I challenge you: your best argument for materialism

[tsig]

This is why I say that some materialist skeptics misunderstand the meaning of skepticism. A skeptic recognises belief, theory, conjecture or assertion for what it is. What you claim to know is one of those. If anyone knew where a conscious mind comes from, the hard problem would have been solved.

It has been the hard problem is getting you to see it.

 

[tsig]

Asserting that it's all in your head...

This is a materialist strawman representation of an idealist or solipsist position. Those two suppose that all reality is in the mind. It is the materialist who assumes that the mind exists inside a head.

Show me a mind outside a head and you'll have a point.

 

[taygatayga]

We have already provided a definition of material/physical. Did you read it ?

Are you using a special tailor-made definition of material/physical that differs from those in a standard dictionary?

No matter how you see the universe, you're going to have to make at least one assumption, though, in this case that something exists. Idealism makes the added leap that this thing is mind.

There is no leap to make. Have you ever perceived or assumed anything without it being in your mind? Is it more of a leap to assume is entered your mind from somewhere outside mind or from another place in mind that you were formerly not aware of?

No, see, materialism doesn't make claims about the nature of "matter", only that it can, as you say, be observed. Our observations are consistent across time and from one person to the next, so we can safely assume, for the time being, that we can draw conclusions from our observations.

I don't think idealism makes claims about the nature of "matter" or "consciousness" and there is no disagreement about the consistency of our observations. The disagreement is about the materialist assumption, conclusion if you like, that there is a physical reality that exists independent of consciousness, not OUR consciousness but consciousness itself.

I can totally agree how material reality SEEMS to exist outside ourselves; it's fair to assume that our experiences are similar.

But exactly the same can be said of the material reality in our dreams. It seems entirely consistent to its own rules, everyone in the dream seems to think so and it exists entirely outside our dream avatar. But we know that it exists entirely within our own mind along with the avatar from inside which we experience the dream. Until we exit the dream it is indistinguishable from the experience we are having now. Why would it take such a leap of imagination to consider that the two states of consciousness might be similar?

 

[taygatayga]

Show me a mind outside a head and you'll have a point.

Can you show me a mind inside a head?

 

[Nonpareil]

Can you show me a mind inside a head?

Yours.

This is not hard.

Your mind behaves exactly, in every circumstance, as though it arises from matter. To assert that it is the other way around, while technically consistent with observed reality if you add enough special clauses, is in no way rational.

You can hide behind solipsism all you like, but that doesn't make your argument any more compelling.

 

[taygatayga]

Your mind behaves exactly, in every circumstance, as though it arises from matter. To assert that it is the other way around, while technically consistent with observed reality if you add enough special clauses, is in no way rational.

Your assertion has no more value than any other assertion. Asserting that you can show me a mind inside a head is not equivalent to the act of doing it. If you can establish an objective methodology for showing me a mind inside a head we can look at adapting it to show a mind outside a head.

You can hide behind solipsism all you like, but that doesn't make your argument any more compelling.

Repeating the same straw man argument to misrepresent my position suggests that you are trying to avoid arguing with my actual position which is that of idealism.

 

[Nonpareil]

Your assertion has no more value than any other assertion.

It's not an assertion.

Your mind behaves exactly, in every circumstance, as though it arises from matter. We have literally thousands of years of evidence confirming this. You cannot dismiss this without asserting that literally all of reality is an illusion - which is meaningless waffle, since it behaves exactly, in every circumstance, as if it isn't.

You can assert idealism all you like, but you have to accept that literally every piece of evidence we have stands against you.

Asserting that you can show me a mind inside a head is not equivalent to the act of doing it.

Quite right. But I haven't just asserted. I have shown you a mind that behaves exactly, in every circumstance, as though it is inside a head. Literally all evidence on the subject supports this.

Since this seems to keep somehow slipping past you, I will reiterate: literally every piece of evidence we have supports the hypothesis that minds are a product of brains.

There are ways to clarify upon that, particularly when it comes to the definition of "brain", but the end result is the same. Every piece of evidence we have supports the given hypothesis. Thus, it is not an assertion. It is a conclusion, a fully rational one supported as thoroughly as it is possible for anything to be.

If you dispute it, it's up to you to make a case against it. Otherwise, denying it is the opposite of rational.

If you can establish an objective methodology for showing me a mind inside a head we can look at adapting it to show a mind outside a head.

Well, yes. You can try. But you won't find any, because minds do not exist without matter.

