the trixie vs. dawkins debate!

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trixie vs. dawkins debate

VS

D I am professor Richard Dawkins. I believe in Science. Not becoming anything after death is real, because that’s all we know.
That’s how far science has gone, and we know our consciousness ends at death.
Nothing happening after death is absolutely empirical. It’s the end of experience.

T Really now, are you sure? That’s not how I see it.

D Really? Well then how do you see it?

T There can be no experience of nothing, there can be no experience of nontime.
If there is no “us”, there is no experience. Therefore there can never be
no such thing as no “us”, because in order for there to be no such thing,
there has to be a thing, and in order for there to be a thing, there has
to be something that exists. And in order for there to be something that
exists there has to be a noticebale contrast. And for there to be a
noticeable contrast there has to be sentience. So there can never be
awareness of nonsentience. Youd have to be incredibly lucky to live in a
world of nonsentience, the odds would be zero. You would never know you were
there, first of all, so it would be impossible for “you” to get there since
there could not be a you, in the first place. So why do you think that when you
die, that’s it? Such a notion is impossible because you would never be able
to experience it, and there would be an infinity of possibility during that
void for consciousness and becoming to arise again. If there is an infinity
of possibility, then it is 100 percent certain that consciousness will arise again.
The only modicum of possibility of credibility you have is first by identifying
the viewer of consciousness and somehow eliminating it, and also eliminating
all known universes. Otherwise how on earth do you believe that consciousness ceases
after you die?

D I’m not really sure, when you put it like that! Go on.

T I am Ultimate Reality. If I die, and my consciousness becomes nothing,
then none of the people around me are real or were ever real or will ever be real.
If I was never them in either a past or future life, then they had no such life. You and me, you see,
I litterally have to experience you for you to be real. And if when my life
ends, that is the end, and consciousness never arises again, then you are ended too. By the way, when you think of it like this,
past and future are almost exactly the same thing.

D Interesting. That sounds a bit like solipsim though.

T I never said it was. In fact I was saying the opposite, that if you
people around me are real, then I am in fact you, in a past or future life.
If not, then you never had consciousness and never will, and solipism is true.
By you, I don’t mean your persona and memories. By you I mean “ME” the
intrinsic viewer of consciousness. Without me, there would be noone to experience
your brains thoughts. Brains would just be brains, but with noone inside watching.

D That seems a bit odd, sounds like you believe in a soul and what not. Daniel
Dennet says consciousness is an intrinsic property.

T Call it what you will. But if consciousness is an intrinsic property, shouldn’t
you be conscious of every brain in the universe? For instance, if you make an
AI, and it’s supposedly sentient, you are not suddenly conscious of the AI’s
mind. Consciousness is not intrinsic like that. In order for the AI to be
conscious, you would have to put your own consciousness in proximity to it’s
own mind and you would have to experience it’s own mind directly.
And a possible way this occurs is through death, and you are reborn
as someone else in the timeline. Anything else is solipism. And if it’s not
solipsm, you’ve created paradox. It is illogical to believe that other people
are sentient, and yet you also believe you will never directly experience
their consciousness. That is illogical and a paradox. It’s like saying there are timelines and personal
memoirres which are outside of the “youness” of Ultimate Reality, yet still exist. Has atheism become
the new religious comfort food? Believing in nothing when they die and magical
thinking of embracing paradox? So’s as they can retain their moral values
and deny the selfishness of solipism, yet comfort themselves by saying they
become nothing when they die and don’t have to live out anyone else’s miserable life?
It seems religion affects even you, Mr. Dawkinson.

T If you believe that you are some how sentient, but yet I am not you,
not experiencing you, then you have yourself quite a paradox. Paradoxes
are sort of like delusions.

D Well speaking of delusions, did you read my book?

T Hahaha

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This isn’t even slightly true. There are very many things that don’t exist, and it’s true (and equivalent) to say there is no such thing as them.

Unless you’re talking of “exists” in the sense of conceptually, but to say there is no such thing as something is to say that a concept has no counterpart in reality.

Again, untrue. You as a sentient being can be aware of the non-sentience of other things by contrast with the things you know are sentient. A dead body shows no signs of sentience.

The rest seems similarly confused, I’m afraid.

3

Comparing yourself with an unrealistic caricature of Dawkins might make you feel clever, but you are not.

There is lots of evidence to show that you consciousness wholly depends on the healthy functioning of your brain.

I can go through some of the proof with you, if you are interested.

