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Split Thread Science cannot explain consciousness, therefore....

The materialist position is exactly that of a religion in that it cannot be shaken by scientific evidence, even in principle. It is entirely faith-based and its acceptance requires nothing more than a willingness to ignore scientific progress.

First materialism was all about 'stuff'. Only bits of stuff were real and nothing more. Then we discovered fields, but instead of accepting that materialism had been proven incorrect, materialists simply included 'fields' into their definition and pretended nothing had happened.

Along came quantum physics, which shows there is actually no 'stuff' at all, just waveform, fields and potential, and suddenly materialism is a belief in 'waveform, fields and potential', but no 'stuff'. The fact that the original meaning of 'materialism' is entirely negated is hand-waved away, it's business as usual.

And now we have the prospect of exotic states such dark matter and dark energy. We don't know what they are as they have not even been detected, but luckily we can be sure that if they are found to exist materialists will shoe-horn them into their definition of 'materialism' and claim, without any sense of irony or embarrassment, that they were right all along.

It's clear that even if some field of consciousness is scientifically proven to be fundamental to the universe, materialists will simply cram it into their definition of 'materialism' and go on pretending they haven't been wrong for the past 2,500 years.

The Religion forum is an appropriate place for such 'discussions.'
 
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baron said:
The materialist position is exactly that of a religion in that it cannot be shaken by scientific evidence, even in principle. It is entirely faith-based and its acceptance requires nothing more than a willingness to ignore scientific progress.
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Only if you ignore what 'matter' means. You're using an antiquated version of the word in order to make it sound ridiculous.

I mean, sure.
 
baron said:
It is entirely faith-based and its acceptance requires nothing more than a willingness to ignore scientific progress.'
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Cool. I asked previously what evidence there was for the idea of a field of consciousness or, indeed, that consciousness can exist outside of the brain. No answer, as of yet. Perhaps you could take this opportunity to explain your position? Especially if you think it's a belief founded on scientific principles or scientific progress.
 
LarryS said:
perhaps . . . but your examples of fundamentalness are far more complex than what I'm suggested - I was not yet concerned with content (novels, coding/decoding, windows, etc.), but awareness itself. Once content is introduced, then soon questions of qualia and dark matter set in : )
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Your supposition that awareness is fundamental is questionable, though. You cannot describe awareness to me, except by means of narrative. No surprise there, you can't describe anything except by means of narrative. But can you describe awareness to yourself or otherwise reflect upon your own awareness without narrative? I think the answer is still no.

Which means, something else is more fundamental than awareness: the construction of narrative. To be aware, something has to construct a narrative of being aware.

If that something is our minds, then mind, not awareness, is primary. If that something is our material brains, or if our minds in turn are secondary to our material brains, then material, not awareness, is primary.

The reason philosophers get tangled up in impossible conundrums about will and awareness ultimately comes down to simple category errors. They assume that will or awareness must be like temperature or velocity, something that can be ascribed to a material thing or to some material process; which in turn, because we can't see it in the material or process itself, might require it to be something ineffable or supernatural or fundamental.

(Hence Schopenhauer's notion of everything being will or expression; in other words, will is fundamental, paralleling but contradicting your hypothesis of awareness being fundamental. How can immaterial will move the material body? Impossible, without supernatural agency, unless will is the only truly real "fundamental" thing.)

Instead, awareness is like purpose or satisfaction or identity or intentions: something only a character or other element in a narrative can have.

This requires some explaining, so here goes. First of all, characters and figures in narrative can of course be real people, creatures, and things. "Narrative" does not necessarily mean "fictional," although narrative can be fictional and we can sometimes use fictional narrative as examples of how narrative can differ from reality. Similarly, "narrative" does not necessarily mean "unreal," though it can in specific instances, and in all cases it is not fundamental reality; something must exist to create it.

So, we can point out that characters in narrative can do things that real people cannot in the real world, such as cast magic spells like the characters in the Harry Potter novels, or jump in and out of story books (possibly altering the text on the pages as a result) like the characters in the Thursday Next novels.

Okay, that's obvious, and we have to go considerably farther to say that for instance purpose is something only an element (such as a character or prop) in a narrative has. In that case the distinction isn't real versus fictional; real things have purpose, but the purpose itself isn't fundamentally real. Purpose only associates with the real thing because our narratives say so. Purpose is not a fundamental property. If all humans and primates and all knowledge of humans and primates disappeared, all the chairs in the world would still have mass and temperature, but they would no longer have purpose. Which means they would no longer fit any common-sense definition of chairs.

