Proof Mind is Fundamental and Matter Doesn't Exist

[Redbeard The Pink]

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We'll start with Santa Claus, since that's the most amusing can of worms you decided to pop open. No, you cannot disprove the existence of Santa Claus or his workshop. No, going to the North Pole will not help. I used to be one of Santa's elves, you see, and I have first-hand knowledge of the security features in his shop. For one thing, it's surrounded by a magnetic field that fucks with people's compasses and other navigational equipment, causing them to constantly circle the North Pole any time they try to get there; the shop is also surrounded by several "false poles," which are designed to prevent human suspicions about why they can't find the North Pole. Humans have never been to the "real" North Pole, only these false ones.

those 'security' features are ad hoc. it's not a valid refutation of the criticism against it. but again, even if you're right you can only at best conclude Santa is possible...

The only other point from this that's even remotely worth addressing is that stupid question-begging thing you keep bringing up, and all I have to say to that is this: it should be obvious to everyone reading this that you have attempted to deliberately construct your argument so that any time someone brings up evidence from the physical Universe, you can cry "question begging!" and move on.

it has nothing to do with the argument. philosophers of epistemology acknowledge you cannot use experience to explain why you experience because that's question begging. you want to challenge it? try something better than 'nuh-uh.'

What's really more likely: that you (whoever the hell you are) have somehow figured out some unassailable Truth about the basic underpinnings of reality, or that you have constructed a childishly evasive argument that allows you to cop out by name-dropping a fallacy?

are you seriously challenging the argument by appealing to some arbitrary probability you have in your head of the chances I have an argument that proves something about a controversial topic? why don't you just say 'you're wrong because I say so...' it might make you look a little more intelligent...

Besides, even your false fallacy is fallacious in the reasoning by which you arrive at it.

so why is my fallacy accusation false? oh right... because you say so... got it!

The question is whether we can use information from our experience to explain why we experience things, and the answer is that as long as the Universe behaves according to consistent rules, yes we can.

so you're saying because material explanations are consistent they are therefore accurate? look up those two words and tell me the difference.

Regardless of whether reality is physical or conceptual, it still behaves according to apparent rules that allow us to glean information about how it works and what goes on in it.

that justifies functional realism but not objective realism. sure it's reasonable to believe that physical laws are pragmatic to understanding the world we experience. but that doesn't mean they can establish the objectivity of the world beyond what we experience. even I accept functional realism.

As long as the alleged Dreamer doesn't change any of the rules, we can learn things about the reality it's dreaming up by studying that reality, including how and why our bodies and minds behave the way they do.

in some sense, yes. you can find how mind behaves by studying the world, though also through epistemology. but you can't explain the fundamental nature of mind by studying the world. that has to be reasoned.

That doesn't answer questions of metaphysical meaning, but then again neither does your whole argument.

which is exactly why the 'evidence' you bring fourth isn't valid evidence against the argument... because it has metaphysical physical implications while your evidence doesn't.

This is also another instance where you've deliberately chosen shitty wording to meet your ends.

there you go again with your ad hominem... look, if you're not going to say my definitions are invalid then quite frankly I don't care what you think about them. I care about reasons, not your preference of sentence appearance.

You've chosen the word "experience" because of its subjectivity.

actually, I used experience in an objective manner. your thoughts of your experience is subjective, but the contents of what you experience is objective. for example, it's subjective for John to say he tasted good food. but it's objective to say he ate food. if the contents of experience don't have added thoughts or opinions, they are objective.

 more appropriate way to word this question might be, "Is it possible to use evidence from reality to learn about how our brains generate our minds?"

that's a loaded question... it already presumes brains generates minds, which is not agreed upon here.

By throwing the word "experience" around and asking if it's possible to prove experience from experience, you try to make it sound like your opponent is always begging the question any time evidence comes up.

irony... your question was certainly more presumptuous than mine. the wording of my question did presume materialism or idealism, yet the wording of your question clearly presumed materialism.

