Materialists......

JustGeoff said:
And this leaves at an impasse. We have an apparently neccesary connection which we are conceptually incapable of explaining. Nagel's position is that this suggests there is something wrong with our concepts. He suggests we look for a new conceptual scheme, under which the neccessary connection between minds and brains becomes obvious and transparent. At this point, p-zombies will become conceptually impossible as well as actually impossible. Do you follow?
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AAAAAHhhhh!!!! NOW I get it. This isn't about p-zombies at all. It's about your inability to understand the word "mind" in a way different than your already preconceived notion.
 
Mercutio said:
We tried introspection, in the beginnings of the science of Psychology. It is a terribly flawed methodology. The problem of using our awareness as evidence is that we can easily demonstrate times when we are influenced by things that are out of our awareness, and times when we claim to be aware of things that we can empirically demonstrate we are not aware of. The nature of our awareness is problematic as well. We can demonstrate that a perceptual experience that feels unitary is actually multiply processed in parallel in several different brain areas, with no one place where anything resembling our awareness shows up. (There is some evidence that the "feeling of awareness" portion of our experience is the firing of spindle cells, and is independent of any of the other visual or other sensory processing.) We simply cannot take our own introspective accounts as bedrock. It is a house of cards.
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I'm afraid that the tradition of introspection goes quite a bit further back than the science of psychology. Before the Enlightenment, before Aristotle, even...

The method of introspection (meditation) is simply more direct than the mediation method prevalent now (and for the past century, really). Wherein, the professor will assess (or often create) a lesioned lobe, watch and record the results, repeat, publish the findings for his peers...

It still ignores the matter of one's own immediate awareness; in fact, it's rather dependent on the prof's to begin with! Thus I ask, which is the flimsier bedrock? An awareness acknowledged and explored or an awareness committed to circumnavigating itself?
 
JustGeoff said:
What you actually said was just wrong.

"The assumption is implicit in the idea that something can be identical to a human being but not be a human being."

is wrong.

The assumption is that something can be PHYSICALLY identical to a human being, but not a human being.
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Which means than the way in which it is different to a human being, if it is at all, must be non-physical. Which requires the assumption that there can be 'non-physical' characteristics. I will agree that my argument requires the assumption that there aren't, if you concede that yours requires the assumption that there are (non-physical characteristics).

And that is where the evidence comes into play. For there is none to support yours, and lots to support mine.
 
At this point we seem to be thrashing around with the ideas of conceivability, logical possibility, and natural possibility. Good luck.

~~ Paul
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
I put it in quotes because we have no way of defining what the mental attributes are. Your definition consists of "we don't have any trouble distinguishing mental attributes from physical ones." That's it. You have no concrete definition of the set H* - H.
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Back to Nagel again.....

The causal argument for identification may make us believe that it is true, but it doesn_t help us to understand it, and in my view, we really shouldn_t believe it unless we can understand it.

The problem lies in the distinctive first-person/third-person character of mental concepts, which is the grammatical manifestation of the subjectivity of mental phenomena. Though not all conscious beings possess language, our attribution of conscious states to languageless creatures implies that those states are of the kind that in the human case we pick out only through these distinctive concepts, concepts which the subject applies in his own case without observation of his body.

They are not pure first-person concepts: To try to detach their first-person application from the third person results in philosophical illusions: e.g. that the subject of my consciousness might have been replaced five minutes ago and all my memories, personality, etc. transferred to a new subject in this same body, without any outwardly or inwardly perceptible sign -- without
any other physical or psychological change. If the pure first-person idea of _I_ defined an individual, that would make sense, but it seems reasonably clear that the real idea of _I_ has lost its moorings in this philosophical thought experiment. The point goes back to Kant, who argued that the subjective identity of the consciousness of myself at different times is not sufficint to establish the objective identity of a subject or soul. That is not to say that I understand just how the first person and the third form two logically inseparable aspects of a single concept -- only that they do. This applies to all conscious mental states and events, and their properties. They are subjective, not in the sense that they are the subjects of a purely first-person vocabulary, but in the sense that they can be accurately described only by concepts in which nonobservational first-person and observational third-person attributions are logically inseparable. Such states are modifications of the point of view of an individual subject.

