Materialism - Devastator of Scientific Method! / Observer Delusion

[tsig]

Nearly 40k posts and this is the best you can do?! Dearie me!

Ah, I get it. Your memeplex is still running 1.0. That's the version that came out when Derek Parfit first published Reasons and Persons back in the mid 80s.

It would write to him and say - "OK, Mr Parfit, if there's no persisting self then who wrote your book, eh? Gotcha there, haven't I?"

What version is your memeplex running? It seems your imaginary persisting self gets irritated when asked a question, how can that be?

Since you? are posting here i will direct my questions to you and not Mr. Parfit.

 

[JoeMorgue]

I exist in a matrix. The nature of that matrix is debateable, but my existence is not.

Well that's rather self aggrandizing, that idea that (g)you are so vitally important that your own existence is beyond question and free of the "X can't prove itself" clause but the base existence of the entire rest of the universe isn't.

Sense of self is no more obvious or self proving then reality.

 

[BadBoy]

This is always asserted as if it's self-evidently true, but is it? Are people happier today than they were during the pre-agricultural era? Are peoples' lives improved while living under the existential threat of near-total/total destruction of all life on Earth through their own actions (e.g., nuclear war/ runaway global warming)? Was your life improved if you were one of the countless millions killed in the technologically advanced wars of the 20th century?

Here's an excerpt from an interesting article:

"The advent of agriculture, for example, increased the collective power of humankind by several orders of magnitude. Yet it did not necessarily improve the lot of the individual. For millions of years, human bodies and minds were adapted to running after gazelles, climbing trees to pick apples, and sniffing here and there in search of mushrooms. Peasant life, in contrast, included long hours of agricultural drudgery: ploughing, weeding, harvesting and carrying water buckets from the river. Such a lifestyle was harmful to human backs, knees and joints, and numbing to the human mind.

In return for all this hard work, peasants usually had a worse diet than hunter-gatherers, and suffered more from malnutrition and starvation. Their crowded settlements became hotbeds for new infectious diseases, most of which originated in domesticated farm animals. Agriculture also opened the way for social stratification, exploitation and possibly patriarchy. From the viewpoint of individual happiness, the "agricultural revolution" was, in the words of the scientist Jared Diamond, "the worst mistake in the history of the human race".
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/05/were-we-happier-in-the-stone-age

But I don't want to derail this thread on materialism causing the end of science. If Prestige wants to defend his assertion, I'll start a new thread.

Yes, sometimes I wonder if living in a long house someplace in a rain forest would be a better life (as long as you don't get sick). No work and worry about paying off a mortgage, just doing Art and going on hunting outings out with the boyz.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Yes, sometimes I wonder if living in a long house someplace in a rain forest would be a better life (as long as you don't get sick). No work and worry about paying off a mortgage, just doing Art and going on hunting outings out with the boyz.

That's like saying "Yes, sometimes I wonder if living on the surface of the sun would be a better life (as long as you don't burn to death.)"

The Noble Savage is one of the worst myths in human history.

 

[BadBoy]

That's like saying "Yes, sometimes I wonder if living on the surface of the sun would be a better life (as long as you don't burn to death.)"

The Noble Savage is one of the worst myths in human history.

lol. Maybe.... Something has to be better than chasing the dollar all day though.

Perhaps if a person is lucky enough and intelligent enough to get by on just being an artist or intellectual of some sort. But maybe it's all he same anyway.

 

[Pixel42]

Yes, sometimes I wonder if living in a long house someplace in a rain forest would be a better life (as long as you don't get sick). No work and worry about paying off a mortgage, just doing Art and going on hunting outings out with the boyz.

It's an easier choice for a woman. Having a baby a year from puberty onwards and watching most of them die before dying in childbirth before I'm 35 does not appeal.

 

[asydhouse]

You agree that if consciousness is purely a brain phenomenon then this must indicate a selfless reality?

I don't agree with this. The brain gives rise to consciousness. The consciousness in each brain is an entity with it's locality in 4D space-time completely distinct from all other physical phenomena. My consciousness is in my head, not in that puddle over there, or that tree, and certainly not in the cat on my lap.