Most real things in the world are entangled and often equivocated with the narratives we tell about those things. You cannot even define chairs without invoking a purpose, i.e. being sat in. You can try to define chairs based on general shape and dimensions, but such definitions will fail. Balans chairs, ball chairs, recliners when reclined, miniature chairs in doll houses, and other variations will likely be erroneously excluded; and/or beds, ladders, or random rocks and logs out in the uninhabited wilderness will be erroneously included. You can try to define chairs based on the act of sitting, but that will either sneak purpose back in (if a chair is something e.g. "suitable for" sitting upon) or lead to other contradictions (such as, here are two identical recently manufactured objects; it's claimed that one is a chair and the other is not, because one of them has never actually been sat on; and you can't tell which is which).

Such commonplace equivocation between material objects and narratives doesn't normally cause much difficulty. But philosophical discussions have a way of probing it without realizing it, resulting in confusion or seeming paradox. The Ship of Theseus "paradox" is a good example. The conundrum asks, is the historically notable ship still "the same" ship after every single one of its component parts have been serially replaced due to wear and tear? It depends on whether we're asking about the continuity of the ship's individuality, which can be formulated as an intrinsic material property (e.g. the statistical clustering of its component particles, relative to those of other ships) or the continuity of its identity, which is a feature of its narrative. (In the former case, the answer further depends on whether we consider only the set of particles that originally constituted the ship, which eventually disperses, or a set of particles that includes those of new components added to the ship during its history. The latter set both coalesces and disperses over time; while the ship exists that set of particles is always partially, but never completely, localized in one moving ship-shaped region of space.) Since a ship, like a chair, exists as such largely as an element of our narrative, we have to pay attention to both possibilities.

Free will versus determinism is in a similar boat, so to speak. We speak of decisions, but decisions are something characters in narrative do, not a physically real phenomenon. In intrinsic physical reality there are outcomes but not decisions. Whether we're looking at whether or not a rockslide happens, whether or not a computer selects someone for jury duty, whether or not a certain eye color evolves, or whether or not a predator chases a spear-wielding hominid instead of running away, when we look in detail at the process we cannot find anything happening that we can call a willful decision. Rocks slide or not based on their nature and the forces applied to them; traits evolve based on chance assortment of genes and biases in the chance of reproduction of organisms bearing those genes; computer circuits switch between states based on electric fields acting within semiconductor materials (we could say "based on logic" instead but that too is an added layer of narrative); the nerve cells in the predator's brain fire based on excitatory and suppressive signals at their synapses.

Yet we say, metaphorically, that the hillside "decided to" let go and plummet into the valley after a heavy rain; and we say, still metaphorically but somewhat less so, that the computer "decided" to single us out for jury duty or that evolution "decided" that blue eyes would become typical among humans in a certain region of the world; and less metaphorically still (so much so that we're likely to take it literally) that the predator "decided" to run away from the threatening spear.

We do this because a narrative about the world, which contains not huge statistically correlated collections of particles and unfathomably complex processes, but things like trees and rocks and rainstorms, some of which have purposes and/or can be altered to better align with those purposes, and beings like elusive prey animals and dangerous predators (with harmful intentions) and other people, who make decisions that can be influenced by means of their awareness of your actions (with varying degrees of difficulty depending on its intelligence), all helping to make the satisfaction of their needs and desires (or yours) a possibility... is useful. Narrative is the form of the model our brain creates to represent and negotiate the world.

And of course, a model of entities interacting in the world that didn't include ourselves would be far less useful and therefore far less likely to evolve, so we apply those same neurological processes to represent and negotiate ourselves as well. Like chairs and ships and saber-tooth tigers, but even more so, our understanding of ourselves is a mingling of our physical reality with the stories (many of them true, keep in mind) we tell about ourselves.

But... we "feel like" we're making decisions!

Of course we do. That's just another way of saying we generate narratives in which we're making decisions.

But... we "experience" making those decisions!

Of course we do. That's just another way of saying we generate narratives in which we're making those decisions.

But... we "experience" those narratives!

Of course we do. That's just another way of saying we generate narratives in which we're experiencing those narratives.

