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

[David Mo]

Our imagination is limited to things we've already experienced.

Does God exist? Does the island of Neverland exist? I can't believe it.

 

[Belz...]

Does God exist? Does the island of Neverland exist? I can't believe it.

At this point I'm just about ready to conclude that you are not engaging in this discussion in good faith. You can't possibly misunderstand my point this badly by accident.

Or can you? Let's try again.

If I imagine a frog with a horse's head, no, I've never seen one of those before. But I've seen horses and frogs and I can imagine stuff that relates to my experience. But I can't imagine stuff that exists completely outside my understanding. How could I?

 

[David Mo]

The point of the matter is that consistency is a RATIONAL and JUSTIFIABLE criterion to distinguish information from the mind from information from outside. As I said before you'll never be 100% sure but who gives a toss?

Name one that is.

Do you know virtual reality?


Anyway, in front of the most coherent virtual impression, the solipsist will say that he doesn't care if it is more or less coherent. The assumption that coherence is the same as reality is a mere convention. The world of quantum physics is not very coherent according to the canons of our everyday impressions. Shall we erase it from reality?
Coherence is a convention not a proof or reality. Whats happes if the real world were incoherent in itself? Our coherent recostruction of the world would be false.

 

[Darat]

You don't realize yet that the solipsist thinks there is only a thinking entity. Whether this is a machine or a brain in a test tube doesn't matter to him. That being who is thinking exists.

Don't you realize that in your own hypothesis if someone has created another being to deceive him/it, that being exists?! You can't cheat someone or something that doesn't exist!

You're still not understanding me - and I do apologies as I suspect it is me that is at fault for not finding a good way to explain this.

Let's try again.

We both agree that the solipsist believes they exist, that they think, that they are a coherent "I"?

The assumption that the entity that thinks it is the solipsist makes is that what it "experiences", that coherent "I" is actually what the singular solpolist would feel like, would experience, therefore it is the solipsist.

It has no way of testing that, it is simply an assumption.

The actual solipsist could be imagining an entity that believes it exists, that it is a coherent "I" but it isn't it is simply a construct of the solipsist. The solipsist could be having a real good chuckle looking at this entity it has imagined that thinks it is the solipsist!

 

[Belz...]

Do you know virtual reality?

Yes. What about it? You'll have your work cut out for you if you want to argue that it's 100% consistent.

Anyway, in front of the most coherent virtual impression, the solipsist will say that he doesn't care if it is more or less coherent.

Consistency is a rational and justifiable criterion to determine what's real and what's not, and in any event we have means to predict and use reality to our advantage, providing solid evidence that this reality is, in fact, reality. It doesn't matter what solipsists respond to that unless it addresses it in a way that challenges the justifiability of the criterion.

The assumption that coherence is the same as reality is a mere convention.

No. I've already explained why it's a good criterion. I never said it is "the same as" reality.

The world of quantum physics is not very coherent according to the canons of our everyday impressions.

Wrong. You couldn't have QM if the quantum realm wasn't coherent.

Coherence is a convention not a proof or reality.

Would you stop repeating that? I've addressed this at least 3 times already. Stop pretending to only read part of my posts, or else stop reading only part of my posts.

 

[LarryS]

I haven't claimed that experience is devoid of content, I began with our most intimate experience as "being present, being aware", and postponed any discussion of specific content.
I am claiming that experience is real, and that the appearance of stuff as physical is value-added by observation, as is the value-added of an appearance being a chair, or a being a galaxy.
A materialist might claim the Big Band was an expansion/explosion of physical matter, I am claiming that the Big Bang is an expansion/explosion of appearance - and from our own experience, appearance is sufficiently real. There is neither a need nor advantage to adding being physical to an appearance.

 

[David Mo]

At this point I'm just about ready to conclude that you are not engaging in this discussion in good faith. You can't possibly misunderstand my point this badly by accident.

At this point it would be useful that you don't make personal insinuations. I'm not answering any of them.
But if that makes you feel better, don't deprive yourself of it. I have very tolerant convictions.

If I imagine a frog with a horse's head, no, I've never seen one of those before. But I've seen horses and frogs and I can imagine stuff that relates to my experience. But I can't imagine stuff that exists completely outside my understanding. How could I?

If I have the idea of the Self, the idea of extension, the idea of limit, the idea of outside limits, la idea de cause, etc., I do not know why I am not going to create the idea of something that exists outside my limits.

