On Fri, Jul 19, 2019, at 22:04, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote:
>
>
> On 7/19/2019 4:49 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
> > I share their perplexity. The idea of immaterialism is natural (and
> > arises thousands of years ago), because the only thing that we cannot
> > doubt (as Descartes pointed out) -- our consciousness -- is
> > immaterial. There is not scientific instrument that can detect
> > consciousness.
>
> That's not really true. Of course doctors assess patients as conscious,
> unconscious, in coma, or brain dead every day.
Yes, but all of this doctor-stuff takes place in the theater of your own
consciousness. There is no evidence of any reality beyond conscious experience.
We only know about the first person, not the third. The problem with the
materialist / emergentist framing of consciousness is that it demotes what is
directly known in favor of a model (third person objective reality), of which
we don't really know the ontological status.
> The myth that
> consciousness is a mystery is part hubris (we are too special to be
> understood)
I know, this idea that we have been going from a process of humbling
experiences, by discovering that the earth is not the center of the universe,
and then how infinitesimally small we are compared to the all shebang, and then
that we are just animals, etc. Several of my friends are very attached to this
idea. They love to think poetically about "how insignificant they feel" when
they realize how small we are, how devoid of anything special. I have to be
honest, I don't particularly care for any of this stuff one way or the other.
I don't know if we are special. Compared to what? All I say is that all that
appears to exist, exists within my conscious experience. The rest, I can always
doubt. What is this "I" I refer to? Also don't know. I suspect it's the same
"I" you refer to, but in a different branch, in a different set of
circumstances. These things that I am saying are tautologies, trivial
observations. The fact that some people find them so absurd or perplexing makes
me thing that there is religious belief involved, even though the religion in
question does not necessarily have a name.
> and part an exaggerated demand for understanding. There's no
> scientific instrument that can detect the wave function of an electron
> either. But with the electron we're happy to have an effective theory
> that tells us when the detector will click or not. Mystery mongering
> about consciousness makes us demand something more that mere measurement
> and prediction, something that doesn't exist for any theory.
The idea of a wave function of an electron, scientific instruments, detectors,
mystery mongering, all of this takes place -- at least for me, and I know of
nothing else -- within the phenomenon I am curious about. That's what makes it
special.
Telmo.
> Brent
>
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