And those particular turtles do indeed go all the way down. (That's an inevitable consequence of the ability to create a narrative model of the world that includes a usefully complete model of the self acting within that world. That modeled self has to include the modeled self's mental model of the world, which includes the modeled self's model of itself. And so forth. However, in practical terms, like images in crude mirrors, the "turtles" probably only go down only one or two layers before losing all coherence.)

Have you ever wondered why conscious experience, which is beyond the limits of the ability of people working with today's most advanced technology to even attempt to generate artificially, can be so readily simulated artificially by means of mere written text? And how we managed to have that ability since millennia ago, and probably since many millennia longer ago by means of oral narrative? That should be astounding, impossible to believe or explain, like discovering that stone age tribes around the world in ancient times came up with complete and workable flight schedules for jetliners despite having no ability to actually build any. Yet instead it's commonplace, taken for granted. Why? Because conscious experience and written or spoken narrative are actually different forms of the same thing. Language, that great human evolutionary leap, readily transforms one into the other.

Awareness doesn't appear to require language, although awareness without language might not have the same qualities we experience it to have. Large portions of the biosphere do just fine without showing any sign of either one, though.
 
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Myriad said:
Your supposition that awareness is fundamental is questionable, though. You cannot describe awareness to me, except by means of narrative. No surprise there, you can't describe anything except by means of narrative. But can you describe awareness to yourself or otherwise reflect upon your own awareness without narrative? I think the answer is still no.

Which means, something else is more fundamental than awareness: the construction of narrative. To be aware, something has to construct a narrative of being aware.

If that something is our minds, then mind, not awareness, is primary. If that something is our material brains, or if our minds in turn are secondary to our material brains, then material, not awareness, is primary.

The reason philosophers get tangled up in impossible conundrums about will and awareness ultimately comes down to simple category errors. They assume that will or awareness must be like temperature or velocity, something that can be ascribed to a material thing or to some material process; which in turn, because we can't see it in the material or process itself, might require it to be something ineffable or supernatural or fundamental.

(Hence Schopenhauer's notion of everything being will or expression; in other words, will is fundamental, paralleling but contradicting your hypothesis of awareness being fundamental. How can immaterial will move the material body? Impossible, without supernatural agency, unless will is the only truly real "fundamental" thing.)

Instead, awareness is like purpose or satisfaction or identity or intentions: something only a character or other element in a narrative can have.

This requires some explaining, so here goes. First of all, characters and figures in narrative can of course be real people, creatures, and things. "Narrative" does not necessarily mean "fictional," although narrative can be fictional and we can sometimes use fictional narrative as examples of how narrative can differ from reality. Similarly, "narrative" does not necessarily mean "unreal," though it can in specific instances, and in all cases it is not fundamental reality; something must exist to create it.

So, we can point out that characters in narrative can do things that real people cannot in the real world, such as cast magic spells like the characters in the Harry Potter novels, or jump in and out of story books (possibly altering the text on the pages as a result) like the characters in the Thursday Next novels.

Okay, that's obvious, and we have to go considerably farther to say that for instance purpose is something only an element (such as a character or prop) in a narrative has. In that case the distinction isn't real versus fictional; real things have purpose, but the purpose itself isn't fundamentally real. Purpose only associates with the real thing because our narratives say so. Purpose is not a fundamental property. If all humans and primates and all knowledge of humans and primates disappeared, all the chairs in the world would still have mass and temperature, but they would no longer have purpose. Which means they would no longer fit any common-sense definition of chairs.

Most real things in the world are entangled and often equivocated with the narratives we tell about those things. You cannot even define chairs without invoking a purpose, i.e. being sat in. You can try to define chairs based on general shape and dimensions, but such definitions will fail. Balans chairs, ball chairs, recliners when reclined, miniature chairs in doll houses, and other variations will likely be erroneously excluded; and/or beds, ladders, or random rocks and logs out in the uninhabited wilderness will be erroneously included. You can try to define chairs based on the act of sitting, but that will either sneak purpose back in (if a chair is something e.g. "suitable for" sitting upon) or lead to other contradictions (such as, here are two identical recently manufactured objects; it's claimed that one is a chair and the other is not, because one of them has never actually been sat on; and you can't tell which is which).