Our sense of self may be an illusion, as currently concluded from certain experimental results, but it is an illusion only in the sense that there is no object such as a soul, which in itself is a very materialistic concept, as it is some sort of token which can be saved or lost, and is regarded as a distinct piece of something which passes into and out of physical bodies without being affected or altered. This lack of a soul in no way alters the experience of being alive. Being alive is no illusion. Likewise my sense of self is unaltered by changing the concept of what my self actually is: an ephemeral phenomenon which is an emergent property of the gestalt of all the subsystems operating in my brain and body. In that sense, I am still myself, just as a drop of my blood, composed of atoms which have given rise to molecules, is still a part of my body (or was until extruded from a pinprick). It all depends on how you look at "illusion". Is a rainbow an illusion?

So what if we have to give up the illusion of being in control, the master of our existence? We have given up thinking we are the purpose of existence at the centre of the universe. It's just another step along that same road of living in the real universe. Note: "living in the real".

So, everything is just happening, observed by no one. This is as near as we can get to a True statement here, as opposed to a socially useful one. Then it seems reasonable to me that our sense of perspective, of things being near or far, is just an artifact of evolution.

Your logic here steps over a gaping hole in your reasoning. There is no earthly reason that distance vanishes just because your sense of yourself is generated by your particular brain. My brain and yours are located at different coordinates in space-time. Likewise different parts of my brain are in different parts of my skull, otherwise it couldn't function.

If anything, the restriction of a mind to the brain that generates it is the very antithesis of the notion that our selves could be anything but separate!

Your "seems obvious" is a hole you need to fill with reasoning. I predict that you will be unable to do that.

Yes. I'd say to a degree. Mathematical principles shouldn't be under any threat, for example. But the sheer weight of value given by scientists and others to method must be weakened by the reality that there isn't actually a subject, an observer.

Since the whole point of scientific method is to remove the observer from influencing or biasing the results of experiment, your statement here is bizarre!

How about we start from here? Thanks for your reply BTW

Nick

Indeed.

 

[asydhouse]

OK. You're definitely conflating epistemology and ontology. Whether someone believes in Cartesian dualism or a strictly monist materialism says nothing about the validity of scientific realism or antirealism. You can be a monist who accepts, say, Daniel Dennett's "Multiple Drafts Model" and still believe in scientific realism. Such a person would say that while the "Mind's Eye" is indeed an illusion it is nevertheless an emergent property of real material things: namely neurons, and these real entities provide a (for the most part) faithfully recreated depiction of how the universe really is. It is therefore incumbent on us to understand scientific theories to be talking about real things. I myself am example of such a materialist scientific realist, though I'm far more certain of my materialism than my realism.

Now, even if I were to concede the point that monism/materialism is difficult (though not impossible) to reconcile with scientific realism, and so scientific antirealism is more likely true this would still not "devastate" the scientific method as you have outlined in your OP. In such a scenario we'd simply reinterpret the results of said method as being an approximation or construct of reality. The scientific method would still be useful even if we started to understand science as an invention of models rather than the discovery of truth since, you know, it seems to work pretty damn well. Atomic theory works and its predictive power is unmatched no matter if "atoms" are actually real.

Indeed!

I am experiencing being alive. It doesn't really matter to me whether the medium of my experience is this evolved body mind or some kind of quantum computer a la The Matrix.

Models is all we've got, really (that word keeps cropping up, do you notice?). Scientific models map onto greater complexity in the universe than the models developed by untutored/inexperienced single people, or schools of ignorant people.

That's why we have developed scientific method! To create more accurate models of the universe and its shenanigans than we could otherwise achieve through our simple "revelations" and "inspirations". A single paranoid schizophrenic's models of reality are less reliable than the reasoned tree of knowledge we have built using science.

But it's all only models.

 

[asydhouse]

Yes, we use double blind studies and look for reproducibility of results, ideally from different researchers. We do this to try and remove subjective bias.

It's great, but the next layer of bias that will need to be assessed and dealt with is now on the horizon. And it's not so subjective, more the opposite. From evolutionary biology & psychology we learn of instinct blindness. The fact that human brains developed instinctual reactions to certain stimuli through selection pressure, over a long period of time, means two things. 1) they're pretty much all the same, and (2) their perceptual and cognitive systems are fundamentally instinctual, though mental capacities to override instinct have more recently emerged.



