How do we know that places like Narnia do not exist?

Well done, 69dodge. You have been accorded the dubious honor of being on Ian's "smart people" list. (It is a very short list.) First time you disagree with him though, you'll be on the other side with the rest of us idiots.
 
69dodge said:
If I were told that the force of gravity obeys an inverse square law and that F=ma, I could, if I were a good enough mathematician, predict that planets move in elliptical orbits. I would not have to be told that they do, as an additional fact.
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That still doesn't make the inverse square law and F=ma axioms. An axiom is "a statement accepted as true as the basis for argument or inference." We are not required merely to accept those two as true. Do you really want to use the term axiom for fundamental observations? In the case of the inverse square law, it isn't even a fundamental observation; a more fundamental observation is that space is 3D.

If I were told about all the physical and chemical and biological processes that go on in a brain when 510 nm light is shined into the eye, but I hadn't ever shined 510 nm light into my own eye (or I had, but I didn't know that its wavelength was 510 nm), would I be able to predict that those brain processes produce the experience of seeing green?
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Yes, because part of learning about the brain processes would be to learn that people experience "qualia" when their senses are stimulated. Would you be able to predict what "green actually looks like," as distinct from red or blue? I have no idea, partly because it's clear that everyone sees green differently anyway.

~~ Paul
 
We still don't understand Ian's model of the senses. How does your model explain why I see green when there is no 510 nm light impinging on my eyes?

~~ Paul
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
We still don't understand Ian's model of the senses. How does your model explain why I see green when there is no 510 nm light impinging on my eyes?

~~ Paul
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Eh? My model? It's perfectly possible to see green if you do not see light since greenness is not one and the same thing as a particular wavelength of light. It only causes your experience of greenness.

According to those who believe in a material world (not just materialists as they believe everything is material not just the external world) nothing we ever perceptually experience is how the external world really is.
 
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Interesting Ian said:
...According to those who believe in a material world (not just materialists as they believe everything is material not just the external world) nothing we ever perceptually experience is how the external world really is.
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Am I the only one here who thinks that is a totally meaningless statement?
 
Interesting Ian said:
Consider the clockwork clock example again. Once you have completely and totally understood all the properties of its component parts, then you can in principle understand why the clock does what it does. [...]

According to the reductive materialist exactly the same sort of reasoning should apply to human beings. Everything that we do is derived from the interactions of the ultimate components of our brains.

That is to say everything we do i.e the totality of our behaviour.

But what about our consciousness?
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I think you're arguing from ignorance. We don't know, as of now, what creates consciousness and why and how. Once we do, you'll say "Ah! Now I see!" and we'll understand, by looking at all individual components and understanding what they do individually and how they interact, what happens when they're put together.

You're just using our ignorance as some sort of metaphysical point and using this non-physical conclusion to attack materialism, which is ridiculous.

Even if this is so, nevertheless we cannot derive our consciousness from the component parts of the brain.

All we would be doing is to say that when the brain is in a particular state, a specific particular mental state occurs.
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Agian, you're assuming this, because you do not have the information necessary to actually reach a conclusion. You ARE arguing from ignorance.

Interesting Ian said:
But this whole debate is metaphysical. It is emphatically not a scientific issue.

Take the example of a clockwork clock. Let's suppose that its internal mechanism is so vastly complex that we cannot figure out why it does what it does i.e we cannot work out why the hands move and keep time and why the alarm sounds.
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Of course we would. Whatever makes you think that ?

II: Eh . .you mean that the hands produce consciousness. So it would just be a brute fact about reality that certain physical processes generate consciousness?

Materialist: No I don't mean that. The hands moving literally is consciousness. Once we have figured out how the hands move, then we have therefore reductively explained consciousness.
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There's that demon again. Basically, you're saying that every product of anything else cannot be described, per say, in materialistic terms. If an object hits another and causes movement, we cannot define this movement materialistically, according to you.

So that's the basic argument except we're talking about human beings rather than clocks. We can see this issue is not a scientific one but rather a metaphysical one. It's not a scientific one because, for the sake of argument, we are granting that it is possible in principle to completely explain all the workings of human beings including all their behaviour.
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Gunderscoredamned sophist! You're just trying to move the question outside the realm of science and into your own courtyard so you can re-define it and "be right". I can do that, too, but it's pointless and a waste of time and energy.
 
Interesting Ian said:
I've had enough of this. I am sick to death of talking about materialism and nobody ever understanding what I'm talking about.

This thread is supposed to be about Narnia!

I'm outta here.
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:jaw-dropp

And he's the one who was so adamant about refuting materialism.

Well, folks, when I joined this forum Interesting Ian had just been suspended, and I wondered why. Now I know.




And knowing is half the battle!
 
Interesting Ian said:
Tricky said:
But feel free to stomp off in a huff because the "idiots" don't understand you. We will somehow manage to keep a stiff upper lip through the terrible depression that envelopes us when we don't have your company.
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They're not posting then.

