Quite good, if enlightened!
Thanks. The "Invincible Argument" and "The Most Logical Form of Judeo-Christianity" is the culmination and final (?) iteration of almost 20 years of internal rumination on the possible nature of existence.
Moderator: Dan~
Quite good, if enlightened!
phenomenal_graffiti wrote:
True. And "I" and the life one lives and the interactions "I" have with others is basically nothing more than an artificial reality or "matrix" composed of first-person subjective experience. In your case, you believe this artificial reality or "matrix" is created by the brain.
Over and again:
You make claims like this as though, in and of itself, making them is all the demonstration that we need in order to make them true.
I'm certainly not arguing that what I believe is true about life and death make it true. After all, how on earth could I possibly know that?!
This is the most important distinction that I make between us. You argue certain things about the afterlife and "subjective experience" on this side of the grave, and then seem considerably more inclined to feel confident in those arguments than I am in mine.
I do "mind the gap" here between "I" and an understanding of existence itself. Including the part where "I" may well be but another of nature's dominoes compelled even to type these words.
phenomenal_graffiti wrote:
Well, let's choose an actual chosen behavior like someone choosing a shirt to wear before going out.
1. The person choosing the shirt is a first-person subjective experience composed of first-person subjective experience.
2. The shirt, while the person is alive and conscious, is a construct made up of the first-person subjective experience of the person looking upon it and handling it.
3. The experience of looking at the shirt and handling it is made up of the first-person subjective experience of the person. For those believing the brain creates consciousness, this entire scene is an artificial construct made up of first-person subjective experience, that sort of emerges or "airbag deploys" from the brain.
4. If there is mind-independence, there are things not created by or within the brain that exist outside the body of a person, that is something completely different from the artificial construct made out of subjective experience that comes from or exudes from the brain. This is the case of the mind-independent version or doppelganger of the physical body of the person and the shirt being selected, as part of an actual chosen behavior. These doppelgangers are not the same thing as the first-person subjective experience artificial constructs flowing from the brain like a movie from a movie projector.
Ergo, for those believing in "mind-independent matter", there is the first-person subjective experience of the shirt of the person choosing the shirt, and there is the mind-independent doppelganger of the shirt in the external world, that would fall to a mind-independent floor and continue to exist if the first-person experience shirt were to wink out of existence if the person should die or fall unconscious while handling the shirt.
If. If, if, if, if, if.
But how is it then demonstrated that this entire sequence of first person subjective experiences isn't actually embedded instead in the psychological illusion of first person subjective experience embedded in the actual objective reality that is encompassed in the laws of nature themselves?
phenomenal_graffiti wrote:
Er, empirical evidence certainly tells us that first-person subjective experience in its seven modes exist. And empirical evidence basically takes the form of first-person subjective experience in the shape and form of a certain artificial reality. Everything that would need to be known about existence itself in order to encompass ontologically the whole of reality, therefore, must take the form of something subjectively experience and must consist of first-person subjective experience.
It's all we have, and are, empirically. There's...uh...nothing else that appears.
All we have...are? How can any of us possibly be privy to all that would need to be known in order to assert that?
When I speak of "it's all we have" I speak of those things/interactions that conscious human minds do seem able to demonstrate as "true for all of us" in the either/or world.
phenomenal_graffiti wrote:
First-person subjective experience is the substance that composes the things we see, hear, feel, and experience from day to day. The afterlife, meanwhile, as it happens to exist and appear within the current state of our existence, appears only in the form of an idea of a world composed of first-person subjective experience. The objective existence of the idea, the existence of first-person subjective experience in the "here and now", brings the existence of the afterlife into focus as the imaginary substance making up the idea happens to be the same substance composing what we experience from day to day.
Here we are clearly in two different discussions. I have no idea "what on earth" this means. This is a "world of words" "general description" of human interactions to me. I'm trying to grapple with how you relate this intellectual "assessment" to the "for all practical purposes" choices that you make in the course of actually living your life.
phenomenal_graffiti wrote:
It's elementary, I think. "For all practical purposes" choices and the course of one living one's life is made up of first-person subjective experience. There's really nothing else.