Consider separation. Seems pretty reasonable, huh? I mean I'm here and well, the laptop is just there. Oh, the wall's over there. Until we remove the subject, I, out of the scenario. Now everything is just object. Everything looks the same but the sense of hard boundaries is dispersing. It's more like a TV screen. Now, a masked gunman has just walked into the room! Ah good, hard boundaries again, instinctual responses override this non-dual spaciness. Glad I learned to fight. That's him dealt with. You get the idea?

Perception, distance - I mean they look real. And in any situation where the brain's instinctual response to danger (or other favoured stimuli) is triggered they will seem real as hell. But that guy measuring the distance between those two points, well that's just an action taking place! Where's the real significance?

You seem to think that the universe must have significance, or it's not worth the trouble of existing. Have you never achieved a state of bliss where simply being was sufficient in itself? The puritan bias in western/anglocentric culture is pervasive, but not a necessary prerequisite for having a successful and fulfilling life.

The significance of scientific method is weakened when the illusion of there existing an observer is seen through. Great, guys. We measured the distance and checked the time. And now, er, we know more about relationships within an erroneous perception of space. Uhm, great.

For tasks with evolutionarily-derived significance, staying alive, reproducing, of course science is wonderful. Determining truth... well maybe. Maybe not.

There is nothing erroneous in describing the distribution of matter in space-time. Humans see a small part of the spectrum of electromagnetic wavelengths. The fact that the universe would look different to us if we saw more of it doesn't change the fact that we have been able to understand the phenomenon and describe it correctly, and demonstrate its existence.

You have an exaggerated attachment to "significance" and "truth". It's a block that you are too attached to, and it's holding you down. We live in the world, and we have expanded our realm of activity through science and consequent technology. Our world will continue to change as more technology and science occur through time. Your attachment to old-fashioned ideas and your conflation of our sense of self (or mind's "I") with falsehood are causing short circuiting in your reasoning, to which you would seem to be blinded.

An illusion is not a falsehood. The falsehood would be in the conclusions drawn, not in the illusion. Science is the method for drawing sound conclusions, provisional until further evidence requires remodelling. Illusory "I" or not, that is still the case.

 

[TheAdversary]

'Cogito ergo sum.

I exist in a matrix. The nature of that matrix is debateable, but my existence is not.'

This. You can be sceptical of everything, but there must at least be something that is sceptical, that 'does' the scepticism. This is more
certain than the existence of a world, if you allow scepticism to go far enough.

 

[Dancing David]

Yes, sometimes I wonder if living in a long house someplace in a rain forest would be a better life (as long as you don't get sick). No work and worry about paying off a mortgage, just doing Art and going on hunting outings out with the boyz.

I don't know, do you have a good friend who pulls teeth and are they good at it?

 

[The Man]

I agree. The neurological activity that creates the illusion is valid. How could it be otherwise, it's just neurological activity? I totally agree. But this does not mean that the illusion created by the activity is valid for all contexts to which it might be applied.

Ah so it can be valid for some "contexts to which it might be applied" but not for others. So which contexts specifically are the ones that are "valid"?

Because what we're talking about here is neurological activity which suggests the presence of something that simply isn't there. And then proceeds to build behaviour on this unexamined assumption. There's nothing wrong with it. Given the restrictions of a monist system it can't get the job done any other way. But simply because something is useful and highly functional within certain parameters does not make it real.

Again we do examine the assumption and your own personal denial of your sense of self can have no validity as you explicitly rely upon that very sense of self to make that denial. I have to say that this aspect is starting to give me some very serious concurs about the underlying nature of your explicitly contradictory denial of yourself.

If I hand you a piece of paper which reads "There's an ogre in the basement. Don't go there!" - the paper is real. The neurological activity which created the thought about an ogre, and which then allowed it to be translated onto paper is real. The neurological activity in your brain which allowed you to interpret and understand the piece of paper is real. But this doesn't mean that the ogre is necessarily real. To find that out you'll have to go down to the basement yourself.

Apparently you still don't understand or just want to deny that you are that ogre and you live in that basement. So when the ogre (you) tells you "ain't nobody down here but us chickens" it is just you lying to yourself. As a result you get self-contradictory assertions of your observation that you're not an observer, the experience of not being an experiencer and you telling yourself you have no self.

Now as a conglomeration of often competing and opposing impulses some levels of contradictions are to be expected. However that doesn't change the fact that a contradiction is a statement that is always false regardless of the truth value of its components.

