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

[Darat]

This thread is the equivalent of someone posting an interesting equation in the mathematics forum and asking for ideas to try and solve it.
We want to discuss whether it is solvable at all and how you would go about doing it. If not, can we at least devise a partial or maybe an approximate solution?

People start commenting and contributing, but it is immediately apparent most have no idea what even +, -, * and / means. Without knowing the terms and understanding their meaning most of the contributions are nonsensical and contradictory.

So far we have not even gotten to discussing the equation, because all the effort has been in trying to explain what +, -, * and / means, it's frustrating.

In an ideal world, you would at least study the basics of mathematics before attempting to contribute to a mathematics thread, the same should hold for any subject.

Yes we have, many times but this is philosophy so it in the end it is all about chewing the fat and having a good old discussion rather than offering any explanations. As folk have mentioned even the premise of the opening post is incorrect but that aside there has been no other explanation for consciousness from the "philosophy" side.

 

[Cheetah]

You've lost the thread of the discussion then solpolism was only raised in this thread (as I may have mentioned once or twice) to illustrate the silliness of LarryS's assertion and to demonstrate how the criticism he makes of what he terms "realists" and the assumption of a world that exists beyond his consciousness also applies to his own assumptions.

The thread has drifted, this is the philosophy section.
LarrS raised a solipsist view and yes, people wanted "to illustrate the silliness of LarryS's assertion and to demonstrate how the criticism he makes of what he terms "realists" and the assumption of a world that exists beyond his consciousness also applies to his own assumptions."

Sure, that is true, but no one has demonstrated anything so far, most of the attempted demonstrations were riddled with contradictions, inconsistencies and logical errors. When David Mo started pointing those out and explaining, he was repeatedly accused of being a solipsist, how odd.

Yes we have, many times but this is philosophy so it in the end it is all about chewing the fat and having a good old discussion rather than offering any explanations.

Not in this thread since I joined it.

A philosophy discussion is not "any old idea goes", logic and consistency are of prime importance. You cannot demonstrate anything if you contradict yourself.

You yourself are guilty of this and I am still waiting for your explanation:

You have simply been programmed to think you think, you have no way to demonstrate even to yourself that you are doing "solopolist real thinking" rather than being a figment of the solpolist's mind that is capable of "real" thinking. (It's really a form of the infamous p-zombie.)

I think you are struggling to find a deep philosophical point to this - there isn't one - well there is but only as deep as any silly philosophy is, remember all it is doing is demonstrating how LarryS's assertion that his "mind reality" doesn't have to start with an assumption like the "non-mind reality" he derides does.

Once again I'm not "struggling to find a deep philosophical point to this" I'm pointing out misunderstandings and errors in logic, like the one highlighted above.

 

[Myriad]

Meanwhile, LarryS hasn't responded since clarifying that what he was offering was, indeed not solipsism after all, but the old what-we-think-is-reality-is-mere-appearances shadows-on-the-cave-wall bit.

I was hoping he might have some actual suggestions regarding what materialists and empiricists should be doing to understand the world, instead of (or even, in addition to) continuing to study the behavior of the "mere shadows."

 

[IanS]

Originally Posted by IanS
… what is happening is that you have a sensory system that is exchanging electrochemical processes back and forth to the brain, and the brain is creating an impression of that very real input from the sensory system. That's what I think you are calling your “experience”.


Yes, you experience that impression.

Well actually, the “impression” is the “experience” … they are not two different things – the brain is simply creating an impression of things (the outside world) as a result of input from a sensory system ...

… there are not two different things being created as first a conscious “impression” AND then also a separate thing called the “experience”. All that you have are the thoughts … it's just those “thoughts” which you are calling “experience” and “impression” (they are also what is being called “awareness” and “mind” … the brain is a separate thing, and what it produces are our thoughts or “impressions” of things).

Originally Posted by IanS
But as far as any of us can honestly tell, that “experience” created by the functioning of the brain, is dependent entirely upon real input from a real sensory system which is detecting a real world around us.

That is not true at all. What you experience excludes the vast majority of the input gathered by your senses. It is also a highly processed, best guess estimate of the input.
I have looked for something in its usual place and found it missing, after looking everywhere else I could think of, I went back to it's usual spot and there it was, all along. I must have seen it the first time, why did I not experience it?

