I challenge you: your best argument for materialism

[Dancing David]

Are congressmen conscious?

 

[Dancing David]

This quote from the above link gets at the heart of it:

"Imagine that. Capturing your visual memories, your dreams, the wild ramblings of your imagination into a video that you and others can watch with your own eyes."

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.

have you shown consciousness absent a brain yet?

 

[Dancing David]

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.

Ho ho, what exactly is the HPC, a problem of a vague definition and wishful thinking.

Have you shown evidence of consciousness absent a brain.

 

[LarryS]

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.

begging the question - you are beginning with the conclusion you are trying to reach

regarding immaterial consciousness - I got me some that going right now. I'm looking out my window, and the clouds and trees are experienced in my awareness without separation, I and content of experience are not separate, and this is what the poets call love, and most humans have experienced love at some point in their lives, a connectivity, the intimacy of reality in awareness.

 

[Belz...]

I'm looking out my window, and the clouds and trees are experienced in my awareness without separation, I and content of experience are not separate, and this is what the poets call love, and most humans have experienced love at some point in their lives, a connectivity, the intimacy of reality in awareness.

You have some dressing with that word salad ?

 

[PixyMisa]

regarding immaterial consciousness - I got me some that going right now.

Scoop out your brain and report back.

 

[Belz...]

Scoop out your brain and report back.

If consciousness was independant of the brain, you'd expect people whose brains are inactive for a few minutes to experience something entirely different. Instead they don't even experience the passage of time. It's almost as if experience is wholly dependant on senses or something. The idea that the brain is a transmitter for consciousness is similarily handicapped by reality.

 

[tsig]

...what ?

Someone seems to have lost the plot.

 

[tsig]

There’s lots of evidence. It simply can’t be scientifically adjudicated. Just like the vast majority of what goes on inside your head cannot be scientifically adjudicated. Like I said…neither side has the empirical advantage. They can’t establish that it is valid, and you can’t establish that it isn’t….

…any more than it can be scientifically established what you dreamed last night
…or why you like chocolate chip cookies
…or whether or not you love your wife
…or how you feel when you ride a roller coaster
….etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.




That was how YOU qualified detection.

Quite apart from whatever nuanced discussion of information may have been occurring…Belz claimed that science has the ability to adjudicate every single variety and nuance of subjective experience.

Perhaps someone should advise the semantically challenged Belz that when he wants to claim that science has the ability to do something…he should use the words:

‘Science currently has the ability to do XYZ.’
….which, to just about any English speaking human being…is identical to:
“Science can do XYZ.’
…or are you one of those human beings who would interpret the second sentence to mean “sometime in the next thousand years science will be able to do XYZ”…?

…but, of course, that’s just me.

If you want to have a discussion about what, precisely, neural scanning is or is not capable of you will find yourself quite surprised at just how many of these folks fall by the wayside.

Nobody has been suggesting brain activity is disassociated from experience. That we can produce a stupidly unintelligible neural scan and associate it with some variety of external behavior is very old news (like I said…the same thing appeared years ago).

Not to mention that the mere capacity to relate specific neural activity to specific external activity is…at best…mundane. To begin with…any one of the trillions of creatures swarming this planet processes visual activity. It is hardly representative of highest order primate identity (‘us’ being the only thing we know of in possession of that which we call consciousness). Secondly…all that indicates is that somewhere in the physiology of the brain visual processing is translated into some manner of coherent neural activity (that can then be translated back into some vague representation of what is being processed). The relevant point is how does that specific neural activity relate to the conscious experience of the individual in question. Merely asserting that ‘neural activity IS consciousness’ (which is what invariably happens here) is as worthless as the words it is written with.

As has been quite clearly established…given the fact that nobody has any idea of the specific relationship between consciousness and the brain…and the fact that modularity of mind is anything but resolved…we’ll just have to conclude that the question of what that blurry image actually represents will also remain unresolved.

Unless of course you, or anyone else here, wants to answer those questions I’ve dropped innumerable times now. So far, everyone has avoided them like the plague.

The issue is the moronic claims that are consistently being made about a) the current capabilities of neural scanning b) the potential capabilities of neural scanning (“we can generate neural scans of parrots that look like month-old road kill now so just imagine what we’ll be able to do in the future”…wow…bare assertions or bust!) and c) what is actually understood about how the brain produces consciousness.

The other issue is what actually does constitute human behavior / consciousness and to what degree neural scanning can adjudicate these phenomenon.

Pixy (and his groupies)…constantly claims that mind is what the brain does. Behavior. But Pixy carefully avoids ever presenting a comprehensive list of what he actually means by the word ‘behavior.’ A minor oversight no doubt. Sometime in the next thousand years, in principle, it will appear.

As Larry quite accurately pointed out…these threads are riddled with nonsense and woo… and this time it’s all coming from the skeptics. Thus…true believers.

