.

Right. If we had absolutely no idea how consciousness arises, materialism would be in a weaker position. But that (despite annnnoid's protestations) is simply not the case. We know it's something the brain does; we know the brain is a computer.

Under naive idealism, every single observation requires a new assumption, because we observe a material universe.

Under something like Max Tegmark's mathematical universe idea, the material universe we see is the result of the deep mathematical nature of reality. That requires no additional assumptions, but it also means that materialism is correct - true, just not Ultimately True. And it's not what most people are talking about when they mention idealism.

 

[RussDill]

This is a materialist assumption. The idealist position supposes that your head is inside your mind which is a part of mind at large.

Lets assume that there is some overarching large conscious entity that can create both subconsciousnesses and also an environment for them to interact in as you state above.

In this environment, evolution is seen to occur and intelligent species can arise. What about the environment/reality prevents conscious entities form independently evolving? If they can independently evolve, when they become sentient, are they considered a subconsciousness or part of the simulated environment the subconsciousnesses interact in?

At which point to beings cross this dichotomy in the evolutionary and embryotic process? Or is there no dichotomy in your interpretation of reality?

 

[stevea]

Let's consider the quality of Bernardo's arguments ...
http://www.bernardokastrup.com/2014/08/the-greatest-contradiction-of-common.html
Here he tries to characterize the materialist POV as logically inconsistent.

On the one hand, our common sense says that the colors we see, the sounds we hear, the smells we feel, the textures we sense, are all the actual and concrete reality. .... , our common sense also seems to suggest that death is the end of our consciousness.....

Now, the point of this essay is extraordinarily simple: these two common-sense beliefs are mutually exclusive. They cannot be both true. ...

Major claim: the existence of an external reality and our belief in the 'end of consciousness' are inconsistent. So how does he demonstrate the inconsistency ?

Let’s start with the postulate that bodily dissolution — death — indeed implies the end of consciousness. Such a notion is entirely based on the idea that your body, particularly your brain, generates all your experiences. ...

The word "generate" does not apply well. A conventional materialist POV presumes that an external phenomenon is apprehended via senses by the mind as an experience; further that the mind directs actions that impact experience.

But if the notion is true, then all of your subjective experiences and their qualities — colors, sounds, flavors, textures, warmth, etc. — are merely representations created within your head.

No! The materialist view is that the similar external phenomena promotes comparable experiences. It's not all in your brain/mind - just the apprehension part.

The "real world out there" has none of the qualities of experience: no colors, no melody, no flavors, no warmth. Supposedly, it is a purely abstract realm of quantities akin to mathematical equations.

Mathematics is an incompetent analogy. Some physical phenomenon like heat or light impinges on our senses and produces experiences of warmth or color closely related to the phenomenon.

It cannot even be visualized, for visualization always entails qualities of experience. In essence, if this is true, your entire life unfolds inside your skull.

No ! This is a distortion that only follows from your mischaracterization of the materialist position. A materialist will recognize that they interact with their hypothetical "real world" . "Life" is a lot more than merely observing experiences, but also involves interacting and modifying with the experiences reality. "Life unfold[ing]" is not like watching a movie.

The materialist POV is obviously that experience is a interaction/reaction of the mind/brain to external phenomena. So - life does not unfold within the mind alone. Here Bernardo is proposing a false dichotomy, he is trying to claim that experience and reality are separable (to a materialist); this is like claiming that we can talk about fish as a separable concept from water, or that the head & tail of a coin are separable.

Your actual skull is somewhere beyond the room where you are sitting, enveloping it from all sides. After all, the room you are experiencing right now is supposedly within your head.

There is no logic here, just concept-salad. To a materialist obviously the "skull" is not beyond the room in any way at all. To materialists the real room contains the real mind, while the mind merely has some limited apprehension of the room via senses.

Further the mind within the room may cease to apprehend - die. There is nothing inconsistent or hard to grasp here.