4

I would prefer the real thing. Wouldn’t it be cool if Dawkins was a real live member of this site?

Funny, because you stole the words right out of my mouth. I was going to say the same thing about you.

Profound insight you have there. Consciousness depends on the brain? Never would have guessed. So…damn…clever.

Nothing…no thing. If it is a thing, it exists, by definition. Nothing also exists, because it is a contrast of what it is not. Black space exists. Philosophy 101.

It’s you who seems to be somewhat confused, I’m afraid. You grabbed the wrong meaning from my words. First of all, your conclusions are not empirical at all, because science has never proven what is sentient, and what is not. The only thing I know for sure is sentient is myself. Thus we have the problem of solipsim. Secondly my statement you quote was unrelated to that topic, and was instead saying that for there to be a noticeable contrast, there has to be sentience, because with no sentience, a contrast cannot be noticed. Which is absolutely true.

5

True. Yet nothing that says what it is, or even where it is located. Until that is known, we cannot truly state that consciousness is not transcendent [as like other qualia/qualities in the world]. There are as was said earlier, real things which have no physical counterpart, which provokes the question; if the experiencing thing is not real, but it is our most real thing ~ the very thingness of our subjective experience, then what is real?
We can ask the same question about reality/universe, and qualia/qualities perpetuating and corresponding to physical reals.

_

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Good post.

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If nothing exists then it wouldn’t be called nothing or have the meaning that it has.

Nothing in the sense of 0 exists. But nothing outside of being 0 the number does not exist. If something is not there, it does not physically exist or perhaps even mentally depending.

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This isn’t true. In order for there to be a noticable contrast, there just has to be the possibility of sentience, not sentience. So for example, if every sentient thing died, there would still be a noticeable difference between the Sun and the Moon- there just wouldn’t be anybody to notice it.

-‘able’ is the potential to be something. Liftable means that something can be lifted, not that it is being lifted. Edible means that something can be eaten, not that it is being eaten. And so on. Noticeable just means that something can be noticed, not that it is being noticed. So, as long as ‘noticing’ is a logically possible set of circumsatnces, things can be noticable whether there is anybody to notice them or not.

And anyway, all of that aside, I don’t see why the first premise is true at all. Maybe in order for something to be described, there has to be a notable contrast between it and something else, but Dawkins doesn’t think anybody is describing what it’s like to be dead anyway.

What you need here is an argument that in order for sentience to possibly exist, it must necessarily exist.

9

Disappointing.
There is no point arguing with a person who has failed to see when an argument has been offered that destroys her own. If she’s not willing to defend her position, and instead prefers to pretend nothing has gone wrong, then she’s failed to realise that she has lost the argument.

Time to look for a decent thread.
Maybe not on this site.

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Lev, remember, everyone on this site is wrong but you.

Noted. However, if there were no such thing as organisms which could digest carrots, carrots would not be edible. So sentience is required for something to be noticeable. And from there the potential to notice becomes valid. Without sentience the possible potential is not activated.

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In a certain sense- if everything that could digest carrots died right now, there is a sense in which carrots would cease to be edible, even though nothing changed about the carrots themselves. But that’s not the sense you use ‘noticeable’ below:

Emphasis mine. If you’re talking about the possible potential for something to be noticeable (or edible) what’s required is not that there is something, in fact, that can notice (digest) it, but only that the possibility of sentience (digestion) exists. If there was a very bright light in a universe with no eyes, then that light is not blinding in the sense that it can blind anybody in that universe as it is. But it is blinding in the sense of having the ‘possible potential to blind’, assuming the evolution of eyes is possible in that universe. Such a small thing, but I think your argument turns on it. “In order for there to be something to exist there has to be a noticable contrast” is pretty clearly talking about potential possibility from what I can tell- that contrast needs to be merely a difference which could be potentially be noticed. Actually being noticed isn’t required.

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Would it still be the case if it was no longer possible for sentience? IOW the potential even, it seems to me, is dependent on the existence of eaters of carrots, given that it is a dynamic between the eaters and the eaten which an adjective like ‘edible’ seems to be positing as ‘in’ the carrot.

If seems to me ‘edibility’ or being edible is about a relationship. It is not about an internal quality of carrots. Everything in the universe, as far as we know, is edible to some kind of (not currently noticable by us) life form. Giant sun-eating interstellar aware clouds, perhaps.

I am guessing that there is a way to show that something could be both A and not A with this kind of attribution of qualities. But I will have to mull over an example.

