Quote:So let's say that all possible world views must incorporate the possibility of the existence of ideas, and that everything humans ever experience, including the experience of knowledge, is experienced as an idea (basically by definition).

We'd agreed to that -long- ago, but it's uninformative /w regards to proving a metaphysical claim and more specifically uninformative with regards to any implication-sans-proof between idealism or materialism.  What's the problem...and does idealism incorporate this, as materialism does with comp and information theories, or does it simply state their existence as brute fact? That would be important, to me.

Generally, when one model is capable of explaining what another refers to as a brute fact...I abandon the latter in favor of the former.

(September 25, 2015 at 7:54 am)Rhythm Wrote: We'd agreed to that -long- ago, but it's uninformative /w regards to proving a metaphysical claim and more specifically uninformative with regards to any implication-sans-proof between idealism or materialism.   What's the problem...and does idealism incorporate this, as materialism does with comp and information theories, or does it simply state their existence as brute fact?  That would be important, to me.

Generally, when one model is capable of explaining what another refers to as a brute fact...I abandon the latter in favor of the former.

I find the explanations of physicalism with regards to (for example) mind to be so question begging that they are equally useless-- no matter how detailed they are. Saying "the brain causes mind" feels right, but actually it's a non-sequitur if you don't know where our experiences of brains ultimately come from. . . and no, you don't get to just say, "the brain, of course," because circles are bad.

(September 25, 2015 at 9:04 am)bennyboy Wrote:

(September 25, 2015 at 7:54 am)Rhythm Wrote: We'd agreed to that -long- ago, but it's uninformative /w regards to proving a metaphysical claim and more specifically uninformative with regards to any implication-sans-proof between idealism or materialism.   What's the problem...and does idealism incorporate this, as materialism does with comp and information theories, or does it simply state their existence as brute fact?  That would be important, to me.

Generally, when one model is capable of explaining what another refers to as a brute fact...I abandon the latter in favor of the former.

I find the explanations of physicalism with regards to (for example) mind to be so question begging that they are equally useless-- no matter how detailed they are.  Saying "the brain causes mind" feels right, but actually it's a non-sequitur if you don't know where our experiences of brains ultimately come from. . . and no, you don't get to just say, "the brain, of course," because circles are bad.

You said that world views must incorporate

Quote:the existence of ideas

Check -  Comp and information theory explain how the material -could- support them, even if our mind does it Some Other Way™ or is made of Some Other Stuff™.

and...

Quote:and that everything humans ever experience, including the experience of knowledge, is experienced as an idea (basically by definition).

Check - Comp and information theory explain how the material -could- support this experience, even if our mind does it Some Other Way™ or is made of Some Other Stuff™.
.

Neither of these things -are- but if you cannot provide an idealists explanation of mind - then why would it matter if there -were- no materialist explanation? How important can this be to you?

(September 25, 2015 at 9:46 am)Rhythm Wrote: Neither of these things -are- but if you cannot provide an idealists explanation of mind - then why would it matter if there -were- no materialist explanation?  How important can this be to you?

I see physicalism as essentially exclusive, and idealism as essentially inclusive, and that's why the difference is important. "Show me the evidence or stfu" with regards to issues of mind, or philosophical issues like those of morality or of beauty, ignores an important facet of human experience-- that not all experiences are sharable or reproducible. To idealism, this is nothing at all: some ideas are sharable, some are personal, and so long as we agree which ideas those are, we're peachy.

Physicalists can not really explain why matter exists, any more than idealists can explain why mind exists; brute facts are a push for all. However, the issue of compatibility weighs in favor of idealism: given mind, it's easy to explain physicalism in those terms, since all our observations and inferences are made in mind. Given physicalism, it is very hard to explain mind: in fact it's not even possible to determine that any physical system, inclucing other people, IS mindful, without the question-begging acceptance of correlates as sufficient evidence.

As for IT, it seems to me that it does a better job of explaining how the brain, which seems to have no conscious "center," nevertheless allows for the sensation of a unified experience, than to explain why qualia exist rather than not. If you don't see it that way, maybe we should make a thread about IT, because it's deep enough to make it worth while.

