I challenge you: your best argument for materialism

[LarryS]

Well of course. They're our reactions--created by our brainwaves--and not intrinsic properties of the objects. Otherwise people wouldn't have different subjective reactions and their reactions wouldn't change due to physical changes, such as losing one's sense of taste and smell and therefore no longer experiencing a mango the same way.

As others have said, brainwaves and brains and humans are real, so of course beauty, flavor, etc. are real to materialists. But they're the result of certain processing in the brain.

If you don't agree, what do you think they are? Are they attributed of objects? We can say, objectively, that an apple is red, if we define red as something that can be measured by light wavelengths. So an apple will remain labelled red even if viewed by a colorblind person. We could also define and then measure its sweetness, crunchiness, etc. Those are all real.

We could even define something subjective like "delicious" based on average attributes in things that humans rate as delicious, and predict on average what most people would classify as delicious. But unlike color or hardness, the word delicious implies subjectivity. If I think something is delicious, it is, to me, and there's no accounting for taste, although I could be classified as typical or an outlier.

What do you think subjective things like beauty, deliciousness, etc. are, if not subjective experiences caused by brainwaves? Are they intrinsic properties that are attached to things, like colors, and a person who can't see the beauty in something is beauty-blind, like a person who can't see the red in an apple is colorblind? But what criteria do you use to define beauty, that's not tied to subjective human experience?

Edited to add: I just saw you answered while I was typing. Sorry, I don't share your desire, so I don't have the same natural bias to believe a certain way.

I find it alarming, the lack of skepticism re pop neurology, that mapping the brain using MRI and measure of blood flow somehow proves brain activity, and this brain activity is associated (like when showing an image) . . . and the more specious claim that this brain activity is the cause of subjective experience.

 

[Darat]

I am not sure where the beauty, color, melody, etc comes from . . . but it sure would be nice if it came from the object - and not from an hallucination.

Why?

 

[Darat]

I find it alarming, the lack of skepticism re pop neurology, that mapping the brain using MRI and measure of blood flow somehow proves brain activity, and this brain activity is associated (like when showing an image) . . . and the more specious claim that this brain activity is the cause of subjective experience.

?

 

[Belz...]

I find it alarming, the lack of skepticism re pop neurology, that mapping the brain using MRI and measure of blood flow somehow proves brain activity, and this brain activity is associated (like when showing an image) . . . and the more specious claim that this brain activity is the cause of subjective experience.

Of course this is a very bad misrepresentation of the argument. As others said we know that consciousness arises from the brain because we can alter it by altering the brain, it only seems to show up in brains so far, and it doesn't survive the brain.

I'm still waiting for you to suggest an alternative.

 

[LarryS]

I was just trying to be funny - unsuccessful so it appears.

 

[LarryS]

?

BTW, I used the expression 'pop neurology' because I think I read somewhere that some researchers had found the spot in the brain which fired when subjects were shown an image of Kobi Bryan

 

[LarryS]

Of course this is a very bad misrepresentation of the argument. As others said we know that consciousness arises from the brain because we can alter it by altering the brain, it only seems to show up in brains so far, and it doesn't survive the brain.

I'm still waiting for you to suggest an alternative.

I have no doubt that the brain has something to do with c-ness. I question the claim that c-ness emerges from brain activity . . . and I question the claim that it's reasonable to believe that brain activity is the cause of c-ness. Re an alternative explanation - don't hold your breath - as I wrote before I have none.

 

[Belz...]

I have no doubt that the brain has something to do with c-ness. I question the claim that c-ness emerges from brain activity . . . and I question the claim that it's reasonable to believe that brain activity is the cause of c-ness.

Again: we know that consciousness arises from the brain because we can alter it by altering the brain, it only seems to show up in brains so far, and it doesn't survive the brain.

It isn't a case of "something to do with consciousness", but "everything to do with consciousness". There is nothing about consciousness that cannot be manipulated by manipulating the brain. Your "skepticism" is unwarranted and irrational.

 

[Pup]

I have no doubt that the brain has something to do with c-ness. I question the claim that c-ness emerges from brain activity . . . and I question the claim that it's reasonable to believe that brain activity is the cause of c-ness. Re an alternative explanation - don't hold your breath - as I wrote before I have none.

I don't count it as a topic I actually need to hold an opinion on one way or the other, but that's the thing: if those who are doing current research offer their best current explanation, I'll go with that unless and until there's a better alternative explanation being presented. If there's not a better explanation available, I don't have any emotional incentive to doubt just for the heck of it.

Because you feel "it sure would be nice if it came from the object - and not from an hallucination," you have an emotional incentive to doubt. And that's the difference.

 

[Belz...]

Because you feel "it sure would be nice if it came from the object - and not from an hallucination," you have an emotional incentive to doubt. And that's the difference.

I have the same incentive, and yet I don't doubt.

 

[Myriad]

Even if we don't have all the answers, there's plenty of reason to doubt the specific hypothesis that the beauty etc. of an art object is in the object itself. Those Van Gogh paintings, for instance, were regarded by the majority of Van Gogh's contemporaries as not only unattractive, but hideous, an affront to art. What changed? The paintings didn't.

