Materialism and Immaterialism

[Darat]

I agree, but after thinking about it a while, I believe that qualia are irreducable in the sense that they can not be directly transmitted. It could be possible in the future that they would want to devote that much computing power to transfering qualia.

...snip...

Its "irreducible" then in the same way a pebble falling into a pond produces an irreducible wave.

I can create a mathematical model of the wave that will be almost 100% accurate but not quite. I can recreate physically another wave that is again almost a 100% accurate recreation. Yet the original wave will have "gone" and can never be recreated.

I agree we should be humble , but trying to transfer the unique patterns from 20 million neurons to another unique set of twenty million neurons would be mind boggling to say the least.

The whole idea would be to boggle your mind

 

[Darat]

Doubt thou the stars art fire
Doubt thou the sun doth move
Doubt truth to be a liar
But never doubt I love

Pretty sure you didn't write this, any chance of correctly attributing it?

Also can't see any relevance of this passage, haven't read one person here say that they doubt that you or anyone else feels love.

 

[ceptimus]

It's Shakespeare. Hamlet's letter to Ophelia.

 

[Interesting Ian]

Pretty sure you didn't write this, any chance of correctly attributing it?

Also can't see any relevance of this passage, haven't read one person here say that they doubt that you or anyone else feels love.

It was on the cover of this book "Consciousness in the physical world". Can't remember author.

 

[AmateurScientist]

This is entirely irrelevant to the topic of this discussion, but I thought I might mention that one of the countless threads on Materialism vs. Dualism (or Immaterialism, if you prefer) is what drew me to the forum itself. Something else brought me to Randi's website, but I was so intrigued by the intellectual discussion and the depth of insight of the participants in it, that I signed on as a member immediately, so that I could participate as a poster.

This is just a simple expression of my gratitude to the various philosophers and scientists who brought me to this board with this interminable, unrelenting, ongoing debate. It is an old one, but a thoroughly fascinating and engaging one. It tends to bring out the best and worst of some of us, including quite spirited and passionate debate and name calling, but it never fails to bring me new insights to an age-old problem regarding consciousness and the nature of reality.

Thanks.

AS--my name came from my desire to declare that I was firmly in the scientific camp in this debate, but also to clarify and disclaim that I am not a professional scientist, and thus do not claim to be an expert in any scientific field.

 

[Louis_Cypher]

I can create a mathematical model of the wave that will be almost 100% accurate but not quite. I can recreate physically another wave that is again almost a 100% accurate recreation. Yet the original wave will have "gone" and can never be recreated.

No argument... just wanted to point out (redunantly, perhaps) that the crucial element is Time, the recreated wave would never have existed in the same time/space that the original did...

 

[DrMatt]

You're not suggesting that heartbeats, etc, are completely deterministic local processes are you?

To the level of individual neurons, perhaps. Interesting that you bring up Quantum Mechanics in the context of gross phenomena like weather. I'm not an expert on QM but my understanding was that it is actually intrinsically neutral about philosophic matters like determinism, though distortions of it get used one way or another all the time.

 

[DrMatt]

There's been some call for me to "define immaterialism and explain what's wrong with its logic". I believe that was covered by several of us within the first page of this thread.

 

[Dancing David]

Opening this new area here, it seems to me that the idea of immaterialism should really be defined by the immaterialists themselves. As that is one of the greatest problems in the debate, define-ing term used by other people icorrectly.

The basic premise of immaterialism seems to be that there is something in life or consiousness that is beyond the purely physical.

The basic flaw in most of the arguments about immaterialsism seems to be that there is no demonstrable way to prove that there is something beyond the material.

(I have left these statements vauge and unhedged to encourage discussion.)

 

[hammegk]

There's been some call for me to "define immaterialism and explain what's wrong with its logic". I believe that was covered by several of us within the first page of this thread.

Yeah, ya'all sure tore up the logic of dualism. Sorry, immaterialism ( or ~materialism) is NOT dualistic. And that is the illogic you have never touched on, other than stating that you find immaterialism illogical. Win remains the only professed dualist I know of here.

 

[DrMatt]

The basic premise of immaterialism seems to be that there is something in life or consiousness that is beyond the purely physical.

The basic flaw in most of the arguments about immaterialsism seems to be that there is no demonstrable way to prove that there is something beyond the material.

