Why is this website so negative towards materalism? The properties of matter seems to hold many secrets. The cultural values of modernity indicate that materalism is synonymous with nihilism and despair but it is these very same principles that Epicurus uses to attain the ultimate happiness. The stoic analysis of causation holds that interactions are only possible between bodies and yet there is room in their system for the gods. I feel that there is much potential in exploring these ideas as long as the prejudices arising from Christian theology are overcome.
Hell are you talking about? most 4thchiners are godless men unfortunately
Humanism is the coolest religion
Humanism was born out of religion and is tied to it
moron all i want is land and love
x = /raex_ts
I've had too many mystical experiences to be a materialist.
Mental experiences are material experiences.
You have no correlative data for this claim.
>Mental experiences are material experiences.
Someone actually typed this unironically. You'll never get it.
You are the one who doesn't understand what a "mystical experience" is.
that magic is real?
"you'll never get it" can't be the basis for a religious claim you moron. It's well known by non-morons that mental is material. You're not in ancient Greece anymore fool
So my thoughts are objects that can be grasped?
>?
apparently not
Sorry, I couldn't help it.
For my personal views I with the Eastern Mystic body/mind/soul viewpoint but I don't see it like minor philosophical quibbling. The mental and spiritual worlds are all their own vast spaces that touch our material realm always, all ways.
>all things exist in three realms
In physics terms this is the quantum model that can be solved with nine dimensions, three for each realm. (speculation on my part)
For the psychological model that I insist that a mental state is an arrangement of electrons suspended within your neurons but they all entangle or sympathetically relate, holding values that you feel but mostly reside in these other realms.
I can't defend these points right now, I have things to do
Your thoughts can be directly manipulated by pressing on different parts of your brain. This is easily shown. So, yes they can be grasped.
Materialism is obviously wrong and I have never seen a defense of it that wasn't pure sophistry. The election tourist ChristLARPers however are below even that.
>Your thoughts can be directly manipulated by pressing on different parts of your brain.
You aren't actually answering his question. He asked whether thoughts are physical objects; you are saying they can be influenced by the brain. Every materialist argues with this constant sleight of hand of saying something vaguely related then jumping to their performed conclusions. It is obvious that mental objects like colors are not physical objects. Next you will conflate light wavelength and the phenomenal experience of color and some uncritical idiot might be convinced
>The election tourist ChristLARPers
It’s been almost a decade. It’s time to stop letting them live rent free up in that tiny pea sized brain of yours
>He asked whether thoughts are physical objects;
Not him, but if you read actual materialist philosophers like Churchland or Dennett they'll very quickly admit that things other than the material exist. They then either privelege the material over the immaterial, saying that it is more real, or say that the immaterial requires the material to exist.
Advances in modern physics make billiard-ball-atomism untenable, at minimum you have to accept the existence of spacetime and elementary particles as two separate substances.
Sounds like empiricism taken to its logical conclusion
>at minimum you have to accept the existence of spacetime
there is no reason to believe time exists, let alone "spacetime"
Thoughts are chemical and electrical pathways and signals in the brain. All material in nature. This is like being ignorant of how a computer works and insisting an operating system actually uses magical divine non-material transcendent properties to process things.
>Thoughts are chemical and electrical pathways and signals in the brain.
No, there is a pretty obvious difference between neural correlates and the phenomenal experiences they correlate with.
>This is like being ignorant of how a computer works
You are undoubtedly ignorant of what a computer is given your and every other midwit's comparison to computers with brains and minds with software. Computers are made by people assigning a syntax and are not tied to any particular physical effect.
>No, there is a pretty obvious difference between neural correlates and the phenomenal experiences they correlate with.
Pure cope
You have to be false-flagging materialists at this point.
There's absolutely no reason to suggest that the "phenomenal experiences" does not directly arise from the material causes.
>There's absolutely no reason to suggest that the "phenomenal experiences" does not directly arise from the material causes.
The burden of proof is on you.
kek, you're brain dead. Material causes are the foundation of whole disciplines of study which directly produce results. What do you have for an alternate theory? Nothing. The burden of proof is on something to replace the functional model of materialism.
Everything that can be empirically measured in our universe.
>Everything that can be empirically measured in our universe.
so what you measure creates the measurement? what about the things you can't measure like an experience?
You can measure an experience. The strength of neural connections, the volume of hormones associated with it, the electrical activity in the brain. Certainly, these measurements are crude and low resolution, but as technology progresses, we will certainly get more accurate and complete measurements
Brain. Dead.
> You can measure an experience
False, it’s only possible to measure CORRELATES of an experience. Awareness itself has never been measured, in part because it has no physical location.
It clearly has a physical location. And even in your own subjective consciousness you can measure your levels of pain and that subjective measurement is commensurate with the physical process of your nerves sending signals to your brain.
You are a caricature. The burden of proof is on something to replace dualism.
Natural selection pressures can only act upon things that have real effects on the survival of the organism. Otiose / merely accidental features of organisms do not arise, because by definition they have no way of doing so if they can't impact the fitness (positively or negatively) of the organism. The one way they can seemingly arise is through random mutations, but given long enough time spans, a random distinct but evolutionarily completely "indifferent" feature, something that is solely a result of random mutational "noise," all things being equal, will be equally likely to pass out of existence -- and in practice one can hardly conceive of something like this, because even the slightest difference in the organism's constitution will still add needless mass, energy consumption etc., making it subject to negative selection pressures.
For qualia, subjective self-consciousness, etc., in short everything we normally call consciousness, to exist at all, at least over large time scales, it must be somehow involved in the fitness of the organism. If an organism without any self-consciousness at all, a p-zombie or purely mechanical simulacrum of a subjectively self-aware being, is totally indistinguishable from a subjectively self-aware being, then it is purely otiose, and there can have been no selection pressures operating on the subjective self-awareness, meaning it never would have arisen or at least (if it was a random mutation) it would have cancelled out over time, either selected against (e.g., because waste of energy) or simply cancelled by noise from other genetic drift.
For the radical epiphenomenalist materialist view to hold, consciousness has to be an illusion that is "had" by nothing, and a completely pointless "ghostly overlay" of the material being which functions or would function perfectly well without having the ghostly overlay at all. Yet it has it for some reason.
Consciousness is simply a phenomenon referred to when a sufficient degree of complexity in processing has been reached. Consciousness is analogous to peawieners' over-the-top plumage, it is an avenue of evolution which yields such strong advantages that it has run-away success. Your consciousness is a phenomenon that arises from a collection of extremely complex systems which have all passed through the mechanism of natural selection, again, there is no reason to suppose that the "qualia" or mind is anything beyond what has been selected for. Allow me to phrase it like this, if something like an imagination, to picture scenarios in the mind of possible future events requires extreme levels of complexity, then phenomenon which arise when extreme complexity appears will necessarily result as well. One dimension is the dimension which contributes directly to the survival of the genes which hold it, and the other is merely a necessary corollary. You may as well argue that neither hydrogen nor oxygen are "wet", so where does the wetness of water come from?
For your argument to hold, you would need to prove that a person could achieve the exact level of complexity as you and lack a "qualia" or mind. But, of course, you seem to be smuggling in a subjective experience of consciousness which you have access to but can't actually prove in any way-shape-or-form to anyone else, which really renders the whole discussion of "qualia" or mind as a bit moot. We can only discuss what appears to have "qualia" or mind and what does not.
Personally, I think it's more useful to examine the "qualia" or mind in Freudian terms. An ego is certainly a necessary thing for a person to have in order to enact his will on the world (something which certainly carries benefits). Similarly, a super-ego by which he can assess his actions through the lens of what others (society, authority figures, and so on) might think is also highly useful and would be selected for. The id is, of course, the energetic font from which action is propelled forward, an equally necessary thing. Thus, all aspects of the human mind are linked to necessity, and I don't see how you could possibly claim that the subjective experience of mind is superfluous or anything extra, it is exactly what you would expect of such a complex, interconnected network of highly refined and perspicacious systems to be.
>Consciousness is simply a phenomenon referred to when a sufficient degree of complexity in processing has been reached.
unless you can say how and when that point of complexity is reached that "creates consciousness" it remains an empty statement with absolutely no proof. why is that assumption needed? because unless you can prove how it actually occurs it's an assumption that explains nothing and doesn't help at all in providing clarity.
Why do you suppose consciousness is a definite state and not a sliding scale? Do lower animals, with less complex brains not show a kind of primitive consciousness? What about people who get lobotomies? Clearly damage to the brain impairs what we refer to as "consciousness"
you can't become more or less conscious. you can become more intelligent or less, but consciousness can never be impaired. a lobotomy doesn't affect it but it damages your brain functions. you know about acquired savant syndrome right?
>AI experts
do they also study philosophy? most of them deny consciousness being a real thing in humans, and that's how they claim intelligence and complexity means consciousness (it's wrong)
You can become more and less conscious. You literally become more conscious as you age and your capacity to coherently identify the material world grows within IQ limitations. Higher IQ people have more consciousness capacity than lower IQ people. An 80 IQ African Black person physically does not have the ability to consciously assess things that a 130 IQ Chinese can.
There just isn't a good argument against materialism. You lose.
you are describing consciousness as self-awareness. it's not the same thing.
Self-awareness is a good litmus test for consciousness though, it's like a classical test case to see if someone is a materialist/computational reductionist or idealist. Mostly because both parties could be saying "dogs are conscious" and thinking they agree, when one party means "dogs have a really good set of algorithms" while the other means "dogs have mind-stuff / a soul in them"
a bird for example can have a more vivid experience than me, while not being self aware. if you say "the bird is not conscious of that experience" that means you are saying "it's not self aware of having that experience" but he has it, he is conscious of that experience. You can't say those two things are the same. the distinction is experiential not rational, so having a higher IQ or a better memory doesn't make you more conscious or less
consciousness IS awareness dumbass. It's the capacity of an organism to identify the material world. Unless you have a better definition?
No, that's a very bad definition. are you even trying?
Once again you have nothing. I'm just assuming you're weak bait at this point with no counterargument, which means I'm correct by default. Sad!
already explained why you're wrong.
That's right.
>a bird for example can have a more vivid experience than me, while not being self aware
An entire argument resting on the assumption that a bird might have a more vivid experience than a human and is somehow therefore experiencing consciousness in the way that humans do... just because? Weak. You can't even define consciousness in that argument because it wouldn't be coherent at all lol
>An entire argument resting on the assumption that a bird might have a more vivid experience than a human
so where is the problem with this?
Easy:
>a bird for example can have a more vivid experience than me, while not being self aware.
baseless assumption. How do you know the bird isn't "self aware"? How do you know the bird can have a more "vivid" "experience" than you? Where do these assumptions come from? How are you defining these concepts?
>if you say "the bird is not conscious of that experience" that means you are saying "it's not self aware of having that experience" but he has it, he is conscious of that experience.