Well you are wrong – please look more carefully at what I said! I said that when we are talking about what the brain detects as the apparent reality of an external world, then as far as we can honestly tell, that so-called “experience” of reality in your mind, i.e. the impressions or "thoughts" that are created by your brain, are “dependent entirely upon real input from a real sensory system”. Example (as explained before) – if from birth the brain was deprived of all sensory input (i.e. no such input whatsoever), then it seems unlikely (perhaps impossible) that the brain would ever be able to form any impressions or “experiences” of any such external reality … you would have no “experiences/impressions/thoughts” of any apparent external reality around you, i.e. no imagination of buses, trains, rivers, the sky, mountains, other people … nothing at all!

As for your example of misplacing your spectacles or whatever it was you misplaced – firstly anecdotal tales like that are notoriously unreliable and extremely poor as evidence for anything. And the reason is that they almost always fail to recognise all sorts of factors that could be misleading you into hopelessly wrong conclusions. Eg, taking your own example – the most likely answer is probably that either you did not look carefully enough (and it's very easy to explain how that happens), or else you were mistaken and the spectacles/whatever were indeed not in that specific place when you first looked for them, eg in the meantime you yourself or someone else has inadvertently put them back in that place!

But lets be clear – millions of people have claimed (for all sorts of reasons) anecdotal tales of strange or unexpected events such as you just described, but whenever those claims/stories have been carefully investigated in an accurate scientific way, it always turns out that the person was mistaken about what had actually happened, and that instead there is a perfectly simple and entirely natural “real” explanation. So examples of anecdotal tales like that are really worthless for anything at all, inc. any attempts to show that something mysterious must be going on between the passage of visual information from the eyes to the brain.

Furthermore a person can also experience a dream or hallucination during which they are totally unaware of it's complete and utter disconnect from what their senses are really receiving.
Do you accept this?

Certainly we can dream or hallucinate mental impressions of things that are not at that particular moment coming direct as input from our sensory system, however, I doubt that those impressions could arise at all without what we call “memory” of previous sensory input which the brain is then using at a later time, i.e. retrieving it as “memory”, to create false impressions/illusions of realistic looking/seeming sensations or "thoughts".

IOW – although memory is no doubt a complex issue, and not one which I think we should allow to complicate & de-rail discussions here even further, I think your examples of dreams and hallucinations are almost certainly just examples of the brain using memory of previously stored input from the sensory system, so as to create from memory dreams and hallucinations … and I expect that both memory, dreams and hallucinations are all fairly well described if not absolutely fully understood, in the relevant scientific research literature.

So to repeat, just to clarify the above – in the example of things such as dreams, what I expect is happening is simply that the brain is reproducing those impressions (they should not be called “experiences”, because they are by definition not real events) from stored memory … but afaik the stored memory has to arise in the first place from all of our earlier sensory input …

… in other words (to repeat the example that I just gave before) – if from birth your brain was deprived of all sensory input, i.e. no sensory detection/function of any kind, then I doubt that you could ever form any such dreams or hallucinations in which you had an impression of things that exist in what we call the external or “real” world around us … I doubt that you could ever dream about busses, cars, trees, cats, food, mountains, stars in the night sky … I expect all of that would be impossible if you truly never had any sensory input of anything at all to an otherwise functioning brain.

Originally Posted by IanS
When you say “If you can think you must have a mind, no doubt about it” … no, actually I do not quite agree with that either. And I think we should all retain an element of doubt or skepticism about that.
Just because something seems inescapably true, or seems to be “self evident”, we have learned in science, and even more clearly in maths, that you should avoid ever thinking thinking like that, as if to tell yourself that anything is a certainty without actual “proof”.


What does a mind do IansS?

Does it not think? Can any thinking thing not be called a mind? How would you go about thinking without a mind? If you had a mind that could not think, would it still be a mind?

