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The Girl with "X-ray" vision

Don't let that door of discussion hit you as you leave

Interesting Ian said:
Indeed I'm tired of wasting my life attempting to communicate with incorrigible dimwits so don't expect me to further participate in this thread.

And don't address me in any other thread either.
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Thank God! (Even if Her existance is outside of scientific study.) :D
 
rwguinn said:
I hate to say it, But II has it correct here.
Go to any elementary or High school text. There are 5 senses. Hearing, Taste, smell, touch, sight. It is through these we gather information about our environment and communicate

Several hits, here are a couple:
http://www.msnucleus.org/membership/html/k-6/lc/humanbio/1/lchb1_1a.html
"The human body has five major senses which operate to gather information from the world around us, sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Any stimulus to one of the sense areas is detected by sensory nerves and is sent to the brain for interpretation."
The BBC lists the same 5, and adds a 6th: Ballance
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Rw, you're ignoring a word there: "The human body has five MAJOR senses..." That's true. The human body (and other higher animals) have five major senses and many lesser ones. Our brains use all of them to gather and use information about their environment.
 
So askolnick, you have now met the most persistent, closed-minded, dishonest, and petty member this forum currently has.

I think it's safe to say you've been "initiated". Would you rather have preferred the paddle spanking? :D
 
Please sir, can I have some more?!

Hawk one said:
So askolnick, you have now met the most persistent, closed-minded, dishonest, and petty member this forum currently has.

I think it's safe to say you've been "initiated". Would you rather have preferred the paddle spanking? :D
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I'd bend over gladly if he would disappear for good.
 
Ian said:
Well this approach sounds like representative realism. Isn't the feeling of roughness, and the roughness itself, essentially one and the same thing? Surely you agree that what you feel by touch i.e its roughness, is normally considered to be a quality of the touched object, where as hitting it and experiencing pain is not part of the said object??
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Sort of. I agree there is a spectrum along which my experience of an object falls. At one end of the spectrum are perceptions of attributes from which I obtain lots of information, such as complex tactile or visual patterns. At the other end of the spectrum are perceptions of "simpler attributes," such as whether the object is hard or soft or ethereal (like fog). I can try to detect such an attribute by gently feeling the object, but that may not give me the information I need, whereas hitting it might.

Some of the senses that you mention give no information about the environment external to the body eg balance, cramp, toothache etc. The rest of it is subsumed under what other people regarded as one of the 5 main senses.
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But that's just not so. My balance is affected by the surface I'm standing on. My toothache is affected by hot or cold liquids. My sense of arm position is affected by wind.

~~ Paul
 
On the sense nonsense: Can hearing be viewed as a finely tuned type of feeling? After all, it's pretty much feeling vibrations, right?

Some of the senses that you mention give no information about the environment external to the body eg balance, cramp, toothache etc. The rest of it is subsumed under what other people regarded as one of the 5 main senses.
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Who said senses had to be external to your body? I thought anything that could gather information would be considered a sense, even if that information is about your own body.

Sounds like Ian's doing his Humpty Dumpty act.
 
askolnick said:
Rw, you're ignoring a word there: "The human body has five MAJOR senses..." That's true. The human body (and other higher animals) have five major senses and many lesser ones. Our brains use all of them to gather and use information about their environment.
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Indeed there are many other minor senses, like
  • Steatopygian sense -- the near instinctual sense to seek shelter when your wife/girlfriend asks you "do these pants make me look fat?"
  • Chlichenian sense -- precognitive awareness of exactly what tired old phrase a sports announcer is about to use. (also see Iantological sense)
  • Poopeelian sense -- Awareness of exactly how close the nearest bathroom is, allowing your muscle relaxation to begin. Failure of this sense is highly embarassing
  • Gerontological sense -- the ability to recognize that you are getting old and cannot do the things you used to. Failure of this sense keep chiropracters in business.
  • Culpalocational sense -- Present mostly strongly in mothers, it allows one to immediately identify which of the children is guilty of a given infraction.
  • Silicesian sense -- Allows you to detect, even without unimpeded visual evidence, whether or not a pair of breasts is augmented.
  • Gustadiscrimminatorial sense -- The recognition of whether or not a restaurant is good merely by looking at the name.
  • Iantological sense -- a viceral sense of disgust and forboding that warns you that Ian is about to post on your thread.
I'm guessing there are many more.
 
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Flange Desire said:
No.
Have you read Pinker for a good (imho) hypothesis for 'consiousness'?
He suggests 'Mind is what the brain does'.

[PETULANT_MODE]
No, I won't read you sig, nor follow your link.
[/PETULANT_MODE]
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What the brain does is a physical activity, a sequence of causes and effects, a function. Consciousness is no more logically entailed than in any other physical process. So he's flat out wrong. He should concentrate on the science and forget the philosophy because he ain't very good at it.
 
askolnick said:
The existance of God and other alleged supernatural phenomena has long been understood as being outside of scientific investigation -- except obviously by you. What is a waste of space is your head. Judging by the nonsense you keep posting, there's very little substance within that bony box.:eek:
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God is supernatural? Good. Then you must agree that we are also supernatural since finite consciouness and an infinite consciousness are of the same ontological status.
 