But what if all this is baloney? What if the colors, sounds, and smells you are experiencing right now are the real reality — the actual world — not "hallucinated" representations within your skull? Then the necessary implication is that all of reality is in consciousness, for reality is then "made of" the qualities of subjective experience. But if that is so, it is your body that is in consciousness, not consciousness in your body. After all, your body is in reality, not reality in your body. And then, in turn, the dissolution of your body cannot imply the end of consciousness; not any more than the death of your dreamed-up avatar in a nightly dream can imply your physical death. After all, it is the avatar that is in your dreaming consciousness, not your consciousness in the avatar.

Sigh ! To paraphrase Alan Watts, when one is confronted with a paradox there is usually a glaring false dichotomy at the heart of it. Is there a pot without a crack ? So can there be a crack without a pot ? No - it's just crack-pottery to consider two aspects of one thing as separable.

Same w/ this tired, ancient mind-body false dichotomy. If Bernardo can evidence a mind w/o a body - then we can talk, until then this is just his brand of mysticism.

Do you see the point?

Yes, I do. There is an over-reliance on syllogistic logic w/o reference to semantics, leading to specious claims.

You attempt to disprove that materialist POV, by tentatively assuming to is true then trying to show that this is logically inconsistent (a negative proof). However to create an inconsistency you inject your monist-idealism claim that the "mind is beyond the room". This presents a circular argument fallacy as well as a straw-man fallacy.

 

[Robin]

In principle, yes. In practice, your brain is too small.

So a large enough brain will be able to manipulate certain symbols and thereby know what it is like for a smaller brain like ours to be experiencing nausea?

I lump that claim in with those made by Bernardo.

 

[Robin]

The thing is, you are claiming that it is not impossible that this might happen under idealism. But what we actually observe is that it's impossible for this not to happen.

So idealism fails utterly at describing the real world; the world consistently behaves as though materialism were true.

Just so long as you are correct that what it is like to feel pain can be derived from a certain symbol manipulation.

Otherwise it appears perfectly possible for all those physical events to occur and for there to be no experience of pain - there is certainly no contradiction involved in that.

Current physics demonstrates no chemical reaction which will fail to complete if not accompanied by a sensation, and no reason that absence of sensations will hamper any sort of chemical or electrical action or behaviour of atoms.

So current physics predicts that if this is an entirely material world then there need not be any such thing as a feeling of pain.

 

[Robin]

Well, that was pretty much his assertion as I took it, some all encompassing kind of consciousness. That we are perhaps just fractions of. So technically we would already have his book but just need to pay for a super conciseness activation key.

Yes, we understand his theory completely, but it is just obfuscated.

 

[PixyMisa]

So a large enough brain will be able to manipulate certain symbols and thereby know what it is like for a smaller brain like ours to be experiencing nausea?

I lump that claim in with those made by Bernardo.

On what basis? The brain is a computer. Whatever it does can in principle be understood by another computer.

 

[PixyMisa]

Just so long as you are correct that what it is like to feel pain can be derived from a certain symbol manipulation.

Otherwise it appears perfectly possible for all those physical events to occur and for there to be no experience of pain - there is certainly no contradiction involved in that.

Current physics demonstrates no chemical reaction which will fail to complete if not accompanied by a sensation, and no reason that absence of sensations will hamper any sort of chemical or electrical action or behaviour of atoms.

So current physics predicts that if this is an entirely material world then there need not be any such thing as a feeling of pain.

Sorry, but this is nonsense.

The feeling of pain is a physical process. It is caused by other physical processes. It's not necessary in any philosophical sense; it just happens to be how the world works.

 

[Pup]

Just so long as you are correct that what it is like to feel pain can be derived from a certain symbol manipulation.

Otherwise it appears perfectly possible for all those physical events to occur and for there to be no experience of pain - there is certainly no contradiction involved in that.

Current physics demonstrates no chemical reaction which will fail to complete if not accompanied by a sensation, and no reason that absence of sensations will hamper any sort of chemical or electrical action or behaviour of atoms.