Well first of all you should be aware of, and admit, that my answer above is only stressing that we should, as a principal of proper care and objectivity, be very reluctant ever to say that anything is a “certainty' (as you just said it must be), unless we can literally show an actual proof for it. And afaik we definitely cannot show any actual proof for your claim … you are instead merely taking it as a self-evident assumption. So first of all;- I'm just saying that although it may seem obvious that you could say (to quote you) “If you can think you must have a mind, no doubt about it”, you should always retain an element of caution or doubt about stating things like that to say it's a certainty without actual proof.

However, if you want a very simple example of why that is actually the case in the specific words of your quote – what you are calling your “thinking” probably is actually identical with what you are also calling your “mind” … i.e. the thoughts are what exist as your “mind” … in which case your statement reduces to “If you can think you must have a mind be thinking, no doubt about it”, and that makes your statement entirely redundant and without any coherent content …

… so what I would prefer to say instead (if I wanted to make a statement like the one you just tried) would be more like “If you can think, i.e. produce thoughts, then it seems that there must surely be some mechanism or process which is causing that” … and of course I agree with all those in neuroscience, medicine, and psychology who say that all genuine modern research shows that the “mechanism or process” for producing any thoughts at all (i.e. what you are calling “experience” & “impressions”), is always a functioning brain (and that brain is of course an object of “reality”) …

… what do you say is the cause of your thoughts/mind? I say it's the physical real structure that we call the brain acting in conjunction with the sensory system etc. How would you explain any such thoughts or “mindful experiences” without a functioning brain?

Originally Posted by IanS
OK, the last of your 3 points was to say “Everything you experience happens in your mind” … well again, No! Actually, not. You cannot say that everything you experience happens within your mind, because those “things” that you “experience” as thoughts in your mind, almost certainly all occur in reality outside of your mind/brain … what's happening in your mind/brain is only that you are re-creating an impression or sensation of that external reality.


This was covered by me above but I wanted to add:
You contradict yourself, your own words concerning experience was "the brain is creating an impression".
So you already admitted that all that you experience happens in your mind, why the sudden turnabout?

It does not matter whether your "experiences" correspond with "reality" or not, it is still happening in your mind. This is the most basic of logical failures. What is your point?

OK, well first look at your actual sentence which I quoted (it's highlighted above) … as I have pointed out at least 10 times here already (mostly to Larry) – you cannot make that statement saying “Everything you experience happens in your mind”. Why, can't you make that statement? Answer- because what you “experience” in your mind are just “thoughts” which are an unreal representation of things that are actually happening elsewhere outside of your mind,. I.e., the events which you imagine as your thoughts (you are calling it an “experience”), are not happening in your mind at all (they are happening in the outside world) …

… all that “happens” in your mind is that your brain is producing an unreal illusion of events that actual happen somewhere else.

To explain that - look carefully at the first part of your statement, it says “Everything YOU experience happens in your mind” …. well, YOU are not just your thoughts or “mind”. You consist of a body and a sensory system with limbs etc. as well as a brain that creates thoughts which we call a “mind”. When your sensory cells detect something, e.g. the heat of a burning flame on your skin, that is certainly happening outside of your “mind”, it is the cells of your skin that “experience” the burning, not your mindful thoughts of it … all that you “experience” in your mind is an illusion of that burning … so you cannot claim “Everything YOU experience happens in your mind” … you are actually experiencing the burning at the cells of the skin, that's where the experience of any burning actually “happens” … it happens outside of your thoughts/mind ...

… what then happens is that electrochemical changes which result from the burning of the skin, are passed to the brain, and the brain processes that electrochemical input as more “brain chemistry”, and the final result of all that brain chemistry is what we later “experience” as illusory thoughts of burning that was actually experienced happening on the cells of the skin.

You only become aware of it because your brain creates that “awareness” (or 'experience”) as an illusion of what has actually happened, but what has happened actually occurred on your skin and NOT in your mind.

If you do not like the idea of the "experience" actually happening on your skin, i.e. if you wanted claim that was not what you meant by "experiencing" (though that certain is where the events actually happen and are experienced), then notice that your brain is also "experiencing" the effect of that burning - the burned skin cells pass electrochemical changes to the the brain and the brain "experiences" that very real input as electrochemical changes and chemical reactions ... but the result of that is, that the brain chemistry then produces as output an illusion, i.e. just thoughts, of the flame and the burning ... so the experience of what is actually happening, takes place at the cells of the skin and then at the brain as a set of electrochemical reactions ... but what the brain outputs is not that "experience" or "happening" itself, what it outputs as "thoughts" or "mental images/awareness" is just an illusory representation of what has actually happened at the cells of the skin.

