Materialists......

[nescafe]

This is an interesting claim, philosophically. It begs the following question: "How do we gather objective data in the first place?" or "What allows us to gather objective data?" or "What allows us to have knowledge of an objective world?" Kant tried to answer questions like these. He tried to change the questions to these sorts of questions.

One answer is that we do not gather objective data, at best we gather intersubjectivly consistent data. I would say more, but my server motherboard ate some capacitors and I want to try and replace them.

 

[UndercoverElephant]

And "all you proved are minds SUPERVENE on brains!". Well gee sherlock! Thanks for that. We don't HAVE 100% evidence that brains are where minds are stored.

"stored"? Ok, but what makes them "real"?

We have very compelling evidence in the FORM of the supervening.

If I were to say that clouds cause rain, would you respond "NO! All the science says is that rain SUPERVENES on clouds!", would that be a rational response?

No - rains actuallt produce rain, physically.

If I were to say that science indicates evolution takes place, would it be rational to say "NO! All science can say is that a bunch of creatures mutated, but it can't PROVE that there's not some higher intelligence guiding the process!", would THAT be rational?

Yes, that would be rational. As long as you didn't say that science could conclusively prove that there WAS such a higher intelligence and it DID guide it, it would be rational. Science cannot conclusively answer that question. Not yet, anyway.

If you answered "no", then why is it rational to say that the evidence that minds ALWAYS seem to supervene on brains, and NEVER seem to occur anywhere else, is NOT somehow VERY compelling evidence that brains ARE our minds.

Because the "are" has to explained. The verb "to be" is used in many ways, but in this case it is crucially important that you explain what it means. But science doesn't do this.

Why invent some outside thing when it isn't needed to explain our mental functions? We have a sufficient model as it is. Remember occam's razor?

Because it is actually needed...?

(Edit: Going back to the moral thing, why is it that no philosophical model of "objective morality" ever seems to satisfactoraly address the issue of how one can morally command their kids to do things or not do things but then the adult can do those very same things if they so chose? Are they "too simple" or "are animalistic barbarians that can't be trusted with logic"?)

Perhaps this should go in the other thread I started?

 

[UndercoverElephant]

Correction. We cannot at this time.

Correction over-ruled. We cannot at any time. It cannot be done.

There is nothing to say that it is impossible, only extremely difficult.

Nope. It's actually impossible.

We can't copy whole brains either, but for some reason, you don't seem to have a problem with future science managing that.

That's because it isn't impossible.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

Rain produces rain? That's like saying bread is produced by bread. What does it mean?

And, I think you and I are operating under two different definitions of "rational". Yours is merely that it has to lack contradictions. Mine says every statement has to be backed by observation, and where it is lacking, a statement can't be made.

You say science can't conclusively state that everythign doesn't have a special ghost friend moving it into place in a way that just so happens to look just like what our physical models predict? Nah, it can't. Is that a problem? It's enough to say there's no evidence at all that that is the case and thus no reason to think it is the case. All the evidence says is that this seems to be how the universe operates, little imaginary unseen ghosts or no.

What is it about the "are" that's so hard to understand. If I said "my meat IS my frickin' sandwitch" is that that hard to understand? Clearly a number of extra aspects make up the sandwitch outside of the meat, and clearly a number of extra aspects make up our physical minds (blood flowing by, the matter itself which could technically be something else, a number of the organelles, they aren't the mind, it's the activity that's the mind), but if I said "our minds are a part of our brains" is that really such a huge stretch? Evidence shows that our minds are altered by things we do to our brains. When a brain is destroyed, there is no evidence of awareness left in that person (at least nothing they can tell us about, thus there's no reason to believe it is the case). When we remove a liver or something else, it does not seem to affect a person's mind. When we probe a tree, it does not seem to show signs of awareness.

We might say "there's some extra... thing..., I guess, that is the mind" or we might say "all that is is mind, and the rest of it is just an illusion", however there's no evidence for either. All we have evidence for is that minds and brains exist with each other and nowhere else, and delving deeper we see what it is about brains that seems to occur at the same time as mental functions. The logical conclusion seems to be "brains are the cause of our awareness". The logical conclusion seems to be "we are nothing more than meat, amazing meat yes, meat that is glad to be alive and can think for itself, meat that can dance and sing and see and comprehend color, and meat that can observe the world around it, but we are only meat".

A song is just noise. Noise that are arranged in a special way, noise that can lift one's spirit and be defined mathematically, but if you say that means there must be something extra to it, it's foolish. Music, in and of itself, is just noise.