 

[David Mo]

Consistency is a rational and justifiable criterion to determine what's real and what's not, and in any event we have means to predict and use reality to our advantage,

Coherence and prediction are nothing more than properties of certain impressions. They only indicate that there is an external reality if you have previously assumed that such a reality exists and is the cause of my impressions. But that's what the solipsist questions.
I am sorry to repeat the same answer every time, but you always ask the same questions.

 

[David Mo]

We both agree that the solipsist believes they exist, that they think, that they are a coherent "I"?

The assumption that the entity that thinks it is the solipsist makes is that what it "experiences", that coherent "I" is actually what the singular solpolist would feel like, would experience, therefore it is the solipsist.

No again. The solipsist cannot speak of "they" as diverse realities. Only one thinking entity exists. And you cannot speak of the solpsist as a different entity of the thing that is thinking. They are one and the only thing in the solipsist universe.

 

[Belz...]

If I have the idea of the Self, the idea of extension, the idea of limit, the idea of outside limits, la idea de cause, etc., I do not know why I am not going to create the idea of something that exists outside my limits.

Because you physically can't. Just like you can't build a stone house without stone, you can't build an idea without its constituents.

Coherence and prediction are nothing more than properties of certain impressions.

That is not a counter to my argument. The point, as I've said numerous times before, is that all of the things that I know for a fact are _from_ my mind are inconsistent. Therefore it is reasonable to conclude that what is entirely consistent is not in my mind.

They only indicate that there is an external reality if you have previously assumed that such a reality exists and is the cause of my impressions.

Non sequitur.

 

[David Mo]

You (as devil's advocate on behalf of solipsism) are claiming that the content of individual experience cannot be evidence for a world external to our individual experience. But neither you nor Larry has offered an argument why that claim should be accepted.

As I said to Larry, it's much like claiming we have no evidence for space outside the solar system. When others point to observations of stars, galaxies, redshifts, radio signals, etc., you keep pointing out "but all those photons that supposedly reveal the nature of the contents of distant space were only detected inside the solar system!" as if that negated the observations somehow, but you haven't explained how.

Most people observe, in the content of our individual experiences, plenty of evidence for an objective reality. Whence comes the experience of an unseen unexpected undesired blow from behind? The solipsist must hypothesize experiences caused by aspects or components of the solipsist mind that he has no conscious awareness of nor conscious control over. (The hidden or "subconscious" or "unconscious" mental forces responsible usually end up being very close parallels to the host of evil and trickster spirits infesting the supposedly objectively real outer spiritual planes of mystic cosmologies, to explain why observations of those realms is so perennially inconsistent.) Everyone else calls those not-controllable-by-ideation sometimes-surprising sometimes-troublesome aspects of life experience, collectively, "the real world," and at that point it becomes a semantic difference.

Of course, it's well known and accepted that solipsism is unfalsifiable in the end. There's an explanation around any experience, even e.g. having that experience itself be altered by unperceived unexpected unwanted events, e.g. the alcohol in spiked punch. "Of course the experience of becoming aware of the presence of alcohol after the fact can retroactively affect past experiences of other things, and it was introduced by my subconscious to facilitate satisfying unconscious desires that my conscious experience couldn't cope with." Yeah, sure.

Larry claims not to be advocating solipsism anyhow. His answer to the above appears to be to claim that experience has no content, which is why I characterize his position as ultimately (and extremely) nihilistic.

The problem is that you are attributing to the solipsist a specific thought that he would never have. Photons, universe, other people, telescopes, chickens, food or Europe Champions League are only ideas in solipsist's mind that is the only thing that exists in his universe.

Notice that when we talk about the solipsist we are not talking about anyone who really exists. We are only talking about a logical problem. A paradox, if you prefer, such as that of the liar or Achilles and the turtle. The paradox is that we all believe that the world exists as something external to our mind but the only thing that our knowledge reaches is ideas in our mind. The paradox is that you can't prove the existence of the world bu means of experiences, because experience is nothing more than a mental entity and that it can be other thing is just what the paradox of the solipsist puts in question.

 

[David Mo]

Because you physically can't. Just like you can't build a stone house without stone, you can't build an idea without its constituents.
.

But you can build an original idea by mixing different ideas. That is what we do all the time when we are creative.

 

[Belz...]

But you can build an original idea by mixing different ideas. That is what we do all the time when we are creative.

Yes, that is exactly my argument.

 

[Dancing David]

None of this has anything to do with nihilism which is the philosophical belief that there is no meaning to existence

Thank you,
There are many many uses of the word!