Even if you wanted to take the position of a full-on solipsist and claim that only your mind exists, so that you actually have no skin or body to sense any such burning, from which you would then claim that real events or illusions of events took place only in the mind (because in that solipsist claim all that existed would be just a disembodied “mind”), then you would be straight back to the question that I posed before – in that case, if you claim you have no body and no brain to actually experience anything, then where did any of your thoughts, mind, mental-experiences come from … what caused or produce dany such effect as thinking awareness or “mind”?

OK so just to repeat for clarity - when you say ““Everything YOU experience ...”, you are not a disembodied brain! … you consist of a body and limbs etc. Any actual burning of your skin is an experience which happens there upon the cells of your skin (not in your thoughts/mind).

 

[IanS]

The thread has drifted, this is the philosophy section.
LarrS raised a solipsist view and yes, people wanted "to illustrate the silliness of LarryS's assertion and to demonstrate how the criticism he makes of what he terms "realists" and the assumption of a world that exists beyond his consciousness also applies to his own assumptions."

Sure, that is true, but no one has demonstrated anything so far, most of the attempted demonstrations were riddled with contradictions, inconsistencies and logical errors. When David Mo started pointing those out and explaining, he was repeatedly accused of being a solipsist, how odd.

Not in this thread since I joined it.

A philosophy discussion is not "any old idea goes", logic and consistency are of prime importance. You cannot demonstrate anything if you contradict yourself.

You yourself are guilty of this and I am still waiting for your explanation:

Once again I'm not "struggling to find a deep philosophical point to this" I'm pointing out misunderstandings and errors in logic, like the one highlighted above.

Cheetah, we are not (at least, I have not), claimed or insisted that David Mo (or even Larry) is a Solipsist. Not in any sense of insisting that they truly believe that no reality exists and that instead only a single disembodied mind exists.

What I have said about Davids earlier posts (and what I think others here have also said), is that David has been making posts in defence of the philosophical idea that we call "solipsism". He has been playing the role of a solipsist, for the sake of making his argument which has been to claim that the ideas of solipsism are unassailable and cannot be shown to be most probably untrue and without logical credible foundation. But as soon as David (and Larry) take on that role of acting as a mouthpiece for solipsist-unreality, then he (and Larry) must expect to be challenged for what he himself is claiming as a valid argument for solipsism.


I think David is wrong in his defence of solipsism, for all the reasons I have explained. I think the claim of solipsism really has no substance or credibility at all, unless of course it can produce an explanation of how our thoughts could ever occur without a brain and it's attendant sensory system. Perhaps there is such an explanation … if there is then I'd like to hear it (really!) … but afaik no such explanation has ever been produced.

As far as Larry is concerned - he is in a slightly different category because he has repeatedly made the claim that "everything that happens, happens within consciousness" ... and of course, as explained here many times, he cannot actually make that statement as a matter of certainty (and he has been presenting it as certainty). And at one point in this thread he also said that he regards claims of a real world as "Woo". So he has quite clearly been taking a solipsist position, even though he later denied that.

But David has also been guilty of taking several different positions at once - at one moment he is arguing in the role as a philosopher who simply proposes solipsism as an idea, but the next moment he writes as if he is talking as a disembodied solipsist mind itself, and of course at other times he keeps insisting "I am not a solipsist" (even though he is always arguing the case for solipsism to be what he apparently thinks of as an unassailable argument).

Well the argument of solipsism is not mere assailable, but actually it's been shown here to be most probably without any credible defence at all. And one reason for that is - as soon as anyone claims the solipsist argument to say that only one single mind exists (ie exists without the external reality of a brain or anything else), then they destroy their own argument immediately, because they cannot make that claim to anyone else or for it ever to be known in any way at all outside of their own thoughts (because in their claim nobody else exists!) ... so any claim or notion at all of solipsist-unreality, cannot ever be communicated in any way ... as soon as it's communicated here in various posts, that instantly shows the claim is wrong! ...

