Comments

  • Bernie Sanders
    Biden has an electibilty problem list as long as my arm.

    Dementia, for one.     — Artemis
    I don't see how the perception that he has dementia would affect any votes, since the case can be made for Trump as well. For example, see this.
  • Questions about immaterial minds
    But each duck exists, and the relation between them exists. We agree about this. But the relation is not another material the way a duck is material - clay or flesh and feather. — unenlightened
    I consider materialism to be possibly true, or at least that it's the case to beat. A materialist can't countenance "forms" existing on their own, because they are not material. However, it's perfectly reasonable to note that everything that exists (every particular) has relations and properties. There are no propertyless particulars, and no properties (including relational properties) that exist uninstantiated in a particular. So the relations among the ducks are just as essential to a row of ducks as are the ducks.
    And in the case of the topic, here, I think we actually agree that there is no magic immaterial mind, but that mind is the relations and processes of a brain. Get the ducks in a row, and the mind and brain line up in parallel — unenlightened
    It is a bit off topic, but it helps to have a common language. We have mental processes, but I think "mind" is just an abstraction. Treating it as a thing may be part of the paradigm problem with understanding mental activities.
  • Bernie Sanders
    This recent Newsweek article suggests that they're actually pretty much tied in that regard (less than a point difference being well within the margin of error): — Artemis
    The article also notes that national polls are misleading. The most relevant polls are those of battleground states.

    Bernie has two electibility problems:
    1) he's dependent on a high turnout from his base. This has not occurred in the primaries, so there's not much reason to think it would occur in the general election.
    2) his policies are strongly appealing to some, but strongly repelling to others. Those who are repelled will be motivated to vote against him. This is akin to Hillary- a lot of people simply didn't like her, so they voted against her ( as opposed to voting FOR Trump). That phenomenon isn't clear in the polls that have been conducted.
  • What does ultimate truth consist of?
    Most concepts described with words are fundamentally fuzzy. — Daz
    Agreed
    But some things seem to me to be part of ultimate truth, in the sense that they are not fuzzy. The categories that come to mind are, in no particular order:

    1) Physical reality. Meaning, everything that exists or occurs in the physical world. Whether in the past, present, or future. Anywhere in our universe, or even in disjoint universes, in case there are any.
    Still fuzzy. Intuitively there's an existential difference between me a Julius Caesar: I exist now, Julius does not. Similar with the future.

    2) Consciousness, meaning all experiences that are experienced.
    Stiil fuzzy. I experience redness (the quale). Does redness exist?

    3) Mathematical truth.
    Are all mathematical axioms true?
  • Belief in nothing?
    my question would be ”What is the object of the belief in the above definition of Atheism?” — Pinprick
    I think you've muddled up ontology and epistemology. It is true that a statement of what does not exist doesn't say anything much about what does exist. But it's an indirect way of saying something like:

    Let E = the set of all existing things.
    God is not a member of E. E is the "object of belief".

    On the other hand epistemology deals directly with beliefs, and it is meaningful to simply say that atheism entails the belief that the following proposition is false:

    God exists
  • Questions about immaterial minds
    Does a row exist? — unenlightened
    Yes, but not as abstract objects. States of affairs (i.e. complex objects) exist that have the properties we associate with rows.

    Which line? — unenlightened

    The ones that use the term "stuff", because it's vague and ambiguous. I disagree with this:
    a row of ducks is more than the ducks, but you haven't come out and said that the more is material, because it sounds odd to say that. — unenlightened
    Assume that materialism is true (for the sake of discussion). This implies that every THING that exists is material. A row of ducks is a thing, and therefore it is a material object. It is a type of object distinct from a stack of ducks, or a row of goats. If things that exist are "stuff" than a row of ducks is stuff, and it's not identical to its constituent ducks; the internal relations between them is as much a part of the duck-row as the ducks themselves.
  • Questions about immaterial minds
    This is physicalim for dummies:
    1. There is stuff.
    2. Stuff is arranged.
    3. Arrangements are not more stuff.
    4. The ranges of arrangement include space and time, which are also not stuff.     — unenlightened
    You're making a mereological error. Do you exist? Are you a thing? After all, you're just a collection of particles arranged a certain way (actually, a loose collection since particles come and go). A complex object is something in addition to its component parts.