Again, in my view, you have merely thought yourself into believing it is all "elementary". You have demonstrated none of it such that all rational men and women can then clearly be shown as obligated to think the same.
Which just brings me back around to the manner in which psychologically it has become important for you to believe that this "elementary" explanation need be as far as you go. Why? Because the explanation works for you in that it allows you to anchor "I" in that which you feel [through argument] is at least an intellectual font of sort.
And you need such a font on this side of the grave in order to at least establish an argument for the existence of a font on the other side of the grave.
Only I immediately recognize that this is all no less true of my own arguments here. It still comes down to that which I am in turn able to demonstrate as in fact true objectively about you.
Not much. Again, being in the same boat here that you are. That, seemingly, we all are.
phenomenal_graffiti wrote:
We certainly can't know that there is an Earth outside the artificial one made up of first-person subjective experience. The existence of planet Earth past and present appears only in the form of something experienced by an "I". It does not appear unless there is an "I" perceiving an object everyone calls "Earth" made up of the perceiver's first-person subjective experience. It follows that a mind-independent Earth may not exist and as such cannot continue exist after "I" ceases to exist (if things can cease to exist).
In other words, you are just like the rest of: flailing about trying to explain something you almost certainly have only a small fraction of information and knowledge regarding.
Dark energy? Dark matter? The quantum world? Something instead of nothing? Mind as matter? Determinsim? Leave that for others to figure out?
phenomenal_graffiti wrote:
You mentioned that consciousness is an inherent component of the brain, but the only brains that have ever been experienced are brains composed of first-person subjective experience. Are there evidence of brains not composed of a person's subjective experience that are subjectively experienced? If these brains are not composed of first-person subjective experience, how can they be experienced or, for that matter, known to even exist, if they are not composed of subjective experience?
I can only note that I am not at all clear regarding what your point is here. What brains performing what tasks in what contexts?
phenomenal_graffiti wrote:
1. People believe the brain creates consciousness.
2. That which (in your words mind you)...'can be proven to be true'...'a demonstrable set of of facts'...if the brain creates every single instance of everything you experience from birth to death---are and must be created by the brain. Everything one experience in the either/ought world, the either/ought world itself, appears and manifests only if it pops out of the brain.
But we still have no definitive understanding of how, given a particular behavior that we choose in a particular context, this "first-person subjective experience" actually works given how the human brain works given how that reflects the evolution of mindless matter into living matter given how that came to exist at all.
It's not what people believe so much as explaining how and why belief itself came into existence going back to, as some speculate, the Big Bang itself.
phenomenal_graffiti wrote:
There are, if mind-independence exists, two things:
a. Everything that is created by your brain
b. Everything not created by your brain (i.e the 'planet Earth [that] will continue to exist even after "I" am dead and gone')
"There are, if..."
Bingo. Then [for me] it always comes down to the extent to which "if" is truly grappled with by any particular individual when the questions get this big. And that is far more a manifestation of dasein in my view. But then this view in itself is no less embedded in my own set of assumptions here.
phenomenal_graffiti wrote:
I hope I didn't come across as "making my beliefs true" by how strongly I place claims and believe them. That being said: in the mythology that the brain creates consciousness, given the belief that death (irreversible cessation of consciousness) exists, the "I" that is formed by the brain, given that it is something for which the brain is responsible, something that cannot exist outside or independent of the function of the brain, and something that would cease to exist when and if the neocortex were to stop functioning,....the "I" or the consciousness of anyone must be, according to this logic, an artificial reality or "matrix" made up of the person's subjective experience produced by the brain.
I do "mind the gap" here between "I" and an understanding of existence itself. Including the part where "I" may well be but another of nature's dominoes compelled even to type these words.
phenomenal_graffiti wrote:But you must understand through direct observance of yourself that you are composed of first-person subjective experience, and that nothing else besides first-person subjective experience appears or manifests. This is the part that existence makes patently obvious. Everything else is make-believe that, if one believes in the objective existence of stuff we constantly "make up" in our minds, one can defend it's existence (poorly) by stating there is nothing that prevents it from existing outside the mind.
phenomenal_graffiti wrote:We have nothing upon which to base the existence of anything that is not first-person subjective experience that would lend credence to any reason to the idea there is an objective reality not composed of subjective experience.
phenomenal_graffiti wrote:Er, empirical evidence certainly tells us that first-person subjective experience in its seven modes exist. And empirical evidence basically takes the form of first-person subjective experience in the shape and form of a certain artificial reality. Everything that would need to be known about existence itself in order to encompass ontologically the whole of reality, therefore, must take the form of something subjectively experience and must consist of first-person subjective experience.