EDIT: And regarding solipsism: that isn't a strawman. Your argument is that no evidence we have can be accepted on the grounds that it might all just be a product of your imagination, or however you would like to phrase the driving force that makes the universe appear the way it is.

That leads, inevitably, to solipsism.

 

[Belz...]

Tell you what Belz…I’m going to let you in on a little secret. When I (and, presumably, every other human being on the planet) look at a red parrot, I actually see a red parrot. I do not see something that looks like a piece of road kill from a hundred feet away in the middle of a blizzard.

You are missing the point: the computer has successfully interpreted the visual cortex' patterns by finding images that create a similar pattern. In other words we are well on the path to doing exactly what I said we can do and which you scoffed at.

Your claim was there is a machine that can detect everything that I experience it.

I have never said anything of the sort. Quote me saying this, or retract this lie.

 

[angrysoba]

No it isn't. I can plug you into a machine and detect the entire process of you tasting beer or feeling the sun.

If somehow those experiences cannot be detected, then they do not exist, and you don't actually have them, either.

Detection is not the problem. We don't even need neuro-gadgetry to know someone is tasting beer; we can just have someone report it, "Mmmm...this beer tastes good!"

But I don't think that is quite what people mean when they experience it. Somehow the experience is qualitatively different from the description (or the detection) otherwise we would not feel the need to go skiing, drive fast cars, try a steak when we can just watch other people doing it.

FWIW, and I expect this to be ignored by those who are not interested in a discussion (not talking about you here Belz...), I am a physicalist and don't agree with idealism or dualists, and I accept Pixy Misa's description of consciousness as a puzzle, rather than a mystery, yet I am leery of those who argue that it has all been worked out and who try to slam those who argue that the explanations so far are not satisfactory.

 

[Belz...]

IOW, we still need consciousness to experience the information. Yes the computer can generate images from contents of the brain, and play it back, but without consciousness it's just a movie playing in an empty movie theater.

Two things about this:

1) You are wrong. A computer, without any human intervention, could analyse this data and draw correct conclusions, using them to reach some goal. Even if all humans were otherwise extinct, it could do work, and science, using this data.

2) It is irrelevant. You are creating a new category of thing, consciousness, that somehow is different from all the other ones, but have no justification for doing that other than unscientific, pseudo-philosophical rhetoric. Once we have conscious computers that can do what we do, it'll all be moot anyway. But how do you check for consciousness in a computer, you ask ? Same way you do so in a human. Otherwise you are left with solipsism, and we all know how useful that little idea is.

There are some here who accept that whole-heartedly, and there are some, like myself, who are skeptical.

What you are doing is not being "skeptical".

 

[Belz...]

This is why I say that some materialist skeptics misunderstand the meaning of skepticism. A skeptic recognises belief, theory, conjecture or assertion for what it is. What you claim to know is one of those. If anyone knew where a conscious mind comes from, the hard problem would have been solved.

Well, that's the thing: there IS no hard problem.

 

[Belz...]

Somehow the experience is qualitatively different from the description

Only because the description is incomplete, Soba. The reason you experience something is because you have all the relevant data of that experience. The reason you don't experience someone else's is because you don't have all of that.

 

[Belz...]

Are you using a special tailor-made definition of material/physical that differs from those in a standard dictionary?

OK let's try the standard dictionary of Merriam-Webster:

1 a: of or relating to natural science
b (1): of or relating to physics (2): characterized or produced by the forces and operations of physics

2 a: having material existence : perceptible especially through the senses and subject to the laws of nature <everything physical is measurable by weight, motion, and resistance — Thomas De Quincey>

b: of or relating to material things

Sounds pretty close to what we said so far. The forces and operations of physics are all about interactions. If something does not interact with physical stuff, it is not physical. Souls, if they exist, MUST interact with the brain in order to have an effect. Thus they can be detected through this interaction. So far, zilch.

There is no leap to make.

Of course it is. Materialism assumes that the mind and the universe around us are made of a single type of stuff: matter. This is simpler than idealism, which posits some fundamental mind-stuff, but not how the universe around us arises.

Have you ever perceived or assumed anything without it being in your mind?

I don't play philosophical games. Philosophy has been replaced by science as a fact-finding tool. It is obsolete.

Is it more of a leap to assume is entered your mind from somewhere outside mind or from another place in mind that you were formerly not aware of?

Yes, yes it is more of a leap because it assumes things not in evidence.