Such commonplace equivocation between material objects and narratives doesn't normally cause much difficulty. But philosophical discussions have a way of probing it without realizing it, resulting in confusion or seeming paradox. The Ship of Theseus "paradox" is a good example. The conundrum asks, is the historically notable ship still "the same" ship after every single one of its component parts have been serially replaced due to wear and tear? It depends on whether we're asking about the continuity of the ship's individuality, which can be formulated as an intrinsic material property (e.g. the statistical clustering of its component particles, relative to those of other ships) or the continuity of its identity, which is a feature of its narrative. (In the former case, the answer further depends on whether we consider only the set of particles that originally constituted the ship, which eventually disperses, or a set of particles that includes those of new components added to the ship during its history. The latter set both coalesces and disperses over time; while the ship exists that set of particles is always partially, but never completely, localized in one moving ship-shaped region of space.) Since a ship, like a chair, exists as such largely as an element of our narrative, we have to pay attention to both possibilities.

Free will versus determinism is in a similar boat, so to speak. We speak of decisions, but decisions are something characters in narrative do, not a physically real phenomenon. In intrinsic physical reality there are outcomes but not decisions. Whether we're looking at whether or not a rockslide happens, whether or not a computer selects someone for jury duty, whether or not a certain eye color evolves, or whether or not a predator chases a spear-wielding hominid instead of running away, when we look in detail at the process we cannot find anything happening that we can call a willful decision. Rocks slide or not based on their nature and the forces applied to them; traits evolve based on chance assortment of genes and biases in the chance of reproduction of organisms bearing those genes; computer circuits switch between states based on electric fields acting within semiconductor materials (we could say "based on logic" instead but that too is an added layer of narrative); the nerve cells in the predator's brain fire based on excitatory and suppressive signals at their synapses.

Yet we say, metaphorically, that the hillside "decided to" let go and plummet into the valley after a heavy rain; and we say, still metaphorically but somewhat less so, that the computer "decided" to single us out for jury duty or that evolution "decided" that blue eyes would become typical among humans in a certain region of the world; and less metaphorically still (so much so that we're likely to take it literally) that the predator "decided" to run away from the threatening spear.

We do this because a narrative about the world, which contains not huge statistically correlated collections of particles and unfathomably complex processes, but things like trees and rocks and rainstorms, some of which have purposes and/or can be altered to better align with those purposes, and beings like elusive prey animals and dangerous predators (with harmful intentions) and other people, who make decisions that can be influenced by means of their awareness of your actions (with varying degrees of difficulty depending on its intelligence), all helping to make the satisfaction of their needs and desires (or yours) a possibility... is useful. Narrative is the form of the model our brain creates to represent and negotiate the world.

And of course, a model of entities interacting in the world that didn't include ourselves would be far less useful and therefore far less likely to evolve, so we apply those same neurological processes to represent and negotiate ourselves as well. Like chairs and ships and saber-tooth tigers, but even more so, our understanding of ourselves is a mingling of our physical reality with the stories (many of them true, keep in mind) we tell about ourselves.

But... we "feel like" we're making decisions!

Of course we do. That's just another way of saying we generate narratives in which we're making decisions.

But... we "experience" making those decisions!

Of course we do. That's just another way of saying we generate narratives in which we're making those decisions.

But... we "experience" those narratives!

Of course we do. That's just another way of saying we generate narratives in which we're experiencing those narratives.

And those particular turtles do indeed go all the way down. (That's an inevitable consequence of the ability to create a narrative model of the world that includes a usefully complete model of the self acting within that world. That modeled self has to include the modeled self's mental model of the world, which includes the modeled self's model of itself. And so forth. However, in practical terms, like images in crude mirrors, the "turtles" probably only go down only one or two layers before losing all coherence.)

Have you ever wondered why conscious experience, which is beyond the limits of the ability of people working with today's most advanced technology to even attempt to generate artificially, can be so readily simulated artificially by means of mere written text? And how we managed to have that ability since millennia ago, and probably since many millennia longer ago by means of oral narrative? That should be astounding, impossible to believe or explain, like discovering that stone age tribes around the world in ancient times came up with complete and workable flight schedules for jetliners despite having no ability to actually build any. Yet instead it's commonplace, taken for granted. Why? Because conscious experience and written or spoken narrative are actually different forms of the same thing. Language, that great human evolutionary leap, readily transforms one into the other.

Awareness doesn't appear to require language, although awareness without language might not have the same qualities we experience it to have. Large portions of the biosphere do just fine without showing any sign of either one, though.
Click to expand...

Could you expand on that?
 
