Idealists: What does 'physical' mean to you?

[Malerin]

I would say aware rather than conscious for the average toaster, but I'm sure there are toasters on the market that I would consider conscious (not just aware, but self-aware).

Unintentionally hilarious (which makes it even funnier). I have to nominate this.

 

[paximperium]

Unintentionally hilarious (which makes it even funnier). I have to nominate this.

Keep flouting your ignorance. The rest of the world will continue to advance as you keep claiming that nothing else is real.

Although not a robot per se, Samsung is working on creating a refrigerator that will be the smartest refrigerator you will ever own. The reason for it being covered here on RobotsRule is because robots and A.I. (artificial intelligence) go hand in hand. According to this Samsung spokesman Chae Hee-kook, the refrigerator will use RFID technology to track the items in your refrigerator. RFID stands for Radio-frequency identification. Tags are placed in many kinds of consumer goods that have RFID tags embedded in them allowing them to be tracked efficiently.
Using inventory levels set by the user, it will notify you when you are running low a particular item. Notification can happen in one of two intriguing ways:

1. The refrigerator will be able to send a shopping list of required groceries directly to your cell phone. So you may find yourself in the near future getting a call from you refrigerator instead of your significant other, asking you to pick some things up on the way home!
2. For participating grocery stores, it will be able to send your order directly to the store.

http://www.robotsrule.com/html/samsung-refrigerator.php

This fridge is likely more self aware than Malerin. While the machine reacts to its sense-data, Malerin will claim that it is not real and keep wasting hot air.

 

[PixyMisa]

Unintentionally hilarious (which makes it even funnier). I have to nominate this.

I'm glad you're amused. Would you care to indicate why you find it amusing?

 

[PixyMisa]

Keep flouting your ignorance.

Psst. Flaunting.

Funny, because most people make the mistake the other way.

 

[paximperium]

Psst. Flaunting.

Funny, because most people make the mistake the other way.

I stand corrected. I shall flaunt my willingness to admit mistakes unlike others.

 

[rocketdodger]

Psi. Humans have got it and computers aint.

Unless the computer is equipped with some kind of wireless communication device.

After all, that is your evidence for psi right? Purely non-physical communication?

 

[PixyMisa]

I'm a bit late to this thread. Has an idealist yet posited a reasonable argument that matter is an illusion that does not also lead to solipsism?

Psi. Humans have got it and computers aint.

This raises at least three questions:

1. What is your evidence that humans have this "psi"?
2. What is your evidence that computers do not have this "psi"?
3. What reasoning can you provide that connects the supposed existence of this "psi" to the claim that matter is an illusion?

 

[rocketdodger]

It doesn't even mean what you think it means. As I've said preporatory mental activity says nothing about conscious decision making.

... snip ...

You don't know enough about all the thoughts motive and impulses to assume anything here.

Saying "I made the decision at time X" is equivalent to "I had not made a decision at time X - t." Yet the data shows a decision could be predicted at time X - t.

This is a very simple result. A person didn't feel they had made a decision yet the outcome could be predicted.

Now you can redefine "conscious" and "subconscious" all you want in order to avoid admitting a point. Whatever. The fact remains that when a person says "I have not yet made a decision" it implies that they do not feel a decision has determined. The fact also remains that if a decision is predictable it has been determined -- in a probabalistic sense, of course.

And these results show that a person can be wrong about whether a decision of theirs is determined at time X - t.

 

[rocketdodger]

Why would we look at dogmatic scripture for an answer? My leanings would probably be more towards future research into such things as NDE's - and possibly even mediums, so long as good, stringent, controls were in place.

Oh.

I thought you were going to say something like "well if we suppose there was a God-mind, it raises questions we could use to tailor scientific research across the board and hopefully better understand the fundamentals of the universe and existence."

It is reassuring to know that, were everyone to accept a God-mind hypothesis, you would advocate research in near death experiences and mediums above all else.

Either find a quote from me where I claim that all you "real materialists" don't recognise there is a "hard limit" to what you can know or don't make baseless accusations.

You have insisted, in at least 10 separate posts, that materialists claim "matter" is "self-sustaining" and "self-creating." Which means within the hard limit of what we can know.

