Thanks. I think there's a lot of strength in most of these arguments within their materialist religious dogma.
And you wonder the responses you receive are sometimes hostile?
They have an internal logic. Like Newtonian Physics has within certain limits. What I'm trying to suggest is that philosophy is an attempt (ok, perhaps stupid and fruitless, but attractive to some) to try to approach truth.
Well, you're wrong.
Philosophy is the study of thinking. You can only establish truth in relation to something else.
If p
then q.
Science is one method of doing that, but the problems with the 'bias filter' conception of science are:
1) All of it depends on accepting doubtful knowledge.
That's why one of the fundamental principles of science is to repeat the experiment, to confirm the observation.
I realise that most of you are aware of this and I'm not disputing that over time science can establish reasonable faith in certain propositions.
Nope. No "faith". Nothing is accepted on faith. Does the observation match my own? Do I get the same result when I repeat the experiment? Does the theory produce useful and accurate predictions?
I might trust a scientific theory, but trust and faith are two very different animals.
What I am saying, from a philosophical point of view, is that this is faith, since all scientific discoveries are 'best guesses'.
If you are talking about theories, then this is inaccurate at best. Theories are predictive models of the world, and the thing about a predictive model is that you can test it. As many times as you want. No faith is required, because you can actually check.
The filter is based on a human invention, confidence (the mathematical variety, I mean, the basis of statistics).
Right. No faith required.
If something is 'statistically significant' it is so with reference to some purely arbitrarily chosen confidence quotient.
Not purely arbitrary. We choose the desired confidence for entirely practical reasons. 95% confidence in a single experiment is fine. 95% confidence that a bridge will hold together is not so good.
So what this means is that the scientist says, "That'll do, I'll take that as best-guess-reality".
Baloney. What the scientist says is that given all the factors involved, this is the probability that the result is an accurate representation of whatever we were trying to determine. And then others repeat the experiment.
Now that's fine, except that it is then transmuted by semi-conscious people into "established fact", and we get the kind of badgering here towards anyone who QUESTIONS its philosophical basis: the facts are in; your conscious experience is evolutionarily useful froth on a material sea of patterned accident.
Do you actually dispute that it's an established fact that brains generate consciousness?
And if so, on what evidentiary basis?
2) Objective observations might not be filtered through a bias filter so much as distorted by the objectifying, pattern-making habit of our minds (which is why there is so much made of the possible potential of altered states of awareness to open the 'doors of perception' to more truthful apperception of reality, rather than merely being hallucinatory error).
You can make that argument. You'll be laughed at, of course. For one thing, objective observations (as best we can make them) led to such inventions as the airplane, while "altered states of awareness" simply lead to people walking off roofs believing they can fly.
For another thing, we know, as I pointed out earlier, how drugs screw up the information processing function of the brain. Far from opening the "doors of perception", good ol' materialist science shows us that, as expected, they just mess with your mind.
And finally there's the question of results. Science produces results. Consistently. Your "more truthful apperception of reality" has been experience by countless individuals since the beginning of history and has produced... Poetry. And mostly bad poetry.
Of course, to a dedicated, pious materialist, the problem is solved by default; to a philosopher it is not.
Not "by default". By endless, tedious observation, experimentation and calculation. By hard work, not by pulling the answers out of your butt.
Even this I put as "might not be..." because I am agnostic, exploring reason and experience in search of undeniable truth.
Really?
Those of you who say that materialism is undeniable have failed to realise that you have no way of knowing whether you are dreaming that belief.
Sure I do. I'm not asleep.
Anyway, I don't think that anyone has said that materialism is undeniable. I said that, for example, it is indisputable that mind is brain function, but by that I mean something different. You can deny that mind is brain function, but there is no rational, evidence-based argument, no dispute, that you can bring to support your denial. Any such denial is based solely on faith.
The philosopher, perhaps wrongly, perhaps stupidly, recognises that the 'established fact' you lot are so sure of is not fact, but faith, and asks again "What do I actually know?"
Again, you fail to understand. That question has been asked, and answered,
and we moved on. It's just not interesting.
What do I actually know, without the possibility of doubt? Not a whole lot. Okay, let's assume materialism is true and see what happens... Hey, look at that, it works!