So current physics predicts that if this is an entirely material world then there need not be any such thing as a feeling of pain.

I don't see that at all. What we call pain or nausea are labels for things that are the result of physical reactions.

Yes, of course, there's no need for sentient life and therefore no need for there to be a feeling of pain. But since there is sentient life, we feel things based on certain brain/nerve reactions and we label those things and those things exist.

 

[Robin]

I don't see that at all. What we call pain or nausea are labels for things that are the result of physical reactions.

Yes, of course, there's no need for sentient life and therefore no need for there to be a feeling of pain. But since there is sentient life, we feel things based on certain brain/nerve reactions and we label those things and those things exist.

I don't know about you, but I use the words 'pain' and 'nausea' to describe sensations that I feel. I knew what they were long before I even knew what a brain was.

We link the brain to these sensations because of our observations that this happens. But there is nothing at all in the physical description of the brain which predicts there must be sensations. There is no chemical reaction which would fail to happen if not accompanied by a sensation, no electrical activity which would happen differently if not accompanied with a feeling of nausea or pain. There is nothing in our physics which requires anything more than the cause and effect between atoms and their associated forces.

Science has no need of the hypothesis that there is a sensation that I am feeling right now.

 

[Robin]

Sorry, but this is nonsense.

The feeling of pain is a physical process. It is caused by other physical processes. It's not necessary in any philosophical sense; it just happens to be how the world works.

So be specific, what chemical reaction or electrical activity would happen differently if there were no feeling of nausea involved? What atom would zig where the physics say it should zag if there were no feeling of nausea?

Whether or not it is necessary in any philosophical sense is beside the point, it is not necessary in any physical sense.

Now you say that it happens to be the way the world works and I agree. But we are talking about how the world would work if it was entirely material. You cannot start with the assumption that the world is entirely material, so the way the world happens to work is not to the point.

I can see nothing in any description of any material entity that would happen differently if there was no sensation involved.

 

[Robin]

On what basis? The brain is a computer. Whatever it does can in principle be understood by another computer.

The brain is a computer. Any computation it does can in principal be computed by another computer. That I can agree with. I know my brain is a computer because I can implement the logic of a Turing Machine. That does not tell me that a sensation of nausea is one of the computations that I do.

Again, with any computation, why would any step complete differently if there were no feeling of nausea involved?

There is no contradiction involved in any sort of computation occurring without there being a feeling of nausea accompanying it.

 

[Nonpareil]

I don't know about you, but I use the words 'pain' and 'nausea' to describe sensations that I feel. I knew what they were long before I even knew what a brain was.

Which is irrelevant to idealism or materialism.

We link the brain to these sensations because of our observations that this happens. But there is nothing at all in the physical description of the brain which predicts there must be sensations.

Except all the sensory equipment attached to it.

Sorry, but where are you going with this? Are you going to claim that there is something beyond computation happening in the brain? That there is some other mechanism that explains sensation? If so, where is your evidence?

There is no chemical reaction which would fail to happen if not accompanied by a sensation, no electrical activity which would happen differently if not accompanied with a feeling of nausea or pain. There is nothing in our physics which requires anything more than the cause and effect between atoms and their associated forces.

Which is beside the point. The sensation is the effect, not the cause.

 

[Robin]

Except all the sensory equipment attached to it.

Again, be specific. What part of that equipment would operate differently if there were no sensations involved at all?

Sorry, but where are you going with this? Are you going to claim that there is something beyond computation happening in the brain? That there is some other mechanism that explains sensation? If so, where is your evidence?

I am testing the claim that the world we experience is exactly what we would expect if the world was entirely material. If that claim is based entirely on "what is your evidence that this is not the sort of world we should expect if it was entirely material?" then it is not much of a claim.

Which is beside the point. The sensation is the effect, not the cause.

Nobody said it was the cause. But if you claim that X causes Y but you find that X could happen exactly the same way without causing Y then you have an explanatory gap.

