PixyMisa said:
AkuManiMani said:
My core point is an anathema to you: The known is inherently a bounded subset of the unbounded unknown. This is an inescapable epistemological fact.
Well, I'll give you this: That's that's a concise and coherent statement.
I thought that might tickle your fancy
Looked at another way...
All knowledge is built on shifting sands, all understandings but waystation
In pursuit of knowlledge true, there is no final destination
Every answered question is a doorway to still more
Shedding light of revelation, transmuting answers of before
In retropsective view, staid conceptions fall to new
No matter how you try, the more you know the less you do
Behold! Confounding Law of The Catch 42... >:}
In more "grounded" terms...
You take far too much for granted in your conception of the world; in this, you're not the first and hardly the last. Like so many others before you, you've become so enamored and intoxicated by your vaunted understanding of the reality that you unwittingly mistake it for reality itself. You have become so fat and contented with the presumed sufficiency of your "knowledge" that you're blind to the manifold mysteries staring you right in the face.
PixyMisa said:
But yes, we* knew that. That's why every single argument you present is some combination of
special pleading and the
argument from ignorance.
Oh, on the contrary. A tributary point of mine is that the majority of your own position is based upon these very same fallacies:
- Your insistence in lending credence only to studies and claims that confirm your own biases, while vehemently dismissing any and all that don't, is itself a form of
special pleading.
- Your bald claim that the mind/consciousness must
in principle be confined to brains, based purely off of the fact that you know of no mechanism that would allow otherwise, is an
argument from ignorance.
Pot. Kettle. Black.
[* Theres that "we", again. Methinks someone takes way too much comfort in the security of group enforcement and social consensus. Whats the deal? 'Fraid to stand alone...?]
PixyMisa said:
In an infinite Universe, there will of course be an infinite number of things we don't know. That doesn't change the fact that, for example, telepathy is impossible in humans, because we can rule that out based on what we do know about biology and physics. It doesn't change the fact that there is no such thing as a disembodied mind, because the laws of physics preclude such a thing.
There is nothing in the laws of physics as we know them that models or defines the mind/consciousness and its contents -- let alone describes what it's properties are. Such a scientific discovery would be, at the very least, worthy of a Nobel prize. I'm sorry, but you're going to have to provide some very hard evidence of such knowledge.
PixyMisa said:
AkuManiMani said:
Could a fool discern the difference between incoherence and his/her own incomprehension?
If the argument is incoherent, wherefore do you judge him a fool?
I'll take that as an implicit "no".
PixyMisa said:
I'm inclined to follow the words of the other writer, Alan Moore, who says that everything people say about magic is absolutely true, as long as you understand it happened inside people's heads. That sounds more like what seems to be going on in this topic.
Alan Moore can be a wee bit pretentious at times, but that's dead on.
So you really do have an ironic sense of humor,
Pixy. That’s cute
But in all seriousness, I also agree with Mr. Moore's assessment, to an extent. However, I'd add that the subjective contents of the mind are just as real, in their own right, as the external objects of our senses. I'd further posit that the external "physical" world of our common experience is quite possibly a more tightly constrained, coherent, and higher res version of what our individual consciousness produce when we dream.
PixyMisa said:
And yes, when people follow through with excuses rather than evidence, it's time to quit.
Agreed. But I hold out hope for you all the same