Similarly, you can show me the most highly regarded, beautiful, affecting passage of poetry ever written in Chinese, and I have no doubt I won't be affected by it. If the beauty of the object were in the object itself, I should be, and the fact that I can't read a word of Chinese shouldn't matter.

 

[LarryS]

the materialist mindset is strong with this group with only weak inferences to back it up . . . I feel like I'm in a true believer's forum not a skeptic's forum. I guess I shouldn't have quipped my 'it would be nice' comment as that was meant to be sarcasm.

 

[RussDill]

I'm not sure. But I don't understand why that's important.

I was using it to mean mathematical symbol manipulation to derive some answer. In this case, an answer calculated before hand would be checked by what actually happens. Unless, as I propose, the "what actually happens" is all you can do to get an answer.

The context of the argument was one in which it is proposed that to count as a valid materialist viewpoint, a process would have to be calculable and hence capable of being mimicked by a computer program. My counterexample was meant to show there are parts of the accepted material world which are not so calculable - in other words, cannot be modeled specifically by a computation.

As I understand it, you can know everything it is possible to know about the current quantum state of caesium-137 and still not be able to model the decay as a discrete event. (By event, I mean something which happens in our universe.)

I think we mean two very different things by model. By model, I mean a physically plausible recreation of a system. You seem to want it to mean not just a specific caesium-137 atom, but in the MW interpretation, a very specific us.

Let me phrase this differently in a way that might make more sense, there is no outcome of a quantum mechanical system that we cannot calculate.

 

[Belz...]

the materialist mindset is strong with this group with only weak inferences to back it up

I submit that you are instead an idealist or something along those lines, and that you are frustrated to find that we don't take to cheap philosophical tricks, here.

Again: we know that consciousness arises from the brain because we can alter it by altering the brain, it only seems to show up in brains so far, and it doesn't survive the brain.

How is that a weak inference ? Literally every piece of evidence we have points to consciousness being entirely physical. There cannot be stronger inference.

 

[PixyMisa]

I have no doubt that the brain has something to do with c-ness. I question the claim that c-ness emerges from brain activity . . . and I question the claim that it's reasonable to believe that brain activity is the cause of c-ness.

On what grounds? This is unquestionably what we observe, and no-one has suggested any property of consciousness that is both (a) real and (b) not something the brain could do.

 

[PixyMisa]

Nausea is more complex that PixyMisa's computation model

Nope.

first of all perceptions are generated events that appear to made by brains. They are partly learned through exposure to sensations and then manufactured (apparently) by brains.

The sensation of nausea if even more difficult than say visual perceptions, because it has a multi channel sensation pathway, including the very odd and complex vestibular sensations, which are partly cochlear based, partly kinesthetic, partly abdominal sensations and partly visual sensations.

And on top of that they are also idiomatic to individuals.

Yes. And all of that feeds into the brain, which is a computer.

 

[marplots]

Again: we know that consciousness arises from the brain because we can alter it by altering the brain, it only seems to show up in brains so far, and it doesn't survive the brain.

I could say all that about a radio and the music which comes out of it. All those statements are true, yet we do not believe that the radio creates the music. Or do we?

 

[AdamSK]

I could say all that about a radio and the music which comes out of it. All those statements are true, yet we do not believe that the radio creates the music. Or do we?

I think where we lose the radio is the second part: there are many ways in which it is impossible to alter the music by altering the radio. You can distort the music, but your only options for the radio are a clear or garbled version of what it receives. We can alter the brain in much more nuanced ways.

There's also the fact that we can destroy the radio, pick up another radio, and get the same music - which is evidence that the source of the music is outside the radio. We don't have analogous evidence for the brain; destroy a brain and the thoughts and memories of that brain aren't reproducible elsewhere.

 

[marplots]

I think where we lose the radio is the second part: there are many ways in which it is impossible to alter the music by altering the radio. You can distort the music, but your only options for the radio are a clear or garbled version of what it receives. We can alter the brain in much more nuanced ways.

There's also the fact that we can destroy the radio, pick up another radio, and get the same music - which is evidence that the source of the music is outside the radio. We don't have analogous evidence for the brain; destroy a brain and the thoughts and memories of that brain aren't reproducible elsewhere.

I wasn't trying to model the brain as a receiver (although that is tempting), I was just pointing the association doesn't mean causation fallacy embedded in the experiments suggested. The argument will retain this weakness until we can model (with good fidelity) the actual causes of consciousness at a deep level and show the brain is the sort of thing that produces those causes.

The problem might be even worse though, if we want to say that only human brains do this thing we are interested in. Because disconfirming evidence comes by way of animal brains - the thing we are suggesting causes consciousness - not being conscious in the same way. Now we have brains of certain types and not other types, instead of just brains generally. That too would have to be explained.

 

[bruto]

I could say all that about a radio and the music which comes out of it. All those statements are true, yet we do not believe that the radio creates the music. Or do we?

The radio creates the music you hear in a sense, by processing a radio wave that comes to it from somewhere else and recreating in reverse the process by which the music was rendered into a radio wave. Radio has been invented, and its workings are known. Can you say the same of the brain? Do you have evidence that the brain is processing a signal that comes from somewhere else? I get music out of my CD player too, but I would not be so crazy as to suggest that the player creates the CD, or that the player can choose what it plays.