Sounds like what we are talking about is the IDEA of self, rather than an essential identity. Which, depending on what we mean by identity, there may not be one.
— Yohan

Sure. Let me know when you've made up your mind which you want to discuss. — unenlightened

I am saying that a person is all relationship. we know for instance hat all the particles of the body are replaced over a few years by new particles. So what is maintained the same over years is the structure, the arrangement of changing substances. — unenlightened

What's with the 'just' and 'merely'? Stuff is just stuff, merely stuff. Relations, arrangements, structures, are meaningful. just meaningful, merely meaningful. — unenlightened

I try to be as vague as possible, but someone has to ask. Really, trot along to a physics forum, and when you find out what stuff is, come and explain it to me. I suppose if E = mc^2 and energy is activity, then it seems that stuff is pure active relation of emptiness to strings or quarks or fuck knows.

But I don't have to care about that. For the convenience of human understanding, light and matter is stuff.

Wouldn't then the definition of the world be "The collection of all particles of matter/energy"?

Absolutely not. It's the relations that matter, not the matter itself. Music is just vibrations in the air you think? No, I say, that's noise; music is vibrations in a relationship. — unenlightened

P1. There is stuff.
P2. Stuff is related.
P3. Relations are not more stuff. — unenlightened

The problem is how you are going to arrive at an epistemology with no notion whatsoever of ontology. While I agree that speculating on ontology in detail isn't useful, we need to at least consider the question of what information is. If we don't want to conclude that information isn't real (which would lead to Solipism) then there must be something ontological to this information. — Echarmion

↪Yohan And what exactly do you think ontology is, or what the word means - that makes a difference. The word itself appears from its roots to mean knowledge of being - so far so good. But being itself has no differentia. And thus it is more than a little difficult to figure out just what "knowledge" of being is knowledge of. What do you say? — tim wood

↪Yohan Yeah, silly buggers. They're a bit like the folk who think they have to specify that letters can't read themselves, presumably to guard against sentence sentience... — Banno

Stove's gem again. This post cannot refer to itself without a mind to interpret it, therefore it cannot refer to itself. — Banno

↪Yohan
Define what it is to be the post, and then define what it is referencing the post. You might find that part of the post is referencing the whole. So a thing cannot reference it self, but can use part of itself to reference itself, like using your fingerprint. — Harry Hindu

Yep, your post refers to itself. — jorndoe

Except that isn't the case. You read the above, you thought about it, you referred to past thoughts and experiences, decided what you wanted to convey, thought about it, worded it in what you thought we be an efficacious way again based on past experience, and posted the above. There is a distinct process A > B > C > D in what you did that involved weighing up alternatives and choosing relative to your frame of reference, i.e. based on your experience and reasoning capabilities, whittled down all possibilities to one without external bias. — Kenosha Kid

Before you can claim consciousness depends on matter, you have to clearly define matter and conciousness. Science has not defined either adequately. It doesn't know what we are looking at, nor what is looking.
This is plainly obvious for all to see.
As far as we can tell, its impossible to know anything about objective reality. Science has not revealed a single objective truth as of yet, only subjective observations (repeated observations sure. But no amount of subjective observation will change the fact that its subjective) — debd

An acceptable definition must be clear, plausible, and internally consistent. It must also either be in correspondence with our intuitions or be supported by arguments that show our intuitions are mistaken.

Brain function is clearly not more fundamental than brain. For brain function, you need a brain. The opposite is not true. — Kenosha Kid

In neuroscience, brain function is mind. — Kenosha Kid

1. If you wish to claim that a mental activity that corresponds to a brain activity is not causally linked, one has to reproduce the success of neuroscience at explaining such correlations without the benefit using what is apparently to neuroscientists accurate, predictive and obvious. It's a difficult position to be in. — Kenosha Kid

2. Otherwise one ends up in a turf war that dualism can only lose. You might accept that yes that brain activity does indeed describe a particular mental activity, but that's -not all that mind is-. As neuroscience explains more and more, this separable dualistic component must necessarily retreat, else resort to (1) above. — Kenosha Kid

An experience being had by nobody is an experience not being had at all, and an experience being had of nothing is again an experience not being had at all. — Pfhorrest

one cannot doubt that an experience of doubt is being had, and so that some kind of experience is being had. — Pfhorrest

But I then say that the concept of an experience is inherently a relational one: someone has an experience of something. An experience being had by nobody is an experience not being had at all, and an experience being had of nothing is again an experience not being had at all. This indubitable experience thus immediately gives justification to the notion of both a self, which is whoever the someone having the experience is, and also a world, which is whatever the something being experienced is. — Pfhorrest

And that's just brains. There's toasters, rope, jelly, shoes, trees, water, air, chinken nungents, mud, sand, oil, car keys, bedsheets, cups, and so on, all material things that show no evidence of thought, that we would be astonished to discover had thoughts. And no evidence of thoughts without some material foundation. — Kenosha Kid

And no evidence of thoughts without some material foundation. — Kenosha Kid

I suggest you get the essence of the Republic by Plato. You don't have to read the entire danged book itself, just Google it. — god must be atheist

You are a brilliant mind: you reinvented the wheel that was first described 2500 years ago, and constantly remindered. This is actually brilliance, to come to the same conclusion as Socrates, without prior knowledge of his teachings. Well done. (I am NOT being facetious.) — god must be atheist

Sorry...I got carried away. You asked about the “origin of the concept “reason””, which is easy enough to answer: understanding. Understanding is the source of all concepts, but the question remains as to whether reason is a concept. The argument has been made that a definition is sufficient to justify the possibility of a concept, but we find so many definitions for reason that conceptual veracity for it diminishes accordingly. — Mww

Explain away if you’re so inclined; no argument from me.......promise.

Yes, I favor idealism of a certain sort, along other disciplines. But that doesn’t matter here, cuz I’m not arguing anything. Just listening, even though I might ask a question or two. — Mww

Direct experience does not reveal an external physical world.
— Yohan

Why wouldn’t it?
—————-

You actually have to assume metaphysical physicalism in order to have the illusion of experiencing an external physical world.
— Yohan

What if I don’t want my experience illusory? — Mww

But if I truly didn't exist before, yet now I do, then I came into being from nothing...
— Yohan

The one does not necessarily follow from the other. While true you didn’t exist at one time, and did at another, doesn’t mean you came from nothing. Granting that the mechanics of standard reproduction gives the body, and if no mind is possible without the body, it follows that the possibility of mind is given from the certainty of the body. One would be forced to show how mind absolutely cannot arise from body, or, show how body is insufficient for mind to arise from it, to disallow that it does, which only then makes room for coming into being of mind from nothing. — Mww

So no need of the arrow of time? There is no content expectation from pre-existence to existence, but if from post-existence to existence holds, then there should be content expected from the former to the latter. Post-existence implies an existence already done, then to return to it should bring the content with it. If there is no such implication, and the return from post- has no content, how can it be said it is a return at all? — Mww

Which is it....all things or possible things? All things except impossibilities, or all things that can exist, which is the same as all possible things that exist, do exist? If all possible things actually exist, they are not merely possible. In which case, the proposition is the same as all things that exist, exist, a mere worthless tautology, true by meaning alone and having absolutely no particular knowledge derivable from it. — Mww