On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 11:26 PM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote:
On 5/3/2010 7:14 PM, Rex Allen wrote:
On Sat, May 1, 2010 at 9:48 PM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com
wrote:
That's assuming I believe some things are true in some absolute sense
unrelated to usefulness. I don't.
I am having the experience of seeing a red book.
But do you *believe* you are seeing a red book. You could be mistaken about
that (in fact you've argued you're probably mistaken). No, you only believe
that you are having an experience that is described as seeing a red book.
But I will concede you may have confidence in such a belief (provided you
know what see, red, and book mean - which requires references that are
less than certain). For myself I don't formulate such beliefs, although I
suppose I could say, I believe I am experiencing something that could be
described as looking at a computer display.
Do you really believe that you are experiencing looking at a computer
display, OR, do you only believe that you believe that you are
experiencing looking at a computer display?
Ha!
What is belief except another aspect of conscious experience?
So there are blind people with anosognosia, who deny being blind and
will invent visual experiences. When they claim to see a red book,
what is their conscious experience? I would guess that their
experience is not the same as mine, but who knows? Maybe it is the
same.
Maybe the sincere belief that you're having a visual experience *is* a
visual experience. If so, that works for me. Maybe that explains the
visual aspects of dreams?
Maybe belief is all that exists? Fundamental and uncaused...
OR maybe the blind anosognosiacs don't truly believe that they are
seeing a red book, but their impaired condition forces them to behave
as though they believed they were?
OR, maybe they aren't having any experience at all. Maybe they have
become zombies...?
I can only work with what I know about my own experiences. But,
thanks to Salvia Divinorum, I have some idea of what it's like to both
believe really strange things, and to experience really strange
things.
If you asked me what I was seeing on one of those Salvia outings, I
would have told you all sorts of crazy things. The visual experience
was real, even if what I saw wasn't.
It doesn't seem to be useful to obtain certainty by giving
up all reference. Is that what you are doing and that's
why you regard your experiences as uncaused and not
referring - so you can have certainty?
Well. I am trying to fit everything that I know into a single
consistent, coherent framework.
Why? Well...I don't know. Too much spare time on my hands?
In general though, it seems like a reasonable way to pass the time.
When I say time and red are aspects of consciousness, I mean it in the
same way that a scientific realist means that spin is an aspect of an
electron.
Red and time are mathematical attributes in a model of consciousness?? Ok,
what's the model?
By definition, a scientific realist believes in the actual existence
of electrons and of the attribute of spin. If he didn't, he wouldn't
be a scientific realist. He might instead be a structural realist.
On 5/1/2010 6:15 PM, Rex Allen wrote:
I'm not switching positions, I'm saying that the honest physicalist
should believe that his beliefs are determined only by the initial
conditions and causal laws of the universe.
Why would he be a determinist?
If he's a physicalist, why wouldn't he believe that his beliefs are
determined by the nature of the physical world? What else would they
be determined by?
Maybe we're using determined in different ways. I use it in contrast to
random or stochastic.
I use deterministic in contrast to random or stochastic.
So if the natural world has stochastic aspects then
one's beliefs could be undetermined and yet still determined by the nature
of the physical world. For example, one of your momentary experiences
might be due to the decay of a radioactive calcium atom in the blood stream
of your brain.
Exactly.
And what if they were? According to the
best physical models we have they are mostly determined by the recent
history of the universe plus probabilistic laws (QM) -
Probabilistic laws are still causal laws, right?
Depends on what you mean by causal? I take probabilistic to mean not
entirely determined by the preceding (=within the past light cone) state.
If it's not entirely determined by the preceding state, then what *is*
it determined by?
So if a physical law is deterministic then under it's influence Event
A will cause Result X 100% of the time.
Why does Event A always lead to Result X? Because that's the law.
There is no deeper reason.
If a physical law is indeterministic, then under it's influence Event
B will cause Result Q, R, or S according to some probability
distribution.
Let's say that the probability distribution is 1/3 for each