Myriad - thanks for your thoughts. I will reread and study them later. As an initial response I would suggest that your introduction of ideas such as a narrative, will, language and etc. are way way down the road from my initial offering of our most intimate experience which is 'being present, being aware'.
And each of us can locate and establish this 'being present, being aware' without any suppositions, language or narrative, though language and perhaps a narrative is required to communicate it with another.
And yes, my claim that consciousness is fundamental is speculative, but since I can find no other 'substance' than consciousness, I have no choice. Now, I am not claiming I author or create my perceptions, or imagine them - physics totally works. Yet I can not find any matter. So, I must have some kind of a 'condition', or science has a long ways to go in understanding reality.
 
baron said:
First materialism was all about stuff. Only bits of stuff were real and nothing more. Then we discovered fields but instead of accepting
that materialism had been proven incorrect materialists simply included fields into their definition and pretended nothing had happened

Along came quantum physics which shows there is actually no stuff at all just waveform and fields and potential and suddenly materialism
is a belief in waveform and fields and potential but no stuff. The fact that the original meaning of materialism is entirely negated is hand
waved away it is business as usual
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Definitions and meanings of words are not prescriptive. They can change over time. And referencing new scientific knowledge into the definition
of materialism is all that is happening here. And it is the correct way to proceed. Science is an inductive discipline so definitions should never be
absolute because new knowledge will always add something to them
 
IanS said:
There's lots of evidence to show that a real universe exists regardless of whether you and your consciousness even exist at all. (...)

What I think you really mean, and the only accurate thing you could actually say, is that it's not possible to literally "prove" that a real universe exists outside of what any of us call our "consciousness". (...)

... you cannot even prove that you are having any specific conscious thoughts about anything! The so-called "thoughts" themselves might be an illusion ... your experience of "consciousness" might be an unreal illusion ... it could be a false belief implanted into your brain by some alien experimenters ... your entire notion of having any conscious thoughts might be a computer simulation ... you cannot literally "prove" that it's not.

So not only do you not know whether external reality exists, you also do not know if the thoughts which you call your “consciousness” are real either!

(...)… instead it's more than sufficient to just describe what we discover and detect by whatever methods and calculations seem to us (or to the most expert people in the field) to be the most accurate that we can produce … and from there we test everything in every way conceivably possible and as objectively and independently as reasonably possible (and that's called “science”) … the other subjects, such the one you are relying upon, i.e. philosophy, are by definition “not science”, because they are not attempting to “test everything in every way conceivably possible” and they are not checking & testing “as objectively and independently as reasonably possible” … they are failing to do any of that ... which is why subjects like philosophy have become such a total and deliberate waste of everyone valuable time.
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Dancing David said:
Yay!

Philosophy is a way to while away the hours...
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Philosophy can do one thing: to show that there are contradictions in something. And in this writing there are several:

It cannot be said that there is much evidence (“a lot of evidence”) that the world exists and that there is no evidence (“it is not possible literally prove”) that the world exists. I guess this happens to IanS because he uses "evidence" and "proof" in two different ways. Either he doesn't notice or he doesn't say it.

IanS fails again into a contradiction when he says that you can't prove that when you think that you are thinking you are thinking. This is because he confuses thinking with thinking that something is true. My thoughts about the Self who is thinking (I am this or that) may be mistaken, but that I am thinking when I am thinking cannot be false in any way.

These kinds of mistakes are typical of people who don't know much philosophy. Reading and discussing philosophy helps us to sharpen our analytical abilities. When a philosopher sees this kind of mistakes, he realizes it right away.

Philosophy is also useful in helping us to better address some problems that have no scientific solution, but which we cannot avoid in our lives. Problems of morality, politics and others within the realm of uncertainty, which is very broad.

Of course —and here I agree— philosophy, especially in the past, tended to make the mistake of believing that it can replace science and come to know parallel universes. It's what is often called "metaphysics." Philosophy is also essential to unmake the mistakes of metaphysics. For example, the positivism that you practice. Because —believe it or not— the most tremendous enemies of philosophy, like you two, are also making philosophy even if you do not know. It is called positivism. Be careful that it does not happen to you like the bourgeois gentleman, who spoke in prose without knowing it.

Maybe you don't like to discuss such abstruse topics as solipsism. Is your right. But do not believe that having a positivist philosophy authorizes you to despise any other philosophy. A thought that is not sharpened in the debate stagnates. And this is usually positivists' vice who think of their beliefs as a dogma.
 
