You are interpreting the sensory input. That’s all you can do. The senses don’t interpret. The brain does not initiate thought from nothing – it does not create. Thoughts come from outside of you. The mind is outside of you. It is the mind outside of you (the world mind – an outside agency) that contains all the knowledge that feeds the intellect and forms you. You are making use of that (sphere of accumulating knowledge passed down through the generations) to create an identity, to assign a meaning to ’you’.
When thought is born, you are born. There is no entity ‘you’ that goes about creating objects. The subject cannot create the objects. The objects create the subject or rather the knowledge you project onto the objects creates you the subject. The important thing to realize is that the knowledge you are using to interpret the sensory input does not belong to you. It is not mine or yours. It is there in the sphere of world knowledge – all second hand stuff – and each of us picks and chooses from that. Sure it’s arbitrary, but we need it for purposes of communication and on that level only. To presume there are elements of reality there is to be exposed to self deception.
Yes, that is absolutely what I mean. Our distinctions are arbitrary when considering the unitary experience of the whole. The distinctions being a secondary inception, inevitably obscure the actual essence of the experience, hence our inability to fully explain it when we view it from such a perspective.
I almost agree, with a few caveats. The physical, for instance the brain and body, are just as much thought as they are physical. So not only are the thoughts coming from outside of you, they are you, physically. What we consider ourselves to be is both ‘physically’ and ‘mentally’ informed by what we experience to be outside and inside of us. They simply ‘show-up’ for us dualistically.
I believe furthermore, that yes, there is no entity that is ‘you’ or ‘me’, but “I” (the point in space referenced to this center of experience) do exist as a force, both creating and being created simultaneously, just as everything else is. It is a co-creation/arising that this existence is.
The thought we are talking about is created by the knowledge that is given to us. So the thought is a self-perpetuating mechanism. When I use the word self, I don’t use it in the sense used by philosophers and metaphysicians – like a self-starter, auto-perpetuating. The body is not interested in that at all. The actions of the body are responses to the stimuli, and it has no separate, independent existence of its own.
Without experience the self would not exist. Without the memory of certain experiences the self would and could be something or some one else. If the self is a self perpetuating thought then it is selecting certain events to remember and others to forget to further create itself. The experience happened only if it alters the self. The self decides. Or that is to say memory creates the self and self decides what to remember.
The burden of proof rests on positive proof, not negative. The question is therefore a little silly.
Prove there is no Santa!
A materialist has no need to prove the non-existence of anything. The claim of materialism is the quest to assert that the investigation of the material world leads to explanation of phenomena; and so it does.
Clearly this quest has grown to include matter and energy; that matter has various states of energy due to its position, charge and motion. So far it has done a great job, casting aside the superstitions and 'divine" or immaterial causes, replacing them with clearly demonstrable and even replicable explanations.
It remains to be seen if the residue of immaterial or spiritual causes claimed by others can be proven. As yet not a single non-material cause has been validated.
So on the one hand materialism continues to be useful in debunking all other methods, and the use of non-materialistic explanations has continued to fail.
The burden of proof rests on he who wants to convince another of his stance.
Then don’t take up the challenge… oh, wait, you’re about to:
The success of the material sciences as explanation for material phenomena is a closed system. Yes, material causes prove to be excellent explanations for material effects. But prove to me that an invisible ghost psychically communicating with another invisible ghost isn’t also a causal chain of events that goes on all the time in the midst of the visible material world.
Sometimes yes, for kids’s sake. In adult kids the distinction between de-facto and de-jure interpretations of burdens of proof, is noted by arbiters, and judges alike. This is not a real court, this is a court of public opinion. Even in the court of the scientific community, there is variance here.
Okay. So for example - what is it exactly that I am supposed to disprove? And what makes anyone think I have to disprove a thing to validate a position of materialism?
In the case of de facto, people are not in the habit of feeling obliged to have to disprove every fiction and fantasy that people can imagine.
If a black cat crosses my path and a person tells me it is bad luck, I’m not obligated in any way to refute or accept that, not even if i get run over by a car five minutes later. There is nothing that causally links the two events.
Human progress is not measured by people believing is superstitions, but by finding direct causative links that accord with and help build a picture of natural laws.
In the case of de jure,, I am not asking you to disprove that you did not pay someone to murder your neighbour. And law provides that you do not have to - and for very good reason. It is simply not possible to disprove a thing that did not happen. You can try to say, that you did not pay anyone anything, but once again there is always the possibility that you had some cash and met a someone. No one can account for every second of the day. Think it through.
The first think you ask,“how”, “when”, and “where” were you supposed to have done this thing? The burden of proof is not with you, but with the accuser to state the case.
