Materialism - Devastator of Scientific Method! / Observer Delusion

[Fudbucker]

'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.

I agree. It's one thing to be skeptical about the nature of reality, but to be skeptical of one's own existence doesn't seem logically possible. I suppose I could tell a story about how I'm a figment of someone else's imagination, and my sense of sense (and consciousness and experiences) aren't really happening to me, but it wouldn't be very convincing and would beg a lot of questions.

 

[Myriad]

I didn't say a body disappears

What you did say was that your audience here (presumably including myself) is comparable to a person standing in a pipe looking one direction who is too stupid or too unobservant to turn around and notice that the pipe also extends in the other direction. That variety of ad hominem was kind of adorable when Plato wrote about it, but it hasn't worn well over the ensuing few thousand years.

Specifically, no one has returned from the open daylight that supposedly exists above Plato's Cave carrying some of the three-dimensional wonders that one could presumably find there. (A rock or pine cone would do, for people who have only ever had shadows on the cave wall to look at.) No one has shown how, once unchained, they can go in front of the fire and take control of the shadows or force the mysterious actors casting the shadows to reveal themselves. No one who claims to be unchained seems to be able to move in any way that this benighted chained mind cannot.

Meanwhile, the very people that Plato was mocking with his famous allegory, the empiricists who Plato described as taking pride in being able to predict the appearances of the mere shadows, have studied and characterized and modeled "shadows" that Plato hadn't the slightest trace of a clue about, like oxygen, combustion, metabolism, germs and their role in disease, genetics, galaxies, electricity, the periodic table, the equations of light, digital computing, evolution, gravity, relativity, the deep cosmos, anesthesia, neuroscience, embryogenesis, and quantum mechanics. The same silly **** who thought studying the natural world was like being chained in a cave looking at shadows, also thought the stars were lights mounted on a hollow sphere. Ironic, eh?

Which is why I ask, jumping forward in time from Plato's Cave to return to Nick's Sewer: What is your superior understanding of the metaphorical pipe behind us, the understanding that all the rest of us are too chained up in perceptual illusions to grasp, actually useful for? What wonders from outside the cave the other side of the sewer can you show us?

 

[BadBoy]

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.

I don't see the importance of the observer in the sense that what really matters is what happens after the observer has observed an event. Like a machine, or a computer program that only ever takes input but never ever has any output is pointless.

Whatever the observer actually is, is irrelevant in my view. It is what happens next based on the observation that counts. Input -> compute -> output. If the output contributes and continues to positively contribute to the current state of being then the idea of the observer not being a real material thing is irrelevant.

Science would be pointless if the knowledge acquired wasn't used for anything at all, for ever and ever. A bit like the Republican party, or philosophy.

 

[Nick227]

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.

Absolutely correct.

The Observer emerges at a higher level of abstraction than the neural level. At what Dennett calls the Intentional Stance. But this does not, of itself, give it ontological validity.

 

[Nick227]

What you did say was that your audience here (presumably including myself) is comparable to a person standing in a pipe looking one direction who is too stupid or too unobservant to turn around and notice that the pipe also extends in the other direction. That variety of ad hominem was kind of adorable when Plato wrote about it, but it hasn't worn well over the ensuing few thousand years.

Intelligence has nothing to do with it. Unobservance possibly. But if scientists applied as much perseverance and rigour to investigating whether their sense of "I" is real, as they do to investigating the world around them, then consciousness research for one would be moving a lot faster. (And Dave Chalmers and Giulio Tononi would have to find a new job)

 

[Nick227]

Specifically, no one has returned from the open daylight that supposedly exists above Plato's Cave carrying some of the three-dimensional wonders that one could presumably find there. (A rock or pine cone would do, for people who have only ever had shadows on the cave wall to look at.) No one has shown how, once unchained, they can go in front of the fire and take control of the shadows or force the mysterious actors casting the shadows to reveal themselves. No one who claims to be unchained seems to be able to move in any way that this benighted chained mind cannot.

Plato's Cave is also commencing from an unexamined assumption - that there's an observer in the cave.

Meanwhile, the very people that Plato was mocking with his famous allegory, the empiricists who Plato described as taking pride in being able to predict the appearances of the mere shadows, have studied and characterized and modeled "shadows" that Plato hadn't the slightest trace of a clue about, like oxygen, combustion, metabolism, germs and their role in disease, genetics, galaxies, electricity, the periodic table, the equations of light, digital computing, evolution, gravity, relativity, the deep cosmos, anesthesia, neuroscience, embryogenesis, and quantum mechanics. The same silly **** who thought studying the natural world was like being chained in a cave looking at shadows, also thought the stars were lights mounted on a hollow sphere. Ironic, eh?