... the only possible exception that I could see as a defence against that, would be for the solipsist argument to claim that all the posts here and all apparent communication to others, was all taking place only in that one solipsist mind ... but in that case as I have pointed out many times, that would mean the solipsist mind is in permanent and immediate contradiction with itself ... at one instant claiming that external reality did not exist, and in the next instant claiming that external reality does exist ...

... and that is the very opposite of a credible position for the solipsist claim to be in, when it's perpetual self-contradiction like that.

 

[Cheetah]

Well actually, the “impression” is the “experience” … they are not two different things.

I agree, it is what you experience, now you are just playing word games.

Well you are wrong – please look more carefully at what I said! I said that when we are talking about what the brain detects as the apparent reality of an external world, then as far as we can honestly tell, that so-called “experience” of reality in your mind, i.e. the impressions or "thoughts" that are created by your brain, are “dependent entirely upon real input from a real sensory system”

Well you are wrong, as I explained, people dream, have hallucinations, mistake things, miss things see optical illusions etc. so definitely not.

As for your example of misplacing your spectacles or whatever it was you misplaced – firstly anecdotal tales like that are notoriously unreliable and extremely poor as evidence for anything.

This is beyond belief. I had no example of misplacing anything.
What are you on about "anecdotal tales", it's part of neuroscience.
Google "perceptual blindness".

… so what I would prefer to say instead (if I wanted to make a statement like the one you just tried) would be more like “If you can think, i.e. produce thoughts, then it seems that there must surely be some mechanism or process which is causing that” …

More word games and irrelevancies.
It is as simple as a mind is a thing that thinks, no more, no less. It is totally unambiguous and uncontroversial, there is nothing to discuss.

“Everything you experience happens in your mind”. Why, can't you make that statement? Answer- because what you “experience” in your mind are just “thoughts” which are an unreal representation of things that are actually happening elsewhere outside of your mind,. I.e., the events which you imagine as your thoughts (you are calling it an “experience”), are not happening in your mind at all (they are happening in the outside world) ...

If you cannot spot the contradiction in that I give up.

We cannot get any further until you are clear on the above.

 

[Cheetah]

What I have said about Davids earlier posts (and what I think others here have also said), is that David has been making posts in defence of the philosophical idea that we call "solipsism".

You are the only one who said that. It is so obviously wrong that I cannot fathom where you got the idea.
And because of your misconception you go on and say things like this:

I think David is wrong in his defence of solipsism, for all the reasons I have explained

and

David has also been guilty of taking several different positions at once - at one moment he is arguing in the role as a philosopher who simply proposes solipsism as an idea, but the next moment he writes as if he is talking as a disembodied solipsist mind itself, and of course at other times he keeps insisting "I am not a solipsist" (even though he is always arguing the case for solipsism to be what he apparently thinks of as an unassailable argument).

which is just ........

 

[Darat]

The thread has drifted, this is the philosophy section.
LarrS raised a solipsist view and yes, people wanted "to illustrate the silliness of LarryS's assertion and to demonstrate how the criticism he makes of what he terms "realists" and the assumption of a world that exists beyond his consciousness also applies to his own assumptions."

Sure, that is true, but no one has demonstrated anything so far, most of the attempted demonstrations were riddled with contradictions, inconsistencies and logical errors. When David Mo started pointing those out and explaining, he was repeatedly accused of being a solipsist, how odd.

Not in this thread since I joined it.

We will have to disagree.

A philosophy discussion is not "any old idea goes", logic and consistency are of prime importance. You cannot demonstrate anything if you contradict yourself.

You yourself are guilty of this and I am still waiting for your explanation:

Once again I'm not "struggling to find a deep philosophical point to this" I'm pointing out misunderstandings and errors in logic, like the one highlighted above.

You've still not explained what is contradictory in regards to the assumption LarryS was making which is what I and others were discussing in addressing his hidden assumption.

 

[Cheetah]

We will have to disagree.

You've still not explained what is contradictory in regards to the assumption LarryS was making which is what I and others were discussing in addressing his hidden assumption.

I never adressed any of LarryS's posts.

This claim?

That's because solpolism doesn't make sense.

But not sure why this is such a hard thing for some folk to grasp.