Andyandy has enough freedom of thought to say that thought is more reliable than the objects being thought about.
Thought? Reliable? Heh.
Those who meditate report that even thoughts can be observed as objects, separate from the witness, the "I" thinking them.
Yeah? Those who experience high fevers report fairies sitting on their beds talking to them. Those who are recovering from strokes report malevolent ducks hanging around their hospital rooms.
Of course, traditionally some of them come to a similar conclusion (or rather, they assert, they aquire direct knowledge) as some of you have been saying here - that the self is utterly illusory (it is one of the tenets of Buddhism). However, it is a very different kind of understanding than what many of you seem to be saying, that facts are just observed, filtered through the magic bias filter of scientific experimentation, appreciated by the clear view of your eyes.
Science is designed as a process to produce reliable and useful results. The scientific method developed not because someone thought that this was a great way to pass time, but because it turned out that if you checked your ideas, confirmed your results, in this specific way, you made much more progress than if you just noodled around.
I am not denying the functional usefulness of science and technology, or external reality.
Okay.
I am reminding us that what we observe has already had a cognitive pattern imposed on it by our minds: we call it a chair and sit on it, even though in a natural sense there is no such thing as a chair; 'chair' is an ideal
Nope. There's no such thing as an ideal chair.
"Chair" is a category.
and you can do the thought experiment of constructing less and less chair-like chairs and find a continuum from 'not-chair' to 'chair' and the dividing line between the two is down to your personal taste in how comfortable you like to be when you sit down.
There's no such continuum.
In a similar way, whatever science 'measures' might have already been projected, as it were, constructed, rather than observed in the raw.
That doesn't mean much. A measurement is not the thing it measures, nor does any scientist think otherwise. A measurement is an interaction.
Am I mistaken in stating that this is one of the uncomfortable discoveries of science itself, that observer and observed cannot be separated (at least in certain realms or dimensions)?
Yes, you are mistaken.
Does it not lead many cosmologists and particle physicists to comment on the kind of 'mystery' I am alluding to?
Don't know about many. There are some, certainly.
I'm afraid my ability to argue this point is poor because I haven't enough knowledge of these areas, but did I dream Chaos and QM, particles popping in and out of existence, wave-particle confusions... Is it Heisenberg who would have a good laugh about the observer being irrelevant.
No. He'd agree, in fact. Heisenberg showed that it's not that the observer can't simultaneously measure a particle's position and momentum to arbitrary accuracy, but rather that a particle doesn't simultaneously
have a position and momentum defined to arbitrary accuracy. The observer isn't the problem; it's the nature of matter that's the problem.
Someone summed it up by saying that science has not found any limit.
That was me.
Newton might have said the same about his clockwork universe.
No.
Science hasn't found any limit to what can be explained. That is, we know of nothing that can't, in principle, be studied and eventually understood by the scientific method. That is not a claim that we know everything.
Newton could have said that there was no known limit to the explicative power of science, and he would have been right, and he'd still be right, even though we've learned an immense amount since his day.
My question was probably rather naive and stupid. Forget it if you like. I just find it stimulating to my curiosity to note that there have been approximately 13 billion human brains through history, but only one of them is supposed to be the 'cause' of 'me'.
Why is this at all remarkable? It's
your brain. If it was my brain, it would be generating my mind.
Annother way of looking at it is to imagine all that mechanistic evolution taking place and questioning whether my hallucinatory perception of a self was at all necessary.
It's not a hallucination. It's real. And yes, it does have useful evolutionary function, and the perception of self is clearly present in simpler form in all animals. (The "mirror test" shows this in higher animals. But even a worm will draw itself away from pain.)
Being one of those several billions for a fleeting lifetime is like crawling inside the cosmos somehow, unnecessarily putting it on as a skin.
To you, perhaps.
It feels significant and strange to exist or have the dream of existing as a person. I mean, we might repeat the process with AI robots, but if we suddenly found ourselves embodied in one, we'd be dim not to wonder why. And if we did, someone would say "It's obvious, dimwit: you have a frame and a CPU, don't you?"
Eh?
I disagree with this. How can I know that the feeling I think I am having is that feeling and (for example) I'm not just a construct that is programmed to think that it is having that feeling?
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