I challenge you: your best alternate to materialism

Apathia said:
I'll do it! I'll do it this time!
I'm a P-Zombie. I only appear conscious to myself.
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I once thought I was a P-Zombie, but it turned out I was wrong. That experience was merely an illusion.

For that matter, being "I" turned out to be an illusion. WE now know that WE are a collection of little sub-P Zombies. Though we prefer Z-Zombies, for obvious egotistical reasons.

Really, this whole consciousness argument just gets sillier and sillier, once you realize that your experience of consciousness is really just a complex illusion shared by the group entity that you call your 'brain'... Or... not.
 
Z said:
I once thought I was a P-Zombie, but it turned out I was wrong. That experience was merely an illusion.

For that matter, being "I" turned out to be an illusion. WE now know that WE are a collection of little sub-P Zombies. Though we prefer Z-Zombies, for obvious egotistical reasons.

Really, this whole consciousness argument just gets sillier and sillier, once you realize that your experience of consciousness is really just a complex illusion shared by the group entity that you call your 'brain'... Or... not.
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Indeed! It's the night of the living dead!
This putrid "I" never stops pounding on the doors of these metaphysical threads.

Some zombies want brains, others want souls.
At the moment, I want some ice-cream.
 
MRC_Hans said:
Materialism does not imply that everything is physical. Just that our ability to perceive everything is physical.

Hans
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We perceive everything physical, not that we perceive everything 'is' physical. This may just be a grammatical error but we perceive our thoughts and they are not physical, just to clarify.:jaw-dropp
 
MRC_Hans said:
The sense of pain and the sense of taste come from different sets of sensors, which alone makes it easy to distinguish the categories.


Hans
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True but what about synaesthesia, where senses get mixed up and the state we are born into. Could this explain consciousness as the ability to separate and distinguish one thing from another and that is solely what it is? When I'm drunk or tired, the world looses its distinctions - when I'm awake, I'm out there and aware of such differences but are slow moving, slow thinking zombies?

By the way as zombies are dead. If you think you're one (and it's not just a mind set), shoot yourself and see if you come back (not in the head though).

The problem is not the world but whether you are in it or out of your head, thinking things about it that aren't true (Might be true elsewhere but here and now is where you live, observe and experience);)
 
pagetheoracle said:
We perceive everything physical, not that we perceive everything 'is' physical. This may just be a grammatical error but we perceive our thoughts and they are not physical, just to clarify.:jaw-dropp
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Well, my wording may not be as clear as it should, but yes, our thoughts are physical. They all come down to physical processes in the brain. The concepts and information our thoughts are not physical, just like the numbers represented in the circuits of your computer are not physical, but the representation is physical. .... According to materialism, that is.

Hans
 
pagetheoracle said:
True but what about synaesthesia, where senses get mixed up and the state we are born into.
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I really think that condition is good evidence of the physicality of your mind processes: Wire something wrong, and our mind processes are altered.

Could this explain consciousness as the ability to separate and distinguish one thing from another and that is solely what it is? When I'm drunk or tired, the world looses its distinctions - when I'm awake, I'm out there and aware of such differences but are slow moving, slow thinking zombies?
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Again, influence the physical brain, and the mind is changed.

By the way as zombies are dead.
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By the way, zombies are fiction.

If you think you're one (and it's not just a mind set), shoot yourself and see if you come back (not in the head though).
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By the way, read the membership agreement.

The problem is not the world but whether you are in it or out of your head, thinking things about it that aren't true (Might be true elsewhere but here and now is where you live, observe and experience);)
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I'm afraid you lost me there.

Hans
 
doronshadmi said:
Why, exactly?
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Because it's a crock. It's a four-person serving of word salad with no supoorting evidence presented for its single premise that borders on the coherent.

There's not even any dressing to go with it, let alone garlic bread. I demand to see the manager.
 
Nonpareil said:
Because it's a crock. It's a four-person serving of word salad with no supoorting evidence presented for its single premise that borders on the coherent.

There's not even any dressing to go with it, let alone garlic bread. I demand to see the manager.
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Too many words for saying "Because I don't get it".

It's ok, no harm done, your "That is not a very good alternative." simply has no basis what so ever.
 
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doronshadmi said:
Too many words for saying "Because I don't get it".
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On the contrary. I understand fully.

Your proposed alternative to materialism is to say that both the material and the immaterial are products of a third, "true" reality. This is the one semi-coherent principle which you put forth.

You then go off on one of your patented pseudomathematical tangents, which contain a lot of impressive-looking brackets, numbers, and images of colorful patterns, but little to no actual content. What you do say could be better expressed by cutting out all of the nonsense you frame it with - but that would make it look less impressive, and besides, if you did, it would be plainly obvious to every reader that it doesn't actually make any sense. Anyone looking for examples can check the "Deeper than primes" thread, where people more inclined than I to follow your train-wrecks of pseudomath through to their conclusions repeatedly point out basic, fundamental mistakes you make, such as trying to claim that an infinitely repeating sequence has a final digit.

But all this is beside the point. Your wall of meaningless "mathematics" isn't there to prove your point. It's there to give you the very fallback you just used: "you don't understand".

No. I don't care. There's a difference.

I don't care because that pile of word salad does nothing to prove your thesis. You claim that the physical and the immaterial have the same root source, but fail to define that source or even attempt to produce evidence for its existence. Come to that, you don't even give a reason to accept the existence of the immaterial. You make two unjustified leaps for the price of one.

When you have an actual definition of your hypothesis, you can claim that I lack understanding. Until then, your proposed alternative remains what I said: word salad.

Now. Where is that dressing?
 
I object to the objections.

Of course it sounds like magic or "word salad." If the only acceptable explanations are materialist in form, anything other than that has to sound nonsensical. Oroborus for worldviews.

How might someone describe an alternate way of understanding the world - distinct from materialism - and not fall into the same trap? Without the preexisting language and conceptual grounding to draw on that we have for materialism, anything else is always going to sound bizarre.
 
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