When the solpolist says "I think therefore I am" - they are assuming that what they experience is "real thought", "real ideas", that they are in fact experiencing anything. They have no way to judge if what they are experiencing is actually "real experience". "You" could simply be an idea of a person the actual solpolist is thinking about.

Remember the reason the solpolist was brought into the conversation was the claim that LarryS made that the only thing we can know without assumptions is our "internal experiences". But to decide that what we experience is "real" is just as much an assumption as a realist makes i.e. assuming the world exists without you experiencing it. There is no starting point in any model of reality that doesn't start with an assumption.

The only thing you can say without assumptions is that you experience stuff.
Whether the stuff you experience is real or not is up in the air, you cannot know.

You got some things wrong here though:

When the solpolist says "I think therefore I am" - they are assuming that what they experience is "real thought", "real ideas", that they are in fact experiencing anything

No assuming necessary, you cannot have an experience without something experiencing it. It is literally impossible.

And so we circle back to

Not at all - I could be a simulation that is programmed to "think I think". Or I could be an imagining of the solipsist and not a real person, just one of its playthings.

and

What you think of thinking may not be "real" thinking, for instance you could be an idea of a poster called Cheetah in the mind of the solpolist.

Where you claim that a figment of someones imagination could be a real thinking person with experiences.

I have demonstrated this to be contradictory and illogical and am awaiting your responce.

 

[MRC_Hans]

The only thing you can say without assumptions is that you experience stuff.
Whether the stuff you experience is real or not is up in the air, you cannot know.

Actually, this is what all science is about: To find out which of our experiences are real.

Hans

 

[David Mo]

Cheetah, we are not (at least, I have not), claimed or insisted that David Mo (or even Larry) is a Solipsist. Not in any sense of insisting that they truly believe that no reality exists and that instead only a single disembodied mind exists.

What I have said about Davids earlier posts (and what I think others here have also said), is that David has been making posts in defence of the philosophical idea that we call "solipsism". He has been playing the role of a solipsist, for the sake of making his argument which has been to claim that the ideas of solipsism are unassailable and cannot be shown to be most probably untrue and without logical credible foundation. But as soon as David (and Larry) take on that role of acting as a mouthpiece for solipsist-unreality, then he (and Larry) must expect to be challenged for what he himself is claiming as a valid argument for solipsism.


I think David is wrong in his defence of solipsism, for all the reasons I have explained. I think the claim of solipsism really has no substance or credibility at all, unless of course it can produce an explanation of how our thoughts could ever occur without a brain and it's attendant sensory system. Perhaps there is such an explanation … if there is then I'd like to hear it (really!) … but afaik no such explanation has ever been produced.

As far as Larry is concerned - he is in a slightly different category because he has repeatedly made the claim that "everything that happens, happens within consciousness" ... and of course, as explained here many times, he cannot actually make that statement as a matter of certainty (and he has been presenting it as certainty). And at one point in this thread he also said that he regards claims of a real world as "Woo". So he has quite clearly been taking a solipsist position, even though he later denied that.

But David has also been guilty of taking several different positions at once - at one moment he is arguing in the role as a philosopher who simply proposes solipsism as an idea, but the next moment he writes as if he is talking as a disembodied solipsist mind itself, and of course at other times he keeps insisting "I am not a solipsist" (even though he is always arguing the case for solipsism to be what he apparently thinks of as an unassailable argument).

Well the argument of solipsism is not mere assailable, but actually it's been shown here to be most probably without any credible defence at all. And one reason for that is - as soon as anyone claims the solipsist argument to say that only one single mind exists (ie exists without the external reality of a brain or anything else), then they destroy their own argument immediately, because they cannot make that claim to anyone else or for it ever to be known in any way at all outside of their own thoughts (because in their claim nobody else exists!) ... so any claim or notion at all of solipsist-unreality, cannot ever be communicated in any way ... as soon as it's communicated here in various posts, that instantly shows the claim is wrong! ...

Reply by allusions:
I do not share the positivist criticism of the solipsism —IanS et alia—, but this is not to say that I am in favour of solipsism. Nor do I share Communists' criticism of capitalism, and this doesn’t mean that I am in favour of capitalism. (This is a hypothetical example. I don't want to provoke the Big Dog. No, for God's sake).