The disagreement is about the materialist assumption, conclusion if you like, that there is a physical reality that exists independent of consciousness, not OUR consciousness but consciousness itself.

The disagreement is ridiculous. Every single piece of evidence we have, individually and collectively, points to that conclusion being true. In order for idealism to be correct, literally every observation in the history of mankind has to be false.

I can totally agree how material reality SEEMS to exist outside ourselves; it's fair to assume that our experiences are similar.

And therein lies the problem: since it seems to do so, always, invariably, unflinchingly, and there is zero evidence that it does not, and indeed no way even in principle to show that it doesn't, we must, at least provisionally, accept that it does. THAT is skepticism. THAT is science.

But exactly the same can be said of the material reality in our dreams.

No. Dreams, hallucinations, musings, fiction, imagination, etc. all have ONE thing in common that reality does not: inconsistency. They shift and often exhibit contradictions and unstable physical laws. That you claim that dreams are consistent shows that you have not done much dream analysis.

 

[Nonpareil]

FWIW, and I expect this to be ignored by those who are not interested in a discussion (not talking about you here Belz...), I am a physicalist and don't agree with idealism or dualists, and I accept Pixy Misa's description of consciousness as a puzzle, rather than a mystery, yet I am leery of those who argue that it has all been worked out and who try to slam those who argue that the explanations so far are not satisfactory.

Understandable. And for clarity's sake, I will repeat that we don't yet know everything about the brain. We know quite a lot, but it's a complicated and messy little design.

The only thing I object to is people trying to stretch "we don't know everything" to mean "we cannot draw any rational conclusions about it at all", which is so patently untrue as to be laughable.

 

[LarryS]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox

I do not believe that there is any language possibly being lost to the universe by our lack of total understanding of black holes.

Among many other things, the frequency and amplitude of a photon is information. It's not a language. It's not a word. It's not from a mind.

This is likely a semantic thing - - to me frequency and amplitude are data points - - - information is 'that's a proton', or sales totals by region, etc.

 

[LarryS]

And they are some people who accept that the Earth is round and others that remain skeptical. They are some people who accept that we went to the moon and others remain skeptical. They are some who accept that the Earth is billions of years old and those who are skeptical. The thing is in all of those examples one side is wrong.

That's the great thing about reality. It doesn't give a toss if you agree with it or not.

Your conscious mind and your experiences therein are neurological functions of your physical brain. You can agree with that or be wrong.

You seem to place much, much, much more important on you personally not wanting to accept facts then is warrented.

your right mr. slippery slope - - and if we legalize same sex marriage people will marry their dog

 

[Lowpro]

This is likely a semantic thing - - to me frequency and amplitude are data points - - - information is 'that's a proton', or sales totals by region, etc.

Well tough luck then, you're on the wrong side of validity.

 

[annnnoid]

I am suggesting that the brain is the seat and creator of consciousness, and itr at least appears that way.

Do you have evidence of consciousness absent a brain?

There are vast amounts of evidence of consciousness outside of the brain. Science simply has no ability to explicitly adjudicate the issue…partly because it has yet to develop any significant capacity to adjudicate subjective experience. Thus, the question is simply unresolved.

You can’t definitively dismiss the evidence any more than those making the claims can insist on them. Neither side has any empirical advantage. So far the issue is simply unresolved.

That's because you've learnt what to label your private experiences so that you can communicate your private behaviours publicly. There is no evidence that "qualia" exist, what we do have evidence for is behaviour - both private and public behaviours. And your learning starts long before your consciousness emerges as something we all label as "me". There are folk with terrible brain injuries that have no sense of "me" because some or all of the structures involved have been damaged and/or destroyed. And we know they lack this sense of me because they no longer use the words we've learnt to associate with that "experience".

We do not ‘know’ these things. These are assumptions. The entire ‘science’ of psychology is still very far from qualifying as an explicit science. And until we have the capacity to explicitly adjudicate the relationship between mind and brain…it will stay that way.

As Chomsky so astutely said: “Our understanding of human nature is thin and likely to remain that way.”

As for qualia…the fact that there is no explicitly quantifiable evidence means a grand total of absolutely nothing…given the obvious and indisputable limitations of currently available neural scanning technology and the mind-boggling dimensions of the human brain (do you know what the limits of neural scanning technology are???...do you know the enormous concentrations of material that this scanning is expected to adjudicate???)

