> On 20 Jul 2019, at 21:52, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List > <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > 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.
That does not follow. Bruno > 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 > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/be84035f-1b8f-b1a1-a722-2cdd2c3ef9d4%40verizon.net. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/C5A73475-991C-4686-BB8F-015B677498CF%40ulb.ac.be.