    You interact with the world as a functional entity. That you exist, and function as you do, is due to the properties and relations of the components that comprise you (i.e. there's no magic involved).
  • Evidence of Consciousness Surviving the Body
    Believing something is impossible, and something really being impossible, are two different things. — Sam26
    The issue is entirely epistemological: do reports of OBEs constitute adequate evidence to justify belief that OBEs are actual?

    A dualist has the background belief that minds are immaterial. For them, there's no obvious obstacle to accepting that a mind might detach from the body.

    A materialist has the background belief that the mind is identical to the brain or at least is a product of brain function so that there is an inextricable link. The mere claim that an OBE has occurred will not undercut this belief.
  • Evidence of Consciousness Surviving the Body
    Can't convince someone who isn't willing to listen, that's for sure. Maybe ponder some more on your belief that "the probability of an advanced, intelligent civilization within a navigable distance, who were motivated to make the long journey, is extremely low". — leo
    Willingness to listen isn't the issue. The issue is epistemelogical:
    1. Proposition PAL (Probability of Aliens is very Low): per established science, the probability of aliens travelling to earth is vanishingly low (e.g. speed of light is an absolute limit -per general relativity; life-permitting exoplanets are rare; abiogenesis is less than certain on apparent life-permitting planets; evolution of intelligence is a matter of chance - there's no reason to think it inevitable; likelihood of intelligent life having the technology, motivation, resources, and longevity to travel enormous distances is very low).
    2. Many people have claimed to have encounted aliens, and those that have been thoroughly investigated have been debunked.
    3. The debunked cases show there to be a psychological phenomenon of believing they've contacted aliens. Call it AES (Alien Encounter Syndrome)
    4. All testimonial evidence is consistent with (explainable as) AES (i.e. none has been shown to be actual aliens)
    5. Therefore there is no epistemic basis to defeat
    belief in PAL (see #1).
  • Evidence of Consciousness Surviving the Body
    ↪Sam26
    If something is believed to be impossible, what sort of evidence would be needed to undercut that belief?Certainly not testimonial evidence.
  • Questions about immaterial minds
    what the questions in the OP seek to do, is to ask what kind of 'thing' or object an 'immaterial mind' can be, presumably to argue that, as it can't be meaningfully defined, then it must be 'taken off the table'.

    In my view, those questions cannot be answered, but that doesn't mean that mind is not real, nor that it's a product of matter or something that can be explained in materialist terms. However, if the question is posed in those terms, then that is the conclusion it seems to point inevitably towards.     — Wayfarer
    I'm not convinced mind is a thing, an existent. There are mental activities, and the phenomenon of consciousness. What we lack is a pardigm for analyzing the phenomena.
  • Questions about immaterial minds
    If you've got three ducks, it's nice to get them in a row.

    And then you've still got three ducks but now you've got a row as well. Assume the ducks are material.     — unenlightened
    By my reckoning, an actual row of 3 actual ducks is a material state of affairs (a thing). It is more than its parts (duck, duck, duck) because it includes the spatial relations among the ducks.

    We can abstractly consider rows; many states of affairs have the properties of "row". We can even abstractly consider rows of ducks - hypothetically, any actual collection of 3 ducks could be arranged in a row.

    Abstractions are mental objects formed by considering states of affairs with some common properties, and mentally subtracting the properties thatv distinguish them.
  • Questions about immaterial minds
    ↪A Seagull
    The assumption of an immaterial mind is an escape hatch from difficult questions. What are qualia? They're the stuff of minds. No further analysis is possible or necessary. The position is unfalsifiable. What can't be denied is that an immaterial mind must still somehow interact with the physical body. Even if the immaterial can do magical things , the interface with the physical is still problematic - that was the thrust of my questions.
  • Questions about immaterial minds
    The mind is not independent of the body. — David Mo
    I don't understand how anyone can deny that, other than through blind faith.