13

YOu may not notice any signs of sentience, but that does not mean you are aware of unsentience. YOu can conclude the non-sentience of things, but you cannot be aware of it. (to be clear: you can be aware, of course, of your conclusion or sense, but not of the non-sentience) It’s sort of the negative of the problem of other minds. Unless one can directly experience other minds - say it is like connecting to a palpable beehive of thoughts and feelings - but when one ‘feels’ into a dead body, one feels the non-sentience. It is perceptible like seeing a circus of seeing a blackness or void.

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Are diamonds edible? Certainly we can’t eat them, and as far as I know, no other sort of earthly life can either. So ‘No’ is the answer a nutritionist or maybe a zoologist would give. But if we’re talking about in the universal sense, of course neither of us knows whether or not there is, out there, some diamond-eating critter. If you want to give a better answer than ‘who knows’, it seems to me you have to look at the qualties of a diamond. They are very hard, and quite rare. But also, they are physical objects, and they are composed of carbon- a building block of life as we know it. If I had 25th century genetic engineering technology and wanted to design a mineral eating microbe for whatever reason, seems to me that diamond would very much be on the menu, and in that case my answer would be ‘yes’. What I’m getting at is, I don’t think the question of potentiality, and thus, the objects qualities can be seperated from issues like these.

Or, as far as we know, Earth contains the only organisms that do eating, and edibility is limited to the things earthlings can eat. In order to present your situation, you have to talk potentialities- the Moon is potentially edible because you can imagine a logically coherent thing (Cloud Monsters) capable of eating it. If, as it turns out, there are no such things as cloud monsters, the Moon is still potentially edible as long as your cloud-monster idea isn’t logically incoherent, right?

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I think that is what I am saying. Which means that edibility in this kind of usage add no new information when used in describing something. If potential is included for some existence that might allow for edibility is included in the conception of the term.

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I’m aware of many things besides immediate sensory input; in fact, there’s a strong cognitive argument that I’m not “aware” of direct sensory input. I don’t think saying I’m aware of your sentience is particularly charitable :wink:

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I don’t quite get the wryness at the end. I can’t see the objection to my point, but perhaps you are not disagreeing. In whatever sense we talk about being aware of things where the sense are involved, we do no include an awareness of sentience. We sense things that we conclude indicate sentience. (one way to look at my objection is through Western history where sentience was withheld often from even other humans and women, slowly moving to animals, and these days plants are being considered potentially aware. A ‘like us’ (white guys) bias was the default, and the problem of other minds was implicit. That’s fine if you want to shift over to arguments saying one is not really aware of sensory input, but this, it seems to me does not support a position that one is aware of sentience. A modern based on scientific models or perception should, it seems to me, lead to a distinction between being aware of a bright light or seeing a shape moving somewhere in front of one AND being aware of sentience. A qualitative difference. Perhaps neither is direct awareness, but there is still a difference between them, in that paradigm. I am sure there are philosophical positions that might come close to saying that both are contructed and in the same way. I think that that latter assertion (that it is the same way) is a stretch, and I wonder if you even have that position. If you don’t it doesn’t matter, in this particular discussion between those of us here, whether there is a strong cognitive argument that one is not aware of sensory input. If you do believe it then we can follow that line and see where it gets us. I think that strong cognitive line suffers from homoculus problems, unless it just tries to unravel all notions of a self, but maybe we can avoid that discussion if you don’t adhere to that one.

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I see this as illogical, but not as a paradox. Surely it isn’t even possible for something to be both illogical, and a paradox?

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The argument was that noticing a difference requires sentience (to do the noticing) - and that therefore there can’t be an awareness of nonsentience. Going with that - to me odd - conclusion, if we can’t be aware of a lack of sentience then we can’t notice the difference of sentience - there would be nothing to contrast with. Therefore, according to OP, sentience ,or not-sentience, or the dichotomy, doesn’t exist.

I’m saying that we are aware of sentience in a way that allows us to contrast with non-sentience; I don’t think that makes me a Western imperialist. At least, not by itself. (As an aside, I’d take issue with the idea that women have ever been considered non-sentient in any culture.)

I think that conflating sensory input with awareness is extremely sloppy philosophy. I’m aware of many things I have no sensory evidence for, by virtue of reasoning, and I’m not (consciously) aware of everything that my senses detect.

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I think Trixie’s argument was that you couldn’t be aware of global non-sentience. As in, it is impossible to be aware of the fact that nothing in the universe is non-sentient.

Might be wrong but that’s certainly how I read it.