Who said that? Do you have any kind of substance to offer that concludes the bird isn't both conscious and "self-aware" to a degree? Being organic the bird by default has some concept of self, even if it's basic compared to human, right (self-preservation)? But is this level of consciousness comparable to humans? Are you able to prove that (or against it) in any meaningful way without material/empirical terms?
>You can't say those two things are the same. the distinction is experiential not rational, so having a higher IQ or a better memory doesn't make you more conscious or less
Why not? How do you define this distinction? Why wouldn't the bird have some degree of relatively basic "awareness" (ie consciousness, or "reality awareness" might work better than "self-awareness") that is comparatively less conscious than us?
The bird doesn't have the physical brain capacity to be able to learn a weather forecast of the next day so this conception of information will never be able to enter its consciousness ie it can't be made conscious of it. Therefore the consciousness is technically "less" than human capacity. Both human and bird experience the next day, but the human was and is conscious of the temperature before and during the experience. Basic example of a definitively different level of consciousness that affects the experience held by both organisms.
Also, you still haven't provided any kind of definition for consciousness. You don't have one, do you?
>How do you know the bird isn't "self aware"?
because they just follow their instincts. but they are still conscious.
>How do you define this distinction?
it's right there: experiential not rational
again, consciousness is not more or less, you either are or not. unless you can explain where that point of complexity is where consciousness suddenly manifests you just assume humans are more conscious, and consciousness is self-awareness. do you ever have a dream where you do something and then you wake up and realise "that was some fricked up shit I did"; you were conscious but not self aware
>because they just follow their instincts. but they are still conscious.
Sure, their instincts, which include a level of consciousness that is limited by their physical capacity.
>do you ever have a dream where you do something and then you wake up and realise "that was some fricked up shit I did"; you were conscious but not self aware
Exactly, you have proven my point with a great example. When you're in a low energy state like dreaming, your level of consciousness decreases; you are less aware. When you wake up and your body can allocate more energy to your brain, your consciousness increases and you are more aware, which allows for a level of rational analysis of your dream memory.
>unless you can explain where that point of complexity is where consciousness suddenly manifests you just assume humans are more conscious, and consciousness is self-awareness
So what your argument boils down to is: "we don't have a perfect way to categorize the difference in levels of consciousness (i.e. awareness) yet therefore surely the difference doesn't exist... because it just doesn't!!!"
Consciousness is a level of awareness. Some animals are more conscious than others, some have an experientially different consciousness than others, all limited by the physical body and brain. Do you have a better definition? Or are you just bait?
I never used the term awareness. I used self-awareness because you seem to think they are the same thing. Are they the same thing in your opinion?
Oof, your reply failed to counter any of the arguments in the post which means you acknowledge their strength and have come to agree with them. Glad to see. Have a great Friday
not following the thread or even sure what you're arguing about but you come across like a complete homosexual, get it together.
you have to be a real moronic homosexual to comment something like this. What are you even doing here
NTA but he's right. You seem like you're on your period.
Makes sense when this thread consists of arguing morons yapping about the basic fundamentals of reality and the anti-materialists don't have any good arguments to make but plenty of words to say, anybody can see this thread is just an exercise in masochistic frustration for everybody involved
you never responded to what is the complexity requirement for consciousness to suddenly manifest so, you too.
in the point about the dream you say that waking up from the intense experience and realizing it was all fake, when in the moment of realizing your experience has diminished, you claim that it's actually more "conscious stuff" when in actuality you were having the peak of the intensity while being asleep and the brain activity was lower, in your view. You seem to not reply to what I say but talk about different things.
i think you are misunderstanding this because of your assumptions . The intensity of experience has nothing to do with consciousness... a dream is also bad example because it is not an experience but the brains simulation of an experience...
we do not know or have establish explicit thresholds of consciousness, but this does not mean they do not exist in reality. there can be a complexity requirement that we just don't have the data to conceptualize coherently as of yet.
>we do not know or have establish explicit thresholds of consciousness, but this does not mean they do not exist in reality. there can be a complexity requirement that we just don't have the data to conceptualize coherently as of yet.
you say this because you assume materialism is true then you claim materialism is true because we don't know yet every detail yet. What if you wouldn't assume materialism from the beginning of your reasoning? I think you would come to something closer to reality
what is your alternative? Because the assumption of materialism has better explanatory power than other option .
it doesn't have any explanatory power. it's circular and self defeating. maybe you say this because of science? but you don't need to be a materialist to write equations
maybe you are out of depth on this question... science rests on material assumption as fundamental fact to work from and as result provides function and consistent explanation of reality we experience... I follow your thread and you do not offer alternative to materialism, just questions...
taking world as immanent and accepting material reality seems to be more beneficial and logic than other explanation. you do not have strong arguments against.... only questions...
>science rests on material assumption
no, it doesn't. you can assume anything about the world and do science. in fact you also claim that we don't know all the details but you still do science.
what is your alternative model compare to materialism...? no more questions of materialism... be clear in your declaration, I would like to see conclusion of your thought
so you admit that materialism is a baseless assumption?
no alternative model or declaration from you... only questions...
yup, just asking questions is enough to debunk materialism
but you have not done any debunking, or prove alternative model . so you do not actually do anything useful or helpful... which itself is quintessential anti-materialist... I guess your lack of constructive argument itself proves the materialist right that... now that is funny
you're talking about alternative models like we need materialism in the first place. you can continue to believe in materialism but just know that it's an assumption with no factual ground
maybe you are teenager who doesn't understand implications of these models... they are used to shape the world. without materialist philosophy there would be no research of atom, no atom bomb. after all, why would atom explode it doesn't exist and isn't central to existence?
do we NEED model? dumb question. we USE model. people like you can question the model, but it works for our uses and needs... meanwhile as you have shown, you don't actually provide any alternative that is more useful... only stupider haha
again, circularity.
>bomb can be real only if it's material, so without materialism you deny bomb exists, therefore materialism is true because bomb exists.
if you can't see why it's a circular argument I can't help you.
>if you can't see why it's a circular argument
Materialism is a circular le fallacy! Debunked! We did it reddit!
>materialist calling me reddit
This is pure projective cope. The way you argue shows that you yourself are circular and self-defeating.
And what is science exactly? Maybe the manipulation and measurement of material reality?
Debunking is a materialist tradition. You letting yourself get lost in semantics doesn't change anything about reality. Just looks like an uneducated Facebook mom getting confused
An assumption with no factual ground? Compared to what? That only makes sense if there is something other than materialism that makes assumptions on factual grounds, and idealism (as a comparison example) ONLY makes assumptions with no factual grounds as we define "factual grounds". What do you think counts as factual grounds, and why is one assumption worth more than another without using any material concepts? When you say "factual grounds" what does that mean to you except for basing something on material facts?
You're making your own middle school le logic socratic arguments up in your head. Basic materialism would hold true that:
- existence means presence in the material reality that we each are able to sense/experience/measure in some way; everything we know (and don't know) is material and arises from the material, including consciousness
- the reality we as humans all collectively experience (the one you're typing on) is material within this framework: it exists and we can sense and interact with it
- this model allows us to conceptualize reality in a way that allows us to understand better and is consistent compared to alternative models.
- materialism is "true" in the sense that these ideas explain our experience better than any alternative. This is what truth means (as we define it), and there is no better alternative at the moment
Again, you talk about factual grounds but you don't even have a way or method to determine fact without materialist assumptions aside from your own version of highschool level semantic games that have nothing to do with the reality that you're experiencing and typing on. So please continue, show us some facts that break materialism. I'm sure you have plenty
p1. I am real
p2. I have a head
c1. My head is real
p3. everything in my head is real
p4. ideas are in my head
c2. therefore, ideas are real
there, no need for your "materialism"
So... you support materialism then. Ideas ARE real; they are physically present across the brain. Are you just upset that we don't have the technology to detect their contents from the outside yet? We didn't have tech to detect radio waves in the past, does that mean they weren't material?
>real = material
Oh I am laughing
grow the frick up moron
You're genuinely moronic and you don't even know it. That's crazy
This is pure projective cope. The way you argue shows that you yourself are circular and self-defeating.
>- existence means presence in the material reality
This is your premise.
your premise assumes materialism.
you use this premise that assumes materialism to prove materialism.
do you understand? want me to write it even more clear?
Yes, go ahead and clear it up. You have been unable to actually define anything without referring to the material. I'll give you a chance. Define the following as they relate or contrast to your non-material views. You should have no trouble:
truth
real
reality
idea
material
logic
existence
>yeah my argument is wrong. but can you prove me wrong by assuming materialism in the premise? oh you can't provide me with a meaningless definition in my own terms? very curious, seems like I won.
You could've tried defining the concepts that you yourself use without using materialism as the base assumption but you literally couldn't, because you don't actually hold a coherent position or viewpoint. It's just a jumbled contrarian reaction to an actual take on complex reality. Boring
just... don't assume materialism? wow that was easy.
You don't know shit about birds, do you? They probably are more clever than you, and they only have their instincts.
Are you moronic? What the frick are you talking about
>but consciousness can never be impaired
Uhh, yeah it can, have you ever gone to sleep? Ever been intoxicated? Ever taken psychedelics? Consciousness is insanely malleable. You are now just spouting off lunacy.
All this proves is that different states exist. The opposition unconscious vs. conscious is really a gradient, and what we normally mean when we say conscious really means "waking, ordinary consciousness." The unconscious is conscious in a deeper way, at a lower level. We are still developing and our present level of "waking" consciousness is limited, but some day we will be able to see or cast a full (as opposed to a dim) light on the things we now regard as unconscious.
James:
>As our mental fields succeed one another, each has its centre of interest, around which the objects of which we are less and less attentively conscious fade to a margin so faint that its limits are unassignable. Some fields are narrow fields and some are wide fields. Usually when we have a wide field we rejoice, for we then see masses of truth together, and often get glimpses of relations which we divine rather than see, for they shoot beyond the field into still remoter regions of objectivity, regions which we seem rather to be about to perceive than to perceive actually. At other times, of drowsiness, illness, or fatigue, our fields may narrow almost to a point, and we find ourselves correspondingly oppressed and contracted.
>Different individuals present constitutional differences in this matter of width of field. Your great organizing geniuses are men with habitually vast fields of mental vision, in which a whole programme of future operations will appear dotted out at once, the rays shooting far ahead into definite directions of advance. In common people there is never this magnificent inclusive view of a topic. They stumble along, feeling their way, as it were, from point to point, and often stop entirely. In certain diseased conditions consciousness is a mere spark, without memory of the past or thought of the future, and with the present narrowed down to some one simple emotion or sensation of the body.
