Re: G.K. Chesterton on Materialism
On Wednesday, March 20, 2013 2:39:40 PM UTC, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, March 20, 2013 12:44:02 AM UTC-4, John Clark wrote: On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 2:17 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: Correlation, even 100% correlation, does not equal causation. BULLSHIT! If when X is changed there is ALWAYS a change in Y in the same direction, and when Y changes you can ALWAYS find a change in X that preceded it, then X causes Y. IT'S WHAT THE WORD CAUSES MEANS! Two flowers bloom at sunrise every day without fail. Does one cause the other to bloom? Do the flowers cause the sun to rise? Instead of two flowers, think of one flower that blooms at sunrise, and something else that happens at sunrise that is completely unlike a flower - like a particular song plays. If we apply this metaphorically to consciousness, then the flower and the music are two perpendicular, correlated expressions of the sunrise. Our subjective consciousness is the music, and it is part of a history of music going back to the dawn of time, and the flower is what the music looks like from the outside, and it has a separate history of plants going back to the dawn of botany or matter. Hello, sorry to want to get involved ;-) I always hear an audible click very shortly after I see the light switch on. There is no direct causation, but the two phenomena are both related via the action of my finger, which if I am technologically unsophisticated may not be obvious (think of cargo cults.) Are you suggesting it might be a similar mistake to say that neural events cause qualia? i.e. there could be an as yet hidden cause for both. Two unrelated systems can both be related to a third, If they are both related to the same thing then they are not unrelated. They can be unrelated except for their mutual relation to the third thing though, obviously. Craig John K Clark -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: G.K. Chesterton on Materialism
On Wednesday, March 20, 2013 5:44:23 PM UTC, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 , Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com javascript:wrote: We can write books and other people can read them, so that must prove that consciousness is not caused by neurochemistry. What the hell??? Books aren't neurological, right? Right, but they are certainly material. There is no direct link between the author's brain and the reader's brain. There is never a direct link between one mind and another, there is always a material middle man, usually many, such as photons reflected off paper in a book, or air vibrations from vocal cords, or in chemical changes in the nerves of fingers, or whatever. Just like the light switch There is not a direct link between the light switch and the light going on either, the closing of the light switch just caused a current to flow in the wire, the current flow didn't cause the light either it just caused the filament in the light bulb to get hot, it was the hot electrons in the filament that caused the electromagnetic waves to be produced. I think explanations are important to prove causation ;-) and it's interesting that you can break this example down. Each explanatory step is materially plausible (it has a satisfactory public explanation), right up to the perception of the light. But the qualia (qualium?) itself doesn't have a public description, and there isn't any sense of satisfaction that it has been explained. It's tempting to believe that's because it's a complicated step, but there seems no obvious way to reduce it. So as far as I can see it is still only an assumption, with the hope/faith that some plausible explanation will one day be found. I'm not sure there are many other widely-held scientific explanations like this one? you remove any connection between neurons, yet the words of one brain (or brain activity ostensibly associated with the words) are still transmitted from one to the other. When you write books I don't always read them AND if I don't read your book your book still exists, so I can say with great confidence that my reading of your books does not cause your books to exist. John K Clark -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: G.K. Chesterton on Materialism
On Monday, March 18, 2013 8:15:39 PM UTC, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Monday, March 18, 2013 11:33:17 AM UTC-4, John Clark wrote: G K Chesterton wrote: For we must remember that the materialist philosophy (whether true or not) is certainly much more limiting than any religion. That is absolutely true, there are more ways of being wrong than of being right, so if you don't care if your ideas are self consistent or not (for example if you don't care that X is not Y and X is not not Y) and if you don't care what words mean (for example if you don't care that if changing X always changes Y and changing Y always changes X that doesn't mean that X caused Y) then you have much more freedom over what you can believe than a logical man does. The man who thinks he is logical is often just stubborn. There are many things related to consciousness which can't be defined in the terms we have learned from manipulating public objects. No state of awareness is uniquely one thing and not another. All phenomenology is multivalent and impacted by intention and expectation. If you want all the parts of your belief system to fit together the range of things you can believe in is severely limited. And finding ways all the parts of the universe fit together in a self consistent way is hard, very hard, so often the logical man must just say I don't know I'm not certain, they religious man on the other hand is always certain but seldom correct. The logical man is a man whose religion is logic. Not that I'm opposed to logic, it just can't penetrate to the cause of awareness. Logic is always an a-posteriori analysis of a sensory-motor experience. there is a very special sense in which materialism has more restrictions than spiritualism… The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe, but the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle. The Christian is not allowed to admit the slightest speck of doubt that a invisible man in the sky sent His son, who was also Him, to be tortured to death by humans even though he loved His son, who is also Him, very much because otherwise he could not forgive humans even though He is omnipotent. Even though He is omnipotent torturing His son, who is really Him, for the crime of eating a apple is the only way He could forgive the torturers. The Christian is not allowed to admit the slightest speck of doubt that it makes sense that if I'm mad at you and then you torture my son to death I will no longer be mad at you. No argument there. I only disagree with you on religion in the sense that I don't think the fictions which have been created are arbitrary. They reflect metaphorical illustrations about consciousness itself, and when taken figuratively all myths can reveal important insights. It's only when people take them literally that it causes problems, and as long as physics refuses to take consciousness seriously, people will continue to take religion literally. What do you think John 5:19 is trying to say about individual free will? It seems to me to be confirming what non-dual traditions also assert: That there is no independent self and thus no agent to exercise free will. They talk about the universal Self, the unicity of existence, which somehow manifests as our apparent, but illusory, individual selves. This universal Self is the only actual entity and it has no independent parts. Independence/multiplicity is merely a feature of the world of concepts, which is ultimately unreal (a product of the Fall?) Free will and determinism are both concepts - in actuality it all happens the way it happens, and God says it is good, etc... The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation… I don't know when Chesterton wrote that but he lived until 1936 and by 1925 physicists, the ultimate materialists, did not believe that history or anything else was simply and solely a chain of causation; however it is unlikely that Chesterton ever knew this and like most self styled philosophers remained blissfully ignorant of all scientific and mathematical discoveries made during the last century or two. Are you referring here to the addition of randomness or probability to the chain of causation? Incidentally I found some more ideas of Chesterton. In 1290 Edward 1 expelled the Jews from England and Chesterton writes that Edward was a just and conscientious monarch and acted correctly because the Jews were as powerful as they are unpopular and the capitalists of their age so when Edward flung the alien financiers out of the land he acted as knight errant and was the tender father of his people. Even in 1920 Chesterton thought there was still a Jewish Problem in