Murican Heritage
"1. Philosophy The doctrine that nothing actually exists or that existence or values are meaningless.
2. Relentless negativity or cynicism suggesting an absence of values or beliefs: nihilism in postwar art.
3.
a. Political belief or action that advocates or commits violence or terrorism without discernible constructive goals.
b. also Nihilism A diffuse, revolutionary movement of mid-19th-century Russia that scorned authority and tradition and believed in reason, materialism, and radical change in society and government through terrorism and assassination.
4. Psychiatry A delusion, experienced in some mental disorders, that the world or one's mind, body, or self does not exist."

 

[acbytesla]

Morality is rooted in evolutionary psychology not in religion which at best merely reinforces it but nothing else
Also it is not objective but subjective or inter subjective. It cannot be objective because it is rooted in emotion

While I believe it is subjective, I don't believe it is rooted in emotion.

 

[Myriad]

The problem is that you are attributing to the solipsist a specific thought that he would never have. Photons, universe, other people, telescopes, chickens, food or Europe Champions League are only ideas in solipsist's mind that is the only thing that exists in his universe.

I didn't say a solipsist would accept the independent existence of photons or telescopes. It was an analogy.

Scientists (and normal humans) accept evidence of the existence of space beyond the solar system despite only ever encountering that evidence within the solar system. The evidence of the thing is not required to be the thing itself.

Scientists and normal humans also accept evidence of the existence of an external physical world despite only ever encountering that evidence in the course of subjective mental experiences. The evidence of the thing is not required to be the thing itself.

Solipsists, provided they're sane and conscious, have experiences like everyone else. They maintain all the content of those experiences (the speeding car they carefully avoid; the air they still insist on breathing for some reason) exist only within their own minds. That claim, as I said, is unfalsifiable. It cannot be disproved. But it also reveals nothing useful about the nature of that content. An unfalsifiable hypotheses cannot distinguish an idea about something that will happen from an idea about something that will not happen. If it could, it wouldn't be unfalsifiable. And that makes it useless for explaining anything.

The solipsist hypothesis becomes tortuous when a solipsist tries to explain experiences like learning something they weren't aware of learning before, which requires them to either disregard any possibility of explanation, or come up with explanations involving complex compartmentalization of things that exist in their own minds, or come up with explanations involving unbounded creative powers they're not consciously aware of exercising. What can a solipsist say about the cause of an experience of an undesired unexpected event? If a solipsist learns French as a second language, why didn't he already know it? Either because he did know it but needed to go through the "learning" experience to become consciously aware of it (strange compartmentalization), or because the language didn't exist until he brought it into being along with the entire history of French literature (unbounded unconscious creative power) via the apparent "learning" experience.

Notice that when we talk about the solipsist we are not talking about anyone who really exists. We are only talking about a logical problem. A paradox, if you prefer, such as that of the liar or Achilles and the turtle. The paradox is that we all believe that the world exists as something external to our mind but the only thing that our knowledge reaches is ideas in our mind. The paradox is that you can't prove the existence of the world bu means of experiences, because experience is nothing more than a mental entity and that it can be other thing is just what the paradox of the solipsist puts in question.

You can't prove the existence of anything by any means, so that's hardly a paradox. But you can hypothesize the existence of things based on the patterns of the ideas in our minds. We don't hypothesize stars because we experience photons in the solar system. We hypothesize them because we experience patterns in our experiences of those photons, such as which directions the photons are coming from. "Proof" is a red herring, as we keep pointing out.

 

[Myriad]

I haven't claimed that experience is devoid of content, I began with our most intimate experience as "being present, being aware", and postponed any discussion of specific content.
I am claiming that experience is real, and that the appearance of stuff as physical is value-added by observation, as is the value-added of an appearance being a chair, or a being a galaxy.
A materialist might claim the Big Band was an expansion/explosion of physical matter, I am claiming that the Big Bang is an expansion/explosion of appearance - and from our own experience, appearance is sufficiently real. There is neither a need nor advantage to adding being physical to an appearance.

Ah, the old shadows on the cave wall bit. Let's see, where's that post where I gave the cave its long-overdue due. Ah, here:

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?

 

[David Mo]

Yes, that is exactly my argument.

Well, I thought it was the opposite.

 

[David Mo]

Solipsists, provided they're sane and conscious, have experiences like everyone else. They maintain all the content of those experiences (the speeding car they carefully avoid; the air they still insist on breathing for some reason) exist only within their own minds. That claim, as I said, is unfalsifiable. It cannot be disproved.

