Seeing red

[The Grand Nudger]

You can demonstrate the body with my name.  But when you look at your hand, do you think "me" or "my hand"?  I think of my body as a vehicle for the self, not the self itself.

I know..you think that there's some other "stuff" in there, a humonculus driving a car.  Even if I accepted this notion I still can't demonstrate that there's even an "in there" to begin with....or so I've been told.

I think brain chemistry and structure do a very good job at explaining why we have certain categories of experience.  It doesn't do anything to explain why mind exists rather than not existing, nor can it even identify whether a given physical system is conscious.  So any thing materialism "explains," it does so with all the assumptions in place which it is meant to be proving.

I'm not sure I understand how an idealist can refer to chemistry or structure as explanation of anything, coherently.  Stolen concepts. Then again, from the above...you don't seem to be an idealist, what with driving your body car around and all.

Who says ideas of burning feet or exploding brains are not a part of reality?  Not I, for sure.  However, we never directly burn, directly touch fire, etc.  We never touch a chemical reaction, or see it or hear it directly.  We perceive represenations of all those events as mental experiences aka qualia.  Therefore, whatever happens, it will be the qualia representing it (whatever it really is) which we care about and with which we interact.

Perhaps you should visit a burn ward sometime, if you doubt the direct and effective nature of fire?  

This is the thing.  It doesn't matter WHAT physical "reality" you point to, I will always be able to say that your knowledge of it is indirect, and that you cannot therefore know its source.  I will always be able to say that YOUR reality isn't the universe-- it's a representation of a universe which you experience internally.  Whether there's a real universe "out there" or not is unknowable, and probably not even that important, since we are interested in the experience of human agency, which is, of course, exclusively mental in nature.

Sure, no matter what I say you can always imply that things may not be as they seem..and you can always state that I do not possess full knowledge.....but that's hardly rational, or a foundation upon which knowledge can be built...nor does it make any positive case for your own explanations as being better or more accurate than mine. In fact, you seem to be quite fond of my explanations, you attempt to co-opt them at every opportunity.

Any idea, yet, on why an android would make you challenge any assumption that I would not? Can't have anything to do with my biology or the androids machinery, that's just a car. I'm just wondering why you allow that I have a soul?
(let's call it what it is Benny, lol)