Communists tend to think that anyone who does not accept their criticism of capitalism is because he is in favour of capitalism. This is because they have too high a concept of themselves. They believe they are the only ones who possess a flawless truth.

Let everyone draw conclusions for this forum from this example.


The solipsist says that there are only impressions and ideas in his mind. Concepts such as brain, nerves, eyes, colleagues, computers, books, texts, experiments, observations, etc. are nothing more than ideas and impressions. That beyond those ideas and impressions he experiences nothing. Take a simple impression —a dog in the stret, for example— and show the solipsist that it is more than just an impression and several ideas together. And do not invoke abstract entities such as Science, Reason or Acts, because for the solipsist this is ideas and nothing else. Come on. Give a valid reason against this belief and stop attributing falsehoods to others.

NOTE: “but the next moment he [David] writes as if he is talking as a disembodied solipsist mind itself”…
This is rigorously false. I never spoke as a “disembodied solipsist”. I imagine that this falsehood is due to some inaccuracy in your way of expression.

Cheetah... the only possible exception that I could see as a defence against that, would be for the solipsist argument to claim that all the posts here and all apparent communication to others, was all taking place only in that one solipsist mind ... but in that case as I have pointed out many times, that would mean the solipsist mind is in permanent and immediate contradiction with itself ... at one instant claiming that external reality did not exist, and in the next instant claiming that external reality does exist ...

Please, explain this. It doesn’t make any sense to me. When or why is the Solipsist claiming that reality exists? This is very confuse.

 

[Steve]

Actually, this is what all science is about: To find out which of our experiences are real.

Hans

 

[Cheetah]

Actually, this is what all science is about: To find out which of our experiences are real.
Hans

Please explain Hans and Steve.

Firstly, how does that relate to what I said? Mine is a philosophical point.
Secondly, I don't think it's true at all.
It sounds like "All of science is about figuring out what is real and what not."
Yes science does a bit of that, but just about all of science concerns studying real stuff, not figuring out if it is real or not. If you want to know about unreal stuff rather study a real thing like human nature to see why some people consider nonexistent things to be real.
Science also has nothing to do with human senses, apart from in the trivial sense of "you need senses to gather data and do science". Science studies the universe in much better detail than fallible natural human senses ever could on their own.
In fact science specifically tries to exclude and compensate for human biases and fallibilities.

 

[David Mo]

[

Actually, this is what all science is about: To find out which of our experiences are real.

Hans

Science is the analysis, explanation and prediction of how some impressions are linked each others. Science assume that some impressions are true under some conditions of observation and theoretical frame. There is not a single scientific study dealing with the distinction between sens data and reality posed by solipsism. This had to be recognized up to IanS in another thread. This is normal, because solipsism poses a philosophical rather than a scientific problem.
Therefore, science is based on an assumption that is common to all mankind, including some who play with the problem of solipsism: our impressions come in some way from the real world. This is so because the belief in the external world is spontaneous and universal.

Science is a good example of how solipsism must be overcome: not by trying to solve it, but by ignoring it.
A metaphysical problem is a problem that has no solution. It is posed in terms that cannot be solved by human understanding. Metaphysics is a factory of producing such problems. Critical philosophers have learned a long time ago to unmask and circumvent such difficulties.
Human consciousness is intentional. I mean, he's consciousness of something. Without this "something" it would not be conscious. And that "something" is lived directly as what is not in the consciousness. A modern philosophy must consider the lived world, not the abstract rational world of metaphysics. That is why, once analyzed the solipsist problem, we move on to something else. If someone claims to be a solipsist we greet him cordially and go.

Another different thing is how this external world is. But this is not the issue now.

 

[IanS]

I agree, it is what you experience, now you are just playing word games.



Well you are wrong, as I explained, people dream, have hallucinations, mistake things, miss things see optical illusions etc. so definitely not.



This is beyond belief. I had no example of misplacing anything.
What are you on about "anecdotal tales", it's part of neuroscience.
Google "perceptual blindness".



More word games and irrelevancies.
It is as simple as a mind is a thing that thinks, no more, no less. It is totally unambiguous and uncontroversial, there is nothing to discuss.