It's all we have, and are, empirically. There's...uh...nothing else that appears.
All we have...are? How can any of us possibly be privy to all that would need to be known in order to assert that?
phenomenal_graffiti wrote:What else can there be besides the patently obvious? Can you or anyone demonstrate that we are something that is not first-person experience? Why suppose an 'extra', save, perhaps, out of the simple conclusion that only first-person subjective experience exists, and the only thing that has ever existed?
phenomenal_graffiti wrote:First-person subjective experience is the substance that composes the things we see, hear, feel, and experience from day to day. The afterlife, meanwhile, as it happens to exist and appear within the current state of our existence, appears only in the form of an idea of a world composed of first-person subjective experience. The objective existence of the idea, the existence of first-person subjective experience in the "here and now", brings the existence of the afterlife into focus as the imaginary substance making up the idea happens to be the same substance composing what we experience from day to day.
Here we are clearly in two different discussions. I have no idea "what on earth" this means. This is a "world of words" "general description" of human interactions to me. I'm trying to grapple with how you relate this intellectual "assessment" to the "for all practical purposes" choices that you make in the course of actually living your life.
phenomenal_graffiti wrote:It's elementary, I think. "For all practical purposes" choices and the course of one living one's life is made up of first-person subjective experience. There's really nothing else.
Again, in my view, you have merely thought yourself into believing it is all "elementary". You have demonstrated none of it such that all rational men and women can then clearly be shown as obligated to think the same.
Which just brings me back around to the manner in which psychologically it has become important for you to believe that this "elementary" explanation need be as far as you go. Why? Because the explanation works for you in that it allows you to anchor "I" in that which you feel [through argument] is at least an intellectual font of sort.
And you need such a font on this side of the grave in order to at least establish an argument for the existence of a font on the other side of the grave.
Only I immediately recognize that this is all no less true of my own arguments here. It still comes down to that which I am in turn able to demonstrate as in fact true objectively about you.
Not much. Again, being in the same boat here that you are. That, seemingly, we all are.
phenomenal_graffiti wrote:But in the meantime, psychological motivation or not....everything could be just be made up of subjective experience, and nothing more. It doesn't matter that I "need" the elementary nature of a reality being made up only of first-person subjective experience to lend logical credence to an afterlife made up only of first-person subjective experience. It doesn't matter that in the end "we simply don't know". Neither does it matter if you are able to admit it faster or easier than I. None of this matters outside the fact that things could very well be "elementary" in that first-person subjective experience in the form of persons is the only thing that exists.
phenomenal_graffiti wrote:The only thing that we can objectively demonstrate to be true is that everything is made up of first-person subjective experience.
Dark energy? Dark matter? The quantum world? Something instead of nothing? Mind as matter? Determinsim? Leave that for others to figure out?
phenomenal_graffiti wrote:Others would, or should, come to the conclusion (in terms of 'dark energy' 'dark matter' etc.) that these supposed existences are made up only of first-person subjective experience in the form of ideas within the mind.
phenomenal_graffiti wrote:
I hope I didn't come across as "making my beliefs true" by how strongly I place claims and believe them. That being said: in the mythology that the brain creates consciousness, given the belief that death (irreversible cessation of consciousness) exists, the "I" that is formed by the brain, given that it is something for which the brain is responsible, something that cannot exist outside or independent of the function of the brain, and something that would cease to exist when and if the neocortex were to stop functioning,....the "I" or the consciousness of anyone must be, according to this logic, an artificial reality or "matrix" made up of the person's subjective experience produced by the brain.