…and precisely where did I indicate that I had positive (definitive) evidence of consciousness outside the brain? If you take the time to read what I wrote…and take the time to think on it for more than three seconds…you will realize that definitive scientific adjudication is NOT a prerequisite for something to qualify as evidence.

Why that is indisputably the case should be obvious to anyone with any more than a fraction of a brain.




All you have to do is look ( http://www.near-death.com/notable.html ). You can claim all you want that none of the examples listed on that page (and there are thousands of others) can be substantiated. But that is not what I said….was it. The simple fact is, they can’t prove they happened, and you can’t prove they didn’t.

You can whine till the cows come home that this or that rank stupidity explains what happened…but until you can directly adjudicate subjective experience ( and despite your idiotic claims of magical machines…no-one is anywhere close to achieving this capability) neither you nor anyone can even begin to establish that these claims are false.

…and, since perception and the abstract mind are, by default, the primary ontological reality (because these are the only things we actually experience)…claims of personal experience take precedence over any claims to the contrary barring explicit evidence of their duplicity.

IOW…it’s not even up to them to prove they happened…it’s up to you to prove they didn’t. And since you can’t even begin to do that…the claims stand.




It would obviously be a waste of time pointing out just how incoherent this statement is. Presumably you are, as usual, arguing something to the effect that science is the only valid approach to establishing the evidentiary quality of information. That science is the only valid epistemology (just like Pixy…just like Belz…just like tsig…what a surprise).

As I pointed out above…scientific adjudication is NOT a prerequisite for something to qualify as evidence.

…if you are actually silly enough to argue that this is false…then explain what specific varieties of science you referenced every moment since you awoke this morning.

Marvelous, simply marvelous.

 

[tsig]

The Woo Slingers. Which is what this is all really about.

No one wants to deny reality. They just want to ignore it when it suits them.

Well not all reality just this one little part, then you explain that reality is seamless and you can't just ignore any of it soon accusations of close mindedness, dogmatism and religious fervor flow and so it goes.

 

[Lowpro]

That was how YOU qualified detection.

Quite apart from whatever nuanced discussion of information may have been occurring…Belz claimed that science has the ability to adjudicate every single variety and nuance of subjective experience.

Perhaps someone should advise the semantically challenged Belz that when he wants to claim that science has the ability to do something…he should use the words:

‘Science currently has the ability to do XYZ.’
….which, to just about any English speaking human being…is identical to:
“Science can do XYZ.’
…or are you one of those human beings who would interpret the second sentence to mean “sometime in the next thousand years science will be able to do XYZ”…?

…but, of course, that’s just me.

If you want to have a discussion about what, precisely, neural scanning is or is not capable of you will find yourself quite surprised at just how many of these folks fall by the wayside.

Nobody has been suggesting brain activity is disassociated from experience. That we can produce a stupidly unintelligible neural scan and associate it with some variety of external behavior is very old news (like I said…the same thing appeared years ago).

Not to mention that the mere capacity to relate specific neural activity to specific external activity is…at best…mundane. To begin with…any one of the trillions of creatures swarming this planet processes visual activity. It is hardly representative of highest order primate identity (‘us’ being the only thing we know of in possession of that which we call consciousness). Secondly…all that indicates is that somewhere in the physiology of the brain visual processing is translated into some manner of coherent neural activity (that can then be translated back into some vague representation of what is being processed). The relevant point is how does that specific neural activity relate to the conscious experience of the individual in question. Merely asserting that ‘neural activity IS consciousness’ (which is what invariably happens here) is as worthless as the words it is written with.

As has been quite clearly established…given the fact that nobody has any idea of the specific relationship between consciousness and the brain…and the fact that modularity of mind is anything but resolved…we’ll just have to conclude that the question of what that blurry image actually represents will also remain unresolved.

Unless of course you, or anyone else here, wants to answer those questions I’ve dropped innumerable times now. So far, everyone has avoided them like the plague.

The issue is the moronic claims that are consistently being made about a) the current capabilities of neural scanning b) the potential capabilities of neural scanning (“we can generate neural scans of parrots that look like month-old road kill now so just imagine what we’ll be able to do in the future”…wow…bare assertions or bust!) and c) what is actually understood about how the brain produces consciousness.

The other issue is what actually does constitute human behavior / consciousness and to what degree neural scanning can adjudicate these phenomenon.

Pixy (and his groupies)…constantly claims that mind is what the brain does. Behavior. But Pixy carefully avoids ever presenting a comprehensive list of what he actually means by the word ‘behavior.’ A minor oversight no doubt. Sometime in the next thousand years, in principle, it will appear.

As Larry quite accurately pointed out…these threads are riddled with nonsense and woo… and this time it’s all coming from the skeptics. Thus…true believers.

