Seeing red

[bennyboy]

I know..you think that there's some other "stuff" in there

No, exactly the opposite. I think there's a body etc. "out there." I am that which has experiences, not the apparatus for having them or their objects.

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.

Since my position is that idealism subsumes the material world view, your constant claim that I'm stealing concepts is pointless. Chemistry is great-- it presents experiences so consistent that we can expand our ability to manipulate the things around us. However, in my view, both the chemistry, and the rules underlying it, and the entirety of observable existence are more consistently viewed as a collection of ideas, experiences and principles than as things and their properties.

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

It's like you think I live in the Twilight Zone or something. Fire hurts, I know that and you know that. But the pain is an experience. The awareness that there is fire is an experience-- all our interactions with the "outside" environment are 100% experiential. To live in a reality that is 100% experiential (read: subjective), and then claim that nothing really exists but objects and their properties, is a bizarre disconnect with what we are actually capable of observing.

[quote]
Sure, no matter what I say you can always imply that things may not be as they seem

I won't imply it. I'll state it as a position of absolute certainty.

..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.

Not co-opted. Subsumed.

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)

The reason an android would make me challenge my assumption is that it is not like me. Other people seem to be like me in most regards, so I extend to them the likelihood that they are also sentient. An android is not sufficiently similar to me in makeup or origin for me to make that assumption-- EVEN THOUGH they may act exactly identically, and I may not even be able to tell them apart. Since their mechanism of processing information is different than mine, and since it may be the method of processing which allows for consciousness, then I cannot be satisfied that an android is conscious, even though it very much seems to be.

I don't know what a soul is, but if it is defined as "that which allows matter to be conscious," without any religious connotations, then it necessarily exists. You will not allow this open a definition, however, so you'll have to say what the word means, and why you think I think you have one.