You have been told, in at least as many posts, that materialists assert such concepts are nonsense/unknowable. Which means past the hard limit of what we can know.

Since you assert that we propose concepts beyond knowledge, you assert that we don't recognize a hard limit to knowledge.

Which for an atheist is clearly that it is uncreated; i.e. self-sustaining, self-perpetuting or self-generating or whatever. Heck, call it auto-sustaining/perpetuating or generating if you like. It all amounts to the same thing, as I am quite sure you fully understand.

OOPS!!

Make that at least 11 posts!

All that seems to be the case here is that you know full well that atheism leads to a position about the Universe that just cannot be logically or reasonably defended. Therefore you're trying to redefine things so that there is no question to answer.

Yes I agree, if you ignore all evidence -- such as mathematics and the rest of science -- it cannot be defended. How weak! I am surprised anyone would buy into such a position! Now that you put it that way, I think I will become a theist.

The same exact thing has been happening in this thread with consciousness and just saying it's information irocessing or whatever - as if ignoring subjective experience while using cognitive sounding words like "self-referencing" and whatever will make the issue go away.

Since you are no longer addressing the points in this discussion, is it safe to assume that you are unable to muster sufficient counter-arguments?

Myself, malerin and PlumJam are all trying to debate the points while all you lot seem to do is debate the points away!

If by "trying to debate the points" you mean 'repeating attacks on strawmen while ignoring actual responses from materialists' then yes, you all are "trying to debate the points."

How long are atheists going to have to go through this - and I'm talking about the well known, public, ones too here - before they realise that people just aren't buying it?

You are right. "Expelled" did so well in theatres across the country.

Obviously, I am not the one who's gone a little bit over the edge here....

... snip ...

And they spit out the pacifier and throw a tantrum!

If you consider a well-written metaphorical insult to be a "tantrum" then yes, I throw tantrums all the time. That is why plumjam never responds to me anymore. He got tired of how my "tantrums" made him look in front of everyone else.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

This raises at least three questions:

1. What is your evidence that humans have this "psi"?
2. What is your evidence that computers do not have this "psi"?
3. What reasoning can you provide that connects the supposed existence of this "psi" to the claim that matter is an illusion?

And while we're at it, what is your evidence that humans have phenomenal experience? Immaterialists love to cite the zombie thought experiment, in which we make an exact physical duplicate of our world, but without human phenomenal experience. And yet those zombies are indistinguishable from us. Whatever method you come up with for determining whether something is conscious,* the zombie gives the same answer.

~~ Paul

* I note that HypnoPsi has not answered my question about how we know whether something is conscious.

 

[HypnoPsi]

Do you have any evidence of the consciousness of anyone besides yourself that is anything other than behavior?

As I've said, I believe in the evidence for a low level of psi ability in humans and that some NDE accounts are genuine.

Are you certain that your evidence of your own consciousness is not behavior as well?

I'm certain that I'm not inclined to redefine the "evidence of my own consciousness", as you call it, as behaviour and then, having leapt from subjective to objective uses of the term 'behaviour' carry on like I've not made the leap.

All so called (materialistic) research into consciousness is nothing more than, at the very best, cognitive modelling in terms of problem solving, ect.,.

Even if this were true, so what?[/quote]


The way atheists do it is little more than just white-washing the facts. The objective and subjective realms are different things. Just using behaviouristic language drawn from information processing and cognitive psychology to describe both the subjective and objective realms does not lead to them both being the same thing.

It's nothing more than trying to get around the scientific rule that correlation is not causation by chasing your own tail.

I have an idea of the properties a thing must have for it to be knowable to a human -- material properties.

What makes you think this idea is correct? Since consciousness perceives in terms of thought it it not more rational to assume that objective phenomena must somehow have the same fundamental basis?

Parsimony dictates that the simplest explanation for a thing having those properties is that there is a thing having those properties. That is materialism.

It's also idealism and theistic phenomenology - that there are objective phenomena with properties "out there" that occupy spacetime doesn't change for anyone whatever theory they ascribe to of what it all ultimately is.

Are you somehow trying to deny that atheism must inherently include the belief that it is all uncreated by any type of consciousness or other (i.e. that it is all self or auto sustaining)?

