I challenge you: your best alternate to materialism

[Dancing David]

Something knows something and I am privy to it. There can't be knowing without a knower.

That is an assertion not a demonstration, it could well just be the appearance of 'knows something and I am privy to it'.

 

[doronshadmi]

Alright. Lets try this again, cause I really don't roll with the endless, semantic debates that lead nowhere:

What would be an irrefutable demonstration that any human being could perform right now in their homes or wherever they are, to demonstrate how they can change anything about the physical, material world they live with, using nothing but their mind?

Since mind and matter are two expressions of the same substance, no one of them can be expressed without the other, so, "using nothing but their mind" or "using nothing but their matter" (as if mind and matter are essentially isolated of each other) is impossible.

Moreover, let's assume that mind and matter are essentially isolated of each other. In that case your question is meaningless.

It has to be stressed that mind's expressed abilities is deeply related to matter's complexity evolution, where self-referential ability is actually the mind\matter abilities to directly be aware of their neutral substance, which is naturally simpler than any multiplicity, including mind/matter multiple expression.

Materialists claim that the substance of reality is matter.

Idealists claim that the substance of reality is non-material (ideal).

In both cases an actual substance must be simpler than its multiple expressions, or in other words, an actual substance is one, such that matter or mind emerge from and return to the same one substance, which is naturally neutral w.r.t its non-simplest multiple expressions (for example: mind\matter expressions).

So, Neutral Monism is the simplest alternative for Materialism or Idealism, which naturally enables their non-simplest expressions.

 

[Ron_Tomkins]

(I'm just passing through) You are assuming there's a physical material world, which is incompatible with what I think is the root of your question.

It's not incompatible, because I'm pretty sure no one will be able to demonstrate such thing

 

[Ron_Tomkins]

Ok, how about this?:

What would be an irrefutable demonstration that any human being could perform right now in their homes or wherever they are, to demonstrate how they can change anything about the physical, material world outside of their own body, using ONLY their mind? (No hands, mouth or any other part of the body allowed)

Since mind and matter are two expressions of the same substance, no one of them can be expressed without the other, so, "using nothing but their mind" or "using nothing but their matter" (as if mind and matter are essentially isolated of each other) is impossible.

Moreover, let's assume that mind and matter are essentially isolated of each other. In that case your question is meaningless.

It has to be stressed that mind's expressed abilities is deeply related to matter's complexity evolution, where self-referential ability is actually the mind\matter abilities to directly be aware of their neutral substance, which is naturally simpler than any multiplicity, including mind/matter multiple expression.

Materialists claim that the substance of reality is matter.

Idealists claim that the substance of reality is non-material (ideal).

In both cases an actual substance must be simpler than its multiple expressions, or in other words, an actual substance is one, such that matter or mind emerge from and return to the same one substance, which is naturally neutral w.r.t its non-simplest multiple expressions (for example: mind\matter expressions).

So, Neutral Monism is the simplest alternative for Materialism or Idealism, which naturally enables their non-simplest expressions.

So you're basically saying you can't. Thank you.

 

[tsig]

It's not incompatible, because I'm pretty sure no one will be able to demonstrate such thing

We have speculations concerning conjectures about what kind of treasure is located at the ends of the rainbow of the mind, none of which prove there even is any alternative to the material world.

 

[Akhenaten]

Hasta la vista, Baby.

 

[LarryS]

It's not incompatible, because I'm pretty sure no one will be able to demonstrate such thing

All I'm suggesting is that your 'challenge' doesn't make any sense except for the spoon-benders, and I don't think there are any spoon-benders here on this forum.

 

[wea]

... and I don't think there are any spoon-benders here on this forum.

doesn't astroman818 qualify?

 

[Ron_Tomkins]

All I'm suggesting is that your 'challenge' doesn't make any sense except for the spoon-benders, and I don't think there are any spoon-benders here on this forum.

I think my challenge makes sense for the claim that there is no such thing as the material world, and that "it's all created by our mind" and all that mumbo jumbo that inspired things like The Law Of Attraction and such.

I also think that when it comes time to address such a round and simple question, those who believe in that, will find a way around the question, to basically escape the responsibility of putting their money where their mouth is.

 

[LarryS]

I think my challenge makes sense for the claim that there is no such thing as the material world, and that "it's all created by our mind" and all that mumbo jumbo that inspired things like The Law Of Attraction and such.

I also think that when it comes time to address such a round and simple question, those who believe in that, will find a way around the question, to basically escape the responsibility of putting their money where their mouth is.

I'm not familiar with any claim as "it's all created by our mind" - I am not aware of anyone making that claim.

 

[Ron_Tomkins]

I'm not familiar with any claim as "it's all created by our mind" - I am not aware of anyone making that claim.