When your physical model does not actually predict that X will cause Y you have an explanatory gap.

 

[Robin]

So suppose this feeling of nausea is a computation. Then there will be an equivalent algorithm running on a register machine. That computation should also produce a feeling of nausea, exactly as I am experiencing it now.

So we load the program and run the first instruction and inspect the machine. Say it has loaded a value from a certain memory location into register A. Then we click over the next step. It loads another value into register B. Next it adds register B to A. Then it does a logical AND operation and sets a bit in the flag register as a result. And so on.

Now we can see what is happening at each stage and the cause and effect - the effect being that certain values are stored at certain memory locations and that the state of the registers is changed. These numbers are meaningless except to a mind who understands the encoding scheme. Individually, each of these instructions will run the same, whether or not a sensation of nausea happens somewhere down the track.

So then it must be the particular order in which it is run? But each of these steps would have run the same even if the before value had been set manually and there was no previous step. The nature of the following step does not change the way the current step runs. There is no different condition created by a step if it’s previous step had not happened and the values were manually set. There is no different condition created by a step if it’s next step simply did not happen.

You could manually run one of these steps even if you knew nothing at all about the previous or the next steps.

And yet we must conclude that there is something happening here beyond those individual instructions and beyond values being written to memory. How exactly? What would be the contradiction involved in all of these steps occurring without there being any sensation of nausea produced?

 

[tsig]

Just so long as you are correct that what it is like to feel pain can be derived from a certain symbol manipulation.

Otherwise it appears perfectly possible for all those physical events to occur and for there to be no experience of pain - there is certainly no contradiction involved in that.

Current physics demonstrates no chemical reaction which will fail to complete if not accompanied by a sensation, and no reason that absence of sensations will hamper any sort of chemical or electrical action or behaviour of atoms.

So current physics predicts that if this is an entirely material world then there need not be any such thing as a feeling of pain.

Pain is a nerve signal to the brain, perfectly materiel.

 

[Robin]

Pain is a nerve signal to the brain, perfectly materiel.

So you guys keep saying.

So remind me, which one of those chemical reactions would occur differently if a feeling of pain did not ensue?

What exactly is the contradiction if that nerve signal went to the brain and the brain processed it as the brain does but there was no feeling of pain?

Where exactly is the part of the physical model that strictly implies that all of this activity will result in a feeling of pain?

 

[Ron_Tomkins]

A simple example of either materializing something into existence, or then, desintegrating something from existence using only the mind, would be enough to convince me that consciousness reigns over matter.

 

[Lowpro]

So you guys keep saying.

So remind me, which one of those chemical reactions would occur differently if a feeling of pain did not ensue?

What exactly is the contradiction if that nerve signal went to the brain and the brain processed it as the brain does but there was no feeling of pain?

Where exactly is the part of the physical model that strictly implies that all of this activity will result in a feeling of pain?

If it's pain from touching a hot stove:

nocireceptor response towards the thalamus which then enters the somatosensory cortex thus the "experience" of pain. This is is constant positive and negative regulation thus pain can be promoted or inhibited in this pathway. Where materialism does well with stochastic elements, idealism dies.

Materialism does NOT predict a strict deterministic "this for that" regarding correlation to the sensation of pain; it can, but it doesn't exclude others either. It implies that the sensation of pain itself is materialistic in its nature. Where Idealism seeks to erect a barrier between materialistic effects and "qualia" materialism finds the barrier nonsensical.

I have a feeling that you're searching for a "gotcha" in nerve vs "experiences of pain without nerve involvement" which shifts and from a more objective determination of pain to a more unmeasured determination of pain which is where the goalpost has moved for idealists and they've mindlessly masturbated to this. But they've only migrated to the fog after giving up so much ground. It's like the black knight with no arms or legs claiming it's a flesh wound...

This is why programmers make terrible physiologists. Programmers SUCK when it comes to actual physiology.