And I'm not so sure the idea that the world is material is a "needed assumption" of science. It seems to be a conclusion. Let's take materialism out of it and just observe. All observations indicate that there's a lot of meat puppets "out there" beyond our simple awareness. They don't seem to be a part of us we can directly control (not evidence in and of itself, but not something you might predict would be the case either). These things may just be our imagination, but they all seem to share observations and come up with their own. I'm no solipsist though. The world all seems to act consistently, which means that when we percieve ourselves to be doing the same thing in this strange sensual worldish experience our odd memory like structures which seem to indicate "past" indicate the same results are happening over and over again.

Basically the world gives plenty of signs it exists independantly of us. It seems illogical to conclude otherwise.

I dunno, I never took a philosophy class in my life. What am I getting wrong? Do I keep falling back into some well of a mistake? Maybe I'm just being thick skulled. I'm trying to "get it" but every single time you try and explain the idea to me, I end up breaking it down into the form I debate against.

 

[SuperCoolGuy]

Any particular reason why you are saying "emotion" instead of "mind"? Emotions are part of human subjective experience, but surely not all of it. What about sensation? Is the experience of seeing the colour red an emotion? A belief?

Sure. Sensation is sufficient since it implies human experience or knowledge through mental capacity or through a mind.

Bare in mind, seeing red CAN involve emotion and does require belief. I've been told all my life that certain things are red. Red is the word we use. R-E-D. Later on in life, I found out about scarlet, rouge, rose, etc. People sometimes disagree on what is red (like the flesh of a ruby red grapefruit).

But bottomline, mere sensation involves the "mind". A subjective experience is involved in any detection, perception, or sensation of anything that may or may not exist outside of our thoughts.

 

[Tricky]

Correction over-ruled. We cannot at any time. It cannot be done.

Nope. It's actually impossible.

Correction of correction over-ruled. Even given your odd assumptions, this is not a logical conclusion.

That's because it isn't impossible.

It is no less impossible than copying parts of the brain, though it might be easier. It is easier to xerox a whole page than to xerox every third word, but both can be done.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

I dunno, I never took a philosophy class in my life. What am I getting wrong? Do I keep falling back into some well of a mistake? Maybe I'm just being thick skulled. I'm trying to "get it" but every single time you try and explain the idea to me, I end up breaking it down into the form I debate against.

You're not wrong.

Geoff is pushing a load of nonsense, and nobody will even give his nonsense the time of day unless he obfuscates it so it looks like it might be sensible. But every time you unpack the obfuscated version, you end up right where you started, with nonsense.

Geoff is actually being actively dishonest when he makes claims about "the philosopher in his ivory tower" agreeing with him. None of the philosophers I know consider Berkeley (who Geoff is recycling) anything other than a historical curiousity. There probably are one or two philosophers floating around as mad as Geoff, but they aren't representative of the discipline. So despite never having taken a philosophy class, you've got to the same conclusion as most philosophers.

 

[nescafe]

Yes, but this means that you still can't copy bits of one persons brain and transfer them to another persons brain. You could only replicate the whole thing. But this is no good for scientific study. It doesn't satisfy the requirements you needed at the beginning of this diversion. Your machine is still impossible.

-EDOESNOTFOLLOW

Again, how does "we do not know how to do it now" equate to "we will not ever know how to do it"? At worst, we will just have to do the old brain-in-a-vat routine with our copied neural network until we had figured it out. Take an astronomical amount of time, mabye. Need to invent new branches of mathematics to describe the holographic encoding of memory and experience, certianly. Impossible? Saying so does not make it so (unless there is some soul-like spookiness involved, in which case those crazy dualists were right all along).

 

[UndercoverElephant]

Rain produces rain? That's like saying bread is produced by bread. What does it mean?

I meant "Clouds produce rain".

And, I think you and I are operating under two different definitions of "rational". Yours is merely that it has to lack contradictions. Mine says every statement has to be backed by observation, and where it is lacking, a statement can't be made.

Then stop defending materialism. Under you own definition of rational, materialism is irrational. No observation can support it.

You say science can't conclusively state that everythign doesn't have a special ghost friend moving it into place in a way that just so happens to look just like what our physical models predict?

Erm...."special ghost friend"? I don't actually remember mentioning this.....

Nah, it can't. Is that a problem? It's enough to say there's no evidence at all that that is the case and thus no reason to think it is the case. All the evidence says is that this seems to be how the universe operates, little imaginary unseen ghosts or no.

I don't have a clue what you are going on about it.

