I challenge you: your best argument for materialism

[annnnoid]

And yet absolutely none has been presented.

Odd, that.

I know Nonpareil…reading what was written is a lot to ask…but when you do you will realize that your point is not even wrong.

 

[PixyMisa]

I know Nonpareil…reading what was written is a lot to ask…but when you do you will realize that your point is not even wrong.

Nonpareil is absolutely correct. Zero evidence for consciousness outside the brain (or more generally, outside computers) has ever been presented.

Zero.

Lots of claims. Lots of claims that evidence has been presented.

Zero evidence.

It is also, of course, impossible. But the fact that it simply doesn't happen is more significant. Things thought to be impossible that happen anyway lead use to scientific breakthroughs. Things thought to be possible that don't happen are discoveries in waiting. Things thought to be impossible that don't happen.... Are impossible and don't happen.

 

[PixyMisa]

This is why I say that some materialist skeptics misunderstand the meaning of skepticism.

And this is why you are wrong.

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.

There is no hard problem to solve.

 

[Lowpro]

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.

Dude keep your extra chromosome out of this conversation, this is how we qualified detection

The inability to detect it doesn't matter so much as whether there is informational changes. Your concerns about the parrot are completely irrelevant. The fact that the image was barely recognizable is of no consequence to the fact that they were able to determine brain activity to an image. Trying to disassociate brain activity from experience is no longer a valid line of thought. Brain activity is physical and its participating in sensation. Deal with it. This little "believer" stuff you're prattling is nonsensical.

And I love how you're the one who loves to say that we have no definition of consciousness but you say you've provided (positive?) evidence that there is a mind outside the head.

 

[Belz...]

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

Yes. Let's. Here, let me help you:

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.

Now, if you keep trying to take everything literally, as you always do whenever it suits your purposes, you will somehow think I have such a machine at home.

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).

No. That is not at all what I said. Not at all. You are lying again, and you are ignoring something I taught you a few weeks ago about the word "can". Do you remember what that was ?

Here, let me help you again: "can" means "it is possible". It doesn't mean we have the ability immediately. It's like someone in 1919 saying "we can go to the moon". Of course he was right, as demonstrated by people 50 years later.

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).

If you put this much effort into understanding things, rather than misunderstanding them, you'd be a genius by now. Tell me: how can something be said to exist if you cannot, even in theory, ever have any evidence of it ? Do you even understand how we can tell things exist ?

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.

No, actually that is not at all what I am saying, and you know it.

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.

Actually, those neuroscientists would point out that we already have machines that can associate certain experiences with certain brain patterns and thus that we can, in principle, detect those experiences with said machines. ONCE AGAIN, ANNNNOID: YOUR IGNORANCE IS NOT AN ARGUMENT.

As for the road-kill-what-ever-it-is parrot mess….big….deal!

Exactly: you DO NOT WANT the human mind to be described by science. You find the idea offensive, because it reduces you to a sack of meat. Sorry, annnnoid, but that's what we all are. I hope you can still sleep at night, or whenever you sleep between your bouts of incredulity.

 

[Belz...]

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

Let's see you dance to your own tune, here: Present ONE such pieces of evidence. ONE that survives even a cursory examination.

None shall be forthcoming.

 

[Belz...]

Show me an external world independent of awareness of it and you'll have a point

Larry, if you are not interested in reading the posts in this thread, I suggest you stop posting in it. If you believe yourself above the ability to learn from those who clearly know more than you, you have no business sounding off here.

 

[Belz...]

The fact that the image was barely recognizable is of no consequence to the fact that they were able to determine brain activity to an image.

That is one of the most impressive pieces of technological advancement I've seen, and yet Annnnoid acts as if it's entirely meaningless. If that's not fundamentalist dualism at work, I don't know what is.

 

[Lowpro]

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.

Pretty much all scientific models describe this. I know I've said this more than a few times here, did you forget them?

BTW what makes you think there's an internal vs. external world?

 

[PixyMisa]

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.

You're making the garage dragon argument? Seriously?

But exactly the same can be said of the material reality in our dreams. It seems entirely consistent to its own rules

Nope.

 

[PixyMisa]

Show me an external world independent of awareness of it and you'll have a point

That's not even logically coherent, and it's certainly not equivalent to the post you responded to.

