Hi Brent, 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. The myth that > consciousness is a mystery is part hubris (we are too special to be > understood) 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.
I understand your point that we can always make additional demands for explanation, and that any scientific theory cannot be expected to do more than what successful scientific theories do, which is to correctly predict phenomena. My main point is this, and I think it goes to the core of our disagreement: No scientific theory predicts consciousness! Putting it another way, every single successful scientific theory that we know about as these two properties: - Consciousness is not required for anything "to work"; - Consciousness is not predicted to exist in any way. Now, I know you will argue that yes, neuroscience can predict and observe conscious states, but the only thing it can do is find correlates between observable behavior and brain activity. Which is great, but has nothing to do with the hard problem. Firstly because consciousness itself cannot be measured or observed. What you can do is observe behaviors that you *assume to be correlated with consciousness*. I challenge you to find any other theory or filed of science where such a speculative leap is accepted and the results after such a leap taken seriously. - Are my cells individually conscious? I don't know. - Are stars conscious? Is Google? Who knows. Emergentists might suspect they are, because they are systems with highly complex behavior. - Are cats conscious? I assume they are, but am I not just noticing their similarities to me? What about plants? Why or why not? - Etc. In the end, I find John Clark's position on this more palatable: he agrees that consciousness cannot be measured, so he doesn't care about the problem. He thinks it's a waste of time to think about it. Intelligence is the interesting thing. Fair enough. But your position is a bit different: you present your own metaphysical belief as scientifically justified, and I don't think that is a tenable position. 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/1ae59181-0197-8be6-a320-418771e9d823%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/0c22cb84-3ea8-4f56-b4ab-1521919f240f%40www.fastmail.com.