What is it about the "are" that's so hard to understand.

It doesn't mean anything.

If I said "my meat IS my frickin' sandwitch" is that that hard to understand?

Only because I know it actually means "My meat IS IN my sandwich".

Clearly a number of extra aspects make up the sandwitch outside of the meat, and clearly a number of extra aspects make up our physical minds (blood flowing by, the matter itself which could technically be something else, a number of the organelles, they aren't the mind, it's the activity that's the mind), but if I said "our minds are a part of our brains" is that really such a huge stretch?

Yes, because you are using the word "are" in a place where it's meaning is critical, but unspecified or wrong. Minds aren't "part of our brains". That's the whole problem. It is not true to say "minds ARE brains". Instead, they CORRELATE to part of your brain.

Evidence shows that our minds are altered by things we do to our brains. When a brain is destroyed, there is no evidence of awareness left in that person (at least nothing they can tell us about, thus there's no reason to believe it is the case).

Agreed by everybody. Brains are neccesary for minds. That does not also mean that brains are minds or that brains are sufficient for minds. It simply doesn't follow, logically.

When we remove a liver or something else, it does not seem to affect a person's mind. When we probe a tree, it does not seem to show signs of awareness.

None of this makes any difference.

We might say "there's some extra... thing..., I guess, that is the mind" or we might say "all that is is mind, and the rest of it is just an illusion", however there's no evidence for either.

Correct, no evidence for this either.

All we have evidence for is that minds and brains exist with each other and nowhere else....

Finally, a correct statement about the relationship. Yes, they occur concurrently. They correlate.

, and delving deeper we see what it is about brains that seems to occur at the same time as mental functions. The logical conclusion seems to be "brains are the cause of our awareness".

NO, the logical conclusion is "brains are neccesary for our awareness".

The logical conclusion seems to be "we are nothing more than meat, amazing meat yes, meat that is glad to be alive and can think for itself, meat that can dance and sing and see and comprehend color, and meat that can observe the world around it, but we are only meat".

No, this conclusion is not logical. It is based on an inductive inference I have already explained is invalid.

And I'm not so sure the idea that the world is material is a "needed assumption" of science.

Realism is needed.

It seems to be a conclusion.

Absolutely false. It is NOT a conclusion. It is a metaphysical assumption. No empirical research can prove it nor disprove it.

Basically the world gives plenty of signs it exists independantly of us. It seems illogical to conclude otherwise.

You keep using the word "seems illogical" or "seems logical". This is a strange bit of terminology. The whole point in logic is to get rid of words like "seems" and find out what is actually the case - and in this case you will find out that some things which "seem logical" to you, actually aren't.

I dunno, I never took a philosophy class in my life. What am I getting wrong?
Do I keep falling back into some well of a mistake?

Yes, you are confusing science and materialism, conclusions with assumptions and minds with brains. The basic problem is that you keep claiming that what philosphers call "naive realism" is true, based on claims from science. But science cannot prove naive realism is true. When you say "seems logical" what you really mean is "seems obvious". Philosophy is about examining things which "seem obvious" to see whether things are really as they seem to be. Often it turns out they are not.

 

[UndercoverElephant]

Correction of correction over-ruled. Even given your odd assumptions, this is not a logical conclusion.

It is no less impossible than copying parts of the brain, though it might be easier. It is easier to xerox a whole page than to xerox every third word, but both can be done.

Tricky, maybe you're not a software type - you aren't getting this. It really is IMPOSSIBLE! It's impossible because in this case there is no "every third word". The information is stored holographically.

 

[UndercoverElephant]

One answer is that we do not gather objective data, at best we gather intersubjectivly consistent data. I would say more, but my server motherboard ate some capacitors and I want to try and replace them.

How do we acquire the framework for understanding and interpreting the data? Where do the concepts come from? How do we acquire those concepts in the first place? What do we start from when we are infants?

 

[Tricky]

Tricky, maybe you're not a software type - you aren't getting this. It really is IMPOSSIBLE! It's impossible because in this case there is no "every third word". The information is stored holographically.

But holographs are physical phenomena. It doesn't make them impossible to be recorded and transferred. It's really VERY DIFFICULT! (I'm assuming that typing a thing in all-caps makes it true.)

 

[UndercoverElephant]

But holographs are physical phenomena. It doesn't make them impossible to be recorded and transferred. It's really VERY DIFFICULT! (I'm assuming that typing a thing in all-caps makes it true.)

