(September 15, 2015 at 3:37 am)Lucanus Wrote:Many feel that way. However, there is literally nothing that you know about, or CAN know about, that you didn't acquire through the use of mind. In your view of the world (which is itself an idea), you hold that maybe .00000001% of space (or whatever) has mind. In my world view, 100% of everything I know about is known through the contemplation of experience by a mind. Your view, I'd say is more intuitive, but it requires an additional assumption-- that what you perceive (with the mind, remember) represents an objective reality which is basically as you perceive it.(September 14, 2015 at 8:17 pm)bennyboy Wrote: Aren't you also now assuming that there's a theoretical state in which a full explanation of mind can or will be known? Are you assuming that science, which has demonstrated very little facility in addressing philosophical issues of cosmogony or psychogony, just hasn't got there "yet"?
It seems to me that mind is a special case, and that the belief that it can or will be fully explained is at this point little more than a statement of faith.
Why? What is the evidence that points in that direction? I find it silly that in an universe so big, that is made out of matter/energy as far as anything can "see", the mind, which is such an insignificant phenomenon compared to the scale of the universe, must be of such utter importance to the workings of the universe itself.
Quote:Moreover, depending on your definition of mind, the evidence we have implies that the universe has existed for several billion years without any minds in it. So how is it then? Did the universe just spontaneously come to exist when the first cell became "aware" of the stimuli that surrounded it? If so, how did the cell begin to exist in the first place? (Jeesh)We have no good history of mind, no plausible explanation of its mechanism. In fact, we entirely lack the ability to determine whether a given physical system HAS a mind, unless you want to redefine mind in purely physicalist terms and ignore the philosophical problem of qualia.
Quote:Saying that the mind is a special case that won't ever be explained by science is a position that is completely unsupported by evidence, and is one of that kind of arguments that try to hold back the most fundamental human longing for the unknown.Nobody's trying to hold back anything. If science DOES come up with even a plausible mechanism for subjective experience, then great. So far, there's no evidence that science is the right tool for this job. The reason for this should be pretty obvious. Science is a process of observation and experimentation. You cannot observe a mind-- cannot measure it, quantify it, or even know whether it's there.
What you CAN do is measure physical correlates of mind, like brain function. But this requires you already to have made philosophical assumptions that serve to beg the question.
Quote:And you know what? I think it's reasonable to make "statements of faith" and to trust that science will get there eventually. History pretty much shows us that doing so is like betting on a horse that always wins.The questions that haven't been answered by science are infinitely more numerous than those that have. Science has proven (obviously) to be highly useful in understanding and manipulating our environment. It has not proven that it can offer plausible answers to philosophical questions of cosmogony or psychogony. So no, I do not accept your statement that faith in science is reasonable, when we can pretty easily see how different, philosophically speaking, the study of mind and the study of other things are.