The physical universe exists; it existed long before you arrived, and will exist long after you are gone. You are part of it, base matter arranged in an interesting pattern. That's all.

What you make of this reality is up to you.

 

[PixyMisa]

That is one of the most impressive pieces of technological advancement I've seen, and yet Annnnoid acts as if it's entirely meaningless. If that's not fundamentalist dualism at work, I don't know what is.

Annnnoid was the person who, at the very first demonstration of the daguerrotype, insisted photography was impossible, and that this didn't count because it wasn't in colour.

 

[tsig]

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.

Go out on a cloudless night and look up. You will see billions and billions of stars wheeling thru the heavens blissfully unaware of human existence.

Now let's see that immaterial consciousness.

 

[tsig]

I know Nonpareil…reading what was written is a lot to ask…but when you do you will realize that your point is not even wrong.

I've seen a lot of bluff and bluster but of evidence I see none.

 

[Minoosh]

Dessi, if you are still tracking this thread, many thanks for the cool animations and analogies. You mentioned early on the study that showed a subject transferring information from one subject to another across long distance with no traditional "sensory" input. There was a separate thread where opinion was mixed; I thought it was significant - and, technically, limited support for "ESP." Others wrote it off as trivial.

I'm not sure test subjects were conjuring words per se - just decoding messages sent, perhaps in Morse-code style, with binary-coded messages on one end being decoded by the receiver. They also reported no emotional associations with the decoded word - they got the word; didn't get the feeling behind it.

The article fogged a few areas, perhaps because proprietary technology is involved. I thought it was a big deal, other forum members yawned.

I will try to search the forum and create a link but I'm somewhat challenged in this area.

 

[Brian-M]

...which is like saying you have a Turing complete machine.

No, it's saying that you have the equivalent of a Finite-state machine.

Considered as an abstract model of computation, the finite state machine is weak; it has less computational power than some other models of computation such as the Turing machine. That is, there are tasks which no FSM can do, but some Turing machines can. This is because the FSM has limited memory. The memory is limited by the number of states.

 

[ehcks]

Show me an external world independent of awareness of it and you'll have a point

Is that how it works, to you? Things only exist because people are aware of them? How does it work when people do find new places that people weren't aware of?

When the first bathyscape visited the bottom of the ocean, did that place not exist, those creatures not live, until they were first seen?

When Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, did the specific rocks he brought back not exist until after he decided to pick them up?

The entire universe we haven't yet explored, along with 95% of our ocean, and some ridiculous majority of the earth below the crust; do these places not exist yet because we haven't been there?

Is this some sort of chronic lack of object-permanence problem? If I cover my face so you can't see me, do I stop existing to you?

 

[PixyMisa]

Is that how it works, to you? Things only exist because people are aware of them? How does it work when people do find new places that people weren't aware of?

It's worse than that; he's asking us to show him something that exists independent of his awareness. But as soon as we show him something...

Again, this idealism business starts with: First, abandon the very notion of evidence. Then...

 

[Nonpareil]

I know Nonpareil…reading what was written is a lot to ask…

Not really, but it does seem to give you some trouble regardless.

Nothing in your post is evidence. Nothing. For the sake of completeness:

There are vast amounts of evidence of consciousness outside of the brain. Science simply has no ability to explicitly adjudicate the issue…

This is self-contradictory nonsense. If a hypothesis cannot be scientifically evaluated, then, by definition, there can never be any evidence for it.

And, as has already been mentioned, this also means that, by definition, it is wrong.

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.

Yes, we do.

As for qualia…the fact that there is no explicitly quantifiable evidence means a grand total of absolutely nothing…

Except that there is absolutely no rational reason to believe in it.

And that your claims for having evidence for consciousness existing without a brain are nonsense, but we already knew that.

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.

No, it isn't.

That science currently lacks any ability to explicitly adjudicate subjective phenomena does not mean that subjective phenomena do not exist.

Straw man.

Please don’t waste my time with your parodies!

Only if you stop wasting our time with your ignorance.

 

[punshhh]

Argument from ignorance.

I'm simply pointing out that just because consciousness and mind can be shown to emerge from the action of the brain, this does not mean idealism is not a possibility.

Seriously, we said exactly that about volcanoes, lightning, stars, wind and other things, and all of them were explained. What makes you think that consciousness is any different ?

Nothing is different, but we are some way off discovering the origin of our material universe, or whatever else exists.