I'm pissed off with this place. No-one ever agrees with me about anything and nobody ever supplies any reasons to remotely justify their disagreement.
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Ian, have you ever stopped and considered that this may be because you're not as smart as you thought you were ?
 
Interesting Ian said:
Eh? My model? It's perfectly possible to see green if you do not see light since greenness is not one and the same thing as a particular wavelength of light. It only causes your experience of greenness.

According to those who believe in a material world (not just materialists as they believe everything is material not just the external world) nothing we ever perceptually experience is how the external world really is.
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Of course. The green thing isn't "green" per se, it just emits a particular wavelength of light that we interpret as the english word "green". But green still exists, as the brain's interpretation of that wavelength. Still, if you cut open a brain, you won't see any green... well... I don't think so. anyway, you're not wrong in your assertions, here, Ian, but your conclusion that green "doesn't exist" is wierd.
 
Ian said:
Eh? My model? It's perfectly possible to see green if you do not see light since greenness is not one and the same thing as a particular wavelength of light. It only causes your experience of greenness.
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Yes, but in the case of the illusion there is no light to cause your experience of greenness. The greenness is entirely internally generated. What I want to know is how your model explains these two different experiences of green.

~~ Paul
 
Hey Natasha! Yes, repeat theatre is quite a useful term. I'm not quite sure how my use of it is ironic, though. Would you not expect me to use it just because you use it to describe me? Well, perhaps you wouldn't. It's kind of a one-way irony, then.

~~ Paul
 
Interesting Ian said:
According to those who believe in a material world (not just materialists as they believe everything is material not just the external world) nothing we ever perceptually experience is how the external world really is.
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When I bang my head against a brick wall, I perceive the bricks to be hard, and they are.
 
Interesting Ian said:
Eh? My model? It's perfectly possible to see green if you do not see light since greenness is not one and the same thing as a particular wavelength of light. It only causes your experience of greenness.
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Yes.

But you said that green was present. It isn't. There is the experience of green. If you said that, no-one would have argued with you.

According to those who believe in a material world (not just materialists as they believe everything is material not just the external world) nothing we ever perceptually experience is how the external world really is.
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I'm not sure I agree with Jeff. I think, with appropriate editing, this could form the basis of a coherent statement.
 
69dodge said:
I'm not sure how to answer that. Why should I expect to see anything?

Well, given everything that I know, which includes the fact that I do see things, I think it's so I can see.

But if I were given just the physics and the chemistry and the anatomy of a brain, without the additional knowledge that owners of brains do consciously see things, I would have no reason to think that that's what it's for.
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How do you define seeing, then?

The eye is a photosensor. It is built to see things. That much is obvious.

I don't believe our two descriptions of science are contradictory. We form hypotheses and test them, but the hypotheses that we form are of the sort that I described, namely, our hypothesis says, if we construct a mathematical theory with such-and-such axioms then all the theorems derived from those axioms are true of the real world. And then the way we test that hypothesis is by deriving theorems from the proposed axioms, and checking whether they are in fact true of the real world.
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They're not axioms. You can't test axioms. (Although you can test systems of axioms by seeing if they produce contradictions.)

There's a reason they are not referred to as axioms and that's because that's not what they are.

I guess it's not about why, if you take a very philosophical, ultimate sort of definition of "why".
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Many "why" statements can be rephrased in a straightforward manner as "what" or "how" questions, yes.

But it's not just about saying "this does this and that does that"; it's about making sense out of what things do, about tying together lot of different behaviour of lots of different things, about finding some underlying simplicity to the apparent complexity.
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Which is just saying "this does this when that does that".

The inverse square law of Newtonian gravitation? I don't think so. Can you explain why you do think so? What is impossible about a gravity that, for example, isn't weaker far from the Earth, but rather has the same strength at all distances?
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Space is three-dimensional. It's very simple.

A force travelling in one-dimension will not diminish, because it has nowhere to diminish into.
An omnidirectional force travelling in two dimensions wil disperse into the second dimension, falling off proportionally with distance.
And such a force travelling in three dimensions will fall off with the square of distance.

I'm not sure what definitions you're using. If we are defining F to be equal to kma, we might as well just define it to be equal to ma, I'd think.
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No.

The definitions of force, and of mass, and of acceleration. Given what we mean by each of those terms, you can't introduce any other units, because then the equation can no longer work.

The Feynman Lectures on Physics has a good discussion of the definitional status of Newton's laws in volume 1, chapter 12. Do you have it? Maybe I'll type some of it up, but it's kind of long.
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I do, but it's in a box right now.

I'm not sure how to explain what I mean without just repeating what I've already said. Yes, it's an observation, but is it an observation that someone could predict who hadn't observed it himself but who knew the rest of the scientific theory of consciousness?
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What scientific theory of consciousness? There isn't one yet, not on that level, anyway.

But given such a theory, yes, ultimately that is the sort of thing it could predict.
 
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