I think there's nothing logically flawed in supposing there's something which has no interaction with the world at all. It's superfluous and thus likely to be ignored by anybody who uses Occam's Razor, and since there's no way to test the hypothesis against the world, it's impossible to distinguish such a thing from something imagined erroneously, but the existence of such a thing itself causes no purely logical problems. Where immaterialism gets into trouble, as Swarm pointed out way back in February, is in supposing that immaterial things explain stuff we see in the world--which implies interaction with stuff and hence that implies that those things are material after all.

To borrow a phrasing from Epicurus:

If its effects can be seen in the world, why call it immaterial?

If it is immaterial, why claim it to have effects in the world?

Back in 1905, the properties of light may have seemed logically incoherent to lots of people. But people could--and still can--actually interact with and measure light. It does things which many people find counterintuitive---but NB that intuition is not the same thing as logic. Intuition has this troublesome habit of leading people astray...

 

[hammegk]

Again, a good statement as to lack of merit for any form of interactive dualism.

Try this one. Reality is not a local phenomena; that is, where is coordinate point x,y,z,t,0 where 6 or 7 "0 "dimensions are needed by some current thinking.

 

[DrMatt]

Again, a good statement as to lack of merit for any form of interactive dualism.

Try this one. Reality is not a local phenomena; that is, where is coordinate point x,y,z,t,0 where 6 or 7 "0 "dimensions are needed by some current thinking.

There are 6 or 7 dimensions of physical reality as modeled by some constructions of superstring physics. This has nothing to do with immaterialism.

 

[hammegk]

Nice -- unfounded -- assertion.

In other words, you cannot show the illogic of ~materialism.

 

[DrMatt]

Nice -- unfounded -- assertion.

In other words, you cannot show the illogic of ~materialism.

Is this in reference to superstring theory?
Superstring theory is an area of physics--which is a science dealing with the physical universe.

If you believe this has something to do with immaterialism, please show your work.

 

[DrMatt]

Again, a good statement as to lack of merit for any form of interactive dualism.

Try this one. Reality is not a local phenomena; that is, where is coordinate point x,y,z,t,0 where 6 or 7 "0 "dimensions are needed by some current thinking.

The notion that a set of coordinates necessarily refers to a location in the intuitively common sense is one of those failures of intuition I was speaking about.

Just to describe the motion of three objects relative to each other in ordinary Newtonian physics, you can easily end up with a 9-dimensional curve. Nothing immaterial about it.

 

[hammegk]

I.E. You have no idea what ~materialism might or might not be, or what has been said about the topic in, by now, thousands of posts on JREF, yet feel qualified to pronounce it illogical.

Impressive critical thinking indeed.


You are correct that the 6, or 7 extra dims over & above the 4-space we inhabit are super-string and/or super-gravity related.

x,y,z,t,0 as I proposed it has no implication about the relative motion of three objects. It represents a single coordinate point origin unknown and unspecified.

 

[DrMatt]

I.E. You have no idea what ~materialism might or might not be, or what has been said about the topic in, by now, thousands of posts on JREF, yet feel qualified to pronounce it illogical.

I feel qualified to draw the conclusions I drew from the definitions presented.

Impressive critical thinking indeed.


You are correct that the 6, or 7 extra dims over & above the 4-space we inhabit are super-string and/or super-gravity related.

x,y,z,t,0 as I proposed it has no implication about the relative motion of three objects. It represents a single coordinate point origin unknown and unspecified.

Since superstring theory is a model of the material world, there's nothing there which has anything to do with immaterialism.

The invocation of it to support mystical models of personality is as misguided as the invocation of quantum mechanics or quarks for the same.

 

[hammegk]

Since superstring theory is a model of the material world, there's nothing there which has anything to do with immaterialism.

Here, let me help you rephrase that:

Since superstring theory is a model of the immaterial world, there's nothing there which has anything to do with materialism.

See, that's what some of us are discussing.

 

[DrMatt]

Here, let me help you rephrase that:

Since superstring theory is a model of the immaterial world, there's nothing there which has anything to do with materialism.

See, that's what some of us are discussing.

Three guys share a hotel room at a conference.

One of 'em wakes up to the smell of smoke and spies that the dresser is on fire.

He's unable to determine whether there's a fire or he's just experiencing sensory experiences of fire. Concluding that this is a matter for another day, he goes to sleep.

Another guy wakes up and spies the fire. He figures that he lacks expertise in the subject of fire, and so it's best for him to go to sleep and let an expert determine whether the fire is a fire, and if so, what should be done about it.

Finally, the third guy wakes up, spies the category of fire, determines that a corresponding category of ways of extinguishing fires exists, and goes back to sleep.