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xjx388 said:
None of that matters on a purely practical level. All each of us knows for sure is that we exist and that we exist in a physical universe where other people and objects exist. It makes no difference if our experiences are some kind of illusion because, from our perspective, everything seems pretty real.

I don't see the utility in musing about us being in a computer simulation, being a figment of God's imagination, etc.
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Belz... said:
Yeah but they do have a point that the experience of having thoughts happens, and so that at the very least, the "observer" exists. What they do with that then, of course, is ridiculous.
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Of course I am to some extent playing Devil's Advocate when I say that by their own solopsist reasoning, they also cannot even claim to be certain that their own consciousness exists. I'm trying to explore that idea to see if even the most basic aspect of the philosophers claim stands up to much scruitiny.

If as they claim, the “fact” that we rely entirely upon our “consciousness” (i.e. our thoughts … where Descartes put it as “I think, therefore I am”), thereby means that any external reality does not or may not exist, then I think we can also point out that all those thoughts themselves are only known to us by some unexplained thing they call “consciousness” … IOW, we are relying on that mysterious "consciousness" to produce any such thoughts at all … so maybe the thoughts are just as much of an unreal non-existent illusion as the apparent external reality.

And what I am saying about that is – (1) if as solipsist philosophy claims, “all that we can be certain of is that our thoughts exist, i.e. our consciousness exists”, then that claim of absolute certainty requires an absolute literal proof … otherwise it cannot be a claim of “certainty” … so where is their literal absolute “Proof”?? … I don't think they have ever produced any such actual proof … and it's certainly not a proof for them to say that it all seems so obvious and seems so certain.

But also, (2) if they accept that, by their own solipsist-type philosophical arguments, their thoughts might also be an unreal illusion in just the same way that they claim external reality to be an unreal illusion, e.g. if they accept that their thoughts and what they call their “consciousness” might just be an illusion created by some advanced alien intelligence using something like a computer simulation (if they agree that can't be entirely ruled out), then they are agreeing that there is in fact and external reality which is producing their “consciousness/thoughts” - the hypothetical “alien computer simulation” is just exactly the same as what we are saying is actually the physical structure called our “brain” … and that just shows that their argument reduces to accepting the need for a physically existing brain, but that IS accepting the need for an external physical reality and not just a “consciousness” that appears in a vacuum.
 
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LarryS said:
If you (and others) claim that the only possible definition of real is an independent physical reality, and to discuss any other philosophy/possibility is a waste of valuable time - then why would you even scan a forum with a title of Religion and Philosophy? You should stick with pure materialist threads where you won't be challenged, and your time not wasted.
And you are correct in that if you can't accept the claim "I exist, I am present, I am aware" as certain - and, if I can't accept the claim 'an independent and physical world exists' as certain - - then we don't have a starting point in this conversation.
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You keep ignoring this question, but I'll try again:

If it's your position that even though you believe that consciousness is a more fundamental layer of reality than matter/energy, but that nevertheless the things we experience are real, and the predictive models we've constructed are as accurate under your worldview as under materialism...

Then why do you feel the need to derail every thread on brains or consciousness by stating 'well yeah, we only have evidence of spirits existing, because that's what we experience, so why are you assuming that things exist independently from some universal mind field?'

It seems that you don't really want to discuss the implications of your assumption in depth, in fact, you claim that there are no practical implications, because every time someone asks you if you believe that means a certain aspect of science is wrong, your answer is that you dont, but that you just believe that mind is more real than matter.

If all you want to contribute to these threads is this rather pedantic/semantic/off topic distinction, why bother?
 
LarryS said:
If you (and others) claim that the only possible definition of real is an independent physical reality, and to discuss any other philosophy/possibility is a waste of valuable time - then why would you even scan a forum with a title of Religion and Philosophy? You should stick with pure materialist threads where you won't be challenged, and your time not wasted.
And you are correct in that if you can't accept the claim "I exist, I am present, I am aware" as certain - and, if I can't accept the claim 'an independent and physical world exists' as certain - - then we don't have a starting point in this conversation.
Click to expand...


Well just about every line in that post is wrong.

First - I have never said that its' certain that what we perceive as the universe around us has to be "real" (or that it has to be exactly as science currently describes it). I don't see any good reason to doubt that reality. And certainly not because some ancient outdated philosophers dreamed up a semantic word-argument that essentially just complains that science cannot literally prove things. But I am not claiming to know every possible aspect of that reality as an unarguable certainty.