    In my opinion it is a problem related to emergence. Different levels of matter cannot be explained by the "lower" ones.
    Assuming you're referring to ontological emergence, not just epistemological, how can you justify believing this? Every conceivable case of ontological emergence is explainable as a function of previously unknown properties of the underlying substance.
  • Evidence of Consciousness Surviving the Body
    There is a great deal of testimonial evidence of alien encounters. All that have been investigated have been discovered false, none verified as true. More significantly, the probability of an advanced, intelligent civilization within a navigable distance, who were motivated to make the long journey, is extremely low. Conclusions:
    1.there have been zero alien encounters
    2. Testimonial evidence is not a reliable means of establishing that an anomolous type of event can occur.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    ↪Michael

    Have you seen this?
  • Questions about immaterial minds
    [
    There are many other such conundrums suggested by your post, which I would sidestep or subvert by pointing out that the mind is never itself an object of perception (unlike the body and brain, which clearly are). The mind is not something which we can stand outside of, and therefore objectify. That's why eliminative materialists believe it must be eliminated. — Wayfarer
    Philosohers conceptually "objectify the mind", and my questions are directed at those who believe the mind is an immaterial object.

    quote="Wayfarer;390265"]many other aspects of 'mind-body' medicine, all suggest that mind influences the body in ways which are hard to account for in physical terms[/quote]
    I'm aware of that, but the difficulty of answering those questions doesn't imply dualism is true. My questions demonstrate there are at least as many questions that dualists can't answer. Should we therefore take both those possibilities off the table?
  • Questions about immaterial minds
    What are these 'hard questions'? — A Seagull
    The hard problrm of consciousness.
  • Mind cannot be reduced to brain
    ↪Agathob
    If the mind is an immaterial object apart from the brain, many questions are raised. I listed them here
  • Questions about immaterial minds
    If the mind is immaterial:
    — Relativist

    .. it's not.     — A Seagull
    Physicalism is often dismissed based on the inability to answer some hard questions. I wanted to show there are also challenging questions for immaterialism.

    I actually don't think "the mind" is a thing; rather, its an abstraction of all the processes that we categorize as mental.
  • The process of getting a job
    A guy, who's grades from chemistry are nearly perfect and who's enjoying studying this subject - can't afford higher education (such as college or even high school because his family lacks of money). That will leave him with a very small amount of jobs which he could be doing in the end. Instead of working in a lab (with the chance of discovering something) he'll be given a mop or a position for a cashier. My question is - is that something we should be taking care of? Or is it a problem so extended it's simply not worth dealing with? — Craiya
    There are endemic problems in the cost of education. If we, through government action, simply foot the bill, costs will skyrocket further. Compare this to healthcare: because most prople had insurance, prices skyrocketed because insured consumers were insulated from actual costs. The same thing could happen with higher education.I favor doing something to make it easier to climb out of poverty, particularly regarding higher education and vocational schools, but we have to be careful to avoid exacerbating the endemic problems.
  • Do Neural Codes Signify Conscious Content?
    The immaterial aspect of the mind (the power to choose and attend, aka aware) has no specific "place;" however, experience tells us it generally attends to data processed by and encoded in the brain -- and we have a reasonable idea of how data gets there. — Dfpolis
    It seems to me the only plausible explanation is that the physical processes cause immaterial mental states. — Relativist

    They inform the mental states, but to inform is not to be an efficient cause. Plans may inform a process, but they do not cause the process.     — Dfpolis
    Even if your mind is not spatially located, your brain is - and there's clearly a strong connection between your mind and your brain. Your mind doesn't obtain sensory input from your next door neighbor's brain. This suggests some sort of ontic connection between something located in space and something that is not. (There is an ontic connection between positively charged and negatively charged particles).

    Besides sensory input, the mind utilizes memories, and it seems the memories must be physically located in the brain, or at least some necessary neural correlates are in the brain. (By that, I mean that in the absence of those physical neural correlates, the mind cannot attend to a memory). This is the implication of memory loss due to trauma and disease. Do you agree?

    You rejected my suggestion that the brain causes mental states, so I assumed you must think the brain reads and interprets neural states. But you also denied that the mind is interpreting neural states (you said to Galuchat, " We do not first become aware (or ever become aware) of our neural state and then interpret what that state means."). What's left?
  • Do Neural Codes Signify Conscious Content?
    I agree that neural processes are physical. Whether or not mental states arise from them depends on whether or not we attend to them. The act of attending to them is an act of awareness (aka the agent intellect). — Dfpolis
    OK, this suggests mental states contingently arise. Nevertheless, the relevant mental states do not arise without the physical input.
    at the fundamental level, physical-mental causation has to be taking place.
    — Relativist

    Why?     — Dfpolis
    Sensory perception ceases when there's a physical defect. This is strong evidence that the physical processes are in the causal chain even if there are immaterial dependencies as well (like attentiveness).