It varies. Sometimes the claim is "It's all created by our mind". Sometimes it's "It can all be modified/affected/changed with the mind". Sometimes they switch back and forth. But it really comes down to consciousness, I think. The thing seems to be, a lot of people are baffled by human consciousness, by how it works. So they, first, treat it as if it was some magic, intangible, paranormal substance. Then, they take that magic substance and project it on the entire universe, and try to explain the universe through it. So you hear things like "The Universe is conscious", "The Universe will attract things to you if you think about them", etc etc. But I really think that the whole issue with some people denying the material world, is because they still haven't come to grasp with the idea that this incredibly amazing thing we call consciousness, can be traced to the same physical world that a rock or a pencil can.

 

[MRC_Hans]

Yes, it would be interesting if a biological construct could be made conscious, or whether it would always remain a "zombie".

How would you tell the difference?

I was asking, can we build a conscious electronic computer? Is this a maybe, or a definite?

By which definition of conscious?

Self-conscious:

Can we (as in currently)? I think not.
Is it possible? Possibly. The strength of computers have been growing exponentially since their invention.

Perhaps you should revise your opinion of me. I have stated many times that I hold no beliefs about anything.

However, you are stating beliefs all the time.

Hans

 

[Ron_Tomkins]

But I really think that the whole issue with some people denying the material world, is because they still haven't come to grasp with the idea that this incredibly amazing thing we call consciousness, can be traced to the same physical world that a rock or a pencil can.

And here's an example from perhaps one of the most important figures who speak for this Belief of the Magic Power of Consciousness. Deepak Chopra



He starts right off the bat, in the first 30 seconds of the interview, by talking about his theory, which as he says "is a theory that a shift in consciousness creates a shift in biology"

There you have it. In its most concise way: The belief that shifts in consciousness can cause shifts in biology. In other words, the belief that your consciousness is powerful enough to change your body.

The theory of course, helps itself in part because the mind does have some power over the body. A person who becomes really stressed can develop insomnia, anxiety and that can bring other side effects that can lead to a headache and even a fever. But then they go and try to stretch it by claiming that you can also cure cancer just by using your consciousness, which is of course... just utterly false, and has probably cost a lot of innocent lives.

By listening a bit more to the interview, you can trace all of Chopra's claims to the same basic principle "That consciousness can change the physical body". This same thought is expressed over and over, in different ways.

 

[Myriad]

Hi punshhh. Sorry for not responding sooner; I've been preparing for a trip and hadn't had much time to think about this topic til now.

I am no expert on the biology of cells, although I don't think that hypothetically deconstructing a cell is of much use here. Due to my point that it is a fully functioning cell which has consciousness. It might be possible when cellular biology is more advanced, to isolate consciousness in one organelle or another, or a group of them cooperating, or the relevance of the presence of DNA. If I were to speculate on any of this, I would be working entirely on intuition within speculation, which I doubt would be of much use.
My point hinges on the idea of a cell as a fully functioning entity and a multi cellular organism as a colony of cells cooperating to generate a complex organism.

I know you're only speculating, but I'm surprised that even as speculation, you would accept the possibility that consciousness in a cell could be isolated to one organelle or another. That suggests you are okay with the idea of consciousness being some particular physical process going on in some particular subsystem of living creatures—and yet you reject the well-evidenced hypothesis that the brain is indeed the consciousness-generating subsystem we observe.

The consciousness-organelle idea, speculative as it is, makes a good basis for some thought experiments. For instance: presumably that organelle must be doing something physical. What physical process could it possibly be doing that would generate consciousness? (For the brain, we have the answer that it computes via trains of impulses filtering through active and dynamic neural networks.) If the organelle were disabled or removed, what effect would an observer be able to see in the activities of the cell? Could we have a p-zombie-cell, and if so, could we tell the difference between it and a fully intact cell? What differences do you think we might see? (And if we can't tell the difference, if the modified cell continues to metabolize and reproduce and respond to stimuli and so forth, then why would evolution have preserved the consciousness-organelle's functionality? It would seem that any single mutation that disabled the consciousness-organelle in a population of protozoa would result in a sort of protozoa zombie apocalypse as the mutants proliferated and competed with the "conscious" organisms.)

By analogy we could imagine a cell as a fully functioning TV(old fashioned with valves etc), consciousness being the programme on the screen*. If one takes a scalpel(wire cutters) to it, one will rapidly discover that it is not any more conscious, no picture on the screen.
A multi cellular organism would be made up of millions of TVs, resulting in a transformed experience and consciousness, like say an enormous cinema screen in 3D.

*the use of consciousness here might need to be tabulated into constituent requirements.

