Not given materialism, it’s not. It’s actually impossible… but by assuming materialism is false, you can conclude materialism is false… that’s not shocking.
If you were to demonstrate the existence of such zombies, I’d say you’d have falsified materialism… merely imagining one, does not do it.
As this state of affairs is made impossible given materialism… this too, just assumes materialism is false.
Consider that knowledge must be physical as there is no other element for it to be. Mary would have to BE all physical facts to know all facts.
Yes it does, if you mean “explain” in the sense of understanding it’s structure and function…
What it feels like to BE, can only be known by BEING, however… and all materialism adds to that tautology, is that BEING is physical.
Mad Man— it seems to me you are being dogmatic and refusing to see the possibility that it is consciousness IS what Being fundamentally is. And by saying that I wish to make it clear I’m not a dualist. We see the world as hard stuff because that’s the way our sensory-cognitive processing system is designed to see it. If you don’t wish to entertain propositions other than your strictly, ratonalized but unexplained materialist assumption then why continue the discussion? I’m not into the kind of hateful things people say when they disagree around here. Love you man!
So, if you can keep an open mind, here Giulio Tononi presents his Integrated Information Theory and Its Implications for Free Will youtu.be/0hex5katLGk Dr. Christof Koch, one of the world’s leading neuroscientists in the field of consciousness research, considers Tononi’s theory the best materialist theory of consciousness available today. Watch the amazing video and we can talk about it.
Daniel Dennett vs Keith Ward • Are we more than matter? Mind, consciousness and free will
To Dennett we are merely highly sophisticated machines with consciousness as an epiphenomenal gloss. He’s so comfortable and confident about it that he finds Ward’s metaphysical idealism amusing. Ward thinks the existence of a conscious free subject makes moral responsibility are possible. Both have to explain why reality is not like appears. If they had been looking for common ground, there it was. Maybe if we wish to make progress in dialogue that’s what we need to do. It would mean going against our natural tendency to fight for our side which in this case is our status quo way of seeing things. Entertaining that possibility reveals what is at stake . In the case of these two guys, they’ve built their careers on their metaphysical positions. So it would take more than a good argument from the other side to get them to change their positions. Reputation then is antithetical to an open mind.
I don’t actually disagree that consciousness is what BEING ME fundamentally IS, but I don’t think everything that IS, is me. It’s not another commitment that makes me reject the solipsism which birthed that premise… It’s the fact that this conceptual scheme you’re presenting me with simply does not adequately describe the reality that I am experiencing.
There’s a reason we use maps and concepts are like maps. Though they don’t often depict things from our perspective, by assuming another perspective they give us greater sight than we naturally have… and we can tell if they are accurate by whether or not they guide us true. Making a fuss about how the map isn’t itself the locations on it, as though this were some great revelation, is not a problem with the map, nor reason to think it’s inaccurate, much less cause to be rid of it.
There is generally speaking two criteria by which any concept can be demonstrated to be true or false… one is if it’s internally consistent or coherent, and the other is evidence, which requires it to be falsifiable. Materialism is easily falsifiable, it renders clear expectations that could fail to be met, and we have yet more experiments to run, any of which could disprove it. As it continually fails to be disproven, its truth value increases in probability approaching certainty. The second criteria is INTERNAL consistency. That is to say, if you wish to disprove it, you have to assume it’s true, then show how it produces a contradiction. You have accomplished nothing, by assuming it’s false and then generating a contradiction with it being true… the only defense it needs from such an assault, is to reprimand the fool who made it.
I have given you my criteria for reconsidering… you may well be upset with me for not making it easy for you, but I don’t suppose it should be easy for you, if its a well considered position. Your version of epistemology may well prioritize other factors to what I consider relevant. I’ll concede any day of the week that my sole priority when it comes to the truth value of concepts is their navigational utility and if you’re merely claiming your map offers something other than navigational utility, that is better than mine… I’ll likely agree with you. That won’t change my priorities, I won’t use your map, but we’ll get to understanding, at least… which may be the best we can hope for.
I’ll consider materialism successfully defended, you will know why someone would subscribe to materialism other than stupidity or dogmatism… and the question posed in this thread will have been answered.