I agree. This is my point from the beginning. But note that “unfalsifiable” has sense only in the context of empiricism. The solipsist claims for an evidence similar to “I exist”.

But it also reveals nothing useful about the nature of that content. An unfalsifiable hypotheses cannot distinguish an idea about something that will happen from an idea about something that will not happen. If it could, it wouldn't be unfalsifiable. And that makes it useless for explaining anything.

(...)

You can't prove the existence of anything by any means, so that's hardly a paradox. But you can hypothesize the existence of things based on the patterns of the ideas in our minds. We don't hypothesize stars because we experience photons in the solar system. We hypothesize them because we experience patterns in our experiences of those photons, such as which directions the photons are coming from. "Proof" is a red herring, as we keep pointing out.

Since that “the solipsist” is only a logic figure it is difficult to imagine what would be his behaviour in day to day life. In theory, the solipsist would behave in the same way that “normal” people. He would establish some relations among ideas —we would say “things”— and predict his future occurrence in the same way that you an I do it. It would be surprised bay not predicted events —like you and I— and search for possible mistakes in the prediction. He would be sceptic about miracles, given that miracles don’t occur in his deductive system. That is to say it would not be distinguishable from other people except by his annoying mania of debating the existence of real world.

I suppose that his belief could arose some problems of psychological order. I imagine that truly believing that you live in a ghostly world must affect you. But if we take a look at the life of Bishop George Berkeley, who was a convinced idealist, it does not seem that he was much affected by his subjective idealism, which is the closest thing to the solipsism I know. Which suggests that he didn't quite believe it. Perhaps his idealism was a way to annoy the rationalists —and he did succeed!— or to draw attention because he was bored of ecclesiastical life— and he also succeeded. I don't know about that.

 

[IanS]

If God doesn't exist, then how are you able to say anything about him?

If there is no god, then please explain how you are able to make posts about him here.

.

That's just playing with weaknesses in how language is constructed, in other words it's merely a play on words akin to "The sun never rises yet I can admire a sunrise".

It's as profound and as meaningful to this discussion as my big toe.

Well David Mo clearly has no understanding of the problem, otherwise he could never have said anything so silly as the above. He should understand the problem because I have explained it to him at least a dozen times.

But just to answer the above – how are we able to say anything about God or make posts here about God? Well the answer is obvious and it simply confirms "reality" – we can talk about concepts and beliefs such as religious beliefs, precisely because we do exist with the reality of a working brain and the ability to speak and to write … that just confirms that we are “real” … reality does exist!

But what I have repeatedly put to people here like Mo and Larry, is that if they are defending a solipsist idea that says reality does not exist, so that all that actually exists is “consciousness” within one single solipsist mind, then there can be no possible way for that solipsist mind/consciousness ever to communicate that idea to anyone else (because according to that solipsist idea nobody else exists … there is no reality outside of that one disembodied mind) …

… that would mean that there are actually no posts here about anything (they all occur only in that one solipsist mind). It would mean that the illusion of any posts here are all just examples of that one solipsist mind constantly disagreeing with itself! ... it's immediately contradicting itself with two opposing arguments at once; at one instant telling itself that reality does not exist but then immediately telling itself that reality does exist ... it's a position of immediate self-contradiction.

To summarise that another way (for those like Mo and Larry who clearly have zero understanding of it!) - as soon as anyone claims that reality either does not exist, or even claims that it may not exist, then by making that claim you are immediately destroying your own claim … because you cannot even articulate or communicate any such claim unless the reality does actually exist!

That is the total opposite of what Mo just claimed about God beliefs – the reason we can all talk about God beliefs is because we do exist!

And finally – I'm sorry to repeat this again to people here like Mo and Larry, because I've put it to them a dozen times already without any kind of credible reply from them, but – until they can provide a credible explanation for the following two questions, they have no case at all in defending solipsist-type claims -


Q1. How is it possible for consciousness and thoughts to be produced without the reality of a brain?


Q2. If only one solipsist mind exists, then how is it possible for that solipsist mind to communicate its beliefs to anyone else? … if all disputes occur only in that one solipsist mind, then why is that solipsist mind in constant self-contradiction by claiming two opposing things at once (claiming both that reality does not exist, and at the same time claiming it does it)?

If solipsist defenders cannot answer those two questions, then they have no case, and that is the end of any credible discussion for claims of non-reality.