There is no reason to believe the things you propose unless you can somehow show them with evidence.

if evidence is whatever you arbitrarily claim is so, then can you blame me for not having it?

one last question to try and add to the conversation. if something for all we know and all we could know is possible or could be true, is that reasonable evidence that it is in fact possible or in fact could be true?

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Ok, once again I'm gonna cut to the chase and summarize as much as I can for Mr. Post-Exploder over here.


First off, you really shouldn't be allowed to type the phrase "ad hominem" again until you can demonstrate that you have learned what it fucking means, since at this time you obviously do not. I can say any damn thing I want about your premises, your definitions, and your whole argument without it being ad hominem. I can call them shitty. I can call them puerile. I can call their mother a two-bit whore. None of that is ad hominem. Regardless of what I actually say to you, it doesn't become ad hominem until I attack you and/or your credibility directly and then try to use that as rhetorical leverage against your argument, per the definition:

(of an argument or reaction) directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining.

So, just to clarify: Profanity =/= ad hominem.


Now repeat that back to me...go slowly if you have to...

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are you seriously challenging the argument by appealing to some arbitrary probability you have in your head of the chances I have an argument that proves something about a controversial topic? why don't you just say 'you're wrong because I say so...' it might make you look a little more intelligent...

Occam's Razor, my friend. Solipsism/Monistic Idealism is neither the simplest nor the most easily testable explanation for how and why we experience the apparent existence of material reality, and until you rule out all simpler explanations and/or come up with a really good piece of observable evidence to prove your claim, Occam's Razor is going to keep cutting your infantile speculating to pieces.

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if evidence is whatever you arbitrarily claim is so, then can you blame me for not having it?

Evidence isn't what I arbitrarily claim it is, but it isn't what you arbitrarily claim it is either. Evidence is repeatable and observable. Simply put: if you can't show it, you can't claim to know it. Your argument isn't evidence just because you want it to be.

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that's a loaded question... it already presumes brains generates minds, which is not agreed upon here.

It's not my fault you won't accept observable evidence from reality. The fact is that if you hook people's heads up to electrical nodes and use stimuli to elicit various emotional and intellectual responses, all different parts of their brains light up depending on what they're thinking and/or experiencing. Because the timing of these events is stimuli, then nerve impulses, then response, it's reasonable to draw a causative chain between these events, suggesting that stimuli from the objective world grants information to the senses, that information is relayed to the brain via nerve impulses, and the brain's nervous response is what we generally experience as thoughts, feelings, and "mind." The evidence indicates that "mind" is a process, not a substance, and that this process is carried out by brains.

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in some sense, yes. you can find how mind behaves by studying the world, though also through epistemology. but you can't explain the fundamental nature of mind by studying the world. that has to be reasoned.

Why the fuck not? Because you say so? If we study enough minds and enough of the observable materials and objects that evidently generate them, why is it then not reasonable to base conclusions about their nature from those observations? Because everything is a dreamland and minds are the only real objects? How does that follow exactly?

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so you're saying because material explanations are consistent they are therefore accurate? look up those two words and tell me the difference.

No, I'm saying we can draw accurate conclusions about the material world because it behaves in measurably consistent ways. I am not conflating accuracy with consistence; I am stating that the possibility of accuracy is sourced by Universal constants.

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it has nothing to do with the argument. philosophers of epistemology acknowledge you cannot use experience to explain why you experience because that's question begging. you want to challenge it? try something better than 'nuh-uh.'

Ok, well...scientists of science acknowledge that natural phenomenon can be understood through material evidence, and that minds are a natural phenomenon. Evolution explains why we have the kinds of brains we have, and biology/neurology/anthropology in tandem pretty well explain how and why human minds work. Sure, we're learning more and more about them the more we study them, but that doesn't mean we currently understand nothing about what they are and how they work (or at least it doesn't mean that for most of us, anyway   ).