So are the less astute religionists.
They are the majority, who are presently screwing up our world.
Those religionist fools expect god to save us from them.
Regards
DL
No argument against this.
Regards
DL
To surreptitious75:
To (conceptually) prove that consciousness is an artificial “SIMS” reality, let’s ignore my metaphysical beliefs for a moment.
Simply observe the common, everyday, and famous belief that:
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The brain creates consciousness
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Consciousness does not nor cannot exist unless there are brains that create consciousness
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Consciousness does not exist until a brain forms and neurons making up the cerebral cortex of the brain begin to fire.
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Consciousness ceases to exist when neurons making up the cerebral cortex no longer sufficiently fire to give rise to consciousness.
The brain is a fleshy organ trapped within a skull. Consciousness, that is for example the sight of one’s room when one wakes in the morning, with the sun streaming through one’s windows, certainly seems to be something residing outside one’s body and skull, as one has visual experience of the periphery of one’s body and the morning view itself seems to be something that surrounds, rather than is within, one’s body.
The beautiful morning view also cannot be mistaken for the brain, which is a baseball-glove shaped lump of glistening flesh hidden within the skull.
Yet, it is amazingly believed that the morning wakeful vista comes from the baseball-glove shaped lump of meat in one’s skull. The star-shaped pieces of flesh somehow have access to something other than just themselves, and piece together this emergent ‘extra’ (magically popping into existence from a former non-existence or there is a magical transformation of something that is not first-person subjective experience into first-person subjective experience), something that does not in the least visibly and tactilely resemble neurons, and somehow this visual experience that does not in the least resemble a brain or neurons or the innards of neurons sort of…ejects from within neurons to intangibly phase like the MCU’s Vision through the bony wall of the skull and skin over the forehead to, er, hang like a hologram before the eyes.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qI7eZiZBRj0[/youtube]
Anyway, if the “hologram” of the morning view winks out completely replaced by nothing should one die while sitting in bed admiring the morning view, then the morning view is not the external world, but a “hologram” or artificial reality created by star-shaped pieces of flesh collectively forming a baseball-glove shaped lump of flesh trapped within a skull.
The same is true of the morning view if brains are like the Swamp Thing’s organs, that were discovered to have absolutely no function and were just sort of “there” to give the illusion that they perform something. The brain may be a “false machine” that is believed to create consciousness but does not, and something or Someone made up of first-person experience in the external world is the one truly responsible for forming my subjective experience and my subjective experience of a morning view.
You are right about (external world and some sensory) beliefs being falsifiable. But if our consciousness is not an artificial reality that winks out when the brain stops operating, what is it?
To Ierrellus:
The ‘hardware of brain neuronal activity’ you refer to is the mind-independent version, which may not exist. Brains observed in neuroscientific, medical, and criminal context are made up of first-person subjective experience. Everything we see, observe, have evidence of is the ephemeral “movie”…
…that appears on the projector screen from the stream of light emanating from the “movie projector”:
The “movie projector” may be anything in the external world, even an external world Person. The “movie projector”, however, is commonly believed to be mind-independent brains.
While mind-independent brains are believed to be the “movie projector” giving rise to the “movie” of our everyday experience barring unconsciousness or death, given that we have never encountered or experienced anything except first-person subjective experience and mind-independence is famously and generally believed to be something that is not first-person subjective experience, invoking mind-independence and mind-independent brains and asserting their “irrefutable, unquestionable” existence is the same thing as a religionist asserting the existence of God.
And…if ‘physical’=‘mind-independent’, there can be no such thing as ‘physical first-hand experiences’ as anything that is ‘physical’ is not and is not made up of subjective experience; the ‘physical’ is something other than subjective experience.
