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My argument against materialism

punshhh said:
Calculus is a way of figuring out something about what has been conceived of. Rather like an ant working out it can go round an obstacle if it can't get over it.
Nothing different about that.
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Wrong. Calculus changes what we can understand. Calculus, for example, solves Zeno's Paradox.
 
PixyMisa said:
Wrong. Calculus changes what we can understand. Calculus, for example, solves Zeno's Paradox.
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Yes we do have an advantage over the ant in that we have the ability to learn from experience and modify our behavior.

I can see no way in which this makes us any different, there are still things which are inconceivable to us. We are just a bit further along the evolutionary tree.
 
PixyMisa said:
Consciousness is computation. Life is chemistry.
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Consciousness is a quality of life, how did life spring into action?

There is only one life on this planet (it has split into billions of different entities ie, plants, fungi and animals), but they are all related in that they were all born*from a common ancestor (small group of primitive organisms).

Explain how to create another life, or provide evidence of another life form beginning on earth less than say 1 billion years ago.

*By born, I mean that all reproduction of life forms is chemically a splitting of one life form into two. None of the new entities in a new generation starts life anew, it is generated out of living tissue which divides.
 
dlorde said:
We are. Hence science.
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Yes, we should also consider that the particular nature of the world we see around us may only appear this way due to our position in it and our apparatus of conceiving our surroundings ie, senses. Along with the particular psychology we have inherited through evolution.

Thus we percieve human world(or primate world), ants percieve ant world and cats perceive cat world.

Each world is quite different.
 
punshhh said:
Give me a reference to a scientific demonstration of making a life under laboratory conditions.
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I think there are, ahem, specialist websites that deal with that kind of thing. I'm sure if you turn off safesearch and start Googling, you'll find plenty of examples.
 
punshhh said:
Yes, we should also consider that the particular nature of the world we see around us may only appear this way due to our position in it and our apparatus of conceiving our surroundings ie, senses. Along with the particular psychology we have inherited through evolution.

Thus we percieve human world(or primate world), ants percieve ant world and cats perceive cat world.

Each world is quite different.
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As I said, that is why we use science. It removes that perceptual bias.

Incidentally, as has already been mentioned, our senses are the means by which we sense, not conceive the information that allows us to perceive our surroundings.
 
punshhh said:
The physical world
and
The thinking mind of a human.
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I am drawing a distinction between this part of the mind, with the thinking mind which is a thought machine or computer.
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The thinking mind is the map room I was refering to, which performs the higher brain functions like thinking, self conscious awareness etc.
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We use the word "thinking" differently, and I think we do that because we have different understandings of what the brain does.
I hope this is clearer.
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Not really. You're drawing a line that I think is not only arbitrary, but hard to locate, and perhaps best ignored. I personally think it's all thought, and all computation.

But maybe I'm missing something. So help me out.

When I see a red cup, am I thinking? My favorite cousin smile? My own smile in a mirror? What about a gray 2010 Toyota Prius? A 20 dollar bill? A calculus equation? A grammatically correct sentence? The word "copasetic"?

And if some of these are thought, why do you think your cat isn't doing it?

ETA: I must also state that the real physical world doesn't care about things like "pennies"; when I see a penny on a desk, that's already an abbreviation of the "real physical world" that's simply useful for my mind. To the "real physical world" there are just a bunch of atoms--and some of the "penny" leaks out into the air even, becoming the smell of copper in my brain.
 
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punshhh said:
Yes, we should also consider that the particular nature of the world we see around us may only appear this way due to our position in it and our apparatus of conceiving our surroundings ie, senses. Along with the particular psychology we have inherited through evolution.

Thus we percieve human world(or primate world), ants percieve ant world and cats perceive cat world.

Each world is quite different.
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No, the world is the same. The perception of it might be different. You're still confusing the map with the territory. You also seem to have no idea that science developed quite a lot of objective measurements for various properties of the world. You know, the kind that can be expressed with numbers on a specific scale. You seem so lost, if it weren't so funny, it would be sad.
 
punshhh said:
laca said:
What is energy laca?

All these animals are conceiving their environment and acting on it, like my cat. They do have limited powers of conception, this is my point, so do humans.

In the human example, yes it would be conceivable if it was explained to them, it is inconceivable because it hasn't and they have no idea about it.

Likewise a scientist may find it inconceivable to live life with time flowing backwards for example. Until it was explained to him by a highly evolved alien.
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punshhh said:
Yes, we should also consider that the particular nature of the world we see around us may only appear this way due to our position in it and our apparatus of conceiving our surroundings ie, senses. Along with the particular psychology we have inherited through evolution.

Thus we percieve human world(or primate world), ants percieve ant world and cats perceive cat world.

Each world is quite different.
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I liked Westworld. How old are you,if I may ask?
 
PixyMisa said:
Indeed. That's the key point here: We are aware of this problem and do everything we can to minimise it.

Mysticism wallows in it.
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Minimising this problem is one of the first steps in mysticism too. One cannot step onto the spiritual path without having taken off your blinkers. You would stumble and fall over at the first step.

Come on Pixy I am not like the run of mill religious cranks you might come across on this forum. I am the real thing, I have been contemplating these ideas for years, this is basic stuff.

Is it inconceivable that there are other schools of thought along the same lines as materialism, but not science based?
 
punshhh said:
Minimising this problem is one of the first steps in mysticism too. One cannot step onto the spiritual path without having taken off your blinkers. You would stumble and fall over at the first step.

Come on Pixy I am not like the run of mill religious cranks you might come across on this forum. I am the real thing, I have been contemplating these ideas for years, this is basic stuff.

Is it inconceivable that there are other schools of thought along the same lines as materialism, but not science based?
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Of course it's not inconceivable, it's just that when compared to science they haven't produced anything useful.
 
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