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Split Thread Science cannot explain consciousness, therefore....

That's just playing with weaknesses in how language is constructed, in other words it's merely a play on words akin to "The sun never rises yet I can admire a sunrise".

It's as profound and as meaningful to this discussion as my big toe.

Do you mean that our imagination could not be able to invent a dawn with the idea of sun and horizon? You despise the power of human imagination.
Tell me, do you think it is impossible for humans to imagine the idea of a god without having seen any?

Accusations of playing with language are meaningless if you don't explain what linguistic error produces them. That is, language analysis. Explain to me what my mistake is and we can discuss it. Otherwise it's a simple, unsubstantiated complaint.
 
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it's an overwhelming interpretation of the evidence, but there is no evidence that it (an independent physical reality) exists.

There absolutely is. And the primary evidence is that everything that we KNOW comes from the mind is inconsistent, and that everything that seems to come from outside is entirely consistent in a way dreams and musings can't be. That you ignore this, or don't know about it, doesn't change that fact.

Or are you confused between "proof" and "evidence"?
 
Everything we attribute to the world happens or has happened in a human being's mind because we do not have a direct experience of the world

You all this this is somehow the definitive argument. It isn't.

Try to find something in your mind that is not an impression, an idea or an emotion.

Ok. Now what?

If God doesn't exist, then how are you able to say anything about him?

I could ask you the same question about Peter Pan.
 
except that there is no claim more nihilistic than the claim that reality is independent and physical, that matter is the only stuff that's real, and everything about being a human being is a running calculation occurring within the skull.
nor am I defending solipsism, that only my finite mind exists

You keep ignoring my question, so I'll rephrase it again...

What's the difference between "consciousness is part of how stuff works" and "Stuff is part of how consciousness works"?
You keep asserting that there should be a difference because you can't imagine a world where your mind isn't part of the deepest layer of reality, but when asked about the specifics, everything still works like it does under materialism.

Why derail every thread about the mind with your assertion, if it never leeds to new avenues of discussion?
Or alternatively... show us these new avenues for discussion and exploration. Don't just mope that nobody accepts your axiom, but show us what it can do for us that the standard model can't.
 
There absolutely is. And the primary evidence is that everything that we KNOW comes from the mind is inconsistent, and that everything that seems to come from outside is entirely consistent in a way dreams and musings can't be.

For me one of the best pieces of evidence of an external reality is that it occasionally throws us an entirely unexpected curve ball. The result of the Michelson Morley experiment, or the discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, for example.
 
Ok. Now what?
That you only know ideas and impressions. So the belief in the existence of an external world is a mere belief or an inference. If the latter, show it, please.


I could ask you the same question about Peter Pan.
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We built the idea of Peter Pan just as we built the idea of God. By combining previous ideas.
 
For me one of the best pieces of evidence of an external reality is that it occasionally throws us an entirely unexpected curve ball. The result of the Michelson Morley experiment, or the discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, for example.

That would be a demonstration if you start from the starting point that impressions are caused by things. If the solipsist does not accept it, all scientific theories become mere combinations of ideas.
 
That you only know ideas and impressions.

No. I know of real things as well, as I've been arguing for a while now. It seems that the idea of using total consistency as a distinguishing characteristic of the real is something we're avoiding addressing for some reason.

We built the idea of Peter Pan just as we built the idea of God. By combining previous ideas.

Yeah but Peter Pan and God don't exist.
 
Do you mean that our imagination could not be able to invent a dawn with the idea of sun and horizon? You despise the power of human imagination.
Tell me, do you think it is impossible for humans to imagine the idea of a god without having seen any?

Accusations of playing with language are meaningless if you don't explain what linguistic error produces them. That is, language analysis. Explain to me what my mistake is and we can discuss it. Otherwise it's a simple, unsubstantiated complaint.

Language is simply a way we describe our model of the world we live in. It is possible in English to produce perfectly constructed sentences which are meaningless for example: "A square circle". That we can create such a sentence has no relevance to the actual world we live in.
 
That you only know ideas and impressions. So the belief in the existence of an external world is a mere belief or an inference. If the latter, show it, please.


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We built the idea of Peter Pan just as we built the idea of God. By combining previous ideas.

Nope - I may think I know that but that does not make it true, as I always say you could be merely an imagining of the solpolist and she has created you to think you know ideas and impressions. You have no way to discount that possibility unless you assume that you are the solpolist. Whichever way you slice it we all start with an assumption that something exists.
 
Everything we attribute to the world happens or has happened in a human being's mind because we do not have a direct experience of the world: we talk about our impressions, ideas and emotions and we believe that some of them have been caused by things and others have not.