Brain death results in the cessation of consciousness because a dead person can no longer experience sensory perception
Whether consciousness can carry on existing outside of the brain is another matter although there is no evidence for this
The only thing that will survive death are the sub atomic particles that the brain is composed from - protons / neutrons / electrons
These particles have lifespans greater than any individual thing in known existence [ except for photons ] but they are not conscious
It all depends of course on how one defines consciousness but at the moment there is no evidence that it resides outside of biological minds
We have no evidence for the existence of another person’s consciousness, so consciousness outside the brain would be entirely invisible and intangible, as it is subjective experience that is not your subjective experience. In order for a non-brain generated consciousness to indicate to you it exists, it would have to have power to speak to you in a language made up of your first-person subjective experience. Where it could come up with your subjective experience is anyone’s guess.
Thing is, we don’t know that mind-independent brains, protons, neutrons, and electrons even exist. The only evidence we have of existence itself, the only thing for which there is evidence of existence, is first-person subjective experience.
Consciousness (as I define it)=first-person subjective experience in the seven forms of sensory, cognitive, and emotional experience. And as before, you can only perceive and experience a SIMS world made up only of your subjective experience, so the subjective experience of anyone other than yourself will not be seen or experienced (evidence), even if it existed independently of the brain.
There might no evidence for the existence of consciousness in anyone other than oneself but one knows that other human beings
also possess a brain and that that brain could therefore be responsible for generating consciousness in them like mine does in me
It would be way more likely that the particular organ of one species would be performing the same function for every member of that species
This is a logical assumption rather than hard evidence and even though they are separate from each other they are not mutually incompatible
I regard other minds as real as my own simply because it is the most rational explanation available and there is no reason I see for it to be false
Solipsism and idealism are far less rational and by logical inference are therefore not true although this cannot be proven in any absolute sense
Never denying the consciousness of other people as I am not solipsist, but the brain may be a reductio ad absurdum when you apply logic into how that which is not subjective experience could possibly come up with subjective experience, particularly when you logically think about how star-shaped pieces of flesh could contain or piece together a view of the city of Paris, France, and where the view of Paris, France was in one’s neurons prior to the piecing together and the airbag deploying of the view from the skull.
This means absolutely nothing. It’s just the way your SIMS reality expresses the repetitive intelligence of a lawful artificial reality made up of subjective experience.
When speaking of things that may or may not exist on a global metaphysical level or in the external world, one does not simply proclaim a view as positively not true (for, how could you know?). Logical inference when correctly and honestly applied observes that the only thing that exists is first-person subjective experience (the world one perceives and the things within it, even billions of trans-historical mammalian brains, is made up only of one’s first-person subjective experience), finds that mind-independence and the emergence or formation of mind from not-mind is far less rational than solipsism and idealism, which are simpler and more probable.
My own mind does not have the cognitive capability to create a mind dependent reality as complex as the one that I experience
And so the only other possibility is that the reality I experience must be mind independent - logically it cannot be anything else
The transition from non mind to mind is same as the one from physics to chemistry to biology - there is no mystery to this at all
By ‘mind-independence’ I mean: 'not composed of first-person subjective experience; something other than or that is not first-person subjective experience. I do not mean ‘mind’ as in ‘a person’s mind and the capabilities of a person’s mind’.
The reality that we experience is complex, but it is nevertheless made up of only the material substance of first-person subjective experience. This is evident(?) in the existence of unconsciousness or death. That world that is perceived just…winks out…when one falls alseep.
So yeah, when talking about ‘mind-independence’ in the sense of ‘my mind’ or ‘your mind’ independence, then there is certainly something else outside that is behind the “matrix” that is your consciousness or mine.
Physics, chemistry, and biology are all made up of one substance: first-person subjective experience. There is no evidence they are made up of something that is not first-person subjective experience.