The problem, then, is how something that is an aspect or element of an individual_s subjective point of view could also be a physiologically describable event in the brain -- the kind of thing which, considered under that description, involves no point of view and no distinctively
immediate first-person attribution at all. I believe that as a matter of fact you can_t have one without the other, and furthermore that the powerful intuition that it is conceivable that an intact and normally functioning physical human organism could be a completely unconscious zombie
is an illusion -- due to the limitations of our understanding. Nevertheless those limitations are real. We do not at present possess the conceptual equipment to understand how subjective and physical features could both be essential aspects of a single entity or process.
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JustGeoff said:
But thanks for coming along and demonstrating that we do indeed have one insane eliminativist idealist on the board. A nice compliment to all the insane eliminativist materialists.

Your position is every bit as stupid as theirs is, lifegazer. You are arguing the non-reality of brains, they for the non-reality of minds.

The only realist around here is me.
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Wow, you really are trying to fill II's shoes aren't you.
 
Belz... said:
AAAAAHhhhh!!!! NOW I get it. This isn't about p-zombies at all. It's about your inability to understand the word "mind" in a way different than your already preconceived notion.
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I guess this wasn't intentionally ironic, but ironic it was.
 
JustGeoff said:
No, because you assumed that conclusion was true right at the very beginning of the argument.
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I've stated before:

Assumption 1) Something exists
Assumption 2) Reality as observed exists to a degree.
Assumption 3) That reality is independent from my observations

The rest is evidence. And you could say that 1) is a given, that 2) is true under any philosophy that assumes 1), and that 3) is the only debatable one.

The rest IS evidence. I don't assume much else. Heck, I don't even assume that my car will start tonight.
 
Bubo said:
I'm afraid that the tradition of introspection goes quite a bit further back than the science of psychology. Before the Enlightenment, before Aristotle, even...

The method of introspection (meditation) is simply more direct than the mediation method prevalent now (and for the past century, really). Wherein, the professor will assess (or often create) a lesioned lobe, watch and record the results, repeat, publish the findings for his peers...
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Are you making an argument from longevity ?
 
DreadNiK said:
Which means than the way in which it is different to a human being, if it is at all, must be non-physical. Which requires the assumption that there can be 'non-physical' characteristics. I will agree that my argument requires the assumption that there aren't, if you concede that yours requires the assumption that there are (non-physical characteristics).

And that is where the evidence comes into play. For there is none to support yours, and lots to support mine.
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I do not concede this. I do not start from any metaphysical conclusion at all. I start from an analysis of the current concepts, specifically the fact that we can distinguish between mental and physical predicates.

Do you agree that you do not need to make any metaphysical assumptions in order to be able to distinguish between a mind and a brain? If so, we can continue.
 
JustGeoff said:
I do not concede this. I do not start from any metaphysical conclusion at all. I start from an analysis of the current concepts, specifically the fact that we can distinguish between mental and physical predicates.

Do you agree that you do not need to make any metaphysical assumptions in order to be able to distinguish between a mind and a brain? If so, we can continue.
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I can't at the moment think of a sentence where I wouldn't swap 'brain' for 'mind' and keep the meaning, although there would be different connotations. However, I'm easily knocked down on this point, all you have to do is provide an example, and since I haven't been trying to find one myself for more than a few minutes, I suspect there is.

Obviously not 'mind' as in 'object to' and 'brain' as in 'hit someone in the head'. :P
 
Belz... said:
I've stated before:

Assumption 1) Something exists
Assumption 2) Reality as observed exists to a degree.
Assumption 3) That reality is independent from my observations
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Your three assumptions amount to a claim that direct realism is true. You cannot defend direct realism from the argument from hallucination. So they are a set of contradictory assumptions. You could be a brain in a vat. Therefore, your assumptions are not safe. This doesn't mean you are a brain in a vat, or even likely to be so. But it does mean we can safely dismiss your assumptions as not safe.
 
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