No Tricky. We are talking about copying parts of holographically-stored things. This is not merely difficult - it really is quite impossible. It is impossible because none of the parts are stored seperately from the whole. It is quite literally impossible to extract and transfer part of a hologram. So please stop saying is merely difficult.

 

[Tricky]

No Tricky. We are talking about copying parts of holographically-stored things. This is not merely difficult - it really is quite impossible. It is impossible because none of the parts are stored seperately from the whole. It is quite literally impossible to extract and transfer part of a hologram. So please stop saying is merely difficult.

It doesn't matter that the parts are stored separately from the whole. If they are stored at all, then it is reasonable to assume that they can be retrieved (separately), copied, and then reinserted into the separate locations. There must be some indexing system that tells the brain where the parts are stored, or you couldn't remember anything.

Consider a client-server computer environment. Each server stores information and each one of those servers may network with other servers. Yet it is possible to back-up and restore partial or complete server databases. Difficult, no doubt, but possible.

So stop saying it's impossible. The only things that are impossible are logical contradictions, and even then, you may wind up changing your assumptions on which your logic is based. You have not shown that this is a contradiction even given your assumptions.

 

[Belz...]

Yes, but this means that you still can't copy bits of one persons brain and transfer them to another persons brain. You could only replicate the whole thing. But this is no good for scientific study. It doesn't satisfy the requirements you needed at the beginning of this diversion. Your machine is still impossible.

Even assuming that you must copy the whole thing, what you're saying is basically that I can create copies of the original mind, effectively having several (initially) identical minds that feel the same thing. How is that subjective ?

 

[Belz...]

It makes a big fat difference if you want to extract parts of it from the whole.

Ah, but you ignored one little point: if the information is stored in the brain and processed in the brain, as you seem to say yourself, then how can you assume that we're not just the sum of our parts ? If you posit a non-materialistic mind, then what exactly does it do ?

Why? Don't they matter? This is the R&P board. Emotions are allowed.

I find emotions are a poor tool for determining truth.

I believe so, yes.

Uh-huh. Present it.

This is an interesting claim, philosophically. It begs the following question: "How do we gather objective data in the first place?" or "What allows us to gather objective data?" or "What allows us to have knowledge of an objective world?" Kant tried to answer questions like these. He tried to change the questions to these sorts of questions.

Er... your five senses ?? I'm not sure I understand how could ask these questions non-rhetorically. Don't you already know the answer ?

 

[Belz...]

Because people like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty were the students/successors of Edmund Husserl, and Husserl more than anyone else in the history of philosophy was an enemy of reductive materialism. Husserl was the person who called the alarm on materialism. Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty followed him and stressed neutrality and the resolution of subjective and objective. The entire movement which the "embodied cognition" people are trying to build bridges to are the phenomenologists, and phenomenology is a branch of philosophy established as a direct reaction to reductive materialism.

What bugs me about many philosophers is that they seem to pit philosophy against science and claim that the former is "better" somehow, because the latter doesn't provide answers to their personnal questions.

But the problem with philosophy is that it doesn't actually give us testable hypotheses. Aside from personnal satisfaction, I don't think philosophy is any useful at all.

YES! The materialist theories of mind end up relegating "mind" to a process in a physical thing. But it isn't.

Still waiting for that proof, of course.

Mind "reaches out"

Now what in Ed's name could THIS mean ?

 

[Belz...]

Then stop defending materialism. Under you own definition of rational, materialism is irrational. No observation can support it.

Well, scientists around the globe seem to think otherwise. In my book that places the burden of proof entirely on you.

Minds aren't "part of our brains". That's the whole problem. It is not true to say "minds ARE brains". Instead, they CORRELATE to part of your brain.

Pray tell, what DOESN'T correlate ?

Agreed by everybody. Brains are neccesary for minds. That does not also mean that brains are minds or that brains are sufficient for minds. It simply doesn't follow, logically.

You're right. But it's the evidence that gives us the answer. Not philosophy or wishful thinking.

 

[Belz...]

No Tricky. We are talking about copying parts of holographically-stored things. This is not merely difficult - it really is quite impossible. It is impossible because none of the parts are stored seperately from the whole. It is quite literally impossible to extract and transfer part of a hologram. So please stop saying is merely difficult.

Really, Geoff ? You're saying that holographic computer memory is IMPOSSIBLE because you couldn't extract a portion of data ? Well, then. Why are these people even TRYING ?

 

[UndercoverElephant]

Really, Geoff ? You're saying that holographic computer memory is IMPOSSIBLE because you couldn't extract a portion of data ? Well, then. Why are these people even TRYING ?

Which people?