>The important fact which this “field” formula commemorates is the indetermination of the margin. Inattentively realized as is the matter which the margin contains, it is nevertheless there, and helps both to guide our behavior and to determine the next movement of our attention. It lies around us like a “magnetic field,” inside of which our centre of energy turns like a compass-needle, as the present phase of consciousness alters into its successor. Our whole past store of memories floats beyond this margin, ready at a touch to come in; and the entire mass of residual powers, impulses, and knowledges that constitute our empirical self stretches continuously beyond it. So vaguely drawn are the outlines between what is actual and what is only potential at any moment of our conscious life, that it is always hard to say of certain mental elements whether we are conscious of them or not.
>The ordinary psychology, admitting fully the difficulty of tracing the marginal outline, has nevertheless taken for granted, first, that all the consciousness the person now has, be the same focal or marginal, inattentive or attentive, is there in the “field” of the moment, all dim and impossible to assign as the latter's outline may be; and, second, that what is absolutely extra-marginal is absolutely non-existent, and cannot be a fact of consciousness at all.
...
>It is evident that from the point of view of their psychological mechanism, the classic mysticism and these lower mysticisms spring from the same mental level, from that great subliminal or transmarginal region of which science is beginning to admit the existence, but of which so little is really known. That region contains every kind of matter: “seraph and snake” abide there side by side. To come from thence is no infallible credential. What comes must be sifted and tested, and run the gauntlet of confrontation with the total context of experience, just like what comes from the outer world of sense.
...
>Let me then propose, as an hypothesis, that whatever it may be on its farther side, the “more” with which in religious experience we feel ourselves connected is on its hither side the subconscious continuation of our conscious life. Starting thus with a recognized psychological fact as our basis, we seem to preserve a contact with “science” which the ordinary theologian lacks. At the same time the theologian's contention that the religious man is moved by an external power is vindicated, for it is one of the peculiarities of invasions from the subconscious region to take on objective appearances, and to suggest to the Subject an external control. In the religious life the control is felt as “higher”; but since on our hypothesis it is primarily the higher faculties of our own hidden mind which are controlling, the sense of union with the power beyond us is a sense of something, not merely apparently, but literally true.
...
>This doorway into the subject seems to me the best one for a science of religions, for it mediates between a number of different points of view. Yet it is only a doorway, and difficulties present themselves as soon as we step through it, and ask how far our transmarginal consciousness carries us if we follow it on its remoter side. Here the over-beliefs begin: here mysticism and the conversion-rapture and Vedantism and transcendental idealism bring in their monistic interpretations and tell us that the finite self rejoins the absolute self, for it was always one with God and identical with the soul of the world. Here the prophets of all the different religions come with their visions, voices, raptures, and other openings, supposed by each to authenticate his own peculiar faith.
...
>The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely “understandable” world. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever you choose. So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way for which we cannot articulately account), we belong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world, for we belong in the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong. Yet the unseen region in question is not merely ideal, for it produces effects in this world. When we commune with it, work is actually done upon our finite personality, for we are turned into new men, and consequences in the way of conduct follow in the natural world upon our regenerative change. But that which produces effects within another reality must be termed a reality itself, so I feel as if we had no philosophic excuse for calling the unseen or mystical world unreal.
>Uhh, yeah it can, have you ever gone to sleep?
No proof that consciousness ends when you fall asleep, to say that you experience it ending is contradictory and self-refuting
>Ever been intoxicated?
Yes, that has nothing to do with consciousness being impaired, you remain fully conscious while drunk
>Ever taken psychedelics?
Yes, that has nothing to do with consciousness being impaired, you remain fully conscious while tripping
>Consciousness is insanely malleable.
No, it's not.
Your position is annihilated by the fact that sleep has different cycles and that some of the cycles do not have dreaming. You actually do lose consciousness when sleeping.
>Your position is annihilated by the fact that sleep has different cycles and that some of the cycles do not have dreaming
There is no evidence that consciousness ceases in dreamless sleep instead of just remaining in pure consciousness without any objective content being presented, so no, what you said doesn't "annihilate" anything but it's just another unfounded assumption.
Do you just assume consciousness continues after death? Why is it so correlated with the living functions of the biological being then? You are just making things up at this point.
>Do you just assume consciousness continues after death?
Consciousness is what is ontologically fundamental, "life" and "death" are just relative notions that arise and dissipate within eternal unborn consciousness.
>Why is it so correlated with the living functions of the biological being then?
Why does the crystal correlate with the colored cloth placed behind it? Answer: It doesn't actually correlate but it just remains the same however the mere fact of their simultaneous occurrence makes the crystal to appear to be changing in a way that correlated to the cloth when it's actually unchanging and it is merely allowing the cloth's color to be viewed through itself because of its translucency.
>You are just making things up at this point.
No, there are multiple schools of philosophy and religious traditions which have been around for thousands of years which talk about this stuff.
Isn't the sufficient complexity argument refuted by the fact that the most complex region of the brain, the hypothalamus is completely unconscious?
"Unconscious" is a bit of a misnomer. In fact, a core aspect of any person's own consciousness is, in fact, their unconscious! Where do you suppose seemingly random thoughts come from when pondering a subject? The unconscious is simply another side of the coin of consciousness and it's all dependent on complexity. I might here reference the cut corpus callosum experiments which show that in a single brain, two sides of consciousness can become separate and form their own independent opinions. Where, then, does this idea of a single, unified "qualia" or "mind" or "consciousness" come from? Really, we are just a collection of different brain centers all processing information and contributing, more like a council of vying politicians than the traditional "spirit" or "soul" people like to think is in us.
I dont see how this is a valid argument, the hypothalamus being completely unconscious pretty clearly shows that consciousness is at least not a product of the complexity of neuronal connections, your counter arguments are just sophistry here
You assume, first, that you can categorically eliminate the phenomenon of "conscious" from the hypothalamus. How could you possibly substantiate this claim? You then make the false assumption that if a particular type of neural complexity does, in fact, result in an unconscious structure, that the same applies to all structures no matter how different they might be. You are out of your depths, anon.
You didnt understand the point at all at all.
Refuting your first argument, we can clearly tell that other regions of the brain are far more connected to consciousness than the hypotbalamus, without invoking the fact that we are obviously completely unaware of what the hypothalamus is doing in our bodies at any given time, there's also the fact that damaging the hypothalamus does not impair consciousness in any way. I'll grant that we cant completely rule out consciousness out of the hypothalamus, but it doesn't really impact my main point in any way. Your second entire argument is a strawman, coming from you not understanding my argument at all. Sit down littlest bro.
Kek, you just assert that you are right and I am wrong without engaging with my points in the slightest. "Strawman"? You claim to know that certain parts of the brain contribute less to consciousness than others. First, the part in question is focused on routine tasks related to the maintenance of the status quo in the body. You may as well have claimed that animals have complex brains but not the consciousness we have. It's the specific levels of complexity aimed towards novel thinking, imagination, problem solving, connection of information which we associate with consciousness. It only affirms the case that the parts of the brain evolved for these things contribute to the phenomenon we refer to as "consciousness".
>You claim to know that certain parts of the brain contribute less to consciousness than others
It's easily demonstrated, if your parietal lobe is damaged for example, it will impact your consciousness far more.
>First, the part in question is focused on routine tasks related to the maintenance of the status quo in the body. You may as well have claimed that animals have complex brains but not the consciousness we have. It's the specific levels of complexity aimed towards novel thinking, imagination, problem solving, connection of information which we associate with consciousness. It only affirms the case that the parts of the brain evolved for these things contribute to the phenomenon we refer to as "consciousness".
You are literally mentally moronic. The hypothalamus has the most complex neuronal circuitry of any brain region. My claim was that neuronal complexity alone is not what makes consciousness emerge (as we experience it, not as it's described by unverifiable psychoanalyst theories), that's it, that's why I said your other argument was a strawman.
The question is ultimately what distinguishes the two entities:
>a p-zombie that is not conscious, it has no first-personal "I am really in this b***h"-feeling, but in every single other way it is indistinguishable from a conscious human being to an external observer
>the exact same, except actually conscious
If you "isolate" whatever it is that makes the latter distinct from the former, the question then has to be asked: how does it interact causally with the world at all? You are positing a completely one-sided causality here, also called epiphenomenalism: the phenomenon of consciousness is a kind of "emanation" of the functioning of the biological algorithm that is the mind, in the machine that is the body. Okay, fine, no one is saying it's impossible to imagine such an arrangement. The question is: if the ghostly emanation has no purpose, how and why did it arise at all?
All the different ways of imagining drives and algorithms developing into something like Dennett's "fame in the brain" definition of modern human consciousness are irrelevant if they can't answer this basic question. Because we are ultimately not interested in the nature of a p-zombie's algorithms, we are interested in the "I'm really in this b***h" first-personal feeling of being conscious. What is the nature, origin, and evolutionary function of that FEELING?
To answer this, it's hard to avoid declaring that we need a whole language of consciousness that simply doesn't play nicely with the language of materials and machines and algorithms. Because all of the latter can be "sufficiently" described externalistically: when I describe how the ChatGPT large language model works, nobody says "okay, but what about that thing where it keeps saying it FEELS self-aware? Is that real or no?" Nobody thinks ChatGPT is self-aware, so it doesn't come up. But a whole lot of people have the empirically verifiable (by them, any time they want, and/or in every moment of their lives) experience of "I am really in this b***h." Like it or not, this is an empirical explanandum, this is something science can't simply sidestep and say "oh you don't really feel that, ignore that; it would be easy to model you as a machine; no of course we can't FULLY model you as a machine, that would be 'general AI', which no one knows how to make, but in principle we could imagine you to be a machine!!" Not very satisfying.
Assuming you do want to actually answer to the question, like I said, you need a whole new language. The "feeling" of being aware requires a language of: "feeling FOR WHOM?" Who is feeling it? This immediately begs the question of mind-matter duality, suggesting that the issue is far more complex than that consciousness is just "another substance alongside matter." As has been said by several in this thread already, even the language of saying consciousness it's an illusion, "illusion-talk," runs on the logic of: illusion FOR WHOM?
Everything hinges on whether you accept the subjective experience of individuals as a valid empirical datum, and thus something needing explaining. If you do that, then epiphenomenalism is not a valid strategy. If you don't do that, then you are in the position of someone who answers the question as to why ChatGPT keeps insisting it's self-aware by saying "must have a bug," and deleting it. And then when asked "well, maybe it IS self-aware? how would we know one way or the other, if we can't experience its experience?" you would be compelled to respond "Nothing is self-aware; self-awareness is a nonsense concept. I am not even self-aware. I am not really saying this right now. There is no I. I function the same way ChatGPT does: I am a complex algorithm. I have no experience. That is how 'I' know that ChatGPT can't be self-aware and its reports eo ipso must be false. Even saying 'I' is a mere convention: its real referent is 'the bundle of biological machinery that produces the complex function that other nearby complex functions sometimes conventionally call Jerold'."