Well, that's certainly a point worth making. But it would have been better to make it before Evolutionary Psychology came along. Now the reality is that we can frame much of science as...

...understanding the inner dynamics of an emergent 4D spacetime workspace that developed to help primates and hunter-gatherers have sex with each other and kill one other on a regular basis...

Put like that it doesn't really sound so great, does it? Certain areas of physics aside, it could mean that all sciences are actually social sciences

 

[Kid Eager]

Plato's Cave is also commencing from an unexamined assumption - that there's an observer in the cave.



Well, that's certainly a point worth making. But it would have been better to make it before Evolutionary Psychology came along. Now the reality is that we can frame much of science as...

...understanding the inner dynamics of an emergent 4D spacetime workspace that developed to help primates and hunter-gatherers have sex with each other and kill one other on a regular basis...

Put like that it doesn't really sound so great, does it? Certain areas of physics aside, it could mean that all sciences are actually social sciences

Could, but doesn't. Chemistry would be most amused.

 

[Myriad]

Plato's Cave is also commencing from an unexamined assumption - that there's an observer in the cave.

So is Nick's Sewer. There's an observer in the pipe. Yet you brought it up anyhow.

Well, that's certainly a point worth making. But it would have been better to make it before Evolutionary Psychology came along. Now the reality is that we can frame much of science as...

...understanding the inner dynamics of an emergent 4D spacetime workspace that developed to help primates and hunter-gatherers have sex with each other and kill one other on a regular basis...

Put like that it doesn't really sound so great, does it? Certain areas of physics aside, it could mean that all sciences are actually social sciences

Put like that, it's marvelous! Capabilities that evolved to help primates compete and reproduce with one another (and also negotiate the many hazards and opportunities of the rest of the natural world, don't forget that part), when employed under the discipline of science, also work to comprehend the cosmos in ways that let us predict its behavior and manipulate outcomes. The connection, that the ambitious primate and the scientist have in common, is the utility of modeling the world. There would be no such utility if either the world, the models, or the organism doing the modeling weren't real.

So... what about the very important question in my last paragraph? What useful things do you find on the other side of the sewer pipe? What does your preferred model work better for?

 

[Nick227]

So... what about the very important question in my last paragraph? What useful things do you find on the other side of the sewer pipe? What does your preferred model work better for?

Knowing who you actually are.

As opposed to going through life merely responding to the cues of what is, essentially, a parasitic memeplex.

Red pill... Blue pill ?

 

[Myriad]

Knowing who you actually are.

As opposed to going through life merely responding to the cues of what is, essentially, a parasitic memeplex.

Red pill... Blue pill ?

Oh, you mean zazen. Or some similar no-memeplexes memeplex. (Embrace that contradiction and you will be enlightened!) Fun stuff.

However, strict materialism, which is the premise of your OP, requires recognizing and acknowledging that responding in accordance with internal state and external perturbations, aka computation, is what life is and does. Fortunately, there's nothing "merely" about it.

Keep in mind: "Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water."

 

[Myriad]

Here's a link to an essay I posted in a thread titled "The Real You" a few years ago. Slightly different starting point, but it covers the materialistic perspective on "who you actually are" pretty well.

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=8956859#post8956859

 

[The Man]

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

OK so "valid" for "communication generally", which would include internal communication and thus important for "researching the issue of consciousness".

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.

"back door"?!?! The assertion that the assumption is "unexamined" has been your front and apparently only door.

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

Nope, a contradiction doesn't gian validity through the back door anymore than it does through front. Nor does the assertion the assumption is "unexamined" gain validity just because you want to call the result of an examination a "back door".

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

Yep, for a simple majority dissenting members are still bound by that majority decision. As an example the Supreme Court of the United States the dissenting members will issue a dissenting opinion but it is still the majority opinion that sets legally binding precedence.

 

[Nick227]

OK so "valid" for "communication generally", which would include internal communication and thus important for "researching the issue of consciousness".

No, for communicating about the results of research. And you don't absolutely need to use "I" for this, it's just that this is the social convention.

You don't need an "I" to do any research, just as well really! The only issue comes when formulating experimentation and interpreting subsequent data. If you actually believe that there really is someone experiencing life, then you can wrap yourself in all sorts of knots here.

Just take a look at the original abstract for Integrated Information Theory if you don't believe me. Tononi starts from completely unexamined assumptions and then proceeds to build a whole theoretical framework upon them.

It's rather as if Newton commenced his theory of gravitation by stating... "Well, of course, we all know that the Jolly Green Giant grows trees and then drops apples from them when he knows they're ready. Let's look at how he does this."

"back door"?!?! The assertion that the assumption is "unexamined" has been your front and apparently only door.

The back door is not to do with the unexamination. The back door is to try and reject the proposition of a selfless reality by saying "well, if there's no one there, then who's proposing such a thing?!"

