It's a perfectly ordinary question with a perfectly ordinary answer – anyone will tell you that a human is conscious much of the time, but a plant never is. — Snakes Alive
That's the thing with ordinary language. Everyone can agree when the term is sufficiently vague. But once you start discussing it in any depth, differences emerge, along with difficulties raised by what everyone thought was simple concept on the face of it. — Marchesk
There is no "must have" except in purely deductive arguments. But purely deductive arguments do not prove the soundness of their premises; they are merely formal, not substantive arguments, so the "must have" is always going to be a relative, not an absolute, one. — Janus
So I don't see metaphysical arguments and systems as fulfilling the role of a search for truth at all, but rather as a search for beauty. — Janus
LOL! That's just the very, very beginning of the discussion, and people are going to want to know what you mean by a human being conscious. It can mean more than one thing. A little bit more discussion, and you'll find out that people don't always agree on what it means for a human to be conscious.
That's the thing with ordinary language. Everyone can agree when the term is sufficiently vague. But once you start discussing it in any depth, differences emerge, along with difficulties raised by what everyone thought was simple concept on the face of it.
And then lo and behold, you find out some people think that plants are actually conscious (along with rocks and everything else). — Marchesk
What possible reason do I have for thinking that an analysis of the sentences used in an argument about those terms will actually yield some information about the way the world actually is? — Pseudonym
but we can have virtually no meaningful discussion about something like universals or tropes because we do not even begin to agree on the nature of the experience that they are attempting to define. — Pseudonym
This is better than the situation in philosophy; vague terms are meaningful, but meaningless ones are not. — Snakes Alive
But when someone like David Chalmers is talking about consciousness, he's not interested in only the words being used, but rather whether subjectivity can be accounted for by an objective view of the world (whether it be physicalism, functionalism, behaviorism, etc). — Marchesk
How could they not be understood once one is well enough versed in the debate? — Marchesk
This is at least partly based on the further perception that some universals have the same property values. — Marchesk
This leads to the question of what is it about the world or ourselves which results in creating universal concepts. — Marchesk
How else do you account for differences of opinion on metaphysical matters? — Pseudonym
And so it seems we're back to where we started. Yes, it may lead to "the question", but none of this shows any reason to believe we can provide a meaningfulanswer to it. — Pseudonym
We can meaningfully discuss gravity because we all agree on our experience of it, — Pseudonym
The same way I account of differences of opinions on anything. — Marchesk
The answers provided are meaningful, — Marchesk
Oh but we all know that gravity is so much more than our experience of it, from bending spacetime to relativistic frames. And before Newton, there was no concept of gravity, despite our experiences in common of falling things. — Marchesk
The dispute over the theories of time doesn't make sense to me — Snakes Alive
Now, if philosophy is defined as that which is nonsensical of course that would follow just by definition. — Moliere
There are many reasons to think experience is not primary.
1. We have bodies upon which our experiences depend.
2. Our bodies were born.
3. Human bodies evolved.
4. The universe existed prior to human experience. It's also much larger than our experience.
And so on. — Marchesk
By the protagonist of a life-experience story, of course a physical world is perceived. Your experience is of being a physical being in a physical world. So, what else would you expect, than to experience a physical world that produced you, and is consistent with you. — Michael Ossipoff
I agree with this; although I would say some people do take it seriously, in the sense that they are emotionally invested in reality being one imagined way or another, even though those imagined ways are not really clear conceptions of anything substantive. I made a somewhat related point in another thread; — Janus
That's a very reasonable and consistent way to look at it, I'm much inclined that way myself, but that it most definitely not the way metaphysics is actually treated, particularly in lay discussions. — Pseudonym
.By the protagonist of a life-experience story, of course a physical world is perceived. Your experience is of being a physical being in a physical world. So, what else would you expect, than to experience a physical world that produced you, and is consistent with you.
.However, the mental is not so easily subsumed under the physical, so maybe I'm not entirely physical.
.At any rate, a question does arise as to whether the world is physical, a combination of physical and mental, mental, or something else.
"Substantive" applies to propositions which refer to, or have implications for, actual experience, which merely logical propositions do not. — Janus
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