If you cannot spot the contradiction in that I give up.

We cannot get any further until you are clear on the above.

No! ... I have already explained all of that in posts 1184 and 1185 above. Please just read those posts carefully and properly.

 

[IanS]

You are the only one who said that. It is so obviously wrong that I cannot fathom where you got the idea.
And because of your misconception you go on and say things like this:



and



which is just ........

No! ... Read the posts 1184 and 1185 ... the answers to your questions, and the very clear and detailed explanations of why your statements are wrong, are set-out at length and covering all aspects in those two posts. You cannot make claims such as saying "Everything you experience happens in your mind" ... you cannot know that, and you cannot claim it as a statement of certain fact like that ... the things that you experience may well have all happened outside of what you call your "mind" (which is just your thoughts, or in fact just the physical structure we call the brain) ... in fact all known evidence shows that those things almost certainly do "happen" outside of your brain. Read the posts - you obviously have either not read them or have not understood what was explained there.

 

[Cheetah]

No! ...I have already explained all of that in posts 1184 and 1185 above. Please just read those posts carefully and properly.

I did, you are wrong.

Google "brain in a vat" and get back to me.

You are fighting facts and definitions, you cannot win, it's not a matter of opinion.

 

[Myriad]

A metaphysical problem is a problem that has no solution. It is posed in terms that cannot be solved by human understanding.

 

[IanS]

Quote: IanS
“Everything you experience happens in your mind”. Why, can't you make that statement? Answer- because what you “experience” in your mind are just “thoughts” which are an unreal representation of things that are actually happening elsewhere outside of your mind,. I.e., the events which you imagine as your thoughts (you are calling it an “experience”), are not happening in your mind at all (they are happening in the outside world) ...


If you cannot spot the contradiction in that I give up.
We cannot get any further until you are clear on the above.

Well I have explained it several different ways at least 20 times here already. But if you need it explaining again in some different words, then here it is for the last time (otherwise I will just refer you back to all the other posts where it was explained in detail so many times already) -

Look at the quote which you yourself have highlighted (above) - the quote that you have highlighted above (and which apparently disagree with or dispute) says "I.e., the events which you imagine as your thoughts (you are calling it an “experience”), are not happening in your mind at all (they are happening in the outside world)" … you appear to be having immense trouble reading that simple statement … it says that “the events” themselves are happening in the real world, and not in your mind … do you understand that???

You already told us that you are not a solipsist and that you do believe real events happen in a real world. So you do yourself believe that the “events” themselves are indeed happening in the real world. E.g., a plane crash happens in reality, in the real world … the event happens in the real world; the event (the plane crash) does not happen in your mind.

All that is happening in what we call “the mind” (i.e. your brain), is that your brain produces a vision-like reconstruction of the events that were detected by your eyesight as a plane crash. The crash does not happen in your mind/brain at all.

The fact that our brain is necessary for us to recognise that any such event has ever happened, is an entirely different matter. All that is actually happening is that we/humans are using a sensory system to detect events that really happen, such as a plane crash, and the brain then processes that sensory “information” to produce a facsimile vision of what was sensed by our eyesight … but the reconstructed imagery in your brain (the brain is the “mind”) is of course not the event itself, it is not the actual crash (there are no metal planes in your brain!).

 

[Cheetah]

From Wikipedia, Brain in a vat:

Read this very carefully.

Since the brain in a vat gives and receives exactly the same impulses as it would if it were in a skull, and since these are its only way of interacting with its environment, then it is not possible to tell, from the perspective of that brain, whether it is in a skull or a vat.

and

Since the argument says one cannot know whether one is a brain in a vat, then one cannot know whether most of one's beliefs might be completely false. Since, in principle, it is impossible to rule out oneself being a brain in a vat, there cannot be good grounds for believing any of the things one believes; a skeptical argument would contend that one certainly cannot know them, raising issues with the definition of knowledge.

If there is anything that you disagree with, it indicates a lack in your understanding of the argument.
I'm willing to clarify anything specific that you have a problem with, but I cannot make you understand the argument, you have to do that for yourself, it might need effort.

Remember the "brain in a vat" is an example to illustrate an unassailable argument, the same one I've been trying to explain to you.