Sure, that is one possible explanation. Others have different explanations. But all I can keep coming back to then is the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, here and now, none of these explanations have demonstrated a capacity to either 1] definitively explain human existence on this side of the grave or 2] definitively resolve whether existence -- "I" -- continues on, on the other side of it.
phenomenal_graffiti wrote:But you must understand through direct observance of yourself that you are composed of first-person subjective experience, and that nothing else besides first-person subjective experience appears or manifests. This is the part that existence makes patently obvious. Everything else is make-believe that, if one believes in the objective existence of stuff we constantly "make up" in our minds, one can defend it's existence (poorly) by stating there is nothing that prevents it from existing outside the mind.
Then, from my frame of mind, the gaps to be closed here are between this and full-blown solipsism, and between both and determinism.
phenomenal graffiti wrote:We have nothing upon which to base the existence of anything that is not first-person subjective experience that would lend credence to any reason to the idea there is an objective reality not composed of subjective experience.
But the gaps above don't go away. Like me, you have no capacity to actually demonstrate empirically, experimentally [let alone ontologically] that the assumptions you embrace here are in fact true for all rational men and women in possession of at least some measure of free will.
phenomenal_graffiti wrote: Er, empirical evidence certainly tells us that first-person subjective experience in its seven modes exist. And empirical evidence basically takes the form of first-person subjective experience in the shape and form of a certain artificial reality. Everything that would need to be known about existence itself in order to encompass ontologically the whole of reality, therefore, must take the form of something subjectively experience and must consist of first-person subjective experience.
It's all we have, and are, empirically. There's...uh...nothing else that appears.
All we have...are? How can any of us possibly be privy to all that would need to be known in order to assert that?
phenomenal_graffiti wrote: What else can there be besides the patently obvious? Can you or anyone demonstrate that we are something that is not first-person experience? Why suppose an 'extra', save, perhaps, out of the simple conclusion that only first-person subjective experience exists, and the only thing that has ever existed?
But the "patently obvious" itself is no less embedded in the gaps above. And, thus, like you, I cannot demonstrate that what I think about these relationships reflects what all reasonable folks are obligated to think about them in turn going back to that definitive understanding of existence itself.
But this is the part that, from my perspective, hasn't sunk in yet regarding your perspective.
phenomenal_graffiti wrote: But in the meantime, psychological motivation or not....everything could be just be made up of subjective experience, and nothing more. It doesn't matter that I "need" the elementary nature of a reality being made up only of first-person subjective experience to lend logical credence to an afterlife made up only of first-person subjective experience. It doesn't matter that in the end "we simply don't know". Neither does it matter if you are able to admit it faster or easier than I. None of this matters outside the fact that things could very well be "elementary" in that first-person subjective experience in the form of persons is the only thing that exists.
But to the extent the dots here either can or cannot be connected definitively between what I think I believe, how that makes me feel, and how that's all intertwined in first person subjective experiences embedded in autonomy embedded in dasein embedded in an ontological assessment of existence itself, we are basically just posting back and forth various "worlds of words" predicated on different sets of assumptions.
phenomenal_graffiti wrote:The only thing that we can objectively demonstrate to be true is that everything is made up of first-person subjective experience.
Suppose we both die tomorrow. Would the either/or world going back to, say, the Big Bang be obliterated in turn? Would it cease to exist?
Would you be able to demonstrate that there are in fact first person subjective experiences after you die?
Instead, we both just take our wild ass guesses here and now and post them.
Dark energy? Dark matter? The quantum world? Something instead of nothing? Mind as matter? Determinsim? Leave that for others to figure out?
phenomenal_graffiti wrote:Others would, or should, come to the conclusion (in terms of 'dark energy' 'dark matter' etc.) that these supposed existences are made up only of first-person subjective experience in the form of ideas within the mind.
Okay, but what does that have to do with what you can in fact demonstrate to be true about the place of first person subjective experience here and now?
Other than to merely assume that what scientists and philosophers will know, say, 10,000 years from now, will confirm your own point of view. And you don't believe that does not have more to do with your conjectures as psychological defense mechanisms than with anything you can actually know for certain about the part after the here and now "I" dies?
Joined with part 1 & 2 it would take an afterlife to read it all. That would make me regret if there actually is one. I think I'll stick with oblivion!
The afterlife needs no invincible argument. It's a certainty. Even if we die when we die, that's an afterlife.
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