Tricky said:
Indeed there are many other minor senses, like
  • Steatopygian sense -- the near instinctual sense to seek shelter when your wife/girlfriend asks you "do these pants make me look fat?"
  • Chlichenian sense -- precognitive awareness of exactly what tired old phrase a sports announcer is about to use. (also see Iantological sense)
  • Poopeelian sense -- Awareness of exactly how close the nearest bathroom is, allowing your muscle relaxation to begin. Failure of this sense is highly embarassing
  • Gerontological sense -- the ability to recognize that you are getting old and cannot do the things you used to. Failure of this sense keep chiropracters in business.
  • Culpalocational sense -- Present mostly strongly in mothers, it allows one to immediately identify which of the children is guilty of a given infraction.
  • Silicesian sense -- Allows you to detect, even without unimpeded visual evidence, whether or not a pair of breasts is augmented.
  • Gustadiscrimminatorial sense -- The recognition of whether or not a restaurant is good merely by looking at the name.
  • Iantological sense -- a viceral sense of disgust and forboding that warns you that Ian is about to post on your thread.
I'm guessing there are many more.
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How about malaproprioception? It's the sense that detects when people are misusing words to humorous effect.
 
Tricky said:
[*]Steatopygian sense -- the near instinctual sense to seek shelter when your wife/girlfriend asks you "do these pants make me look fat?"
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That's not a Steatopygian sense (whatever that means). That's a Suicidal sense. A "Death Wish" kinda sense.
 
askolnick said:
Rw, you're ignoring a word there: "The human body has five MAJOR senses..." That's true. The human body (and other higher animals) have five major senses and many lesser ones. Our brains use all of them to gather and use information about their environment.
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Look, I'm not disagreeing with you guys.
But I must say that every kid is taught, from day one, that there are 5 senses, and everything elses is just an extension of those. You can't pound that "5" thing into their heads for 10-12 years, and then say "You are wrong".
The sense of ballance keeps us from feeling the sense sense of falling (feel the wind? see the ground?), , the sense of despair ("I'm gonna get hurt!") or sense of Doom("I didn't see the cliff! I am going to die!")
Is sense of doom paranormal?:D
 
rwguinn said:
Look, I'm not disagreeing with you guys.
But I must say that every kid is taught, from day one, that there are 5 senses, and everything elses is just an extension of those. You can't pound that "5" thing into their heads for 10-12 years, and then say "You are wrong".
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Ian and you must have been raised somewhere very strange, at least from my point of view: Just about every mention that I can recall of "five" and "senses" in the same sentence had the word "major" between them.
 
Interesting Ian said:
God is supernatural? Good. Then you must agree that we are also supernatural since finite consciouness and an infinite consciousness are of the same ontological status.
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Well, apart from not presenting any evidence of the existence of God, that God, if he exists, is conscious or that God's consciousness must necessarily be infinite.

The topic of consciousness is certainly an intriguing one, but to assume that because consciousness exists then the afterlife/God etc. must also exist is a serious non-sequitur (not that II has necessarily stated these things, but I've met many people who have).

I think the most compelling experimental results about consciousness that I've heard of come from Libet (See Benjamin Libet on Wikipedia). His experiments provide evidence that consciousness, whatever its nature, is a direct by-product of neural activity, in that the decision a person will make can be determined prior to their conscious decision through EEG analysis. Hence, it seems consciousness comes after the event of neural activity, rather than simultaneously or prior to it.

Interesting, no?
 
drfrank said:
Well, apart from not presenting any evidence of the existence of God, that God, if he exists, is conscious or that God's consciousness must necessarily be infinite.
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A non-conscious God is just as much as an oxymoron as a non-conscious person. If we are non-conscious then there are just physical bodies behaving in certain ways i.e we don't exist since we are defined by our consciousness. If God is non-conscious then there is just the physical Universe behaving in certain ways i.e God doesn't exist since God is defined by its consciousness.

Yes God's consciousness can be finite, but that makes even less reason (if that were possible) to judge God as supernatural but us as not.

The topic of consciousness is certainly an intriguing one, but to assume that because consciousness exists then the afterlife/God etc. must also exist is a serious non-sequitur (not that II has necessarily stated these things, but I've met many people who have).
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Then why bring it up? I assume no such thing, and no one else has assumed any such thing in this thread either.

I think the most compelling experimental results about consciousness that I've heard of come from Libet (See Benjamin Libet on Wikipedia). His experiments provide evidence that consciousness, whatever its nature, is a direct by-product of neural activity, in that the decision a person will make can be determined prior to their conscious decision through EEG analysis. Hence, it seems consciousness comes after the event of neural activity, rather than simultaneously or prior to it.

Interesting, no?
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Then it refutes materialism doesn't it. Consciousness cannot be one and the same thing as neural activity if it comes after it. If they do not occur at the same instant it follows that they cannot be the same thing.

Libet's research, if taken at face value, seems to suggest epiphenomenalism rather than materialism.
 
Unimpressive Ion is back, still in the full flower of his skill. Too bad he has me on Iggy (he’s afraid of me), or I’d ask him this:

I.I., don’t you have moments of doubt? Aren’t there times when you wonder why the hell you bother with this rubbish? Doesn’t reason sometimes obtrude into your consciousness? If someone tried to sell you, say, a business proposition using no better evidence than the woo-mongers use, you’d tell him to get lost, and probably with some indignation.* So why this abject credulity when it comes to vapid and pointless stuff like PK, mind reading, the I Ching, mediumship, spirits, stigmata, that wretched Russian girl, and so on and on?

I wonder what far-fetched beliefs you don’t accept? Perhaps crystal healing? Atlantis? Mu? The face on Mars? There must be at least a few things you don’t consider to be true – and if not, why not? Could it be that you sometimes use (ew!) evidence or a lack of it to decide what you’re going to believe?

* I don’t really think that. Ian the Wicker Man could be suckered by any old cheap con. I hope he isn’t allowed to leave the house with more than, say, a pound in his pocket.
 
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