Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[bennyboy]

You can tell yourself.  If it didn't exist you wouldn't have anything to object to, lol.  This is more of the usual gap making for gap filling.  It's not like we haven't learned a single fucking thing about our minds or brains in 50 years, now is it?

Wait a minute, now, we were talking about hypotheses or theories of mind, not the description of neural correlates to mental experience.  You claimed that a theory of mind "wasn't fleshed out until the 60's and 70..when it enjoyed immense success, and is only now in competition with sub-branches of it's -own- working assumptions.  It's been delivering the entire time."

I don't think any theory of mind enjoys that status, and I'd like you to explain why you think it does.  And you can start by explaining how those theories identify what physical systems are or are not capable of subjective experience.


See, here's the thing. Science requires observations, and you cannot observe subjective experiences. You can only observe correlates to subjective experience, and this requires a question-begging assumption. There really is no way to dispute this, unless you redefine terms so that correlates ARE mind-- which is exactly what you do.

But I can redefine anything as anything else, and will have the same problem you do-- that there was still something there in the first place that people had a real interest in, and since you've stolen their word, you've really only posed a minor inconvenience-- how to talk about the thing they've been talking about for thousands of years. So if I say that "apple" means "red," and insist that every time I see something red, it's an apple by definition, then what happens next? Trees will still produce the same juicy red fruit, and people will still use actual apples in their pie, and will not accept ketchup in their discussions about apple pie.

I'm interested in ACTUAL mind-- that is, the experience I have of sensations and ideas. And until you can demonstrate how material functions arrive at that state-- and I mean even a PLAUSIBLE mechanism, nevermind a "fleshed out" theory, then you're really just refusing to engage in a discussion about the thing I'm talking about.