Not to mention…that there is massive amounts of evidence that qualia exist. That evidence is us. The simple fact that we have these experiences is, itself, evidence. The simple fact that there are people who represent the situation in those terms is, itself, evidence. That science currently lacks any ability to explicitly adjudicate subjective phenomena does not mean that subjective phenomena do not exist.

The fact that it sees something matters more than the fidelity, you realize that right?

I swear I wanted to qualify the word "detect" for a reason, because for people like you it needs to be qualified.

How is it that I’m the one who needs the qualification??? I’ve been insisting on it for ages. I’m not the one making these beyond-ridiculous claims that we have these magical machines that have the capacity to detect all sorts of human experience…

…when the facts are not only more modest…but many many many many orders of magnitude more modest.

There is simply a massive range of human experiences which there is a grand total of absolutely zero technological ability to detect in any way, shape or form…and a very great deal of what can be detected is not easily adjudicated and even that which can be adjudicated with some degree of fidelity is…as that pathetic example (parrot or road kill…I sure can’t tell) clearly shows…barely recognizable.

So don’t come to me with this crap about me being the one who’s honking all the wrong horns here. Talk to your buddies in the true believer camp!

..and yes…I have actually taken the trouble to confirm these conclusions with people who actually put the word Neuroscientist after their names…which, I can guarantee is probably a great deal more than most of these pseudo-wanna-be-skeptics can claim.

Serious questions. Can you read? Do you understand the difference between possible and currently feasible?

Please don’t waste my time with your parodies!

Serious questions:

Can you read?
What does it mean when someone says “ We have a machine that can detect everything you experience.”

Does the word ‘everything’ mean ‘everything’?

Yes…or no?

You should be very familiar with this line of nonsense after getting hammered a while back by Dr. Rees.

You are missing the point: the computer has successfully interpreted the visual cortex' patterns by finding images that create a similar pattern. In other words we are well on the path to doing exactly what I said we can do and which you scoffed at.

I have never said anything of the sort. Quote me saying this, or retract this lie.

Why don’t we just have a quick look at what you said.

No it isn't. I can plug you into a machine and detect the entire process of you tasting beer or feeling the sun.

If somehow those experiences cannot be detected, then they do not exist, and you don't actually have them, either.

Lets see…you claimed that there is some machine (which you have yet to identify…fail #1)....which can detect the entire process of ‘you’ (presumably…anyone) tasting beer and feeling the sun (again…not a shred of evidence to support this assertion…fail #2).

You then claim that if these experiences cannot be detected (…by this magical machine which you refuse to identify)….then they do not exist (another assertion without a shred of evidence to support it…fail #3).

You are claiming that magic machine ‘blither-blather’ can detect whatever it is you are experiencing…and if magic machine ‘blither-blather’ does not detect it…then you are not experiencing it.

Or are you actually going to argue that magic machine ‘blither-blather’ can only detect you drinking beer and / or feeling the sun…and nothing else????

I can, within a day, find at least a dozen neuroscientists who would find your claims so ridiculous they wouldn’t even want to waste their time responding to them. Do us a favor and find at least one who will agree with you…and while you’re at it…make some attempt at skeptic self-respect and produce actual evidence if you’re going to make extraordinary claims.

As for the road-kill-what-ever-it-is parrot mess….big….deal! Pixy produced something similar years ago. That blurred joke hardly merits the compliment of progress…however technically dazzling it may be. Let me know when this magic machine of yours can actually do something beyond what any 6 month old can produce with a box of crayons and a full diaper.

Understandable. And for clarity's sake, I will repeat that we don't yet know everything about the brain. We know quite a lot, but it's a complicated and messy little design.

The only thing I object to is people trying to stretch "we don't know everything" to mean "we cannot draw any rational conclusions about it at all", which is so patently untrue as to be laughable.

But Nonpareil…are you now going to claim that you did not make this statement:

Everything you listed can be and has been detected by a myriad of scientific instruments.

Your ignorance is staggering.

…in which you explicitly claim that everything that a human being experiences can be detected by some variety of scientific instrument.

So tell everyone again who it is that is making the ridiculous claims?

 

[LarryS]

Show me a mind outside a head and you'll have a point.

Show me an external world independent of awareness of it and you'll have a point . . . but no need because this topic has been shown to be a red herring.

 

[Nonpareil]

There are vast amounts of evidence of consciousness outside of the brain.

And yet absolutely none has been presented.

Odd, that.