…and precisely where did I indicate that I had positive (definitive) evidence of consciousness outside the brain? If you take the time to read what I wrote…and take the time to think on it for more than three seconds…you will realize that definitive scientific adjudication is NOT a prerequisite for something to qualify as evidence.

Why that is indisputably the case should be obvious to anyone with any more than a fraction of a brain.

I believe the qualification stands. If you take issue with the measuring devices already developed or being theoretically plausible then tell us why. If the sensations in the brain are not information thus cannot be measured I would like to hear how you know that. But I suppose the opposite can be asked: If we cannot measure it with a degree of fidelity, how can we be sure of our measurements? The answer to that is simple enough and I'll go back to the parrot.

You took issue with the images fidelity, with how resolved it was. If the image was all you had, and we were not discussing the process and the theory of how the machine worked then you would have a point worth discussing, but you haven't said anything about that, you've attacked the picture itself and its quality.

If your concerns are on the fidelity of the picture then you have to admit that the picture is a result of measuring the sensation of the image as the brain activity is working with it.

If your concerns may be that the image isn't just unresolved but we are supposing a gestalt for instance I don't think anyone would disagree. I would think that most all of us agree that our sensations are gestalts elicited from brain activity anyways. The fact that the output was considerably informational (it would have to be since its an output, one determined from measured brain activity) then it would have to be true that the brain activity is informational in that experience too.

What the image really shows is that we are able to measure a complex information process from brain activity as it elicits a sensation of an image. That means sensations are measurable, detectable, and thus are no longer abstract.

Now, as you have said and I agree, no one really has a consensus on what consciousness is. However since evidence has shown that sensations are measurable and detectable, if we want to make sensations a fundamental property of consciousness then we would have to agree that consciousness must also be measurable and detectable. The other options would be to disassociate sensation from our definition of consciousness, letting that go to the brain activity camp (assuming dualism is being argued here; if we're supposing monism then consciousness is not fundamental and instead epiphenomenal which makes consciousness necessarily measurable anyways. This is what Koch and Tononi have tried to model. This also makes it physical with respect to information theory).

But you must agree to this as you've said this is mundane. Your issue was with how this processing relates to the experience. The answer would be that it's causally related. This is adjudicated by experiments such as the parrot image. To reiterate, claiming that its fidelity is poor has no relationship to the fact that it demonstrates a causal relationship between the processing and an informational sensation. At this point you would have to make a positive claim that any conscious experience must still be abstract regardless of this evidence and since you have not actually provided that then there is no ability to even suppose sensations to be anything but informational. In laymans terms: Saying that experiences are not a part of consciousness means you have to also show that consciousness is something else too. You haven't even done that, you've begged that this must be the case. I cannot fathom why you do not realize this. As far as we can tell, if consciousness exists as an abstraction, then sensations are no longer a part of consciousness. That's what the evidence adjudicates. Maybe this means that consciousness as an abstraction doesn't exist and is instead a placeholder word for the brain processing, and in our ignorance philosophical ideas have supposed incorrect properties to consciousness and experiences. We have done so before with theories such as phlogiston, maybe we're doing that with consciousness too.

Also I put (positive) in parenthesis because I wanted to say just the word "evidence" however I wanted to also see if you had specifically positive evidence. Sorry if you felt like I was assuming you had already presented specifically positive evidence.

 

[Nonpareil]

Have you even considered those areas where materialism is weak? For example, time.

Not weak. Time is a dimension. Its existence is not a problem for a materialistic universe.

Or having to lump energy and fields into the materialism basket, even though those "things" aren't matter.

Not weak. Properties of matter are not a problem for a materialistic universe.

Or, perhaps the idea of relationships between material objects - should those be considered material too, or are those relationships something else altogether?

Information has already been discussed in this thread. And no, it's not a problem for a materialistic model either.

There’s lots of evidence. It simply can’t be scientifically adjudicated.

Then it's not evidence.

Just like the vast majority of what goes on inside your head cannot be scientifically adjudicated.

Your ignorance is not a compelling argument.

…but, of course, that’s just me.

Yep. Because you are being willfully obtuse.

Nobody has been suggesting brain activity is disassociated from experience.

Then it can be measured, quanitified, and objectively examined, and your entire argument is moot. Literally all you can do after saying this is hide in the areas where practice has not yet caught up with theory and say "nuh-uh, you can't catch me here!", constantly dancing back further as the areas of ignorance are removed.

It is hardly representative of highest order primate identity (‘us’ being the only thing we know of in possession of that which we call consciousness).

If you discount the fact that animals are conscious, yes.

So basically, if you're wrong.

Secondly…all that indicates is that somewhere in the physiology of the brain visual processing is translated into some manner of coherent neural activity (that can then be translated back into some vague representation of what is being processed).

And again, you contradict yourself. If this happens, then we have scientifically adjudicated evidence.