P.S.
I’ve already seen and recall enjoying the Dennett vs Ward discussion… good stuff
There is no solipsism involved. In reality there is only one consciousness. It only seems to be separate and localized and centered in each one of us. The world of perception is an apparent world, bound by time, space, and causation. We are involved in the evolution of nature, and manifestation of the absolute consciousness. that does not change, or re-evolve. Infinite perfection is latent in the tiniest one celled organism. It is an objectification produced by the mind which is itself objectified as the brain. From the amoeba to human the change is not in consciousness itself — that remains the same, unchangeable — but the change occurs in the objectification according to laws of perception and cognition.
Concepts are mental representations. According to cognitive science, conceptual structure arises from our sensorimotor experience and the neural structures that give rise to it. The very notion of “structure” in our conceptual system is characterized by such things as image schemas and motor schemas. Our brains are structured so as to project activation patterns from sensorimotor areas to higher cortical areas. Projections of this kind allow us to conceptualize abstract concepts on the basis of inferential patterns used in sensorimotor processes that are directly tied to the body. The structure of concepts includes prototypes of various sorts: typical cases, ideal cases, social stereotypes, salient exemplars, cognitive reference points, end points of graded scales, nightmare cases, and so on. Each type of prototype uses a distinct form of reasoning. Most concepts are not characterized by necessary and sufficient conditions.
The evidence is all phenomenal and therefore processed by the perceptual - cognitive mental system I described above. Thereby the world is objectified. What it is in itself is beyond the limitations of the brain we can’t say. It exceeds the limitations of language which can only point to it and that not literally because space too is an apriori based product of the brain as Kant showed . It’s even beyond mathematics which too is a method of objectication which requires the a priori structures of time and space.
Okay well your concepts seems to work adequately for your "navigational utility. " My concern is primarily with learning how to release people from the things that keep them in psycho-social bondage beginning with myself and working from there. If I can actually have that effect on sentient beings for the remainder of my days as a psycho-somatic entity I will be fulfilled.
I have already acknowledged your intelligence. I think you thought I was being sarcastic. I’m confident you have many reasons for holding to materialism.
Dennett certainly held his own against Ward as well I expected. I thought that Ward’s conception of a human being was higher than Dennett’s. Ward thinks that we are conscious, free moral agents whereas Dennett thinks we are determined and mechanical. Consciousness to him may be strictly computational. He floated information theory as an explanation. That’s inadequate IMO. Dennett doesn’t like to admit that everything he proposes is reductive. But it is.
Aove I posted the links to Giulio Tononi presenting and discussing his Integrated Information Theory so we could get an idea of the actual current status of what is considered the avant garde of research into the putative material bases of consciousness. The theory takes as input what Tononi calls ‘complexes’: closed-cycle neural processes in the brain, each entailing a given anatomic organization. The amount of information integrated by a complex, represented by the variable Φ, is then calculated for each complex based on its anatomic organization. As I understand it, the idea is that, when Φ crosses a certain threshold, the complex somehow becomes conscious. The problem is he doesn’t explain how or why that would happen.
So if that’s where the research is at then Dennett’s materialism is based on faith and hope in the future whereas presently there is a lack of evidence. Of course if my “evidence” is insufficient I could be accused of a kind of “God of the gaps” position which is threatened by the same future possibility when AIs become conscious.
My favorite movie “Blade Runner” dramatizes that exact scenario. I recently watched the sequel to Blade Runner which wasn’t as good as the original IMO, but it continues to spin out this theme which is still fascinating.
Felix… I don’t know how to say this politely. I honestly, without meaning to be snide or insulting, cannot process what it is you’re describing. I understand the individual words you’ve strung together, but the picture you’re painting is incoherent and so alien to any experience of mine, except perhaps a fever dream, that I don’t know how to utilize this conceptual scheme, even if I were to adopt it… it is quite literally, meaningless to me.
Perhaps if you expressed it differently it would make sense… perhaps I’m simply too stupid to comprehend, or perhaps it truly is gibberish… I don’t know which.