(September 11, 2015 at 2:31 pm)Rational AKD Wrote: Definitions:
Mind- simply that which produces consciousness. you can think of it as a product of material interactions or its own substance, but either way it cannot be denied mind exists.
Argument:
1. a metaphysically solipsist world (a world where only a mind exists) cannot be proven false due to epistemic limitations.
2. it is unreasonable to presume solipsism is impossible given 1, therefore it must be reasonably granted solipsism is possible.
3. given 2, it is possible for mind to exist in a solipsist (immaterial) world while it is not for matter.
4. there is therefore something that it true of mind but not of matter. this means they cannot be the same thing and mind is not reducible to matter.
5. substance dualism has been proven false due to the interaction problem (substances can only interact via shared properties and substances cannot be fundamental and share properties).
6. therefore, all is mind and monistic idealism entails.

Your assertion in 4 that mind and matter are separable on the assumption that solipsism is a logical possibility is unwarranted. From here you merely beg the question. Why should we grant that simply because the mind can imagine itself to exist independent of any physical components then such a state must be actually possible? What would a mind that precedes matter be like? How could you even begin to speak of its functions or what purposes it might serve? Does it conceive of objects that it has had no experiences of? Does it recall when it is in contemplation and forget when it is distracted? Upon what basis? If mind is inextricable from matter, and neither 1 nor 2 necessitates that that should not be the case, then 3 is not true. How have you solved the "interaction problem" as you call it? If the mind produces only immaterial objects which it then perceives in differentiated form from objects of thought, impelled to call the former material and the latter immaterial, you've merely rephrased "matter" and "mind" as "immaterial A" and "immaterial B," as their properties still differ in all of the respects in which they appear to, and from which the "interaction problem" becomes a problem in the first place. So, what does that solve?

(September 26, 2015 at 10:14 pm)bennyboy Wrote:

(September 25, 2015 at 9:46 am)Rhythm Wrote: Neither of these things -are- but if you cannot provide an idealists explanation of mind - then why would it matter if there -were- no materialist explanation?  How important can this be to you?

I see physicalism as essentially exclusive, and idealism as essentially inclusive, and that's why the difference is important.  "Show me the evidence or stfu" with regards to issues of mind, or philosophical issues like those of morality or of beauty, ignores an important facet of human experience-- that not all experiences are sharable or reproducible.  To idealism, this is nothing at all: some ideas are sharable, some are personal, and so long as we agree which ideas those are, we're peachy.

Hi Benny. I was wondering if you could clarify something for me about your position? Here you talk about issues of morality and beauty and sharable and reproducible. Is it your position that certain aspects of conscious experience, like the experience of beauty, are not hypothetically reproducible... or have I got the wrong end of the stick? In other words if you hypothetically made an exact copy of a brain in a particular state of processing, right down to the quantum level, that it would not reproduce certain conscious experiences such as beauty? This being regardless of whether it's a materialistic reality or one that acts like it is.

(September 28, 2015 at 7:43 am)emjay Wrote:

(September 26, 2015 at 10:14 pm)bennyboy Wrote: I see physicalism as essentially exclusive, and idealism as essentially inclusive, and that's why the difference is important.  "Show me the evidence or stfu" with regards to issues of mind, or philosophical issues like those of morality or of beauty, ignores an important facet of human experience-- that not all experiences are sharable or reproducible.  To idealism, this is nothing at all: some ideas are sharable, some are personal, and so long as we agree which ideas those are, we're peachy.

Hi Benny. I was wondering if you could clarify something for me about your position? Here you talk about issues of morality and beauty and sharable and reproducible. Is it your position that certain aspects of conscious experience, like the experience of beauty, are not hypothetically reproducible... or have I got the wrong end of the stick? In other words if you hypothetically made an exact copy of a brain in a particular state of processing, right down to the quantum level, that it would not reproduce certain conscious experiences such as beauty? This being regardless of whether it's a materialistic reality or one that acts like it is.