The relevant point is how does that specific neural activity relate to the conscious experience of the individual in question. Merely asserting that ‘neural activity IS consciousness’ (which is what invariably happens here) is as worthless as the words it is written with.

The hard problem is nonsense. Literally every piece of evidence we have - the evidence which you have admitted exists - points to the fact that, yes, neural activity is consciousness.

If you want to say that it isn't, produce your evidence.

Hint: Your disbelief is not evidence.

But Pixy carefully avoids ever presenting a comprehensive list of what he actually means by the word ‘behavior.’

"Produce something that you haven't ever claimed to have or your argument is moot" is not particularly compelling.

As Larry quite accurately pointed out…these threads are riddled with nonsense and woo… and this time it’s all coming from the skeptics. Thus…true believers.

Still waiting for evidence of consciousness outside the brain.

…and precisely where did I indicate that I had positive (definitive) evidence of consciousness outside the brain?

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

Stop dancing.

You can’t definitively dismiss the evidence

True, because there isn't any to dismiss.

If you take the time to read what I wrote…and take the time to think on it for more than three seconds…you will realize that definitive scientific adjudication is NOT a prerequisite for something to qualify as evidence.

Your definition of "evidence" is lacking.

All you have to do is look ( http://www.near-death.com/notable.html ). You can claim all you want that none of the examples listed on that page (and there are thousands of others) can be substantiated. But that is not what I said….was it. The simple fact is, they can’t prove they happened, and you can’t prove they didn’t.

Not evidence.

…and, since perception and the abstract mind are, by default, the primary ontological reality (because these are the only things we actually experience)…claims of personal experience take precedence over any claims to the contrary barring explicit evidence of their duplicity.

Absolutely, unequivocally wrong.

As you have always been.

 

[tsig]

It strikes me as a prohibition against intellectual musings, the very thing I enjoy. That's what cast it in a religious light for me. The idea of the sacrosanct and the certain, in contrast to the exercise embodied in discussing the issues, seeing what nuances might emerge, what paths could be followed.

No one is prohibiting you, they are disagreeing with you.

You keep using words that imply that saying that reality is real is a religious statement, why do you do that?

 

[JoeMorgue]

Are people getting paid by the ellipse around here and not telling me?

 

[Nonpareil]

So prove that science is the only valid epistemology.

It works.

Prove that yours does the same.

 

[tsig]

begging the question - you are beginning with the conclusion you are trying to reach

regarding immaterial consciousness - I got me some that going right now. I'm looking out my window, and the clouds and trees are experienced in my awareness without separation, I and content of experience are not separate, and this is what the poets call love, and most humans have experienced love at some point in their lives, a connectivity, the intimacy of reality in awareness.

A purely human emotion produced by electro-chemical reactions in your brain triggered by favorable stimuli. Why should we think it has any cosmic significance?

I am deliberately avoiding jokes about brainlessness.

 

[annnnoid]

It works.

Prove that yours does the same.

…is it really necessary to argue such absurdities???

Tell me Nonpareil…what percentage of the population who are alive on this planet or who ever have been can be said to explicitly understand what is referred to as the epistemology of science?

I would say that 1% would be a high estimate…but lets go way out on a limb and assume that upwards of 10% of the folks who are alive on this planet are functionally familiar with scientific epistemology.

Are we supposed to conclude that the other 90% are incoherent failures (and if you are actually going to argue such garbage…do make at least some effort to support it with evidence)???

…and are we supposed to conclude that the 10% who do have scientific experience actually apply this scientific epistemology to dealing with their everyday life (I have a direct relative who’s a physics prof. at Cambridge…he would find this idea beyond laughable)???

…and if you are actually going to insist on defending these nonsensical positions…then answer the question you avoided (once again).

What specific varieties of science epistemology do you reference when you wake in the morning and every moment thereafter until you fall asleep.

Pixy ran away from the question…are you going to run away as well?

 

[Belz...]

…is it really necessary to argue such absurdities???

Tell me Nonpareil…what percentage of the population who are alive on this planet or who ever have been can be said to explicitly understand what is referred to as the epistemology of science?

That group would not include you, it seems.

I wish you could filter out the incredulity in your posts, but then there'd be nothing left.

 

[PixyMisa]

…is it really necessary to argue such absurdities???

Science works. Nothing else does. Case closed.

 

[Nonpareil]

…is it really necessary to argue such absurdities???

If you want to try and present anecdotes as evidence, yes, you do have to show that they are valid.

It's not a complicated concept.

What specific varieties of science epistemology do you reference when you wake in the morning and every moment thereafter until you fall asleep.

Pixy ran away from the question…are you going to run away as well?

It's not running away if the question is irrelevant, poorly-phrased nonsense.

It's just refusing to waste any more of our time than necessary on your purposefully obtuse ramblings.