I challenge you: your best alternate to materialism

[Belz...]

you have missed http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=10423465&postcount=1092.

I have not missed it. You have NOT answered my question.

Yes or no: Are you aware that these brain waves are _effects_ of brain function ?

 

[doronshadmi]

Awareness requires thought in this case. Your claim is contradictory in addition to being unevidenced.

Dear Belz... this is indeed the best conclusion that one can get by only talking or thinking about awareness.

 

[doronshadmi]

Yes or no: Are you aware that these brain waves are _effects_ of brain function ?

Yes, and I am also directly aware of their invariant substance, which is something that your current awareness do not have, according to your own evidence ("Awareness requires thought in this case. Your claim is contradictory in addition to being unevidenced.")

You are still missing http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=10423465&postcount=1092 that gives you the direction in order actually find the answer to your question.

 

[doronshadmi]

That's like saying that I can't understand law without being a lawyer or judge. That's ridiculous. If your claim is true, it can be explained.

Exactly the opposite, you really know the law and naturally act according to it only if your awareness is directly aware of the substance of all possible phenomena (you are naturally developed into an harmonious factor among all possible phenomena).

No woo or any supernatural nonsense is involved here.

 

[realpaladin]

Dear Belz... this is indeed the best conclusion that one can get by only talking or thinking about awareness.

This is what people say that are not proficient at inferring information from secondary, tertiary... order artefacts.

The whole 'you can not know X because you only talk about X' makes X non-existent in the communal knowledge domain.

EDIT: Or to put it in another way: I do not have to *be* the Higgs-Boson to show that it exists. Capiche?

So, unless you are able to show how one can infer X, that sentence can be construed as 'I have no clue what I am talking about, but I would like to come over as knowledgable and interesting'.

 

[Belz...]

Dear Belz... this is indeed the best conclusion that one can get by only talking or thinking about awareness.

That is a dodge. You are unable to provide evidence for your case, and when I point it out, you retort that evidence is the wrong way to look at it. In other words you deny the possibility of knowledge, and thus no claim you make could ever be considered true.

See how that works ? If you deny the possibility of evidence, then you cannot know anything, and thus no claim can ever be true or false.

Yes

Excellent ! See how smoothly things go when you put your mind to it ?

I am also directly aware of their invariant substance

Brain waves are the invariant substance ? You said the invariant substance is the underlying reality of thought and matter. Now, admitting that brain waves are _generated_ by thoughts, how can you maintain that ?

according to your own evidence

Stop using that word. You have no idea what it means. Look up a dictionary.

You are still missing http://www.internationalskeptics.com...postcount=1092 that gives you the direction in order actually find the answer to your question.

It does no such thing.

Also, I don't want directions. I want evidence. I'm not participating in a treasure hunt.

 

[turingtest]

Originally Posted by Belz... View Post
That's like saying that I can't understand law without being a lawyer or judge. That's ridiculous. If your claim is true, it can be explained.

Exactly the opposite, you really know the law and naturally act according to it only if your awareness is directly aware of the substance of all possible phenomena (you are naturally developed into an harmonious factor among all possible phenomena).

No woo or any supernatural nonsense is involved here.

Riiiight- just a convenient distortion of what Belz pretty obviously meant by "law," to fit your agenda rather than Belz's analogy. It's just coincidence, I'm sure, that that sort of dishonest re-definition is one tactic by which woo is maintained.

 

[Belz...]

No woo or any supernatural nonsense is involved here.

Except that "natural" specifically refers to the material world. By definition, neutral monism is supernatural.

And unevidenced.

 

[Dancing David]

Idealism is based on a simple rational analysis of personal experience. It is derived from thoughts like " I think therefore I am". Perhaps it is attempts to describe or explain the mechanisms in an idealist universe which are equivalent to the angry gods in a volcano explanation.

And what makes you think that thoughts are accurate?

 

[Dancing David]

Deep come is a phenomena at the expressed level of reality, which is simply the lack of one's awareness.

This is not the case of TM where one's awareness is not bounded by any phenomena at the expressed level of reality, including the lack of one's awareness at deep coma.

So you are contradicting yourself.

 

[Dancing David]

Please look at this diagram:

[qimg]https://c4.staticflickr.com/4/3296/5721561558_c5b78c3152_b.jpg[/qimg]

The absolute symmetry in that diagram is defined (without loss of generality (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Without_loss_of_generality)) by the endless non-composed 1-dimesional element, whether it is straight or not, and it remains invariant among all of its possible vibrations and their combinations with each other, defined as the expressed level of the endless non-composed 1-dimesional element.

So actually there is only absolute symmetry (only one endless non-composed 1-dimesional element, which is not one_of many thing) that is expressed as multiple phenomena that do not break its absolute symmetry.

Techniques like TM simply unfold the absolute symmetry to the human brain, first only by its straight state during TM practice, and then also by its non-straight states and their combinations, during daily life.

The benefit of naturally being aware of absolute symmetry during daily life is fulfilled by actually becoming a factor of harmony among all possible expressed phenomena, which are naturally tuned by absolute symmetry, which remains unbroken and invariant among all of its possible broken and variant expressions.

The outer "{" and "}" in set theory is exactly the absolute symmetry among all of its possible broken and variant expressions (transformations) defined as its members.



Not at all, our brain is exactly the linkage that enables each one of us to become a factor of harmony during daily life.




Personally you are (yet) misunderstanding binary trees, as clearly seen in http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=10381545&postcount=645.



