RE: Why materialists are predominantly materialists
September 22, 2016 at 11:53 pm
(This post was last modified: September 22, 2016 at 11:59 pm by bennyboy.)
(September 22, 2016 at 8:44 pm)Rhythm Wrote: 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.Okay, I'll dream up a unicorn, and then you try and poke it with a big needle. Then try and poke the brain portions in which the unicorn is represented. I might smell smoke, or the unicorn might vanish, but I can tell you what won't happen, 100%-- the unicorn won't get poked with your needle. That's because the experience is an experience, and the mechanism is a mechanism. They aren't the same.
And no, you can't poke red. That's because red is a color, not an object, and only objects can be poked. You can poke maybe the brain part that generates the experience of red, but you can't poke red.
I think you are conflating representation with reality. There are little people on my TV screen, but that's just a representation. I can't touch the little people cuz boink! my finger will just bounce off the screen. The movie characters won't be like "Hey, dude! Don't poke me!" Yeah, I could corrupt the file, or melt the physical film, or whatever, and fuck up the movie-- but that doesn't mean I'm doing those things to say Angelina Jolie.
