Seeing red

[The Grand Nudger]

I don't need to assume the truth of your position. 

No, you -don't- have to, but this is precisely what you do when you make the claim that your pov subsumes my own.   You are claiming explanations -for idealism- that you have declared to be -insufficient-.   Do you see what that does to your position?  Do you see the incoherency and inconsistency in this?  

"This stuff is insufficient to explain "x", and idealism works just like it."

When I see a brain, I see what you see (I'm willing to assume).  When I listen to a professor, I hear what you hear.  When I hit someone in the head with a bat, they are as KO'd in my reality as they are in yours.  The difference is that you have the idea that those experiences represent a fundamental truth, and that you know what that fundamental truth is: that there is a material universe and nothing else.  I do not take this position, which I see as both extra and unsupportable by our observations. 

It doesn't matter whether or not they do or they don't represent a fundamental truth. I could be a brain in a vat, things may not be as they seem.  How many times do I have to keep saying this?  In the context of the question I've asked you it's entirely irrellevant from the outset.  I seem to be conscious, the android seems to be conscious.  There is no dilemma presented to you by an android in the future that is not present for you here, in the present, with me. The rest of the similarities we share..the fingers eyes and toes...the brain..you tell me that this is -not- the mind..you keep insisting that this be so. Well, then it can't be used to disqualify the android...or rule me in. Understand?

I can't hope to sway you to materialism until we get some resolution on why I can't convince you of a standard logical fallacy, well described well defined and well demonstrated, and I don't care to until such time as we get that resolution. I think the area here were we can agree without either of us budging an inch on that count..and where you are inconsistent -to your own stated view and process- ..and regardless of that views truth, is in with-holding in the case of the android what you grant in my own, or vv.

Your comments earlier, regarding a pragmatic assumption and meaning fail to hold an ounce of water, here. The assumption of an androids consciousness is no more or less pragamatic, and no more or less meaningful...than the same pragmatic assumption, for the same reasons, in my own case..here in the present. This dilemma doesn't await you on on some distant horizon, it's staring you in the digital face and having a conversation about dilemmas with you...right now, right here.