Take for example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGijME2caEM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gtd2zqDXZkA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO3AnD2QbIg

I see a graph, and you are still wrong, the chirality of the weak force means that there is broken symmetry. period.

 

[Nonpareil]

(I will pair the discussion down a bit, as I don't have the time for long replies just now.)

A moment of pedantry, since homonyms are a bit of an obsession of mine: you mean "pare", not "pair".

Sorry. Completely irrelevant, feel free to ignore it in later posts. Just had to say it because my inner word Nazi was kicking up a storm.

And findings in neurology arent evidence that it's not there.

I didn't say they were, though they are certainly evidence that it's not necessary.

And there's still no evidence for it, either.

Also the fact that logic is a human invention is a hindrance in a discussion like this, as it will put human ideas on a pedestal which they don't necessarily qualify for.

"Logic is a human invention" holds no weight when it demonstrably works.

ok, so you say self consciousness is only a result of computation. By the way you are stretching the sinews of that brain like elastic there.

You can think it as unlikely as you like. Every piece of evidence we have points towards that conclusion.

Yes you would have proof if someone where behaving in a self-conscious way. But it is only in the knowledge that that person is biologically identical to yourself that you can rule out that it is not a robot mimicking that self consciousness.

"You have proof, but you don't have proof."

Contradictory statements aside, this is still circular reasoning. You are assuming that organic life is a prerequisite for consciousness, then using that assumption to assert that p-zombies can exist if they are machines.

But even that doesn't really help you. The moment that a machine that behaves in every circumstance exactly as though it is conscious shows up, we have evidence that the machine is conscious - which would send your entire argument against machine consciousness out the window.

Can you give me a functional definition of is? Or is there none?

I have given it before, both in this thread and in others.

"Behaves in every circumstance exactly as though something is true."

*No, if anything, I am saying it may be Y. If it is Y then everything we are aware of is irrefutable evidence.

Which does not help you in any way, since you have no way of ever knowing, ever, that it is Y.

Idealism is still not rational.

Except for the machines which mimic conscious behaviour.

"A thing that has X property has X property."

"Unless it's a machine!"

That isn't how it works. It still has X property.

Incorect, all that is required is computation that mimics self conscious behaviour.

An absolutely perfect mimicry is the thing it is mimicking.

I would not advocate belief in anything(in the religious sense), anyway this is not a question of belief, it is philosophical positions.

Word games.

Idealism as a philosophical position remains untenable. You either reject all possibility of knowledge and retreat towards solipsism, in which case you still aren't rational in any sense and your entire position collapses as soon as you understand what "is" means, or you simply don't have any supporting evidence.

You really can't get around this.

 

[Nonpareil]

Your Cheese analogy has nothing to do with the record of this scientist

It has everything to do with it. Saying otherwise doesn't make that less true.

He's a quack.

 

[Belz...]

"Logic is a human invention" holds no weight when it demonstrably works.

Always, I'd add.

An absolutely perfect mimicry is the thing it is mimicking.

This is a critical point that anti-AI people don't understand. They are assuming a distinction that is supernatural, even if they don't admit it. They want everything to be the same physically and yet something that remains that's different. Same problem with qualia.

 

[Belz...]

Your Cheese analogy has nothing to do with the record of this scientist

...

It has everything to do with it

It has everything to do with it

It has everything to do with it.

Great minds think alike.

 

[Nonpareil]

This is a critical point that anti-AI people don't understand. They are assuming a distinction that is supernatural, even if they don't admit it. They want everything to be the same physically and yet something that remains that's different. Same problem with qualia.

Exactly. It's the p-zombie problem. You cannot behave in every circumstance exactly as though you are something and not be that thing. The idea is incoherent. That is what it means to be something.

For something to be true mimicry - by which I mean that it is an illusion, and not the real thing - there must be a point where the illusion breaks down. If it does, then the entity does not behave exactly in every circumstance as though it is the thing it is mimicking.

But that still doesn't make p-zombies a coherent concept. If there is a point where the illusion breaks down, then the p-zombie is not indistinguishable from an actual, conscious entity - which means it doesn't even meet the first of the two criteria for p-zombiehood, which are still self-contradictory.

 

[doronshadmi]

Brain waves are the invariant substance ?

No, in addition to the variant phenomena known as brain waves, I am also aware of their invariant substance (the simplest form of existence), which is naturally free of any activity like waves or thoughts.

 

[doronshadmi]

You are redefining terms to avoid admitting that your graph is wrong.

Wrong, you simply ignored the rest of the post.

 

[Belz...]

No, in addition to the variant phenomena known as brain waves, I am also aware of their invariant substance (the simplest form of existence), which is naturally free of any activity like waves or thoughts.

That's not what you said. You said you were aware of [brain waves]' invariant substance. What did you mean by that ?

Wrong, you simply ignored the rest of the post.

I did read it. Stop making things up. You redefined a type of dream as non-dreaming. Your graph is simply too simplistic to account for all scenarios.

 

[doronshadmi]

I see a graph, and you are still wrong, the chirality of the weak force means that there is broken symmetry. period.

Any asymmetry, including the weak force, is derived from and returns to the absolute symmetry (the simplest state of existence) all along space\time phenomena, in the past, right know and in the future, where only absolute symmetry remains unchanged all along space\time phenomena as its invariant substance.

This is exactly the reason of why one's awareness can be aware of itself without thoughts.