The real fallacy is resurrection of Gilbert Ryle’s “ghost in the machine” (The Concept of Mind 1949) in the 21st century. Neuroscience continually defies Cartesian dualism. If mind were not an electrochemical process, modern psychiatric medicines would be an enormous hoax. See Changeaux and Ricouer’s “What Makes Us Think”.
i’ll see your changeaux and ricouer and raise you a peter hacker…
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRmQ3eHhdqk[/youtube]
Thanks. I’ll stick with dennett and the churchlands.
that’s strange because both dennett and hacker are trying to save/salvage the concept of freewill, but hacker does it much cleaner than dennett, who produces really off-the-mark arguments for the existence of freewill. once in a video he begins by saying we should examine freewill at a biological level rather than at the level of physics. yeah, as if the biological wasn’t some form of a physical system. he then goes on something of a ramble saying determined means inevitable and since humans can anticipate future events, they can alter the course of inevitability (by ‘avoiding’), so on and so forth. none of this is relevant and side-steps the stronger points of the argument for determinism. hacker, on the other hand, simply examines the meaning of the terms employed in the determinist language and finds that much of these concepts are senseless. for instance the very word ‘determine’ itself implies anthropomorphic connotations that are misleading; nature doesn’t ‘determine’, doesn’t ‘deliberate’, doesn’t ‘intend’, anything. only to humans does such a description apply when speaking of a causal agency such as a ‘determiner’… while we can also speak meaningfully with the word in other respects that imply no causal agency… e.g., ‘the rules determine what we can do’ or ‘the meteorologists determine the weather’. in neither case is anything being ‘made’ to happen. just sayin’.
but churchland. bro. he’s as hardcore materialist as they come, and wouldn’t be caught dead even saying ‘freewill’.
imma tell you whats been going on in philosophy in the last eighty or so years concerning freewill/determinism. the matter was pretty much concluded that there is no freewill. not even a smidgen of it. so philosophers had to find a way to make this terrifying conclusion manageable… and reintroduced variations of compatibalism again. these, too, failed miserably, and the future wasn’t looking too bright once again. finally analytical philosophers like wittgenstein and hacker come along and diffuse the problem by redefining the concepts involved in the arguments. now of course they know, secretly, that there’s no freewill FREEWILL, so they invented another kind of freewill by removing from the concept the old cartesian notions of substance dualism. freewill now becomes simply a capacity that is described by behavior rather than some kind of property that an immaterial entity has.
at any rate, so so much talk of the ‘mind’ in senseless and confusing ways in philosophy is to blame for much of its floundering. example:
‘If mind were not an electrochemical process’
if you have five processes, and stop one, would you still have ‘mind’? reductionalism tends to equivocate descriptions of ‘mindful behavior’ with descriptions of inert physical events. of course, we couldn’t be mindful without a brain, but this doesn’t mean the brain is mindful. its the entire being and its behavior that is described as mindful. in a sense… as hacker put it… modern neurology is as dualistic as descartes was because it defines mind as a possession rather than as an activity. bloody hell, man, pull yourself together! this makes no sense!
Free will is the ability to think and act within the parameters of genetic determinism.
My reading for the past 20 years has been in the field of neuroscience. IMHO, the neuroscientist never lost so much time as when he/she stopped to learn about consciousness from the word games of philosophers. Sorry to hear about Dennett. I enjoyed reading his “Consciousness Explained” among other works. How would he respond to Hacker?
Consider a point of logic gentlemen.
If you have a free will, you can deny yourself it’s use upon request. Right?
IOW, you can give up a course of action to do something else upon request.
Since we can all do that, that is proof positive that free will exists within us all and we are only limited by nature and physics.
I cannot exercise a will to fly for instance.
Regards
DL
How does your definition of free will differ from mine?
Philosophers are concerned with what can be said; scientists are concerned with what can be done.
nope, because that denial itself would be an act of freewill, according to your line of reasoning. remember what the great sage-bassist geddy lee declared on the permanent waves album: ‘if you choose not to decide… you still have made a choice!’
so this ‘giving up a course of action to do something else’ isn’t also ‘limited by nature and physics’?
are you saying everything about you is subject to the forces and causes of nature except your decision to raise your left arm instead of your right?
I was making a point. Not comparing definitions.
I was just showing hoe one can confirm that one has a free will.
If you showed such a proof of concept in your description, I missed it.
Regards
DL