As to the analogy I was thinking of before a corporation and board of directors can act as whole even while parts of it might even oppose each other. The board might not always come to unanimity, a consensus or even a quorum but the various individual sub-divisions still proceed upon their latest business model or corporate strategy.

 

[Nick227]

What is the distinction between the physical self and the mental self? What part of the mental self is not physical?

The Observer.

 

[Nick227]

Suppose I were that man in the pipe, and you were there with me. Because your mental model is more complete and more accurate (you know about and can make use of the opening behind us), you would be able to amaze me with your ability to disappear and reappear at will. Simply take a step backward, and I could no longer see your or imagine where you might have gone.

I didn't say a body disappears

 

[Nick227]

What version is your memeplex running?

Rogue memeplex 1.0. It's an open source project examining possibilities to reconfigure human conceptual self.

 

[Nick227]

Ah so it can be valid for some "contexts to which it might be applied" but not for others. So which contexts specifically are the ones that are "valid"?

Social, sexual, communication generally. Just not so handy for researching the issue of consciousness.

Again we do examine the assumption and your own personal denial of your sense of self can have no validity as you explicitly rely upon that very sense of self to make that denial.

If you like that back door, then take it. I'm not stopping you. As I said to tsig, it's been used by many since at least Parfit.

Apparently you still don't understand or just want to deny that you are that ogre and you live in that basement. So when the ogre (you) tells you "ain't nobody down here but us chickens" it is just you lying to yourself. As a result you get self-contradictory assertions of your observation that you're not an observer, the experience of not being an experiencer and you telling yourself you have no self.

Now as a conglomeration of often competing and opposing impulses some levels of contradictions are to be expected. However that doesn't change the fact that a contradiction is a statement that is always false regardless of the truth value of its components.

Again, if you want the back door then for sure just use it. There are plenty of back doors.

As to the analogy I was thinking of before a corporation and board of directors can act as whole even while parts of it might even oppose each other. The board might not always come to unanimity, a consensus or even a quorum but the various individual sub-divisions still proceed upon their latest business model or corporate strategy.

You're saying the board can act as a whole, even though the members dont'? I don't really follow.

 

[Kid Eager]

Nope. Still no invalidation of the scientific method. I'll check again in a couple of days.

 

[Nick227]

Nick, is your point that without an observer there is no way to sift through the good/bad evidence that any basic science requires you to do? Something along those lines?

I don't think so. My original point was that we need to factor in the reality that there is actually no observer when undertaking science **. But really the thread is just a general exploration of this issue for me.

There don't seem to me to be so many people who can ask "good questions," with a couple of exceptions. So it seems to drift off into the usual "if there's no observer then who's writing this post?" - kind of thing. Be great to find a forum where people have already grasped the core point and are now looking at implications. But maybe that's not the kind of thing you do when you've grasped the core point.

** eta: plus a bid of evol psych of course

 

[Nick227]

There is nothing erroneous in describing the distribution of matter in space-time. Humans see a small part of the spectrum of electromagnetic wavelengths. The fact that the universe would look different to us if we saw more of it doesn't change the fact that we have been able to understand the phenomenon and describe it correctly, and demonstrate its existence.

Oh absolutely. We know a lot about an emergent workspace that developed, so to speak, to help primates and hunter-gatherers have sex with each other and kill one other on a regular basis. Well done, science. That's really great.

You have an exaggerated attachment to "significance" and "truth".

I certainly have an attachment to truth. Meaning and significance don't factor so highly, but sure a little here and there doesn't hurt.

 

[LarryS]

I don't think so. My original point was that we need to factor in the reality that there is actually no observer when undertaking science **. But really the thread is just a general exploration of this issue for me.

There don't seem to me to be so many people who can ask "good questions," with a couple of exceptions. So it seems to drift off into the usual "if there's no observer then who's writing this post?" - kind of thing. Be great to find a forum where people have already grasped the core point and are now looking at implications. But maybe that's not the kind of thing you do when you've grasped the core point.

** eta: plus a bid of evol psych of course

re the questions like "if there's no observer then who's writing this post?" . . . these can all be answered via neurological activity. IOW, all objective human behavior can be explained by objectifying the mind as a gaggle of firing neurons.
However, if we reduce the mind to an object, a collection of firing neurons, can we have a single subject or observer? I don't see how.