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

uruk said:
[weenie mode] But if the chocolate strong force behaved exactly like gravity well.... wouldn't it...,you know,......be gravity?[/weenie mode]
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I never said it behaved the same, only that it brought about the same result. Perhaps the Chocolate Strong Force holds planets together by a Coco Field. :D
 
uruk said:
Right, one of those theories would be Schrodinger's. But I believe that most of the others just require extra spatial dimensions rather than full blown universes.

just...ah...being an pendantic weenie again. :)

Carry on!
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You could very much be right, mate. I subtract my statement, then, and replace it with "one theory". :)
 
PixyMisa said:
Because if materialism is true, all mental states reduce to brain states. All you need to do is recreate the appropriate parts of the brain state. The Big Book of Everything There Is To Know About Colour explains how to do this.
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I'm still not sure what you mean by "reduce."

I agree that if I could recreate the appropriate brain state, then I would see green even though no green light is entering my eyes. But who says I can do that just by reading a book and thinking various thoughts? Maybe it requires electrodes stuck in my brain or something. Or are you allowing for the possibility that the book says, "stick electrodes in this part of your brain, and send this electrical signal through them," and that I have in my black and white room all the necessary equipment to do so?

Either way, it seems to be beside the point, though. Because then I have seen green, so of course I'd be able to recognize it if I see it again later.
 
Taffer said:
Yes [we do have some scientific theory that is able to predict which subjective experience results from which brain processes].
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Like?

When I say predict, I mean predict something new, not something we already know because we've already observed it.
 
69dodge said:
Like?

When I say predict, I mean predict something new, not something we already know because we've already observed it.
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Oh, my apologies, I didn't read your post clearly enough. :o

In this case, I should have replied "I don't know, but I'm sure we could".

(I thought you said do we have knowledge of which processes produce which specific subjective experiences. Again I apologise.)

We have evidence that some subjective experiences are produced by specific processes in the brain. This suggests that conscisouness (or at least, these subjective experiences) are physical. We can induce that all subjective experiences are phsyical, in the absence of evidence to the negative.
 
69dodge said:
I'm still not sure what you mean by "reduce."

I agree that if I could recreate the appropriate brain state, then I would see green even though no green light is entering my eyes. But who says I can do that just by reading a book and thinking various thoughts? Maybe it requires electrodes stuck in my brain or something. Or are you allowing for the possibility that the book says, "stick electrodes in this part of your brain, and send this electrical signal through them," and that I have in my black and white room all the necessary equipment to do so?

Either way, it seems to be beside the point, though. Because then I have seen green, so of course I'd be able to recognize it if I see it again later.
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Given your allowed to use one colour, then it's possible to induce its complement in the 'mind's eye'. Like this...

http://www.patmedia.net/marklevinson/cool/cool_illusion.html
 
sphenisc said:
Given your allowed to use one colour, then it's possible to induce its complement in the 'mind's eye'. Like this...

http://www.patmedia.net/marklevinson/cool/cool_illusion.html
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That is indeed a very cool illusion. I saw a lot of stuff like that in the Exploratorium in San Francisco.

But you don't even need to see anything. Most people have had the experience of rubbing their closed eyes very hard and seeing colors. You can fool your eyes into sending signals to your brain.
 
We've done the Knowledge Argument to death. The problem is simple: Mary can learn complete knowledge about color vision, but that does not enable her to form some of the memories that one forms from actually seeing color. Therefore, when she leaves the room, her brain is not in the same state as a person who has learned to see color.

If there was an operation we could perform on her in the room, to give her these memories that she cannot form from book learning, then she would not be surprised when she left the room.

Philosophers don't know any neurophysiology.

~~ Paul

Edited to add:

Pixy said:
Because if materialism is true, all mental states reduce to brain states. All you need to do is recreate the appropriate parts of the brain state. The Big Book of Everything There Is To Know About Colour explains how to do this.
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And if it explains how to perform surgery on yourself to get your brain in the right state, Mary is all set. When she leaves the room, she will not experience anything new.
 
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69dodge said:
I'm still not sure what you mean by "reduce."
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Just consider something like a clockwork clock. By looking at the components of that clock - namely the cogs, the springs, and the wheels - and how they all interrelate together, we can actually understand how the hour, the minute and the second hands move.

The clock wouldn't do anything which in principle couldn't be derived by looking at all its component parts and how they inter-relate.

We might have a phenomenon which we cannot understand by looking at the parts it is composed of, but nevertheless in principle it should be understandable. And even if we cannot understand the intricate mechanism we can still make observations such as the hour hand rotating through 30 degrees every hour etc

In an analogical manner the behaviour of people must be wholly explicable through the interactions of electrons and quarks. But in practice it is too complex and we have the science of psychology to "explain" peoples' behaviour (just as we might have a science of clocks which simply consists in making observations of the hands and how fast they travel). But nevertheless the real true reason why we behave as we do is through the interactions of ultimate particles (not that I actually believe this of course, but I know everyone else on here does).