Try to find something in your mind that is not an impression, an idea or an emotion. The same goes for any mathematical formula or scientific observation. These are ideas and impressions, and then beliefs.

And all this is independent whether we consider the mind to be a brain product or not.


You (as devil's advocate on behalf of solipsism) are claiming that the content of individual experience cannot be evidence for a world external to our individual experience. But neither you nor Larry has offered an argument why that claim should be accepted.

As I said to Larry, it's much like claiming we have no evidence for space outside the solar system. When others point to observations of stars, galaxies, redshifts, radio signals, etc., you keep pointing out "but all those photons that supposedly reveal the nature of the contents of distant space were only detected inside the solar system!" as if that negated the observations somehow, but you haven't explained how.

Most people observe, in the content of our individual experiences, plenty of evidence for an objective reality. Whence comes the experience of an unseen unexpected undesired blow from behind? The solipsist must hypothesize experiences caused by aspects or components of the solipsist mind that he has no conscious awareness of nor conscious control over. (The hidden or "subconscious" or "unconscious" mental forces responsible usually end up being very close parallels to the host of evil and trickster spirits infesting the supposedly objectively real outer spiritual planes of mystic cosmologies, to explain why observations of those realms is so perennially inconsistent.) Everyone else calls those not-controllable-by-ideation sometimes-surprising sometimes-troublesome aspects of life experience, collectively, "the real world," and at that point it becomes a semantic difference.

Of course, it's well known and accepted that solipsism is unfalsifiable in the end. There's an explanation around any experience, even e.g. having that experience itself be altered by unperceived unexpected unwanted events, e.g. the alcohol in spiked punch. "Of course the experience of becoming aware of the presence of alcohol after the fact can retroactively affect past experiences of other things, and it was introduced by my subconscious to facilitate satisfying unconscious desires that my conscious experience couldn't cope with." Yeah, sure.

Larry claims not to be advocating solipsism anyhow. His answer to the above appears to be to claim that experience has no content, which is why I characterize his position as ultimately (and extremely) nihilistic.
 
It's cool how imagination is a tool that can be used both to either learn about the real world and understand how it works, or to completely negate it and claim that each one of its parts is an illusion.
 
No. I know of real things as well, as I've been arguing for a while now. It seems that the idea of using total consistency as a distinguishing characteristic of the real is something we're avoiding addressing for some reason.


Yeah but Peter Pan and God don't exist.

Mere consistency only shows that some impression are consistent. An artificial world can be very consistent.
 
Mere consistency only shows that some impression are consistent.

Have you been actually reading the post I've made? So far you don't seem to have. I've already addressed all of that, and others have as well. It seems to me like you're simply playing devil's advocate but without taking any new information under consideration.

The point of the matter is that consistency is a RATIONAL and JUSTIFIABLE criterion to distinguish information from the mind from information from outside. As I said before you'll never be 100% sure but who gives a toss?

An artificial world can be very consistent.

Name one that is.
 
Do you think it's possible that nothing exists? If so, doesn't the illusion of something constitute something in and of itself?


Of course something exists!

Don't confuse my criticism of solipsism as meaning I hold another view, it is just the likes of David and LarryS who keep asserting that the realist has to make an assumption and the solipsist doesn't or that we can "know" our "experience/awareness/meness" is "real". It's a matter of trying to get them to understand that all claims that anything exists is based on an "assumption".

For me it matters not one iota if it is as Myriad has expressed it so eloquently it is all made of ducks, or quarks or the fluff god found in her belly button one morning.
 
Of course something exists!

Don't confuse my criticism of solipsism as meaning I hold another view, it is just the likes of David and LarryS who keep asserting that the realist has to make an assumption and the solipsist doesn't or that we can "know" our "experience/awareness/meness" is "real". It's a matter of trying to get them to understand that all claims that anything exists is based on an "assumption".

But it isn't an assumption. Something exists is the only thing you can say with 100% certainty, and that's the crutch that solipsists use. You can't use it against them because it's absolutely indisputable.
 
Nope - I may think I know that but that does not make it true, as I always say you could be merely an imagining of the solpolist and she has created you to think you know ideas and impressions. You have no way to discount that possibility unless you assume that you are the solpolist. Whichever way you slice it we all start with an assumption that something exists.

You don't realize yet that the solipsist thinks there is only a thinking entity. Whether this is a machine or a brain in a test tube doesn't matter to him. That being who is thinking exists.

Don't you realize that in your own hypothesis if someone has created another being to deceive him/it, that being exists?! You can't cheat someone or something that doesn't exist!
 

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