Placebo said:
From Interesting Ian
Consciousness lies outside the province of science
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Wow. Could you let us know where you obtained this information?
It simply requires an understanding of science. Science deals with the physical world and consciousness is not part of the physical world. That is to say the task of fundamental science is to discern patterns in the world of the sensory experienced (ie qualia) and describe them utilising theories. But consciousness, or selves, or
experiencers are not themselves experienced and are not therefore part of the physical world.
Many notable people seem to disagree with you:
Then many notable people don't know what they're talking about.
http://www.sci-con.org/history.html
They call it 'The scientific study of consciousness'.
There's even a society dedicated to it:
http://www.cognitivesciencesociety.org/contact.html
Keep in mind that cognition is 'The mental process of knowing, including aspects such as awareness, perception, reasoning, and judgment'
Your opinion may perhaps be influenced by this?
My opinion is never influenced by materialists because their position is manifestly absurd and quite clearly wrong. What they do is to
presuppose the correctness of the materialist metaphysic. Thus they believe they are discovering things about consciousness when discovering the functional (causal) role that the neural correlates of consciousness play.
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It is only in the early 20th century that it became a scientific taboo
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As Robin said in another thread:
quote:
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From Robin, in another thread
By the way, how do you determine what is beyond the purview of science? Is there a great stone tablet somewhere that sets out these limits? I thought that the only criteria was that if something is at least indirectly observable and in some way measurable then it is within the purview of science.
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Consciousness is certainly not measurable. Indirectly observable? Well, I rather think that the materialist would say it is
directly observable. This is of course absurd. Let me quote what I've said on a previous occasion.
the particular question I would like to address is why should we suppose that other peoples’ bodies are "inhabited" by conscious minds (or why phenomenal consciousness is associated with brains). Your argument no doubt will be that materialism stipulates this to be so; it is an axiomatic premise of materialism. But this makes your definition of materialism an arbitrary one. A metaphysic which glosses over awkward facts. Allow me to explain.
It seems to me that materialism should stipulate that the physical exhausts reality. That once we have completely described the Universe in physical terms then we have said all that can be said about the Universe or reality.
But what is the physical? It seems to me that it should be everything, that, at least in principle, can be observed by anyone with appropriate faculties and suitable instruments. In other words all that is objective exists, or to put it another way, all that is discernible from the third person perspective exists. This will also include things which can only be indirectly seen (although strictly speaking I reject the direct/indirect dichotomy). This then includes such entities as electrons, because although they can only be "indirectly" seen they nevertheless play fruitful roles in our theories describing the world ie we need to hypothesise electrons in order to explain certain aspects of reality.
Now there is something peculiar about conscious experience which marks it off from all other existents. It is simply this. It cannot be observed or detected by anyone with appropriate faculties and/or suitable instruments! Thus according to my prior definition of the physical it is not a physical existent. Thus I may have toothache to take an arbitrary example. But you cannot observe that toothache, all you can observe is the effects of the toothache, the grimace of pain for example. Conscious experiences in other words are irreducibly private.
Now you will no doubt say that by observing the grimace, or at least by observing the neurons fire, then you are observing the toothache since materialism holds that the toothache and its neural correlates are one and the same thing, or at least aspects of the same thing. But an objective examination of this toothache will necessarily leave out the subjective irreducibly sensation of pain. The actually sensation of pain does not figure into the physical facts about the pain according to our prior definition of the physical. Nor can we infer the sensation of pain since, unlike an electron, the (phenomenological) pain does not play a part in any description of our behaviour. The pain per se cannot play a part because pain per se is not part of the objective publicly accessible realm. Only the neural correlates of the pain can play any fruitful role in our theories.
In short then either a materialist has to concede his metaphysic is internally inconsistent, or he must arbitrarily include phenomenological consciousness within his world picture. But if he opts for the latter then the whole prima facie plausibility of his world view crumbles away. No longer can he say that for something to exist it must be in principle be directly observable or play a fruitful role in some theory about the world, because this then necessarily precludes phenomenological consciousness. He
has to expand the notion of the physical to even include things that cannot be directly or even indirectly detected, even in principle!
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From Interesting Ian
All of it. How reliable can any single anecdotal report be?
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Indeed, I was not asking for a singular example, but rather the multiple sources you had in mind.
You seem to have indicated some in your reply all the same.
quote:
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From Interesting Ian
I'm saying dreams are a separate reality? I don't even know what that means.
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Could you clear up what exactly you do believe?
Do you believe in OBE as being genuinely out of body for example?
I'm always interested to hear opinions on it.
It's more complex than that. I don't really believe we are in our bodies in the first place. Basically I neither believe that with OBEs we are "out of our bodies" nor that it is wholly hallucinatory. I think the truth lies somewhere in between these 2 positions.
You really shouldn't care what people on here say; a lot of them are just close-minded buffoons. Who cares what they think. I certainly don't