Yup… but there’s a compounding effect as we establish concepts and models that allow us to build on them.
That our senses are what give us limited and sometimes flawed access to a physical, independent, objective world, is one of the earliest ones, and unbelievably well evidenced… so we build on that.
Conversationally receding back to ignorance so as to reevaluate these concepts, won’t provide new evidence so as to yield different results… phenomenal or otherwise.
I have no objection to that endeavor and in fact wish you the best of luck… but everything in moderation.
Reason is necessary for collaboration, but is also restrictive… Responsibility is binding, but if you release people from it, it’s both destructive and cruel.
Patterns constrain, but to lose them entirely and you have chaos…
I don’t actually agree with your assessment of Dennett… but this may not be a big gap between us, because to be fair, I’m not entirely in Dennett’s camp.
I don’t think the science is anywhere near done on this topic and while we currently have many hypotheses, I don’t believe we have anything remotely approaching a scientific theory of mind.
Like I said… there are many avenues still left for us to experimentally disprove materialism.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t disqualify in advance, any untestable hypothesis… precisely because they are untestable, as I prefer ignorance to delusion
I think that the metaphors Kastrup uses are helpful, even if they are only metaphors. The whirlpool in the flow of a river, even if it seems to be permanent, is only the river. The local consciousness in each of us is compared by Kastrup to a vortex in the consciousness “at large” and manifests itself in a certain way with its own characteristics and behaves like an “alter” - a dissociated self-state - which we know in multiple personality disorder or dissociative identity disorder, only within a larger context.
If we study living things, we notice in many of them signs of an awareness in different degrees. The interaction with humans seems to further that awareness and help the brain of animals to identify with situations that do not belong within the normal range of activities. It is often connected to food, but there are learning processes at work that indicate a progress beyond the immediately apparent food dependency. This suggests that the local consciousness we are talking about may even be present in animals.
It is the vastness of the world, let alone the universe, and the consequence of the hypothesis, that either boggles the mind or moves us to reject it, because it is beyond our imagination. However, I am sure that we are on to something. I’ll have to react to the rest of the post later …
I think that it is normal for people to have difficulty in getting their heads around this, because it goes against much of what had been suggested as the proven material basis of being. The fact that numerous great minds throughout the last two centuries have doubted this is ignored because, in general, people didn’t understand anything they said, and had to just accept that in their fields they had made great discoveries. The fact that these people made a connection to Advaita/Non-Duality in the ancient traditions suffered under the fact that it was so foreign to western thought.
I think that what a lot of people have in common, who embrace this view, are people who, back in seventies and eighties had discovered Alan Watts, or the numerous other people who brought Buddhism and Zen to the west. Having comparisons to contemporary views that seem to have been influenced by a struggle between Monotheism and Atheism, people like you and myself have been able to ascertain the general dogmatism of western society and contradicted it. It is a bit like what Owen Barfield noted as paradigm changes in the participation with reality, which brought about the axial age, then Christianity (with all of its Greek influence), and later the Reformation and the rise of science. In each case, it was met with resistance, just as violent as it is met with today (perhaps more), and science has proven itself to not be better in this regard.
Iain McGilchrist points to the fact that, as he puts it, we are being dominated by a left-hemisphere view of life, which is like spotlight vision as against floodlight vision, and concerned with particulars, and with components, and fail to see what makes those pieces become a whole. It isn’t just that we see things in a particular way, we have the ability to habitually focus away from the larger picture and fail to give ourselves the benefit of putting what we see into perspective. We are carried along by a general narrative that lays down the language we used and therefore also the concepts, which we tend to project onto what we experience. Obviously, we all do this, but it is becoming aware that we are doing this, and taking the step back to allow the right-hemisphere put things into perspective, that is important and it is habitually not done.
Of course, the biggest problem people have with this is that it isn’t something they can dissect in a lab, figuratively speaking. Materialism wants something that they can slap about, grasp and take apart. When what you are looking at is the ground of being, you just don’t have that possibility, and when you are used to left-hemisphere categorisation, something that is both the studied object and the studying person, as well as the space in which it all takes place, blows your categorisation apart.