> On 20 Jul 2019, at 21:52, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List > <everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote: > > > > On 7/20/2019 1:32 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: >> >> On Fri, Jul 19, 2019, at 22:04, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote: >>> >>> On 7/19/2019 4:49 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: >>>> I share their perplexity. The idea of immaterialism is natural (and >>>> arises thousands of years ago), because the only thing that we cannot >>>> doubt (as Descartes pointed out) -- our consciousness -- is >>>> immaterial. There is not scientific instrument that can detect >>>> consciousness. >>> That's not really true. Of course doctors assess patients as conscious, >>> unconscious, in coma, or brain dead every day. >> Yes, but all of this doctor-stuff takes place in the theater of your own >> consciousness. There is no evidence of any reality beyond conscious >> experience. > > So the doctors decision about you has nothing to do with reality.
That does not follow. Bruno > And you see no problem with that kind of reasoning. It appears to me that > you are willing to discount everything as evidence for anything else. All > that counts as evidence is experience and it can only be evidence for itself. > >> We only know about the first person, not the third. The problem with the >> materialist / emergentist framing of consciousness is that it demotes what >> is directly known in favor of a model (third person objective reality), of >> which we don't really know the ontological status. > > Ontologies are always model dependent. > >> >>> The myth that >>> consciousness is a mystery is part hubris (we are too special to be >>> understood) >> I know, this idea that we have been going from a process of humbling >> experiences, by discovering that the earth is not the center of the >> universe, and then how infinitesimally small we are compared to the all >> shebang, and then that we are just animals, etc. Several of my friends are >> very attached to this idea. They love to think poetically about "how >> insignificant they feel" when they realize how small we are, how devoid of >> anything special. I have to be honest, I don't particularly care for any of >> this stuff one way or the other. > > My point has nothing to do with humbling experiences. It is that we think we > have understanding of a lot of physics because we can use to for predictions. > But when a neuroscientist finds he can predict what a subject will think > when a certain brain point is stimulated that's dismissed as not really > evidence for a material basis for thought because...well thought is special. > My point is that we demand some kind of intuitively satisfying explanation of > thought that is "better" than mere prediction...yet in all the rest of > science we think the ability to predict means we know reality. I think both > are off the mark. > >> >> I don't know if we are special. Compared to what? All I say is that all that >> appears to exist, exists within my conscious experience. The rest, I can >> always doubt. > > What you doubt is what is inferred from your direct experience. But what is > this process of inference? Ideas pop into my consciousness with no conscious > inference of them all the time. > >> What is this "I" I refer to? Also don't know. I suspect it's the same "I" >> you refer to, but in a different branch, in a different set of >> circumstances. These things that I am saying are tautologies, trivial >> observations. The fact that some people find them so absurd or perplexing >> makes me thing that there is religious belief involved, even though the >> religion in question does not necessarily have a name. >> >>> and part an exaggerated demand for understanding. There's no >>> scientific instrument that can detect the wave function of an electron >>> either. But with the electron we're happy to have an effective theory >>> that tells us when the detector will click or not. Mystery mongering >>> about consciousness makes us demand something more that mere measurement >>> and prediction, something that doesn't exist for any theory. >> The idea of a wave function of an electron, scientific instruments, >> detectors, mystery mongering, all of this takes place -- at least for me, >> and I know of nothing else -- within the phenomenon I am curious about. >> That's what makes it special. > > And I'm suggesting that it is your curiosity that makes it special. If you > were that curious about why the wave function of an electron is what Dirac > said it is, if you were willing to just keep asking "Why?", you'd find that > special too. Bruno wants this curiosity to bottom out on computation because > he thinks he understands computation. > > Brent > >> >> Telmo. >> >>> Brent > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/be84035f-1b8f-b1a1-a722-2cdd2c3ef9d4%40verizon.net. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/C5A73475-991C-4686-BB8F-015B677498CF%40ulb.ac.be.