The point here is to eliminate "epiphenomenalism with subjective experience" as a real position between two extremes:
>subjective experience does exist and requires explaining, and materialist mechanism by definition and by necessity cannot explain it
>subjective experience does not exist and therefore materialist mechanism is a sufficient explanation for all automatons ("living" beings, but also AIs, computers, and machines)
Once this dichotomy is established, no one in their right mind will pick the latter position except crazed AI researchers who don't really understand the stakes because they're so narrowly focused on their love of computationally modelling quasi-minds.
Why exactly can't materialist mechanism by definition explain the "epiphenomenalism of subjective experience"? Again, you seem to concede that it's possible a complex enough computer has it's own form of consciousness, and it is purely a product of materialist mechanism with no possible ulterior input. Your own subjective experience is an emergent quality of complexity. It's the "wetness" of water which is in neither hydrogen nor oxygen.
Because then consciousness does have ontological status and is a distinct "something," distinct from matter, for you, in which case it's not epiphenomenal. You are not an epiphenomenalist, you are an emergentist. That puts you at extreme odds with most physicalists/materialists, who are called "eliminativists" or "reductionists" for a reason - they don't have an emergent consciousness, they have an "apparent, but not really anything" consciousness.
I respect emergentism to some extent, I just think it's a kind of weak halfway point on the way toward panpsychism, because in order to explain the "possibility" of consciousness' emergence being part of the framework of the universe, one has to explain its relationship to the base-functions of the universe, and at that point you're getting into talking about how all matter is proto-conscious or incipiently conscious, etc. And I see this sort of panpsychism itself -- toward which, in my opinion, today's analytic philosophy of science is tending -- as basically analytic philosophy groping its way back toward Platonism anyway. If the universe is "incipiently mental" everywhere, how far are you really from a more robust idealist account?
>It's the "wetness" of water which is in neither hydrogen nor oxygen.
This is the thing in your post I would say is an outright mistake, because it is eliminativist/reductionist as I outlined above, yet the rest of your post is emergentist.
It's also useful for reflecting on the problem though, because it recapitulates the issue I described in the posts you're responding to: Wetness exists FOR a subject. We need a language, minimally a dualistic one, to describe mere matter and then what matter SEEMS like (FOR a something -- and what is that something?).
(continued)
In my opinion what you're getting caught on is exactly the pseudo-position between the two extremes, which I outlined in my previous posts: There is a logically coherent position that posits that "wetness" is NOTHING. There is no wetness. Instead, what actually exist are bio-computer-machines that putter around encountering H2O, interacting with it algorithmically-evolutionarily, and somehow generating "This is wet," because this circumlocution of actual reality ("This is H2O") was/is somehow evolutionarily beneficial to the bio-computer-machine. This is the eliminativist account. In this case, wetness is not an "illusion" in the sense that the bio-computer-machine has illusions (for then it would have consciousness, which we're establishing it does not have); it is only a circumlocution. It's only an illusion in a secondary sense -- in that WE might mistakenly attribute consciousness to the machine. And yet we are also such machines, so now we have the problem why we -- the same sorts of beings as the machine we are observing, which by definition has no illusions -- have "illusions."
Conversely, if you do think that the experience of wetness has ANY ontological status whatsoever, you have to explain "for what? for whom?" If you are an emergentist OR an idealist, this is no problem, because you accept that the subjective experience (as opposed to just the external appearance, i.e., illusion, of subjective experience) is a "something," a thing with ontological status, a really existent thing having causal relationships with the world.
You can be one or the other and retain at least logical coherence, but there is no position between them. Epiphenomenalism is necessarily eliminativist reductionism.
"Wetness" refers to the phenomenon of apprehending attributes of a certain amount of water. It's a kind of heuristic way for a "bio-computer-machine" to process information and store it in a way as to be useful. This is not to say that "wetness is nothing", it's simply to say that the experiential aspect of "wetness" is a tool, a map, a way of apprehending something and utilizing it in thought in a way which is useful. Thus, both sides of the coin are true, first, that "wetness" as a thing in itself does not actual exist, or rather, it contains inaccuracies or generalities which are false when applied to the true nature of water in question. But, also, "wetness" as an experience, as a tool, as a concept is totally real to us, we know exactly what it is and can recall it readily. In other words, evolution selects for machines that are capable of interacting with reality in a way which produces results, not necessarily in a totally accurate way. This may be why we have such a hard time conceptualizing the quantum realm, or time as a concept itself, since we have evolved to interact in a very specific environment, and ill-equipped to venture beyond those bounds. This, again, supports the case that "consciousness" is simply a kind of operating system, a way for useful concepts like "wetness" to be created, stored, and accessed when needed to navigate the biological being towards beneficial things and away from harmful things in accordance with the natural selection process.
I don't mind if you're a consistent eliminativist, the only thing I find odd is when you then say things like this:
>real to us
What's "us"? Is it distinct from the way in which ChatGPT's training model exists "to it"? If so, then what is the nature of that distinctness?
In my opinion it's simply the case that you are trying to have your cake and eat it too: you want mind (mentation) to be a "something," distinct from what my computer is doing right now to process these keystrokes into (etc.) so I can talk to you via a bunch of similar computers. But you also want it to be "in principle" the same as what my computer is doing.
Either the quale/qualis of wetness "exists," in which case it exists IN some medium (i.e., FOR some subject), or it doesn't. If it does, then that subject or thinking-being is either an irreducible metaphysical substance (in the classical sense of the latter term), OR "qualia-ness," "being-like-something" (etc.) is something that is always "possible," either taking place at a low level everywhere, or "instantiating" in sufficiently complex machines. In this case, you either have emergentism or panpsychism or both. In which case you are a kind of idealist anyway.
>But you also want it to be "in principle" the same as what my computer is doing.
How is it not the same "in principle"? The biological and physical systems are required to exist in a certain formation to be of any use. Again, the concept of "wetness" exists as an experience in the operating system of our biological computer which is our mind. In the mind, it is associated with memories, sensations, even abstractions that may have become connected with it. This merely denotes the usefulness of the concept, and that the concept, in so far as it exists in the mind, exists for real. But applied to water, it is inaccurate, it is filtered through our perception, it is a way for us to relate to it, to interact with it, and to modulate our actions accordingly. Both the structure of the water and the biological structure of the brain are physical and real, and thus, even the experience is simply the phenomenon of processing the information through the brain.
Why can't the subjective status and distinct "something" of consciousness be a quality of matter and energy in a particular arrangement? You seem to be endowing the experience of consciousness with some kind of other-worldliness when, in reality, everything points to it being firmly and totally rooted in physical, biological roots. What are you even supposing consciousness to truly be? And why would it be so suspiciously locked into a meat prison where all impulses and contents of the consciousness stem from evolutionary imperatives? Everything from your desire to win or score points in this discussion stems from desires which are rooted in a line of biological instincts brought to you by the DNA you carry, which made you, and which have passed through the crucible of natural selection going back into the mists of time. Everything points to physical, biological explanations. I just don't see what you're getting at trying to classify consciousness as something separate.
>Nobody thinks ChatGPT is self-aware
A number of top AI experts are literally warning that AI is reaching consciousness
nta but can you define material?
> nta but can you define material?
> Everything that can be empirically measured in our universe.
> what about the things you can't measure like an experience?
> You can measure an experience.
Exactly.
When you say "material", you are really referring to experience.
The problem is that
> Without any understanding of what the physical is, we can have no serious understanding of what physicalism is.
> After all, what does it mean to say that everything is physical, as opposed to chemical or financial.
It's called the condition question:
> the question of what it is for something (an object, an event, a process, a property) to be physical.
The article about Physicalism in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/
So I watched the video and glanced over the article and as I understood it, people have problems with defining what "physical" or "material" actually is, what it means, how we define it.
The definition ends up circular. "Physical is physical".
If you say that everything is physical, and you define physical as physical, that's nonsense.
(Of course they don't formulate it in such obviously circular way, they say something like "physical is whatever can be described through physical properties of objects or physical processes", but it ends up circular anyway)
>It's called the condition question
>If you say that everything is physical, and you define physical as physical
O.K. but aside from homosexual language games, what's the issue? It's not a real issue? Words never precisely map out reality unless reality itself is that crisp (as in the case of mathematics), there are ambiguous items of furniture that would be tables to half the people and stools to the other half. Even supposing there's some crisp boundary for "physicalism" ever to be defined without someone picking nits, what would the benefit of that be, aside from homosexual language games? (Nothing at all because our reality is much as physicalists imagine it to be.)
- My experiences are my world.
- Well no shit Sherlock! Everybody knows that. You think you added something to the discussion, you think you solved something by saying that?
I think your discussion is a homosexual language game. I am asking why you think it isn't one, if you do in fact think so. Can you not read?
Why are you pre-supposing that you are out of the language game somehow?
You are in it and you are losing, you can't even define the thing that you claim everything is.
Because I am not? For me to be in the game, I would have to be arguing for a definition. But I am not. I am asking how a definition would be useful to me or anyone in a position to materially affect the world. Supposing a crisp definition of "physicalism" or any other "-ism" even existed, what benefit do I get from it? Does it help me move a chair? Run a financial model and make money? Gather data at a CERN collider? How does it materially help? Does it, as I assume, stay confined to homosexual language games of no material consequence?
I think it's better to call it the mind game instead of the language game.
And your position boils down to "I'm out of mind games because I can do things".
Ok, you wandered into that part of the mind. Keep exploring!
Rather, it boils down to "I like it when something materially useful about reality is communicated ('cooperate'), and dislike it when people equivocate and try to mislead the counterparty with the goal of peawienering one's linguistic ability ('defect')."
For example, as you just used two different meanings of "mind" in "mind games" and "part of the mind," and implied it's not YOU who has yet a massive library of materially useful thought about reality to explore, by just wandering out of the homosexual little philosophocorner. How distasteful, more so on your third refusal to answer the question of the use of such a definition. Why not answer it, if you're gonna play homosexual ape games anyway?
> and dislike it when people equivocate and try to mislead the counterparty with the goal of peawienering one's linguistic ability ('defect').
But I'm not trying to mislead you or peawiener anything.
> and implied it's not YOU who has yet a massive library of materially useful thought about reality to explore, by just wandering out of the homosexual little philosophocorner.
My position doesn't prevent me from exploring materially useful thoughts about reality.
Come one, stop strawmaning.
> your third refusal to answer the question of the use of such a definition.
Because without it you're uttering nonsense or trivialities.
> hey, people, look, I found the answer to everything. "It is what it is"!
> You are in it and you are losing
Who said that the purpose is to "nail it", make a guess that turns out to be true?
Maybe the purpose is to wander and explore and then realize that problem exists, that reason and knowledge have boundaries.
If so, then he's not losing but progressing.
T. P-zombie
A thought can't be "grasped" the same way a program running on a computer can't be grasped, moron. Is the program immaterial? Is it out of reality? The framing of the question is sophistry and you're obviously too stupid to get it. The thought is a complex material process of electrical and chemical switches in the material brain. You can't weasel your way out of it.