Where there are specific claims of ghosts, and spiritualist mediums communicating with the dead, the number of successful de-bunkings are great. Not once has any claim to spirituality survived the simplest test to verify it. And for generations people have provided cash rewards for any inexplicable event. The Great Houdini’s cash offer was never taken, and Randi’s million dollar challenge is still in the bank.
On the other hand the claims of science are replicable, demonstrable and can be verified by anyone at anytime.
Take your choice!
Nope, but I feel no need to convince you otherwise.
No, but I can’t prove they aren’t real and neither can you (plus they’e material).
Oh, it’s not about validating materialism, it’s about falsifying immaterialism. What I disagree with is the all too common line (which I believe comes out of logical positivism) that goes: if the existence of X can’t be proved, X doesn’t exist. ← This is bullshit.
Even the results of particle accelerator experiments?
On top of that, de facto has actually further watered down to a lower threshold of by virtue of public policy. It dictates in certain narrow cases. For instance, no one argues about spirituality anymore, generally, but in some cases where the application of believes in spirituality is well warranted, it is otherwise. Such can be the case for the existence of God. It would be cruel and unusual punishment for people to present a counter proof predicates that, in those cases, God would imply a need to invent Him. A person brought up in a traditionally Muslim belief system, and is at death’s door, to point to the absurd notion of such belief, would counter indicated.
It does not create a burden , but it does imply the exercise of humanity and compassion.
Not so, just standing up to the challenge like I said I would… but you seem to be saying you’re not even taking up the challenge. I’m wondering what you’re doing here then. Is it just to point out how silly the question is?
Which is different from saying it can be proved not to exist.
According to the Wikipedia article on logical positivism, “only statements verifiable either logically or empirically would be cognitively meaningful.” So to say anything about an unverifiable (or unfalsifiable) entity, including that it exists, would be meaningless. Ergo, if it can’t be proven, it can’t be said to exist. Some take that line a step further and claim that if it can’t be said to exist, it can be said not to exist, which is what I’m calling bullshit if for no other reason than what LP claims is that nothing can be said of its existence or non-existence… but I’m not a logical positivist.
Hmm… well then maybe I’ll get my 5 year old daughter to take a jaunt over to our local particle accelerator and see if she can replicate the splitting of a proton into two up quarks and one down quark.
gib,
I’m not sure the word ‘exist’ can be defined in a way that makes the question non-trivial. You could define ‘exist’ in a way that it makes it true by definition that immaterial things don’t exist, and you could define it in another way that makes it trivially true that they do. Do you have a definition of ‘exist’ in mind such that the question you pose is controversial as opposed to solved by definition?
I could be incorrect, but I was under the impression that a materialists holds the position that all phenomena is attributal to or an agency of material, in which case, things which someone else might consider immaterial (e.g. Consciousness or thought), are wholly explained in terms of having or being of substance. It is essentially the position that only materiality exists (or maybe more accurately “that which exists can only be explained in terms of or through materiality”). I think Gib is interested in someone who holds this position to prove it.
So, I’d rephrase the challenge. Instead of proving the nonexistence of immateriality, prove that only materiality exists, or prove why phenomena should only be defined or understood as having some material existence.
Not really. Try: objectively out there. Or: independent of me (but that would make me non-existent). How would you define “existence” in the everyday hum-drum layman’s way of understanding it?
“Material” to me means made of matter (no very controversial, I know), and is a subset of “physicality” by which I mean taking a position and/or volume in space (which could include space itself).
I’ve never found it exceptionally difficult to imagine forms of existence by which things don’t take positions or volume in space yet have a there-ness to them. The Mosaic God who claims to permeate (or is) all of existence in the phrase “I am that I am”–everywhere and nowhere at once–to have this sort of existence. Also, abstract principles and truths, moral right and wrong, are sometimes thought to be, by Platonist, by moral objectivists, really “out there” without taking up positions or volume in space. So I don’t think I’m alone in being able to conceptualize these kinds of things (though believing in them is another matter).
That might be one way to approach it, though I’m not too keen on redefining terms.
To tell you the truth, I’m not sure I remember why I started this thread. There’s a reason I called it a zombie thread. If it had a grave stone, it would read: Mon Jun 22, 2009 to Mon Jul 26, 2010. That was 5 frickin’ years ago!
I think I only wanted to taunt and tease the materialists, posing a challenge which they knew they couldn’t meet yet would be dying to try.
The reason why I ask about definitions is because we're in a tricky spot right now. Since the first materialists, science has had to admit to the existence of all kinds of immaterial things- forces and energies and waves, and perhaps laws and numbers and so on. The physicality of today is nothing at all like that of a couple centuries past that thought the universe was just itty bitty indestructible pebbles and the spaces between them. These days, really the only thing the materialist is denying the existence of is 'religious-type stuff'.
BTW, from an epistemological perspective, you are absolutely right about the burden of proof- it’s on the one with the desire to convince somebody of something, clearly.