    Immaterial does not mean physically impotent. The laws of nature are not made of matter; nonetheless, they effect physical transformations. — Dfpolis
    Laws of nature describe physical-physical causation. Mental-physical and physical-mental is unique.
    This implies there is a causal chain from the physical to the mental.
    — Relativist

    No, it shows that the agent intellect can transform physically encoded data to concepts (mental intentions).     — Dfpolis
    How does the physically encoded data get into an immaterial mind? How do you explain the dependency on physical processes? If you deny the dependency, why does input cease when the equipment is defective? It seems to me the only plausible explanation is that the physical processes cause immaterial mental states. The attentiveness issue doesn't refute this, it just adds a switch.

    I hope you can see that I'm treating mind as an immaterial object, and merely trying to infer how the mind interfaces with the world.
  • Do Neural Codes Signify Conscious Content?
    I do not assume that "electro-chemical signals produce the related mental states." — Dfpolis
    I suggest that we can deduce this is the case.

    I do not assume that "electro-chemical signals produce the related mental states." Following Aristotle, I see this as the work of the agent intellect, which acts in the intentional, not the physical, theater of operations. — Dfpolis
    But surely you must agree that sensory perception originates in physical processes, and ultimately mental states arise. This implies there is a causal chain from the physical to the mental. This suggests that somewhere in the chain, there is a final physical event followed by an initial (non-physical) mental event. There can be parallelism, but at the fundamental level, physical-mental causation has to be taking place. Mental causation entails the converse. I refered to this interface as a "transducer". It seems unavoidable if the mind is non-physical.

    I do not assume the mind is immaterial. I deduce — Dfpolis
    I have not deduced it, so I'm considering it a premise, for sake of discussion. Challenging it would entail a different discussion.
  • Do Neural Codes Signify Conscious Content?
    Yes, it does. How does this allow us to distinguish data on the sensor state from data on the sensed? — Dfpolis
    As I said, the pain signal (in effect) reaches a transducer which produces the mental state of localized pain. Does this much sound plausible? If so, what is your specific issue?

    If the mind is immaterial, as you assume, the issue seems to he: how do physical, electro-chemical signals produce the related mental states - right? It's not clear what specific issue you're focusing on. I'm just saying there has to be some sort of physical-mental transducer - that's where the magic is (the physical-mental causation).
  • Who wants to go to heaven?
    ↪Wallows
    How about: the sheer ecstacy of being in heaven reduces the temptation to sin to vanishingly small levels.

    I should become a theist.
  • Who wants to go to heaven?
    Free will can only disappear if it exists in the first place. But supposing it does, what makes you think free will necessarily disappears?
  • Exciting theories on the origin of the universe
    As a non-physicist and non-theist, I think these speculative hypotheses are interesting in two respects:1) they expand the possibilities we can consider - e.g. showing that a finite past is feasible; 2) they refute arguments from ignorance regarding the "need" for a creator.

    That said, I feel strongly that we (non-physicists) ought not to embrace any specific hypothesis. None are established physics, and probably none are actually true. They are possible, but there's unknowns in physics that need to be filled before any cosmological hypothesis can become accepted physics. It's fun to extrapolate from them, but we shouldn't get so overconfident that we think we've got it all figured out.

    One guy I read suggested simply that the laws of physics are most fundamental. — Gregory
    Either that guy is a physicist doing a bad job of metaphysics, or that statement is incomplete. Laws of physics are typically described as equations, but it doesn't make sense to consider equations (alone) as the fundamental basis of the universe. The equations are not abstractions that exercise control over reality; rather they describe how material things behave.
  • Do Neural Codes Signify Conscious Content?
    how do I distinguish a signal indicating the existence of a condition causing pain from a signal that says only that a pain receptor is firing? Since they are one and the same signal, I do not see how I can. — Dfpolis
    When a pain receptor is fired, the mind experiences it as the quale "pain". That is the nature of the mental experience. In effect, the signal passes through a transducer that converts the physical signal into a mental experience.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    :lol:
  • Do Neural Codes Signify Conscious Content?
    I am not arguing for solipsism. I take as a given that we are conscious of objects other than ourselves. Rather than questioning this datum, I am trying to understand the dynam­ics making it possible — Dfpolis
    I agree, but how does this allow us to distinguish body states from external states? — Dfpolis
    I suggest that it's a consequence of the neural connections being different. Consider how we distinguish the location of a pain in the left knee - it's a consequence of the specific connections from peripheral nerves to specific areas of the central nervous system, wherein we become consciously aware of the pain's location. Even after the pain is gone, the memory of the pain is unique from other conscious experiences. Visual and auditory information are also unique, and processed through unique neural paths, and this maps to conscious experiences that are also unique.

