RE: Why materialists are predominantly materialists
September 22, 2016 at 8:44 pm
(This post was last modified: September 22, 2016 at 8:49 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
(September 22, 2016 at 6:56 pm)bennyboy Wrote:(September 22, 2016 at 1:00 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote: This is simply an abuse of Leibniz' law. That they do not appear to be interacting in the same way is no evidence that they are different. This is simply a philosophical maneuver. If experiences like redness do occur in the brain, they are a result of being 'poked' by the right nerve impulses. That I poke something with the impulse from a probe rather than an impulse from a nerve is a difference without a difference. You seem to be making an abstruse argument that things happen in your subjective awareness because of non-physical events. You are simply assuming your conclusion again.I'm not disputing any of this. I'm saying you can poke the mechanism for experience, and this is not the same as poking the experience. The experience is say slow-dancing with Tomb Raider era Angelina Jolie; how does one poke that? Am I going to have a big needle coming into my field of view? Feel a sudden pinch on my butt? How would it even work?
I'm NOT saying that anything other than the brain is responsible for experiences. I'm 100% agnostic on where experiences come from in a deep philosophical sense, BUT in our practical understanding, it seems to be all about the brain. Please understand this-- I'm not even saying you're wrong. . . I'm simply saying you can't equate the framework which allows for the supervenience of a property with the supervened property. They cannot be said to be identical, because they must be treated differently.
Must, lol. No, they mustn't. The addition done by your computer and the computers hardware are -exactly- the same thing (addition, to a computer, is simply a description of the state of the adders). You can say "may computer does addition" or, you can point at the adder in-state and say "this is my computers addition". Your general rule is demonstrably invalid. If it's applicable to a brain....it would be a special case.
If your experience of redness is, in fact, the state of some portion of your brain..then poking the portion does indeed poke red. Now the rule has been made invalid in the specific because it fails to exclude this -sufficient- possibility.
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