Neurons do not function like computer switches at all, abandon all computer related thinking when you talk about the brain, it's completely 100% innacurate on a fundamental level and immediately gives it away that you know nothing about this subject and nothing you say should be taken seriously.
Not the person you're replying to but I wanted to note that if anyone is interested in this, Hubert Dreyfus' "What Computers Can't Do" is a classic book on this topic. He updated it to "What Computers (Still) Can't Do" for the second edition I believe.
It's called an analogy, and all you're posting is bait. You provide nothing. They do function similarly in that there are material currents and physical changes that happen when thoughts and experiences occur. Unless you think that brain imaging is just a conspiracy?
Have you... have you not heard of neuro-imaging? Are you so stuck in ancient Greek philosophy that you forgot the world has figured out a way to scan brains showing thoughts are literally material?
My lil dumbass homie computer switches are just binary on/off selectors, read how the neuron functions, it's too long and complex to get into here. As for your second point, you're just pointing out correlates, we can see changes all across your body when you think certain thoughts, for example something that makes you nervous coincides with muscular tension in the stomach region, we don't claim that the stomach created the thought.
The body cannot digest when the stomach is removed. The body cannot be conscious in any measurable way when the brain (and parts of the spine) is removed. Your correlate argument ignores the fact that we can compare organisms with and without brains. A human without a brain has significantly reduced consciousness to the point of dysfunction. Therefore the brain is the pre-requisite or epicenter of constructing consciousness. You still provide nothing.
If I removed your brain, do you seriously think you would be conscious in any meaningful way?
Computer switches are material, as are neurons. You're getting lost in semantics, like a woman, because you aren't seeing the basic analogous fact that they are both material/physical and are, as such, comparable for this purpose.
Why are you so bitter and harsh? Relax.
What compels a woman to write statements like this your bait is ineffectual, if you don't have anything interesting to provide then you're just wasting your own time newfriend
>It's called an analogy
It's a garbage one because programs and thoughts hardly alike, and "you're obviously too stupid" to think that they are.
>a program running on a computer can't be grasped
Not literally (I know you took it literally), but programs are entirely physical phenomena. The interactions of neurons are entirely physical phenomena. But thoughts are immaterial. This is fairly obvious. There is a quantitative difference between the cause of seeing red or blue light. But there is no quantiative difference between red or blue; it's qualitative.
Tons of ancient Greek philosophers thought the soul was material. Also
>it's current year!
This moron might actually think synapses are the result of mystical forces fricking around
What causes the synapses to fire?
NTA; synapses don't fire, neurons do, synapses are the links between them, and what can you possibly not understand about this? An ion current flowing through a cell membrane until a threshold is reached and the action potential rapidly overshoots and the cell repolarizes, it's not that hard of a concept. Study the Hodgkin–Huxley model and any number of its descendants. Neurons in the brain cause these voltage spikes in each other. Sensory neurons have large gate proteins embedded in their cell membranes, which let ions through differently, for example proteins in thermoreceptors change shape a little when cooled down or warmed up, which causes fewer or more ions to pass through the membrane, which changes the receptor's firing rate. These action potentials are propagated to the brain via nerves. Similarly with tactile receptors, which let fewer or more ions through when the gate proteins are mechanically deformed. Computational neuroscience is more interesting by far than wordcel pseudistry, try it, e.g. from Dayan & Abbott.
You're only describing how they fire, not why. The real question is if the synapses cause intent or desire or if desire and intent cause the firing. I intend to pick something up, that force of intention acts on my brain, and my brain then fires in such a way which causes me to pick up the object. We cannot explain intentionality by purely mechanistic means. This book goes into detail about it
>You're only describing how they fire, not why.
WTF? "Neurons in the brain cause these voltage spikes in each other." Did you experience a temporary fugue state while reading?
To answer why a neuron fired is to answer what, physically, caused it to fire. Which I did in passing, and Dayan & Abbott do it thoroughly. It's not a mystery, ion conductivity of membranes is understood. It's not any more complicated than an equivalent electronic scheme with enough resistances for different types of ion gates (proteins). We cause neurons to fire in vitro by adjusting K+ and Na+ concentrations. Less importantly, there are also self-exciting neurons that keep firing now and then. The physics of that is also understood.
I talk more about how heat or pressure on the skin causes neurons to fire because that's more varied (more interesting) physics, but the brain doesn't need sensory input for its neurons to keep firing all on their own. That's just the nature of the system made of a membrane, ion channels, and ions on the inside and outside of the membrane. If you build a few electric circuits equivalent to a neuron under the Hodgkin–Huxley model, and connect them appropriately, they'll just keep firing. And reflect known properties of neuronal firing rates, with refractory periods, noise and all. Describing this circuit, as any text on mathematical/computational neuroscience does, is literally the answer to why a neuron fires.
>I intend to pick something up, that force of intention acts on my brain
You're deeply confused. Your intent *is* your neurons firing, and the author of that "book" should have educated himself in something useful.
>>I intend to pick something up, that force of intention acts on my brain
>You're deeply confused. Your intent *is* your neurons firing
nta
you do realize that science is describing a phenomenon, not causing the phenomenon, right?
And so? You do realize that 2 + 2 makes 4, or did you also misread something?
is the word peanut the same as an actual peanut? I doubt you are serious with this statement.
this is not a why.
no, you're not describing why a neuron fires, you are describing what you see in the brain when a neuron fires.
I see a person close to me in danger. I have a reaction. my brain has neurons doing things BECAUSE of what I see, not because the neurons fire.
you even act like the thing is settled when macro-objects are still impossible to predict and calculate. Sure, you take a synapse and put it in a lab and do something to it, but you act like they got a brain and computed all the synapses and predicted what the person will do. or a simple object. they were never able to do that because guess what REALITY and EQUATIONS ON PAPER are different things.
>no, you're not describing why a neuron fires
Well, it's settled then: you're either moronic or motivated not to understand; I'm satisfied with the try I have given this.
>act like the thing is settled when macro-objects are still impossible to predict and calculate
Sure, the thing of why a neuron fires is pretty much settled.
As an aside, and I note I don't intend this as evidence for the fact that it's settled lest you try to misread me again, but an interesting aside, Midjourney v6 and GPT-4 are based on neurons which are computationally tractable simplifications of the original Hodgkin–Huxley model from the 1950s. Dayan & Abbott went over more computationally tractable and more biologically realistic modifications of the H–H model back in 2003. The capabilities of Midjourney v6 are causally downstream of those measurements of squid axons with a microvoltmeter in the 1950s.
What does the computational intractability of predicting an entire brain have to do with neurons? Are you intentionally pretending that since we couldn't predict a chess grandmaster in the 1970s the rules of chess must not have been settled?
>you act like they got a brain and computed all the synapses
I see; you are a liar. As I said, I'm satisfied with the try I have given this.
>why do you drink water?
>because H2O molecules move up and down into my stomach and they get into my stomach and then into the kidneys and I urinate
strange world you're living in, anon. I'm sorry for you
But you ought to feel sorry for yourself that you attribute to me something not remotely close to what my posts said — either because you are a liar, or because you really are failing so miserably to follow the mechanics (and see *why* a neuron must necessarily fire).
my neurons fired and that why I respond to you, don't blame me. I guess the 30 million synapses from the right side are throwing a party in my brain
>my neurons fired and that why I respond to you, don't blame me.
Your neurons are you, same thing.
Scientism.
It's kind of common for modern physicalists to think describing a phenomenon is the same thing as explaining it. They often think the how is the why. You just went on to explain the how again and totally sidestepped the problem that intention cannot supervene on matter.
I am describing why a neuron fires. I am explaining that it will necessarily fire, because it is set up so. I am guessing you are mathematically illiterate and can't just look at the differential equation of the equivalent circuit, so maybe it will help to imagine a pendulum that keeps getting pushed every now and then? Is it not obvious that describing how that pendulum is set up is to explain why it keeps wobbling? It must necessarily swing. The deal with neurons is the same.
>problem that intention cannot supervene on matter
This is as absurd as "sight cannot supervene on matter" or "hearing cannot supervene on matter." Sight, hearing, touch, intention, remembering are all processes carried out by the brain. Through its neurons, firing. Because they are set up like that, like billions of tiny pendula, to keep swinging and pushing each other in complicated patterns so long as external energy is supplied as food and oxygen.
Words cannot convey on how much beauty, that dispels this kind of linguistic confusion, you are missing out for your lack of understanding of electric circuits, differential equations, and the H–H model.
Intentionality cannot be demonstrated to supervene on material bodies
Same, and I used to be quite the cynic.
It's self-refuting and produces shitty societies.
This. The only way materialism can exist as an "ideology" is if an atheistic, nihilistic clique at the top of the civilization imposes it through constant cultural engineering. Normal people naturally tend toward spirituality and religiosity, and crucially, intellectuals throughout all of history and in every civilization have naturally tended toward idealist, nondualist metaphysics. Even the Greeks, whose intellectuals were all practically atheistic by the late 5th century after a century or two of proto-scientific speculations (including some quasi-materialist systems like atomism), then produced Plato. Even Aristotle, the great empiricist who rejected Plato's forms, was still basically a nondualist, for whom the highest state was a state of reverential contemplation of nature's forms, forms which also dictated sophrosyne and phronesis rather than hedonism and "secular humanism" to man.
"Humanism" itself is a much-abused term, as it was developed by Renaissance (you guessed it) Platonists. The entire history of modern science stems from the revival of Neoplatonism and Neopythagoreanism in Renaissance Italy. Kepler thought he had proved the Timaeus right in his astronomical observations. Newton was a hermetic alchemist. And so on.
The smartest men in history, the best scientists in history, were all non-materialists or at least had every strong anti-materialist sensibilities, even in ages with strong social pressures to conform to materialism as the "default" view. Materialism is not even a real position, it's the absence of a position, it's a kind of agnosticism combined with "well, let's just focus on what's in front of us"-ism, bolstered by modern "frick yeah science!"-tier scientism and its naive enthusiasm for smartphones. Meanwhile 80% of the population is addicted to porn and on three different kinds of pills just to function. Oh and those pills, those wonders of modern materialistic science, nobody understands them, nobody understands the mind, the "theory" behind them is literally some guy in the '50s synthesizing them as a byproduct of industrial rubber production in the R&D basement of some conglomerate, eating some to see if he could sell it to anyone, noticing it had an anti-inflammatory response, and now 50 years later we vaguely "know" that it "cures depression" (depression rates have skyrocketed during its period of widespread use and there is now a massive backlash against using it). See David Healy's books. Now everybody is talking about a return to religion, a return to meaning, even the smartest people. Big surprise.
So again, the only way it can persist as the "default" is if some clique at the top forces it upon people. Gee, I wonder what that clique's real motives are.