Secondly - it's not your place to be telling others here that they should not reply to what you say, and should not reply with criticism of your philosophical claims. Those are claims in which you are denying (or at least doubting) what scientists have worked so hard to discover and explain over recent centuries, and similarly denying that people of all kinds have over mans history struggled in what have often been appalling circumstances of persecution & hardship etc. by saying that no such things ever really happened ... frankly that's a disgraceful insult to all of these people who struggled to overcome all sorts of adversity.

And thirdly - what's all this arrogant sounding nonsense of "where you are challenged"; what are you "challenging"? You make a philosophical claim that the universe is not real, so that all the worlds scientists and all the achievements of science would be a mistaken illusion, and you claim that to be a "challenge" to people who do not think your philosophical claims have any real credibility? No ... the "challenge" here is that some of us are not willing to give philosophy students a free pass to post irresponsible grandiose claims that would deny science and deny reality ... not willing to let that pass unopposed unless you can back up such claims with real evidence to show that the claim is anything more than just complaining that science cannot literally prove that its description of the universe is 100% perfect & certain.
 
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IanS said:
Well just about every line in that post is wrong.
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;)

You make a philosophical claim that the universe is not real, so that all the worlds scientists and all the achievements of science would be a mistaken illusion.
Click to expand...

And on the other hand I've got others who are offended at the idea that the "self" may be an illusion (in jabba's thread). The mind MUST be primary.

not willing to let that pass unopposed unless you can back up such claims with real evidence to show that the claim is anything more than just complaining that science cannot literally prove that its description of the universe is 100% perfect & certain.
Click to expand...

That'd be difficult for them since their claims deny the very possibility of evidence and knowledge. It's wishy-washy facillitation.
 
LarryS said:
And you are correct in that if you can't accept the claim "I exist, I am present, I am aware" as certain - and, if I can't accept the claim 'an independent and physical world exists' as certain - - then we don't have a starting point in this conversation.
Click to expand...


You are not being asked to accept it as literal "certainty" that a physical world exists. You are not being asked to claim anything as "certainty". In fact I'm asking you to understand why science shows us that it's probably not possible ever to say that we can know anything as a matter of actual certainty.

It's just a question of what we can detect as evidence.

What we detect as evidence for anything, is entirely consistent with a real universe existing more-or-less exactly as science describes it (it's described and detected as the same thing by all living creatures).

It does not matter if you say that what we detect is only realised by us in what we call "conscious awareness", i.e. we are using whatever means we have to detect and appreciate all things (that's a brain and a sensory system). Those are all things that we are aware of in just the same way that we are aware of our thoughts. The evidence is that our thoughts exist, that we exist, and that all of the external world exists.
 
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LarryS said:
Myriad - thanks for your thoughts. I will reread and study them later. As an initial response I would suggest that your introduction of ideas such as a narrative, will, language and etc. are way way down the road from my initial offering of our most intimate experience which is 'being present, being aware'.
And each of us can locate and establish this 'being present, being aware' without any suppositions, language or narrative, though language and perhaps a narrative is required to communicate it with another.
And yes, my claim that consciousness is fundamental is speculative, but since I can find no other 'substance' than consciousness, I have no choice. Now, I am not claiming I author or create my perceptions, or imagine them - physics totally works. Yet I can not find any matter. So, I must have some kind of a 'condition', or science has a long ways to go in understanding reality.
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Have you ever had an experience something like this:? You're in a room where a few people are talking to one another, but you're distracted by something else so you're not participating in or paying attention to the conversation. Suddenly you hear one of them say,

"I don't know, but maybe I can ask LarryS."

And you speak up and respond:

"Maybe you can ask me about what?"

You have to ask the question because you weren't listening to the conversation. What attracted your attention was the mention of your name.

But the words "maybe i can ask" were spoken before your name. So how did you manage to know them? How did you manage to "be present" retroactively, two seconds in the past?

Being-present itself cannot be primary if that "presence" as you experience it requires memory (however short-term). Yet that appears to be the case.

Furthermore, a concussion, seizure, certain drugs, or other phenomenon that can impair short-term memory will, by all accounts of people who have experienced these things, affect the nature of that "being present" experience or whether you have it at all.
 
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