But our behaviour is not only supposed to be reducible, but also our consciousness and everything we ever experience. In other words by looking at all the intricate interactions of my brain, one should in principle be able to derive what I am experiencing even if you have never had that experience yourself. If you can't in principle, then reductive materialism is false, and we have to fall back to non-reductive materialism at a minimum.

Another way of putting this is to ask whether a string of 0's and 1's can possible tell you what it's like to experience greenness.
 
PixyMisa said:
No new principles. Just vastly more detail, in both theory and information. It would be utterly impractical; no-one could ever learn it all.


What if I said that the book was thirty billion pages long? And that you would have to have a cell-level brain scan done, and then spend a century doing calculations on a supercomputer, followed by three hundred years of additional study before you understood what the experience of seeing red felt like?
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Making a string of 0's and 1's much much longer is clearly of no help.
 
Interesting Ian said:
Just consider something like a clockwork clock. By looking at the components of that clock - namely the cogs, the springs, and the wheels - and how they all interrelate together, we can actually understand how the hour, the minute and the second hands move.

The clock wouldn't do anything which in principle couldn't be derived by looking at all its component parts and how they inter-relate.

We might have a phenomenon which we cannot understand by looking at the parts it is composed of, but nevertheless in principle it should be understandable. And even if we cannot understand the intricate mechanism we can still make observations such as the hour hand rotating through 30 degrees every hour etc

In an analogical manner the behaviour of people must be wholly explicable through the interactions of electrons and quarks. But in practice it is too complex and we have the science of psychology to "explain" peoples' behaviour (just as we might have a science of clocks which simply consists in making observations of the hands and how fast they travel). But nevertheless the real true reason why we behave as we do is through the interactions of ultimate particles (not that I actually believe this of course, but I know everyone else on here does).

But our behaviour is not only supposed to be reducible, but also our consciousness and everything we ever experience. In other words by looking at all the intricate interactions of my brain, one should in principle be able to derive what I am experiencing even if you have never had that experience yourself. If you can't in principle, then reductive materialism is false, and we have to fall back to non-reductive materialism at a minimum.

Another way of putting this is to ask whether a string of 0's and 1's can possible tell you what it's like to experience greenness.
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hmmm, are the 0s and 1s written in green? :)
 
sphenisc said:
Given your allowed to use one colour, then it's possible to induce its complement in the 'mind's eye'. Like this...

http://www.patmedia.net/marklevinson/cool/cool_illusion.html
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Yes., works for me. Excellent stuff.

But it says on that page:

There really is no green dot, and the pink ones really don't disappear. This should be proof enough, we don't always see what we think we see.
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What does that mean?? We either always see what we think we see, or we never do. What we "see" is implcitly shaped by low-level theory about how the world is. The world that we see is a construct by the mind (I would say the mind not the brain).
 
sphenisc said:
hmmm, are the 0s and 1s written in green? :)
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No.

The reductionist holds that all possible information exhausts all possible knowledge. So in principle a sufficiently large sting of 0's and 1's tells us absolute all things. If you have acquired all possible information by reading a sufficiently large book, then you cannot possibly learn something by seeing something or doing something. You will already know what greennes is like, what having an orgasm is like, what tasting vanila ice cream is like. Just a string of 0's and 1's tells you all this. Well, according to the reductive materialists.
 
Interesting Ian said:
But I'll be discussing this extensively in my website when it is eventually completed in the fullness of time.
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Funny. A whole post just to repeat this.

Interesting Ian said:
What does that mean?? We either always see what we think we see, or we never do. What we "see" is implcitly shaped by low-level theory about how the world is. The world that we see is a construct by the mind (I would say the mind not the brain).
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As usual, you're making things far more complicated than they really are.

Interesting Ian said:
The reductionist holds that all possible information exhausts all possible knowledge. So in principle a sufficiently large sting of 0's and 1's tells us absolute all things.
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I suppose it would.

If you have acquired all possible information by reading a sufficiently large book, then you cannot possibly learn something by seeing something or doing something.
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But that's a bad analogy. The "book" you posit would have to also give you every possible experience about the thing it is discussing. Without that, it DOESN'T have all the information.
 
I went to Narnia once. It was not as cool as that movie made it out to be.

A female dryad seduced me with an encantation. It was very unpleasent. She was mean and did not pay attention to my needs.

Then a viscious gang of fawns stomped me Hell's Angel style. That was brutally painful. I barely made it out alive.

Do not fall for all that pro Narnia propaganda you see in the media these days. You could get hurt, or worse.
 
Sorry if this is an idiotic question but...
This reduction thing. Is it ok to have things that ARE irreducible? Or is the theory that reduction is infinite?
I think I get Ian's view on this, but not everybody else's.
Ta. :)
 
Taffer said:
I never said it behaved the same, only that it brought about the same result. Perhaps the Chocolate Strong Force holds planets together by a Coco Field. :D
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Yea, but wouldn't the presence of heat reduce the solar system into a really gooey, tasty chocolate fondue?

Truly a universe I would like to visit!!!!
 
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