How come Dawkins shits on philosophy when his memetics is philosophical?
Because Dawkins doesnt know what philosophy is
Those Dawkins quotes are not really anti-philosophy. The first is genuinely positive, common sense is regarded in science as notoriously unreliable. The second is connected by the same idea, if you read the context (unsurprisingly, it's an anti-religion thing).
Bill Nye said nothing wrong here either. Side-by-side, sure, it does not sound as cultured or exciting, but he is merely stating his own reasonable enough opinion. He isn't tearing down philosophy. He isn't even claiming he's necessarily right.
2/4 entries on here don't really belong. Also 2 of these are TV presenters and not major scientists.
As an aside:
>Krauss defended Epstein after his 2008 guilty plea of procuring for prostitution a girl below age 18. In 2011, Krauss told an interviewer, "As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I've never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people...I don't feel tarnished in any way by my relationship with Jeffrey; I feel raised by it."
lmao
>Krauss
That’s an easy early life
Good post anon, thank you. God bless
What about idealist dualism? And the absence of a position should not be without consequences, metaphysical, ethical or otherwise.
> What about idealist dualism?
The most philosophically robust types of non-dualism like Advaita Vedanta could be seen as agreeing with that as they hold that ultimate reality is ‘conscious’ (the idealism component) while agreeing with ‘dualism’ inasmuch as they hold that consciousness is something that is metaphysically independent and different from phenomena. One of the advantages of the ‘dualism’ of Awareness vs phenomena in Advaita and also Samkhya philosophy over the ‘dualism’ of Descartes is that mind and thoughts are seen as subtle extensions of matter, so in this way a two-way causal relationship between thoughts/perceptions and the exterior world are maintained in a way that can account for how one interacts with and influences the other (thus obviating the most trite and worn-out objection against dualism), while at the same time preserving the fact of consciousness itself (which isn’t mind or thoughts) being something that is independent, non-physical and not modifiable by anything else.
This is a departure from what is normally argued by defenders of dualism that e.g. the ‘qualia of drinking espresso’ is non-physical, from an Advaitist and Samkhya POV the qualia of drinking espresso involves the combination in experience of the non-physical consciousness illuminating the subtle elements of the intellect/mind that produce the experience of the flavor of the espresso.
Dude I’m not a pajeet
Large aimless wall of text with pictures of Neil Degrasse Tyson and Bill Nye. Was this written by a woman?
You have no position. Reality is material and is identified by humanity into a coherent objective narrative as best it can manage, and this narrative gets stronger every year. Meanwhile the alternatives are... "we can't know everything! God is out there and he won't let us!" Great? Your position is more nihilistic than any materialist viewpoint is.
Go sit in a cave and pray. It's where you belong, right?
>Meanwhile the alternatives are... "we can't know everything! God is out there and he won't let us!" Great? Your position is more nihilistic than any materialist viewpoint is.
homie this is so contrary to millenia of systematic theology. I'm not saying you have to agree with it, but there are very rigorous and coherent worldviews that are not materialist
You give me faith in humanity. Alas the age of materialism is past its peak
You gave an interesting opinion but your deliver of it is embarassing. You're not as transgressive and contrarian as you believe you are with your words. Religion, spirituality, have been everywhere and will be everywhere. You make it sound like religion ought to be reconstructed and revived and not like there's billion of theists alive today. Your writing ironically resembles reddit atheist contrarianism kek.
>Renaissance (you guessed it) Platonists.
Marge, I'm confused. I thought humanism was developed by Catholics who were sick of the tedium of scholastic metaphysics
This, you can't make money with faith, spirituality and non-materialistic forms of healing the mind. Unless you are a church. But ironically once the material supplements of the church will fade people won't just go back to the church from which they were drawn away in favor of secular pleasures in the first place.
>inquisition kills all the wizards
>"materialism is true, trust me"
This. Magic and alchemy was real and we threw it all away for machinery.
>Why is this website so negative towards materalism?
It's how they cope. Personally, I understand the hatred for matter as it is, but it's a cope to deny it.
Mainly because egos are possessed by their possessions, and all most people on this board possess are a few adopted metaphysical stances that make themselves feel better about themselves. Materialism and idealism do not even make sense and it's pretty fricking amazing that a species so "intelligent" has been vacillating between two points of intellectual moronation for thousands of years, still unable to conclusively decide what is "right"
Maybe, just maybe that was idea all along, to get people stuck in a word loop so that they never take action. In any case, I hope your metaphysical discourse and debate saves you when the time comes
Ah yes. Here comes that one Anon that always claims to hold the answers to any given thing, yet can never provide any evidence of such.
He’s right. It’s a false dialectic and both can be easily refuted, but materialism far more easily than idealism.
It's not that I hold answers, it's that I do not think there is a question
>It's not that I hold answers, it's that I do not think there is a question
That's a good line, I may use its essence, but not directly quote it.
Save it, Bill. It's all yours, my friend.
The question is:
> Two most obvious models of the world are both wrong. What now? What is it then?
The question is: why do you feel a need to "model" the world? Seems like life gets along fine without "knowing". In any case, the obvious solution is to say that life is simply composed of inseperable bodies and minds, and that separating them destroys the living thing. Thus, cutting a tree kills the tree because you split its body from its mind. You kill humans by ripping their bodies apart and you torture humans by questioning their experience of life. You kill the world by ripping it apart. Just leave it be is my preferred stamce
>stamce
Oops, looks like I made a spelling mistake. Please disregard everything in that post
For simple reason that others are carrying out that modeling task and coming to conclusions that make them more powerful than you and thus can control your existence. Pretty good reason to model if you value your existence
Where has all this control led? I don't really like the human world or the civilization project. Obviously people who do not value the way things are going to be willing to kill what is, including me, but that's alright since I try to walk in and enjoy the light of the world as much as possible. I'd rather live for one day than exist for a hundred years
Because it’s obviously wrong. Everyone likes to dunk on presuppositionalists but they are absolutely right that the presupoisitions that would be necessary to even imply materialism contain contradictions that refute the possibility. Reason cannot be material. If it is material, it’s unintelligible by default. There is absolutely no way to overcome this. Even attempting to do so would demand reason. This is one of the many examples of how this worldview is totally indisputably refuted.
Not to mention qualia and subjective experience have at least provisional ontological status until proven otherwise, according to Searle. Just saying "it's an illusion lol" is moronic, because the opposite could just as easily be true. It's dogmatic to say "well we should assume it is!" No, you should take EVERYTHING about observable reality, including qualia and subjective experience, as explananda (things needing to be explained).
If materialists try to say that consciousness is really just an illusion and we're all Turing machines, they still have to answer what the point would be of computers "deluding themselves" that they're conscious. To call it an illusion still raises the question: an illusion FOR WHOM? WHO or WHAT is deluded? A computer can't be deluded, it can only compute.
The whole thing is just nonsensical. The most they can do is describe just-so stories about a theoretical universe in which machines evolved algorithms and acted just like we do but were never really conscious. Even if those just-so stories held together (they don't), they would still not be proved true for this universe.
Well, saying it’s an illusion would also contain a contradiction in that the conclusion that it is an illusion would necessarily be an illusion. Taking a dogmatic position would contain the contradiction as well, but so would what you said, the concession that they’re ontologically unjustified. You don’t actually know, not even that you don’t actually know. This is why I mentioned the presuppositionalists because whether you’re taking about dumb atheistic materialists or Searle, you’re actually trapped in skepticism either way and refute yourself by default. Searle is actually doing the same thing but just adding another layer of language that should mean nothing in particular in his worldview.
Secular philosophy necessitates taking reason, logic, etc. immaterial principles simply as axiomatic, which they confuse as “necessary” for some argument with “literally is the true and objective case independent of proceeding arguments”. You actually cannot take these as some axiomatic foundation and then proceed to elaborate a worldview which makes such a thing impossible, which is what all these people do. You’re either mired in self-refuting skepticism or some sort of deism which justifies and there are just no exceptions at all.
Reason is simply a method of understanding the laws which govern material. It's a tool to apprehend material. Where is the contradiction? Every supposition that deviates from materialist groundings is ultimately proven wrong against the test of reality over time.
If that account of reason were true, it would mean reason is merely a construct of the individual mind, which would make it unintelligible and subjective by default, which defies itself. How could I accept something you say as reasonable if reason itself is merely a method of your subjective mind, which I obviously can’t know? It’s not possible.
I don’t even know what to say about that last statement because it’s a contradiction in itself.
>website's against materialism
ALL of us use some form of computer or phone to write on here.
I feel like with any philosophical debate it gets muddled by peoples inherent need to be right about things.. But with the diversity of philosophical thought and people adhering multiple different schools it is apparent that things aren't that clear cut.
Materialism is certainly an avenue worth exploring and I'd say that it's the prevalent world view of most normies and even more so among women. I feel like this is a reason for the lack of success that internetty people tend to have with women because there is certainly happiness to be gained through it.
Among people on this site I feel that a more idealistic approach is often what is sought rather than a pragmatic one. The critiques of materialism I feel are mostly tied to an over reliance on the material world to provide happiness but as with most things its a matter of balance. Because relying on things will not be enough but forsaking the simple pleasures of things is like the buddhists, maybe a path away from despair but not towards happiness.
My relation to materialism is quite neutral although it's gaining favor as I move away from being a consumer to a producer of things.
>
le enlightened centrist has arrived
I remember Butters was an avowed epicurean.
Because it’s gay
27th post best post
Your first question was answered by your last statement.
>Why is this website so negative towards materalism?
It's just sanctimonious christcucks who want to virtue signal and proclaim their alleged moral superiority online.
Most regular people are religious and you’re not high minded or unique for opposing it. It’s the definition of pretentious.
"Not being high minded or unique" is not the definition of pretentious.
>I look forward to being an alcoholic
should we tell him?
How else is anyone here doing to get laid unless Jesus forces women to have sex with them using his Aryan magic?
rent free, erev rav
>The strength of neural connections, the volume of hormones associated with it, the electrical activity in the brain.
you can do all that when brain activity correlates to an experience. I'm talking about the actual experience, your experience doesn't look and feel like neural connections in the brain. you could get 100% accuracy in a brain description and still not create an experience, because what you do is looking at a brain while a person is having an experience, not the brain creating that experience.
(forgot to mention I'm not that anon you're reponding to)
>For your argument to hold, you would need to prove that a person could achieve the exact level of complexity as you and lack a "qualia" or mind.
you can't make a statement and then say it's on the other guy now to prove how you are wrong
William James, one of the greatest philosophers of all time, whom Husserl said would have founded a native phenomenological movement 20 years before Husserl did if people had just truly understood his genius:
>My thesis now is this: that, when we think of the law that thought is a function of the brain, we are not required to think of productive function only; we are entitled also to consider permissive or transmissive function. And this the ordinary psycho-physiologist leaves out of his account.