    You referenced Plantinga, so perhaps you're familiar with "properly basic beliefs". Our "beliefs" about the external world are basic, baked into the mechanism (or support structure) that produces (or supports) consciousness. (I'll add that they are properly basic, because they are a consequence of evolutionary development: a functionally accurate grasp of the external world is advantageous. This is the core of my refutation of his EAAN).
  • Do Neural Codes Signify Conscious Content?
    Communication (including: data, encoding, code, message, transmission, conveyance, reception, decoding, information) is a good analogy for the sensation process if a physical (as opposed to only semantic) type is acknowledged. — Galuchat
    It's a useful analogy in some contexts, but it may not be the best analogy for analyzing the ontology of mind. For example, we aren't going to find a physical structure that corresponds to a packet of data (from perception) or of decomposable information (like the logcal constructs that define a concept). That is not sufficient grounds to dismiss physicalism; it may just mean we need a different paradigm.
  • Coronavirus
    ↪schopenhauer1
    Look on the bright side: had China not had their one-child policy, there would be more Chinese people today and consequently, more individuals with the virus.
  • Does the question of free will matter? Your opinion is asked
    ↪Athena
    :up:
  • Do Neural Codes Signify Conscious Content?
    Physical" means now the reality it calls to mind now. Its meaning may change over time (and has), but the present paradigms are based on our conceptual space as it now exists. Changing paradigms involves redefining our conceptual space, and a consequent redefinition of terms such as "physical" and "natural." — Dfpolis
    I don't think it requires redefining "physical" and "natural", it means reconsidering the nature of our thoughts. A visual image is something distinct from the object seen, it's a functionally accurate representation of the object. In general, our conceptual basis for a thought is based on the way things seem to be, but the seemings may be illusory. It seems as if a concept is a mental object, but when employed in a thought, it may more accurate to describe it as a particular reaction, or memory of a reaction: process and feeling, rather than object.
  • Do Neural Codes Signify Conscious Content?
    Like the problem of distinguishing self-data from object-data, this seems to intimate that we have a ca­pacity to grasp intelligibility that is not fully modeled in our present understanding. — Dfpolis
    I agree with this, and suggest this may just mean we have a problematic paradigm. E.g. reference to "information" seems problematic, because information connotes meaning, and meaning entails (conscious) understanding - which seems circular, and it doesn' seem possible to ground these concepts in something physical. That doesn't prove mind is grounded in the nonphysical, it may just be an inapplicable paradigm.

    Consciousness is that which mediates between stimulus and response. As such, we should consider the evolution of consciousness from the simplest (direct stimulus-response), to increasing complexity, and develop a paradigm that can be applied to the development of mediation processes. As far as I know, this has not been done.
  • When are we at the brink of needing new technology?
    The threat I am referring to, is the inability for human beings to find activities that suitably pass the time. — Jhn4
    Mankind has invented this forum. Problem solved.
  • When are we at the brink of needing new technology?
    when do we require new technology? When do we decide that the human race has reached stagnation and cannot collectively produce new 'content' to keep itself fresh?...
    ...I would argue that we are reaching that stage in history now, and that it poses a threat to our existence, and it is an emergency that needs tackling.     — Jhn4
    What threat(s) to our existence are you referring to?
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    ↪NOS4A2
    The hypothesis needs further testing. I suggest you help elect Bernie Sanders to test whether the stress this induces in conservatives results in their bearing more females.

    If true, it's ironic that Trump - the womanizer - is the cause of more women.
  • Infinity and Zero: do they exist?
    That’s right. The issue is this should be self-evident and the problem is people just don’t understand the words. — Zelebg
    I think it's a product of the pedagogy of mathematics, physics, logic and some related fields. We're taught that triangles and laws of physics (expressed as equations) exist. This leads us to speak of them that way, and this leads to treating them as ontic, and not just as a manner of speaking.

    From the point of view of a mathematician or physicist doing his normal work, it doesn't matter. It's convenient to treat them as existing, as a methodological principle. But when mathematician's and physicists conflate the methodological semantics with ontological claims, they've gone too far.
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