This means either stuff has been around forever, which a human cannot comprehend, or the stuff somehow came from something other than existing stuff, which a human can also not comprehend. Since we can't comprehend either, it is pointless to even think about it.

It's practically the whole point of scientific thinking to generate hypothesis and construct theories. Do you just dislike this because it leads to theism being parsimonious?

I don't say "self-creating and self-sustaining" because those are nonsense ideas. Results without a cause. A human can't think like that. You are deluding yourself if you think you can.

I'm not an atheist who believes in these nonsense ideas...


You know, this whole post reads of typical atheist/materialist/skeptic behaviour of trying to desparately redefine things so that they simply don't have claims or beliefs and "nothing to defend".

One could construct God in exactly the same way following the exact same logic.

No, they don't show or even hint at consciousness being distinct from physiology.

To show that, one would have to find results that suggest the physical state of a mind can remain the same while the consciousness it produces changes. No such results exist.

NDEs refute this idea.

For myself, I think that John Searl has come very close to pointing out the faults in this reasoning with his Chinese Room thought experiment.

No, he hasn't.

All he has pointed out is that if one accepts that consciousness is computational then one must accept that they could be a chinese room themselves.

He did not, in any way, show that consciousness is not computational.

Nobody is required to prove a negative. You have yet to show that consciousness is computational. Just using computational language for cognition and computation is not enough.

Why do you imagine your friends and family have any conscious subjective experience?

Because I fully believe that low levels of psi ability exist in humans and that at least some NDE's are true.

~
HypnoPsi

 

[HypnoPsi]

Translation: You can't explain everything about materialism therefore my magic thinking is the true one.

Nope. Theism is the most parsimonious theory about existence solely because it deals with all the facts and is predicated upon something known.

Whether or not it's "true" is another question altogether.

~
HypnoPsi

 

[Dancing David]

This is only true when you observer reality through the filter of classical physics. From a quantum viewpoint things just doen't look the same at all.

~
HypnoPsi

That is just silly word play, you are reading foolish stuff into my statement that is not there.

The substance that appears to be there behaves as though it is quanta of energy that follow the behavior modeled as QM.

Try to remember I am not who you think I am, I am a nihilist. I see no meaning in any proposition, they are all meaningless in and of themselves.

Utility/validity in making predictions is all that there is that can be labeled as 'possibly coherent' explanations' of the 'observable behaviors'.

So your statement about my carefully worded statement about 'substance' makes all sorts of silly baggage you put on to it.

I feel that quanta of energy are a model that accurately seems to model the behavior of reality, as it appears.

I really don't care if it is 'god' or 'matter'. Anything beyond a cursory glance at physics will tell you that 'matter' is just a label property ascribed to certain aspects of 'energy'. There is no 'wave/particle duality'. Quanta appear as waves all the time and in every place, the 'waveform' does not collapse, it is a 'waveform' all the time, it intersects with other waves forms to produce the effects that we label as 'matter'. Again only from appearance.

But the models seems to suggest that 'it' is waveforms all the time, it is always 'energy'.

Whatever that is, again, I only am labeling the appearance, I think that if it is godthought, phenomena, butterfly dreams or quanta is meaningless.

It behaves as though it has 'subsatnce' although that 'substance' behaves as though it is 'quanta of energy'. It could be Magic Sky Pixie and the Fairy Horde. It doesn't have meaning, except as a way to label what appears to be.

 

[Dancing David]

Psi. Humans have got it and computers aint.

BTW, I'm not an idealist. I'm a theist and phenomenologist if that matters.

~
HypnoPsi

I think we should split this to another thread, do you agree?

 

[PixyMisa]

As I've said, I believe in the evidence for a low level of psi ability in humans and that some NDE accounts are genuine.

Why, though? After all, the quality of the research ranges from the appalling to the abysmal, and the entire field is utterly discredited.

The way atheists do it is little more than just white-washing the facts. The objective and subjective realms are different things.

Why do you think this?

What makes you think this idea is correct? Since consciousness perceives in terms of thought it it not more rational to assume that objective phenomena must somehow have the same fundamental basis?

Since I can turn your consciousness off by any of a variety of purely physical means, no; rather, it is very silly indeed.