>Suppose, for example, that the whole universe of material things—the furniture of earth and choir of heaven—should turn out to be a mere surface-veil of phenomena, hiding and keeping back the world of genuine realities. Such a supposition is foreign neither to common sense nor to philosophy. Common sense believes in realities behind the veil even too superstitiously; and idealistic philosophy declares the whole world of natural experience, as we get it, to be but a time-mask, shattering or refracting the one infinite Thought which is the sole reality into those millions of finite streams of consciousness known to us as our private selves.
>"Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,
>Stains the white radiance of eternity."
>Suppose, now, that this were really so, and suppose, moreover, that the dome, opaque enough at all times to the full super-solar blaze, could at certain times and places grow less so, and let certain beams pierce through into this sublunary world. These beams would be so many finite rays, so to speak, of consciousness, and they would vary in quantity and quality as the opacity varied in degree. Only at particular times and places would it seem that, as a matter of fact, the veil of nature can grow thin and rupturable enough for such effects to occur. But in those places gleams, however finite and unsatisfying, of the absolute life of the universe, are from time to time vouchsafed. Glows of feeling, glimpses of insight, and streams of knowledge and perception float into our finite world.
>Admit now that our brains are such thin and half-transparent places in the veil. What will happen? Why, as the white radiance comes through the dome, with all sorts of staining and distortion imprinted on it by the glass, or as the air now comes through my glottis determined and limited in its force and quality of its vibrations by the peculiarities of those vocal chords which form its gate of egress and shape it into my personal voice, even so the genuine matter of reality, the life of souls as it is in its fullness, will break through our several brains into this world in all sorts of restricted forms, and with all the imperfections and queernesses that characterize our finite individualities here below.
>According to the state in which the brain finds itself, the barrier of its obstructiveness may also be supposed to rise or fall. It sinks so low, when the brain is in full activity, that a comparative flood of spiritual energy pours over. At other times, only such occasional waves of thought as heavy sleep permits get by. And when finally a brain stops acting altogether, or decays, that special stream of consciousness which it subserved will vanish entirely from this natural world. But the sphere of being that supplied the consciousness would still be intact; and in that more real world with which, even whilst here, it was continuous, the consciousness might, in ways unknown to us, continue still.
>You see that, on all these suppositions, our soul's life, as we here know it, would none the less in literal strictness be the function of the brain. The brain would be the independent variable, the mind would vary dependently on it. But such dependence on the brain for this natural life would in no wise make immortal life impossible,—it might be quite compatible with supernatural life behind the veil hereafter.
What book is this from? This stuff is absolutely galaxy-brained
what commonly passes for materialism is actually dualism reskinned, reinforcing the body-mind disjunction by positioning the "natural world" as separate from the humans that occupy it. the new materialist school (ala Abram and his brand of Husserlian eco-phenomenology) is much better suited the posmodern task, helping us reclaim a bit of our lost spiritual heritage (by way of our bodies and their place in the larger perceptual fabric) while also leaving room for scientific innovation/advancement, beckoning toward a new version of an old subject-object synthesis that neither the laboratory nor the chapel can sufficiently accomodate, their respective dogmatics having led to imaginative bankruptcy and ontological isolation of the human from the nore-than-human world
explain this debate in fortnite terms please
What distinguishes a server full of bots that are so good that you can't tell them apart from humans from a server full of such bots, plus one "real" human?
If your answer is
>Nothing, because the "realness" in the phrase "real human" is simply a roundabout way of saying "The best bot, the perfectly complete bot," because all "real" humans are is bots to begin with. A complete human bot would simply be a perfect copy of the original human bot. It would then not be a simulation, but an instance of a human.
then you are a hard materialist
If your answer is
>No, there is something irreducible, something that separates even the best simulation from a real conscious being
then you think consciousness has "ontological status," from "onto-" meaning "something that is," meaning: you think consciousness "is" something, thus it has "the status of being something."
If you are in the former group, you don't need to worry about questions like "what is mind?" because for you, in principle, making the best Fortnite bots is the same as trying to make the best model of the human brain. In fact they are the exact same task, ultimately: simulating "general intelligence" until it ceases to be a simulation and becomes as sophisticated as the real thing, or more. You can then begin working for DARPA making anime waifu chatbots with a clear conscience.
If you are in the latter group, you are allowed to experience wonder at the unsolved mystery that is consciousness, and thus to explore metaphysical and spiritual solutions and to view all of modern physics as merely taking us to the antechamber of real answers as to the real nature of the cosmos.
ok i get it now thanks one more question would plato be able to crank 90's in no build?
If someone were to copy you, atom for atom, so that an identical copy of you existed, would the consciousness be identical or would it be different?
>"Motive," the construct said. "Real motive problem, with an Al. Not human, see?"
>"Well, yeah, obviously."
>"Nope. I mean, it's not human. And you can't get a handle on it. Me, I'm not human either, but I respond like one. See?"
>"Wait a sec," Case said. "Are you sentient, or not?"
>"Well, it feels like I am, kid, but I'm really just a bunch of ROM. It's one of them, ah, philosophical questions, I guess. . ." The ugly laughter sensation rattled down Case's spine.
(reposting to fix ugly greentext formatting)
NTA; but yes of course, modulo a different viewpoint of the world and the no-cloning theorem. The contents of the cloned-me's consciousness would be no different from mine, were I to be teleported into that spot.
Only if you assume a certain ontology. If unique souls exist and are only correlated with bodies, then it would be a dead clone. It may not even function properly as it has no soul -- it would be like the classical israeli parables about the golem that reprimands its creator and destroys itself as soon as it is created, because only God can create souls in that way, and "it" is nothing (except maybe the angelic hypostasis of a certain principle speaking through the golem to say "Don't fricking do that"). On that note, the failed Robocop knockoffs scene in Robocop 2 is interesting. One of them literally does pull its own head off, like the golem in the legend erasing the magical character on its forehead to destroy the integrity of the enchantment and thus itself.
On a different ontology, that of emergentism for example, where software is a function of the arrangement of hardware, it would have a distinct consciousness that begins to diverge from the moment it was copied from you. It would also presumably have differences due to quantum indeterminacy and such, since measuring atoms to make sure they are "the same" is impossible.
On a totally eliminativist ontology, it would also be the same in the sense that two computers sold side by side in the store are the same, and different in the same way that the two computers possess minor atomic or subatomic quantum differences etc.
What matters here is the ontology one chooses. You can't prove the invalidity of one ontology by showing that one is internally consistent. They're all internally consistent explanations. Just like there are many different possible models of physics or mathematics that all "work." We then need other criteria for determining which we prefer.
Because you're conflating emergentism with eliminativism. For example:
>the concept of "wetness" exists as an experience in the operating system of our biological computer which is our mind.
Then you should also be committed to my computer currently "experiencing" the "right" thing to do when I hit each key. If so, you are a panpsychist. If your answer would be that only a sufficiently COMPLEX computer does this, then you are a more strict emergentist. But emergentism and panpsychism generally overlap, for reasons outlined above.
(continued)
The question isn't whether the computer has a "concept" (program) of water that is not itself the molecule "water." We already know that. But this is the kind of function-calling conception of AI that is sometimes called "good old-fashioned AI," in which we view the mind as a very very very complex semiotic computer system, i.e., a system that converts stimuli (like light hitting a sensor on the computer) to signs and symbols (like a picture of a light, or the word "Light"). This paradigm is dead now, partly thanks to Dreyfus' work in What Computers Can't Do, which in part argues via Heideggerian phenomenology that the mind ITSELF doesn't function in this way (so it's not just an issue of computers having a hard time replicating it because the mind is so good at it), rather, minds seem to "think in" interwoven contexts and holistic (parts/wholes) relations that can't be modelled accurately by computers. If you're interested in this I can dig up a recent article on how well AI researchers have integrated this critique, the answer being, basically not at all. They're still just trying to brute-force general intelligence via larger and larger algorithms.
>Both the structure of the water and the biological structure of the brain are physical and real, and thus, even the experience is simply the phenomenon of processing the information through the brain.
This is perfectly coherent as long as you are an eliminativist. But if you believe that the EXPERIENCE of water in me, or the EXPERIENCE of "this guy is hitting the 'k' key, I'll show him a 'k' on screen, humans love 'k's," in my computer, is ANYTHING OTHER than a roundabout way of describing "the computer just responds to stimuli using mechanical switches / the human computer does the exact same," i.e., that there IS NO experience in actuality, then you are a form of idealist.
Again, what you're doing (in my opinion) is conflating the epiphenomenalist (eliminativist) account with the emergentist account and not realizing that the former necessarily eats consciousness when they are placed side by side, while the latter necessarily tries to escape and bestow ontological status on consciousness.
>if you assume a certain ontology
O.K., but more importantly, Superman or Spider-Man? So long as we are willing to entertain talmudic language games and pretend that thousands of pages of learned theological sophistry add anything but obstacles in trying to optimize the actual world we are part of.
Your strawmanning is tedious, and judging by your treasure trove of IQfy may-mays, you are moronic. The correctness of a view isn't dictated by what is intellectually impressive to a layman. Would thousands of learned pages "proving" that 2 + 2 = 5 be a sign of an above average intellect, capable of producing them? Yes. Would they be intellectually impressive to a layman? Yes. And they would still not be correct. Are nerd arguments about Spider-Man and Superman intellectually impressive? You bet, they memorize the canon better than some do the Talmud. Are they useful? No.
Ah I see now, so it's like string theory?
Not quite. String theory is mathematically useful, even if a string theory doesn't end up describing our reality well. Plenty of interesting mathematical techniques came out of there, and some are even actually, gasp, applied.
Do they apply them to explaining why 40+ years of consumer-grade computing and infinitely available information and self-expression and synoptic access to every text in human history has only turned everybody into idiot homosexuals?
You are assuming everyone hasn't already been an idiot and a latent homosexual. Social contagion has been there since we became humans, so have idiots. My objection to dragging in non-materialist "ontologies" is epistemic rather than instrumental. Religion is useful to have as social glue for people of average and below average intellect, and if anything I would prefer more religion in contemporary western states, ceteris paribus. Similarly, I'm not entirely sure formal markets and stock exchanges would work very well to improve living standards in Africa or Arab countries as a replacement for their kin networks; the instrumental usefulness of formal markets is intelligence-dependent. Irreligious communities comprised of people with high cognitive ability don't actually suffer from dysfunction the same way that the general population does, they can do whatever the frick they want, and still not be dysfunctional.
>just trust me, let science run the world for two centuries! no more spiritual mumbojumbo!
yes, up to and until the indentical copy is made aware of its derivative status.
also atom for atom is a silly phrase. It's not fricking LEGO
Ultimate happiness is incoherent with a transcendental worldview. At best an Epicurean can find contentment with waiting out the clock
Why?
Because materialism is for stembugs who want to maximise serotonin production. Simple as.
