PM, hi. You're amazingly good at putting ideas into categories and missing (or is it in order to miss) the point being made. We don't change paradigms, you say, we replace theories. The old geocentric model wasn't science, so somehow that invalidates the point I was making. You object to my re-using Joe's suggestion that I just 'make things up and present idle imaginings' to emphasise the imagination (often quite idle) involved in devising new theories, insisting that Copernicus worked it all out for 30 years. If he is like many scientists who report how their theories come to them, he won't. He will have worked out the details for years, but the idea will probably have hit him in a moment of idle imagination. Besides, all of this was to defend the action of positing possible cosmologies, when Joe seemed to tell me that wasn't on. Jeeez, are you being deliberately obtuse? The EXAMPLE of the Copernican revolution is just one example. It is really neither here nor there. I have hardly ever come across anyone so unimaginably literal in their reading of things. I am simply pointing out that THEORIES GET CHANGED, and before they do NEW THEORIES OFTEN COME FROM LEFT-FIELD, FLASHES OF INSIGHT, and to the uninitiated they simply LOOK LIKE RUBBISH AND ARE IGNORED.
Changing the titles of particular classes of mental model from 'paradigm' to 'theory' and all the other reprocessing you do of every worthy thing put to you by a non-believer doesn't make their experience go away. It doesn't make them mad or bad. They even admit that most of what they are saying must seem wrong to you, because it comes from personal experience, subjective experimentation, and requires a post-representational, translogical condition of consciousness to resonate with it. You have to get out of your head, or rather into it, to come to your senses. Most of us also rejected such ideas for ages. But, contrary to your assertion that non-material philosophy has no evidence, there is extensive evidence of that kind from thousands of years of experimentation in consciousness - the findings are still hard for most of us to understand, but nevertheless they inform the belief systems of most of humanity. You won't yet have much idea of the extent or appreciate the convergence of the evidence because - quite simply - you haven't been exposed to it enough. You will read it and gawp at mankind's genius for nonsense. Now, have a look at your latest computer program; imagine you haven't yet learned the language: it would be garbage, wouldn't it?
Why is it a problem? What are these alternatives? The one you presented - the radio broadcast analogy - is an absurdity.
Ok, I already said it probably is rather unlikely, but again you failed to take the meaning, because you have so little imagination.
I think you need to come to a better understanding of what science knows about consciousness, and how we know it. And there is no better place to start than the
MIT Introduction to Psychology lecture series by Jeremy Wolfe. It's engaging, insightful, often funny, and superbly presented. And it's free.
Thanks. I appreciate it. I am completely open to understanding what material science says about consciousness, and I am always completely open to recognising that it explains it. I struggle to do so. I really turn over what I hear and read in my mind and worry that it's just too difficult for my little brain - sometimes. Mostly I get it, and it doesn't satisfy me. It doesn't square with my understanding of my subjective consciousness of being. Your machine is not conscious and you know it. You suggest that that is just a matter of complexity. I disagree. I don't think consciousness is some 'reflection' process of unconscious synapses, ever.
, I do not state that materialism is "wrong", as you might hurry to conclude, but I do realize it is deficient in the sense that it is an incomplete account of what we call reality.
