Materialism (championed by Darwinists) makes reason Impossible.

dafydd said:
What on Earth are you talking about?
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It appears he's started standard wooster tactic #7; spew assorted phrases vaguely related to the topic at hand, salted with occasional links, in the hope of appearing knowledgeable.
It's not working.:rolleyes:
 
yy2bggggs said:
I've been reading this for quite some time, and I have absolutely no clue what your point is throughout the entire diatribe. In fact, every time I think I understand what your point is, you say something completely the opposite.

I for one am lost. Could you please explain, very clearly, who you are objecting to, what exactly is it that they said that you hold objection to, and what your objection is?
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I am objecting to the OP which states that reasoning cannot be understood, explained and modeled starting from materialistic principles.

As our mentation, reasoning and consciousness all contain multitudes of different aspects, I have tried to explain what the current view of the operation of the total is.

If I say 'there is no soul or God' it does not make me any wiser or better informed than somebody who says 'yes there are, too'.

Instead, I try to figure out and explain as far as I understand how things such as 'soul' and 'consciousness' and 'reasoning' are created as representations in our neuronal networks.

I am opposing to stuff that do not have references in scientific literature or that are not based on own personal experience. Which again has to be taken in its context.
 
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Aepervius: So basically the human-"whys" are almost certainly a meaningless artefact.

I misunderstood this line.
The human whys are based on emotions which are very real, not artefacts.
 
catsmate1 said:
It appears he's started standard wooster tactic #7; spew assorted phrases vaguely related to the topic at hand, salted with occasional links, in the hope of appearing knowledgeable.
It's not working.:rolleyes:
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your ad hominem makes you appear scientifically illiterate
it is working very well :p
 
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from one of the .pdfs I was linking to

The prevalent assumption of this view was that a direct link exists between knowledge and the implementation of behavioral decisions —that is, that one does what one actually knows. In the 1970s and 1980s, decision-making researchers identified phe- nomena that systematically violated such normative principles of economic behavior (see Kahneman & Tversky, 1979).

In the 1990s, they began to show that many forms of decision making, especially those that involve a high level of risk and uncertainty, involve biases and emotions that act at an implicit level (see Hastie & Dawes, 2001).

In recent years, decision making has become a subject of neuroscience research. Neuroscientists applying diverse methods, including the lesion method (using brain damage that occurs as a result of stroke, etc., to examine how different brain areas contribute to various mental functions), functional imaging, and other physiological techniques, have begun to elucidate the neural process underlying the execution of successful and unsuccessful decisions.

This effort has converged with the field of behavioral economics in showing that decision making involves not only the cold-hearted calculation of expected utility based upon explicit knowledge of outcomes but also more subtle and sometimes covert processes that depend critically upon emotion.
 
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Akhenaten said:
You'd probably have had better luck if that's what the OP had actually stated.
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The OP says materialism makes reason impossible.
I am saying that on the contrary, reasoning as it occurs in humans, can indeed be understood and modeled without resorting to metaphysics, with current tested and established materialistic methods.

As for Darwinism, the apparatus for reasoning has evolved and its predecessors can be seen in action all around us. Also, as with genetics where all kinds of material we have no use for in our current form is being carried from generation to generation, we can find in our consciousness ancient traits that are counterproductive in our urban life.

The OP takes a shot at Darwinism with no knowledge that its very principle, variation and selection, is at the heart of all mentation and human reasoning is not an exception. Neural Darwinism is a hypothesis proposed by Dr. Gerald Edelman in 1978. At the time, he was pessimistic about ever testing it because the computing capacity simply was not available.

His Darwin series robots are working and seem to prove his hypothesis correct. http://www.mindcreators.com/NeuralDarwinism.htm

My argument is that Darwinism in fact makes reason possible.
To you this has nothing to do with the OP's statement?
 
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Let's see now . . .


lemurien said:
I am objecting to the OP which states that reasoning cannot be understood, explained and modeled starting from materialistic principles.
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But that's not what the OP stated.

Ergo . . .


Akhenaten said:
You'd probably have had better luck if that's what the OP had actually stated.
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Because I'd thought that:


lemurien said:
The OP says materialism makes reason impossible.
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Hmmm.


lemurien said:
My argument is that Darwinism in fact makes reason possible.
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Well you should have said that then, shouldn't you?

Anyway, Darwinism doesn't make anything possible. If anything, it's simply a way of describing mechanisms that actually do make things possible, although in this particular case it's just a scare word used by people such as the OP in place of 'godless heathen heretics', which takes too long to type.



lemurien said:
To you this has nothing to do with the OP's statement?
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That's not what I said, but it really doesn't matter.

Nothing at all in a reality-based Universe is ever likely to relate to one of DOC's OPs. I suppose I'm not doing much more here than expressing my amusement that you think otherwise.

He posts crap like that all the time in much the same way that a schoolboy might poke at an ant nest with a stick, and posting all the high-sounding nonsense that you have in response to it is pretty entertaining, in a train-smashy kind of way.
 
Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi: "Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination" gives a detailed account about how the OP is wrong.
 
I do not care who DOC is. He presented a false argument from ignorance. There have been many people participating in this discussion. As far as I've seen, nobody has been presenting any data on HOW matter becomes conscious.

If you want to explain why the materialistic paradigm (yuck) is valid in explaining stuff that present to most of the people as soul or God, you should know something about what is currently going on in the neuro field.

Goddidntdoit just isn't enough.
 
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Moving to Montana soon?
BC ended when JC was born, give or take a couple of decades.
 
For the love of FSM, this thread has concluded its original purpose ages ago, let the damned thing die and start another please
 
lemurien said:
I do not care who DOC is. He presented a false argument from ignorance. There have been many people participating in this discussion. As far as I've seen, nobody has been presenting any data on HOW matter becomes conscious.
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This is a burden of proof claim.
If someone claims that "God is required' for a consciousness, than that person better first demonstrate a god is actually there. Otherwise, you end up with a bootstrap argument.

Simply saying that consciousness comes from materialism is the reference claim. It's what we have observed for ALL occurances. Why would consciousness be different?
 
Akh: Anyway, Darwinism doesn't make anything possible. If anything, it's simply a way of describing mechanisms that actually do make things possible

I used the expression as shorthand. Had you had the patience to peek behind the link I posted, you would't have to resort to nitpicking just to puff your ego.
 
joobz said:
This is a burden of proof claim.
If someone claims that "God is required' for a consciousness, than that person better first demonstrate a god is actually there. Otherwise, you end up with a bootstrap argument.

Simply saying that consciousness comes from materialism is the reference claim. It's what we have observed for ALL occurances. Why would consciousness be different?
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Yeah.
The OP says that it cannot possibly be so.
Edelman's work shows that it can be so in addition to which he figured out how it can happen.

The existence or non-existence of god(s) has no significance here.
I do agree, there is no proof either way. I ignore the question. Not relevant in my world view. But the stories and the traditions DO have some force to them whether true or not. This force is real.
 
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