>but muh stoicism and epicureanism
Both of these schools of thought - though vastly superior to anything you'll find in modern society - are completely SOVLLESS. Neither stoicism nor epicureanism have any space for real divinity. Their "gods" are such in name only.
how is the Providence materialistic?
Because conservatives are idealists since time immemorial. Materialism is the way but it doesn't pay lip service to kings, tyrants or priests.
Materialism is a kinda meaningless term when local realism has been thoroughly refuted in QM
>QM babble
Sure buddy.
I thought materialists were supposed to be staunchly anti-cope
You are mistaken. They're coping hedonists.
You really don't know what you're talking about and so it's pointless to really engage with that argument.
Still gonna do it so you can deny it's true and feel like you're correct when you're not :
>Bell theorem says either causality is not real or locality is not real
>Easily scared physicists stick with the COPEnhagen interpretation because they feel a world without freewill is worse than a world with causality
>So we throw locality out of the window out of pure personal preference
they're called interpretations because they are divergent views based on the EXACT SAME MATHEMATICS you clearly have no clue about. Some i fricking love science youtuber got you thinking QM disproved determinism but if you did half your homework, you'd see it doesn't. Again, doesn't matter because your feelings are hurt by that mere prospect so w/e
I mean you're right I dont know the math behind the theories, but the 2022 physics nobel prize was given to a group of physisists under the pretense that they had sufficiently disproven local realism to the point where there was absolutely no question about it anymore. I know that they originate from bell's theorems but it isn't 1960 anymore, and I'm more willing to trust nobel prize winners than random anons.
Don't academics love the idea that there is no free will, that dont make no sense
Lol no they don't, especially philosophers
Kant : freewill
Sartre : freewill
Analytics : freewill
Maybe sociology/history/natural sciences majors don't fall for that but philosophers always do except for Spinozists
Fear of death + thousands of years of slander. Epicurus was a great man.
Most people do not think so hard about things, they simply react. Why are people so negative towards materialism? Because of the society they inhabit. I went to the dentist yesterday and, apart from the fact I went to the dentist I was simply saddened by the surroundings my trip took me through. Roads which required maintenance, homes in disrepair, beggars at intersections, commercial buildings vacant, hateful slogans and signs in peoples yards, natural spaces overtaken by tenements and warehouses.
I can only compare my surroundings to those of my childhood and notice things have not gotten better,so of course I will take a dim view of materialism.
Epicurian forever by the way, I will share some of my happiness with you if it puts us both above the average.
Have you read Oswald Spengler's Decline? He has some very interesting ideas relating to this very topic. In fact they stand at the very center of his theory.
>Why is this website so negative towards materalism?
Because materialism isn't trad. That's literally all to it.
Both were refuted by the skeptics using their own arguments. Filthy dogmatists
>Why is this website so negative towards materalism?
It's boring
Idealism brought us Lord of the Rings and Warhammer 40K. What has materialism inspired?
malevolent social forces prevent many people from engaging in materialism that they otherwise would have in that they imbue unnecessary meaning into material objects. owning something means you're part of some group, and that might be a bad group, etc. people are more violent when they are more materialist.
mickey_mouse_donald_duck_retort.jpg
It's just boring and played out, and the hard problem of consciousness indicates it is false to boot.
Material should only be held onto when it is something that holds value that can be passed down. If you are buying funko pops or furbees, you are a homosexual and no amount of time will make sitting on a stack of goyslop a better investment than having things that retain their value against inflation.
bump
>Why is this website so negative towards materalism?
materialism = marxism for /misc/cels.
Marx was right, and the most avowedly Marxist state on Earth is currently replacing the USA as top global superpower.
>replacing the USA as top global superpower.
Can't tell if bait, or a deep dive of head in ass. Posted by a moron either way.
You are delusional. The USA can't even manufacture paper masks without China. Not only is China catching up in straight up GDP, but China has leveraged a huge portion of supply lines so that they now hold the reins over the global economy much more than the USA currently does. Also, if you care to examine the military of each country, the USA has outdated and failing technology while China continues to push the edge of technological innovation, especially with long range missile capacity.
They claim to be and Marx is essentially required reading for any government official. Look up what Xi Jinping and other top CCP members have to say about Marx and Western Capitalism. It's clear that they have studied Marx deeply and learned the lessons therein to be able to leverage the innate Capitalist instinct to maximize profits at the expense of national interests in order to shift production power to China. The Means of Production really are the keys to the world, and China has expertly stolen them right out from under the USA. It's true what they say: The Capitalist will sell you the rope you hang him with.
Is china even Marxist anymore?
You cannot empirically prove that I am my brain.
I have never seen my brain, so there is no evidence I have one
Full disclosure: I am not a philosopher, merely an amateur so keep that in mind.
It's probably the trickiest philosophy problem. The physicalist (I think most philosophers have abandoned the term materialism) view of the mind enjoys the fruits of our best science when explaining the brain, but there comes a point when the physicalist says, "When X, Y, and Z happen, a first-person experience emerg- er uhm exists... (because you have to be careful about that 'emerges' word)." First-personess does present a problem, many think, to physicalism because our most fundamental science seems to explain everything in a third-person perspective. And it's difficult to imagine how assembling a bunch of non-conscious particles can create a conscious being. A similar problem dogs panpsychists. How can an assembly of a bunch of little conscious things create a large conscious whole (the combination problem)? There are other physicalist ways to try and resolve the issue. One way is to propose that our understanding of matter isn't complete and that physics only gives us a partial picture of what it is.
The general problem with dualism is how the mental could interact with the physical. As far as we can tell, the workings of the brain follow the known laws of physics without any outside interaction- commonly called physical causal closure. And you don't want causal overdetermination by having the the mental and the physical both causing the same thing at the same time for obvious reasons. Epiphenomenalism seems pretty unpopular because a lot of dualists want to keep mental causation, but it would at least let you say that consciousness is indeed non-physical and you get to keep physical causal closure. It would also fall in line with some experiments that have been done that purport to show that your brain has already decided to perform an action before you have consciously decided to do that action. Though these experiments have been contested. Now you can be brave and say that mental states do affect brain states in such a way that it violates physics. If you take that route you can sorta lean on the fact that our means of examining the workings of the brain aren't good enough to detect these mental influences. But physical causal closure is pretty popular, so not too many go down that route. Idealism, which is not a dualist theory, doesn't do much better than dualism in terms of explanation because you still have to explain why when we looking at the brain everything still seems to be following the physical laws.
how can an assembly of atoms produce a liquid when the atoms themselves aren't liquid (the combination problem)? mind = blown! one way is to propose that our knowledge isn't complete and there must be an immeasurable liquidity inherent to each atom
also philosophers of science, you know, the guys who worshiped the idea of one "scientific method" and didn't bother to look at what actual scientists were doing, have just barely accepted feyerabend's against method decades after the initial hateful reception, and even the best of them, such as hasok chang with his "pragmatic realism", are still blind to the institutional and social sides of science. yeah. philosophers, be they physicalists or not, aren't gonna explain anything, and especially not "the brain".
So what's the answer?
take a step back and thoroughly consider that your internal perception of the world is not, in fact, the world. your sensors are very limited. the actual world is quantum excitations in fields. that "red book" on your desk is a region dense in quantum excitations that bind to each other. you sense but the tiniest fraction of the electromagnetic field around you, much less other particle fields. reality is and has always been perfectly normal clouds of probability amplitudes, that's not weird. the fraction you sense is tiny and weird.
so you know, this "red book"? you aren't "conscious of the red book", that's a nonsensical framing. some of your neurons are entangled with the activity that sensing a "red book" creates in your other neurons. all consciousness is access consciousness, you aren't accessing the world across a sorcerous medium, you're accessing yourself, i.e. the neurons which are in some particular state after neural impulses coming from your sensors excited them.
consciousness isn't an on or off thing. this ability of some bunch of neurons to access other neurons is a cognitive ability like any other. there can be more of it, or less of it. an animal can sustain it for longer, or in a less noisy way. you are yourself a complex enough bunch of neurons that this access consciousness doesn't feel broken to you (even though it is, you aren't complicated enough to eliminate low-ability phenomena like the attentional blink). less complex animal brains have less of this internal access. in the limit, one neuron doesn't access its own state (accessing is experiencing a neural excitation entangled with the object being accessed, but a neuron can't be excited in two entangled ways at the same time), and so there's no consciousness.
Very interesting and I appreciate the response. Not too sure what to make of terms like "sensing" and "accessing." Also, is this related to IIT or any of the other theories like Global Workspace or Higher Order Theories? Where should one go to read more about this?
>Also, is this related to IIT or any of the other theories like Global Workspace or Higher Order Theories?
no on the IIT (I think it and other purely computational frameworks are nonsense), semi-related on the GWT
>Where should one go to read more about this?
honestly i'm ad-libbing a possible physicalist take on how no extraneous entities are necessary for consciousness over and above neurons accessing each other. i'm borrowing the term "access consciousness" from Ned Block's A-consciousness vs P-consciousness but still I think Block's P-consciousness concept is confused because he didn't go far enough down to the mechanistic level. the search for neural correlates of consciousness is the closest to what i have in mind, e.g. a set such as this:
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-022-00587-4 (get that off Annas' Archive)
- https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.06.23.546249v2 (the parts on neural correlates)
- https://www.nedblock.us/courses/mind2022/ (the readings under "Experiments on Phenomenal Consciousness and Access Consciousness")
Not trying to argue but just curious, how do you account for mystical experiences that feel as if you unify with some kind of universal consciousness. Like how do you place them in your model.
>Not trying to argue but just curious
appreciated! some combination of:
- brains are incredibly flaky! you know optical illusions but here's a thing about the visual system going on pause during saccades: https://nitter.nl/Foone/status/1014267515696922624
- experiences described as spiritual or mystical can be semi-reliably induced with ketamine, other psychedelics, transcranial magnetic stimulation. ketamine in particular is a dissociative anesthetic, a perfect match for "universal consciousness".
now i can't feel solid ground under me when it comes to ketamine in particular and dissociative states of consciousness, i don't even know if any ethics board in the world would approve an experiment to look into this, but if i absolutely had to guess, i'd guess ketamine disrupted the coherence of your "consciousness" neurons accessing your "sense" neurons? like the readings from different neural ensembles would lag too much and would be partially disconnected in ways the brain wasn't used to, and so your sense of self would become noisier/fuzzier?
just wildly guessing though
Does your model also consider magic or other spiritual practices (that bring material results) an impossibility? And what do you think a person experiences after death, just nothing?
>muh finitude
it's the trad tryhards and trump tourists
>the reason people are metaphysical idealists is Donald Trump
Because materialism is the scourge destroying mankind
The truth is only a scourge of evil.
Philosophical materialism got its foundations euthanized by mechanics from physics showing such determinism as simply wrong and false. There's nothing left but cope.