Seeing red

[emjay]

Is it that argument, or similar, that you're putting forward here? I'm really sorry but I have trouble understanding these sorts of logical arguments, even if that does make me as thick as a plank. I just can't get my head around what we call in Mafia games, WIFOMs: Wine In Front Of Me, and that's what these sorts of arguments seem like to me.

No, it's not quite the same, though certainly I find Lewis' argument interesting.

When it comes to attempts to establish truth at a foundational level, the brain-mind thread of thinking leads to a nasty circle, or at least a question-begging assumption.

• My brain creates mind.
  
• My mind perceives a brain.
  
• Therefore I know that the brain is real, and that mind comes from it.
  

This is similar to:

• God created the Bible.
  
• The Bible says God is real.
  
• Since God created the Bible, we know it's accurate, and guess what?  It says God is real.
  

In the latter, you must take AS GIVEN either that God exists, or that the Bible is correct.

The problem with the former is that you must take AS GIVEN either that the brain creates mind, or that the perceptions of the mind represent an objective reality.  But they are mutually self-supporting.  So any materialist view which attempts to use brain science to establish the truth about what mind is is really doing this:


In the scope of everyday human life, this doesn't matter: you do your brain science, you develop your drugs, you live your life-- much the same as you don't need to understand QM (or possibly even what framework might underlie QM) to know that your desk is solid and it's safe to put your dinner on it.  It's only when you start looking for "truth" that you have to challenge those things we are so sure we "know."

Thanks for that explanation, it's helped and I understand yours now But I still don't understand CS Lewis' (well Professor Haldane's, whoever he may be)... I don't understand how he gets from the first point to the second, but that's not important because that's not your argument, but just saying. Anyway, yours is indeed a major paradox and one that leads to all sorts of seemingly impossible to answer philosophical questions.

One such question is 'why me, in this time and place?' If I look out there at everyone else, I see people with brains and have no problem assuming that each one has a consciousness. But then if I look at a video of myself with some other people then I can see that my mind is in one of many and the question is why that particular one? Part of the question is answered by my deterministic world view... there are no souls able to inhabit a body... there is only one me... only one way this life - my life - could be lived. So as long as my living body exists, 'I' am the consciousness that is guaranteed to 'inhabit' it, because this consciousness represents this body. So if you and I switched places, with me seeing out of your eyes and you seeing out of mine, I'd be you and you'd be me... there would be no change at all in the brain or experience... it would not be like that film Freaky Friday, where Lindsay Lohan takes over her mother's body and vice versa and they maintain their former personalities and memories... that couldn't happen in my world view, not even hypothetically. And from this perspective it's obvious why I can't see from any other person's perspective, because this is the perspective of this body. But despite all of that, there still remains an inkling of the question 'why me?' even though 'I' am the objective consciousness that is guaranteed, by the clockwork universe, to represent this body when it was determined that it would appear. It's very hard to identify exactly what I mean by me in this sense, especially given the way I view the brain as encompassing all aspects of personality, but nonetheless the (probably irrational and/or illusory) feeling is still there. One way out is to say that while I can ask the question 'why me?' there's nothing to say that I (well not I as in the I that represents this body but whatever I'm referring to - I'm sure you know what I mean but we can't define it) am not also you and everyone else and vice versa. There's no way I could ever know the answer because from this perspective I am 'trapped' in this consciousness, just as you are in yours. Anyway, that's just vague speculation - it doesn't answer the question in any way that puts my mind at ease. I do wonder if the questions are made harder by my use of language... that all my 'I's and 'yous' etc need to be either better defined, replaced, or removed entirely... so that the language itself doesn't create paradoxes that wouldn't be there if I could frame the questions right... because as it stands, the above mixes all sorts of probably incompatible viewpoints... including... as much as I try to fight it ...dualism; I think asking 'why me?' is a dualistic question but one that nonetheless I feel the need to ask, however irrational it may be. I need to identify what it is that's asking that question because in my view, that's part of the system - part of the illusion. If it wasn't, it would be a soul.

Anyway, after all that, the above perhaps only applies in a materialistic world view... one with the paradoxical brain-mind 'nasty circle' argument that you explained? Do you think like that or do you not even ask those sorts of questions because of your world view?