I can't comment confidently on how, or if, a cloned brain would feel-- specifically, I don't/can't know if such a construct would be a philosophical zombie.  I suspect, as you probably do, that if you could exactly reproduce a brain, it would think it was the original, and would not know that it was a clone; and it would have all the feelings and experiences that the original had.

I didn't really intend to talk hypotheticals, though.  I'm talking about the fact that while I can drop a rock, and you will see it drop, I cannot imagine dropping a rock, and have any confidence that you will imagine an identical dropping rock.  My contention is that science is really a system for organizing and communicating about shared experiences, and is independent of a physicalist world view.  It doesn't matter, for example, if the "real" rock is really in the Matrix; so long as gravity is consistent and can be experimented on, science can be done, and you don't need to take a gnostic position on the real nature of whatever is underlying your observations.

If you point to science, you are pointing to a set of necessarily materialist propositions.  You cannot argue using the truth of such propositions, for a position that argues against the truth of those same propositions. If the universe, for example, is not made of stuff - then what science tells us, -that this happens because of the properties of "stuff a and stuff b in medium c" is of absolutely no consequence. Those explanations are inaccurate and non-representative. It is ludicrous to point to them and say "well, if idealism is true then "ideas" work like we think stuff works"...., no, because stuff doesn't work at all, it doesn't even exist..............are you telling me that ideas work just like the stuff that doesn't exist works, or that any difference between ideas and "stuff" -which does not exist- is indistinguishable?

If mind were made of "ideas" ..-if this were true-, if mind was a product of non-material "idea interactions" and thusly some idealist conception of the same better explained our mind......it wouldn't matter.  That still does not tell us what the universe is made of even if we accept it as absolutely true without any argument /w regards to mind.

What am I supposed to make of this sort of response anyway? One minute science is good enough to claim whole-cloth for your position, the next it's uninformative. How does idealism explain the workings of the universe? Apparently, effectively (if not functionally) the same way science does. Them, for some odd reason.......that all breaks down at mind? You're awfully selective about when you find science to be compelling and when you don't.

(September 28, 2015 at 11:58 am)bennyboy Wrote:

(September 28, 2015 at 7:43 am)emjay Wrote: Hi Benny. I was wondering if you could clarify something for me about your position? Here you talk about issues of morality and beauty and sharable and reproducible. Is it your position that certain aspects of conscious experience, like the experience of beauty, are not hypothetically reproducible... or have I got the wrong end of the stick? In other words if you hypothetically made an exact copy of a brain in a particular state of processing, right down to the quantum level, that it would not reproduce certain conscious experiences such as beauty? This being regardless of whether it's a materialistic reality or one that acts like it is.

I can't comment confidently on how, or if, a cloned brain would feel-- specifically, I don't/can't know if such a construct would be a philosophical zombie.  I suspect, as you probably do, that if you could exactly reproduce a brain, it would think it was the original, and would not know that it was a clone; and it would have all the feelings and experiences that the original had.

I didn't really intend to talk hypotheticals, though.  I'm talking about the fact that while I can drop a rock, and you will see it drop, I cannot imagine dropping a rock, and have any confidence that you will imagine an identical dropping rock.  My contention is that science is really a system for organizing and communicating about shared experiences, and is independent of a physicalist world view.  It doesn't matter, for example, if the "real" rock is really in the Matrix; so long as gravity is consistent and can be experimented on, science can be done, and you don't need to take a gnostic position on the real nature of whatever is underlying your observations.

I wasn't really wanting to talk hypotheticals either. I've finally managed to get to the end of the thread reading every post carefully and slowly so I think I have a fairly good understanding of everyone's position, but I did think that what we all had in common was the belief that the brain in a particular state directly correlates with a certain experience... so that even if the world was 'monist idealist' it would still appear to be correlated in exactly the same way even if there was no 'real' material behind it. I.e. if the monist idealist world is functionally identical to the material world then science would produce the same findings whichever it was. So with that in mind I just wanted to check whether you believed that the brain accounted, or appeared to account for all aspects of consciousness and conscious experience. As it stands I'm torn between yours, AKD's, and Rhythm's positions but I did think we all had that one thing in common and just needed to check.