Are you somehow trying to deny that atheism must inherently include the belief that it is all uncreated by any type of consciousness or other (i.e. that it is all self or auto sustaining)?

Of course we deny this. Atheism need include no beliefs whatsoever; it merely excludes positive belief in gods.

It's practically the whole point of scientific thinking to generate hypothesis and construct theories. Do you just dislike this because it leads to theism being parsimonious?

Nothing can possibly lead to theism being parsimonious.

NDEs refute this idea.

NDEs don't refute diddly, I'm afraid. There's not the slightest shred of evidence that NDEs are anything but physical processes.

Nobody is required to prove a negative. You have yet to show that consciousness is computational. Just using computational language for cognition and computation is not enough.

If you could bring up one, just one, aspect of consciousness that is not clearly informational in nature (and that actually exists) you would have a point.

Because I fully believe that low levels of psi ability exist in humans and that at least some NDE's are true.

Well, you're wrong then.

 

[plumjam]

Try to remember I am not who you think I am, I am a nihilist. I see no meaning in any proposition, they are all meaningless in and of themselves.

bolding mine
The second sentence is made up of two propositions, both of which propose propositions to be meaningless. It's an entirely self-defeating position to take.
Start again.

 

[HypnoPsi]

The sense of an internal self or perceiver gives individuals a frame of reference to process the information they receive. There are obvious advantages to believing there to be an "I" that needs feeding, protecting, and to interact with other "I"s.

You're still not seeing it are you? You are giving individuals as frame of references and having someone believe there to be an "I" that nees feeding, etc.,. None of this explains why there should be a subjective sense of an "I".

There is in fact an evolutionary explanation for consciousness. It won't kill you to look things up.

No, there are evolutionary theories for the development of cognition. You're only kidding yourself that it leads to qualitative experience. In short, you need to believe all of this first in order for it to be true.

You cannot experimentally demonstrate or justify the belief that consciousness is equivalent to or caused by information processing.

It was already shown that you're attributing abilities to the God-mind that no humans possess, and therefore your analogy fails.

And, again, the point of constructing a theory parsimoniously is not perfection - it is only to be parsimonious about it.

Yes, meanwhile physical causes can alter or destroy consciousness. You can hardly claim that consciousness is "uncuttable."

Nope. NDE's prove this completely wrong. Consciousness is completely distinct from physiology.

"Information," like the term "law," is a label we use for our understanding of what we observe. Your argument is no more coherent than the one creationists use in claiming that "laws" exist and laws require a lawgiver.

Can you give any examples of laws and information causing themselves to exist?

~
HypnoPsi

 

[HypnoPsi]

Yes, I finally see what you mean. I agree. What now?

We should funnel billions into psi research and see where it leads us. From that point on we should build models and theories based upon the data we gain.Whether or not they confirm or disconfirm aspects of any given religion or philosophy is moot.

~
HypnoPsi

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

You cannot experimentally demonstrate or justify the belief that consciousness is equivalent to or caused by information processing.

How do you justify the belief that consciousness exists at all?

Nope. NDE's prove this completely wrong. Consciousness is completely distinct from physiology.

Then I would think you could show me a disembodied consciousness. Whatever NDEs are, they clearly require a body.

~~ Paul

 

[HypnoPsi]

What is materialism/physicalism predicated on? What's its foundation?

I gave you two reasons off the top of my head, which are demonstrable causality and repeatable observation.

I'm not saying that objective reality isn't a thing or is in anyway unreal. My definition of atheistic materialism/physicalism is that things are self-sustaining (as in being uncreated or sustained by any consciousness).

What justifies theorising that information - or even some stuff or other - can sustain itself?

I accept that ultimately we don't know and that all we have about either God or matter is theory. That's not the point of building a scientific theory. I'm only saying that theism is more parsimonious.

Chop consciousness just once and it disappears.

And I disagree based on NDE research.

If God-mind is a "theory" then what predictions does it make and how can we test it?

Now that is a sensible question. It can be tested (in principle if not in practice) on the grounds that God could - and indeed would - be falsified if you could show something existing that was truly self-sustaining and/or uncreated.

~
HypnoPsi