 

[Nick227]

Yep, for a simple majority dissenting members are still bound by that majority decision.

OK, I've got you. So what's the significance here?

 

[Nick227]

Keep in mind: "Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water."

Chopping and carrying is one thing. Trying to work out how consciousness arises is quite another. Knowing the truth of a selfless reality inevitably deeply affects the latter.

 

[MRC_Hans]

Chopping and carrying is one thing. Trying to work out how consciousness arises is quite another. Knowing the truth of a selfless reality inevitably deeply affects the latter.

OK, Nick227. Have dropped in on this thread on occasion, for some time now.

Still waiting for you to make some sense.

Not holding breath.

Hans

 

[The Man]

No, for communicating about the results of research. And you don't absolutely need to use "I" for this, it's just that this is the social convention.

OK so now not valid for communication generally and apparently not even necessarily valid for "communicating about the results of research". Apparently internal communication doesn't even enter the subject of consciousness for you.

You don't need an "I" to do any research, just as well really! The only issue comes when formulating experimentation and interpreting subsequent data. If you actually believe that there really is someone experiencing life, then you can wrap yourself in all sorts of knots here.

Evidently one can "wrap yourself in all sorts of knots here." even if they believe that there really isn't "someone experiencing life"

Just take a look at the original abstract for Integrated Information Theory if you don't believe me. Tononi starts from completely unexamined assumptions and then proceeds to build a whole theoretical framework upon them.

Every consistent theory has assumptions or axioms that can neither be proven nor disproven within that theory. See Gödel's incompleteness theorems...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel's_incompleteness_theorems

While inconsistent theories are just that, self-inconsistent and/or generally inconsistent. If for some reason you prefer the latter (inconsistent) to the former (incomplete) then just own it and revel in that inconsistency. The thing is it can even be you doing that revelling regardless of even if there is a "you". That's fun and tragedy of inconsistency, while you can escape you, you still can't.

It's rather as if Newton commenced his theory of gravitation by stating... "Well, of course, we all know that the Jolly Green Giant grows trees and then drops apples from them when he knows they're ready. Let's look at how he does this."

Someone needs to work on their analogies, that the apples falls still needs an explanation for how it falls, not who grew it or dropped it. Perhaps this is part of your difficulty, looking for some memes to grow or drop in a sense of self as opposed to just how that sense of self and the internal communication involved actually, in terms of nurology and information, works.

The back door is not to do with the unexamination. The back door is to try and reject the proposition of a selfless reality by saying "well, if there's no one there, then who's proposing such a thing?!"

So again if you examine the assumption and conclude that an "I" is valid then it is just a back door. Again it has everything to do with examining the assumption of an "I" and the results of that examination, just calling it a "back door" doesn't change that.

 

[The Man]

OK, I've got you. So what's the significance here?

To reiterate...

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.

 

[The Man]

...and of course the obligatory "bomb 20" link for such discussions...

 

[Nick227]

Apparently internal communication doesn't even enter the subject of consciousness for you.

That's not what I said. I said that the "I" is not needed; that it's an artifact of the usefulness of language; that it's a social convention who's primary function is in communication. I didn't say that internal communication wasn't important.

What you are doing is expanding what is written into a larger and different category, and then arguing against your own interpretation. I don't understand the point of doing that. It's obvious that it's not going to convince me. Do you yourself find what you're doing convincing?

Every consistent theory has assumptions or axioms that can neither be proven nor disproven within that theory. See Gödel's incompleteness theorems...

The Man... purlease! You are really scraping the bottom of the barrel now! How on earth does bringing up Godel and incompleteness justify starting a theory from an unexamined assumption which can be examined, but which just hasn't been examined by the author of the theory? Do me a favour!

While inconsistent theories are just that, self-inconsistent and/or generally inconsistent. If for some reason you prefer the latter (inconsistent) to the former (incomplete) then just own it and revel in that inconsistency. The thing is it can even be you doing that revelling regardless of even if there is a "you". That's fun and tragedy of inconsistency, while you can escape you, you still can't.

You can mutter all you like. I will tell you something for absolute nothing. Integrated Information Theory in particular and Panpsychism in general is utter rubbish. You want to believe in it, then you go ahead mate. These professors will be bringing back leeches, and strapping moles on your head to cure migraines next.

Someone needs to work on their analogies, that the apples falls still needs an explanation for how it falls, not who grew it or dropped it.

Fair point.

So again if you examine the assumption and conclude that an "I" is valid then it is just a back door. Again it has everything to do with examining the assumption of an "I" and the results of that examination, just calling it a "back door" doesn't change that.

The "back door" is demanding to know who is writing about a selfless reality. Subjective examination of the assumption of a personal "I" is the deal, yes.