But note that if we have millions of components to make a TV with, the components don't have to be TVs (image-displaying devices) themselves. An array of millions of single-pixel devices (even light bulbs) makes a perfectly workable TV. So, just as TVs don't have to be made of smaller TVs but can be made of (large numbers of) something else that aren't TVs, a conscious mind doesn't have to be made of smaller consciousnesses but can be made of large numbers of something else that aren't conscious themselves. (I think that the something else is switches; that is to say, interconnected devices that change output state nonlinearly at input thresholds, which could be neurons in a brain or logic gates in a computer or "cells" of a finite automaton.)

But even if that's wrong, that some other process (perhaps involving undiscovered physical forces or substances) is responsible, as long as it's some kind of physical process, most of the same conclusions would still follow. The only alternatives seem to be dualistic ones, such as the "antenna analogy" where the brain or organelle is only an interface between the material body and some external nonmaterial source of conscious awareness (e.g. spirit).

Interesting, my intuition would be that it would not be conscious while frozen, equivalent perhaps to our experience of taking a general anaesthetic, in relation to self-consciousness.

Yes, because it is fully functional. It is remarkable that these organisms can survive freezing. There must be a complex physiology developed to cope with the destructive effects of crystallisation. Presumably it is avoided by some kind of solidification of a fluid state.

if it were alive after thawing, it would be conscious, because it is alive and fully functional.

I would suggest that what we are thinking of is an "internal state", something not fully understood by science. What the internal state of a cell is like, as a personal experience, is probably beyond us.

I agree that if they were conscious before freezing they would still be conscious afterward; and that they would not be conscious while frozen. That suggests that we're both thinking of consciousness as a material process but not a material substance.

The reason I ask, though, is that we can base more thought experiments on the frozen tardigrade. We could (in theory, remember) disassemble the frozen tardigrade atom by atom and reassemble it from the same atoms in some other place. (The fact that it's suspended/frozen eliminates the problem of interrupting an ongoing consciousness process, as long as we agree that consciousness resumes when it's thawed out.) We could also disassemble it atom by atom and reassemble it from different (but identical) atoms and then scatter the original atoms to the four winds. Or we could reassemble multiple copies. What effect would this have on the original consciousness? Give these possibilities, can we say that a tardigrade's proto-consciousness continues as singular process carrying through freezing, or did one consciousness end and a different one begin?

 

[doronshadmi]

So you're basically saying you can't. Thank you.

I am bassically saying that if mind and matter are not simple as their common substence, then your question is meaningless.

 

[The Man]

Yes. Thank you. So considering you both understand what I'm asking and also see the fault in accurately narrowing the definition of my question, do you think you could help me rephrase it in a better way?

Sorry for the delay.

Actually, I thought your car question related the gist sufficiently. That we'd expect to find more apparently direct mind manipulation of the physical world. The problem is of course if the physical world is just some aspect of "mind" (or a mind), as idealism would posit, then what we do perceive as physical interaction is in fact the manipulations of some mind.

 

[Ron_Tomkins]

I am bassically saying that if mind and matter are not simple as their common substence, then your question is meaningless.

What would be a meaningful question to falsify/test whether or not materialism is true?

 

[ynot]

Ok, how about this?:

What would be an irrefutable demonstration that any human being could perform right now in their homes or wherever they are, to demonstrate how they can change anything about the physical, material world outside of their own body, using ONLY their mind? (No hands, mouth or any other part of the body allowed)

Anyone capable of psychokinesis, please hold my hand up.

 

[LarryS]

What would be a meaningful question to falsify/test whether or not materialism is true?

Not to quibble, but Materialism does not include the notion of 'meaning' so there would be no 'meaningful' question.

As far as testing whether Materialism is true - one sure bang up way to prove it is true, would be to find some matter that lies outside of our being aware of it.

But the various flavors and permutations of Materialism and Idealism are descriptions or possible representations of reality - and may not be capable of being proven true or false, they are merely useful up to the limits of their power to explain and predict. Be careful though - both include the capacity to measure and quantify.

 

[Bubba]

1) Because similar claims have been tested many times, and the result is invariably negative.

2) An ability to somehow know what was happening far away (without modern technology) would be immensely valuable to those posessing it. even knowing what they were having for dinner. If even a few people posessed such a power, we would surely know about it (and it would not be used for guessing dinners ).

3) The laws of physics do not support the notion, and we have yet to show ANY kind of instance where the laws of physics do not apply.

Hans

I asked for more info. She says it is not like guessing. She does this only when she gets an impression ie the thought of whichever food comes to mind. She says there can be weeks or months between times and that it happens just a few times yearly.

She never anticipates or plans it. She says it doesn't matter if she is acquainted with a person's eating habits or not. The thought of a food just 'pops in'. Her friends agree it is not a regular thing and that she's been doing it for decades.

In my case, it was about what my friends (strangers to her) were serving on the other side of the country. She wasn't and isn't familiar with what I customarily have for dinner anyway.

Merely anectodal of course, but there it is.