On 7/20/2019 1:32 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Fri, Jul 19, 2019, at 22:04, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote:
On 7/19/2019 4:49 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
I share their perplexity. The idea of immaterialism is natural (and
arises thousands of years ago), because the only thing that we cannot
doubt (as Descartes pointed out) -- our consciousness -- is
immaterial. There is not scientific instrument that can detect
consciousness.
That's not really true. Of course doctors assess patients as conscious,
unconscious, in coma, or brain dead every day.
Yes, but all of this doctor-stuff takes place in the theater of your own
consciousness. There is no evidence of any reality beyond conscious experience.
So the doctors decision about you has nothing to do with reality. And
you see no problem with that kind of reasoning. It appears to me that
you are willing to discount everything as evidence for anything else.
All that counts as evidence is experience and it can only be evidence
for itself.
We only know about the first person, not the third. The problem with the
materialist / emergentist framing of consciousness is that it demotes what is
directly known in favor of a model (third person objective reality), of which
we don't really know the ontological status.
Ontologies are always model dependent.
The myth that
consciousness is a mystery is part hubris (we are too special to be
understood)
I know, this idea that we have been going from a process of humbling experiences, by
discovering that the earth is not the center of the universe, and then how
infinitesimally small we are compared to the all shebang, and then that we are just
animals, etc. Several of my friends are very attached to this idea. They love to think
poetically about "how insignificant they feel" when they realize how small we
are, how devoid of anything special. I have to be honest, I don't particularly care for
any of this stuff one way or the other.
My point has nothing to do with humbling experiences. It is that we
think we have understanding of a lot of physics because we can use to
for predictions. But when a neuroscientist finds he can predict what a
subject will think when a certain brain point is stimulated that's
dismissed as not really evidence for a material basis for thought
because...well thought is special. My point is that we demand some kind
of intuitively satisfying explanation of thought that is "better" than
mere prediction...yet in all the rest of science we think the ability to
predict means we know reality. I think both are off the mark.
I don't know if we are special. Compared to what? All I say is that all that
appears to exist, exists within my conscious experience. The rest, I can always
doubt.
What you doubt is what is inferred from your direct experience. But
what is this process of inference? Ideas pop into my consciousness with
no conscious inference of them all the time.
What is this "I" I refer to? Also don't know. I suspect it's the same "I" you
refer to, but in a different branch, in a different set of circumstances. These things that I am
saying are tautologies, trivial observations. The fact that some people find them so absurd or
perplexing makes me thing that there is religious belief involved, even though the religion in
question does not necessarily have a name.
and part an exaggerated demand for understanding. There's no
scientific instrument that can detect the wave function of an electron
either. But with the electron we're happy to have an effective theory
that tells us when the detector will click or not. Mystery mongering
about consciousness makes us demand something more that mere measurement
and prediction, something that doesn't exist for any theory.
The idea of a wave function of an electron, scientific instruments, detectors,
mystery mongering, all of this takes place -- at least for me, and I know of
nothing else -- within the phenomenon I am curious about. That's what makes it
special.
And I'm suggesting that it is your curiosity that makes it special. If
you were that curious about why the wave function of an electron is what
Dirac said it is, if you were willing to just keep asking "Why?", you'd
find that special too. Bruno wants this curiosity to bottom out on
computation because he thinks he understands computation.
Brent
Telmo.
Brent
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