I never suggested anything about “subjective experience.” I didn’t recommend anything. That’s just a one-off sentence in an “I’m back” post. But if I thought we had “subjective experience,” and if I thought there was such a thing as a material world, I supposed I might think it needed a “materialist substrate.” I don’t think I’ve ever, in my website or blog, used the phrase “subjective experience,” or even the word “subjective.” The very phrasing of your question seems to me to imply the need for a material basis for experience. We’re not only on different pages – we’re in different books.
If you haven’t watched my videos, you really have no idea where I’m coming from. People who haven’t watched them, but who have only see a line or two of something I’ve written , often think they do – “Oh, he’s some kind of Idealist” or “He must be a solipsist” or “He must not know the first thing about the structure of the brain,” etc. I think there's also often a suspicion that I'm some kind of closet spiritualist or irrational. Far from it. I'm sure you probably don’t feel like sitting around and watching a bunch of videos by some wacko non-materialist. I have no problem with that. But there are some basic concepts which you simply can’t do without if you have any hopes of understanding what I’m trying to get at.
Imagine you’re trying to explain a geometrical concept to someone for whom a point, line, and plane are things drawn on paper with a pencil, and they have no conception of the abstract idea of a point, line, or plane. If they don’t understand these abstract ideas – and if they have no desire to understand them - nothing else you try to explain will make any sense, and they will simply have no idea what you’re talking about – and they might think you’re a wacko when you claim that a circle is all the points that are equidistant from a given point, when it’s “obvious” to them that no circle they make is like that. It’s the same with my ideas. You're simply not going to understand what it's about thinking in conventional terms.
I like to encourage people not to view these ideas as "threatening." I think you'll see that they're not irrational and they're not anti-science. I mean, it's not like you're going to get sucked down a whirlpool of irrationality and end up in a cult in the backwoods in Oregon. Try to approach them as a curiosity of sorts; as a quirky worldview that just might have some interesting ideas tucked away inside. It’s about finding new ways to think; about replacing ways we learn to think with ways that allow us to understand our experience differently. It’s not about “convincing you that materialism is wrong” and that “you should believe what Rob believes.” It’s about showing you a way I’ve found to think about our experience in which materialism no longer makes sense, but one that requires some new concepts, and redefining some old ones. Does it make science “wrong”? No. I’ve come to understand that science and materialism are two different things, and the first doesn’t need the second. Does it mean that “the brain” has nothing to do with our experience? No. It means that the relationship isn’t that represented by the materialist worldview. Does it mean that neurologists are “wasting their time”? No. It means that there is another way of thinking about what they are doing. In the end, it’s not about, “let’s all throw away rationality, join a commune, rip off our clothes and play bongos in the sun.” It’s about taking rationality in a direction which materialism will never, on its terms, allow us to go.
All I can tell you is to watch the first video or two and see if it tweaks your interest. I suspect that a person almost has to already have some dissatisfaction with the materialist worldview to approach my ideas with an open enough mind to start to see that it makes sense. If you go into it “looking for ways to shoot it down,” you’ll certainly not get anything out of it. Then there’s the fact that people can think in very different ways. Will a person – say a computer programmer for example – understand my ideas the way I –thinking very differently from a computer programmer – do? Possibly not. But we can all have fun throwing these ideas back and forth. That I look forward to!
I'll try to think of a productive way to start a new thread on this.
If you haven’t watched my videos, you really have no idea where I’m coming from. People who haven’t watched them, but who have only see a line or two of something I’ve written , often think they do – “Oh, he’s some kind of Idealist” or “He must be a solipsist” or “He must not know the first thing about the structure of the brain,” etc. I think there's also often a suspicion that I'm some kind of closet spiritualist or irrational. Far from it. I'm sure you probably don’t feel like sitting around and watching a bunch of videos by some wacko non-materialist. I have no problem with that. But there are some basic concepts which you simply can’t do without if you have any hopes of understanding what I’m trying to get at.
Imagine you’re trying to explain a geometrical concept to someone for whom a point, line, and plane are things drawn on paper with a pencil, and they have no conception of the abstract idea of a point, line, or plane. If they don’t understand these abstract ideas – and if they have no desire to understand them - nothing else you try to explain will make any sense, and they will simply have no idea what you’re talking about – and they might think you’re a wacko when you claim that a circle is all the points that are equidistant from a given point, when it’s “obvious” to them that no circle they make is like that. It’s the same with my ideas. You're simply not going to understand what it's about thinking in conventional terms.
I like to encourage people not to view these ideas as "threatening." I think you'll see that they're not irrational and they're not anti-science. I mean, it's not like you're going to get sucked down a whirlpool of irrationality and end up in a cult in the backwoods in Oregon. Try to approach them as a curiosity of sorts; as a quirky worldview that just might have some interesting ideas tucked away inside. It’s about finding new ways to think; about replacing ways we learn to think with ways that allow us to understand our experience differently. It’s not about “convincing you that materialism is wrong” and that “you should believe what Rob believes.” It’s about showing you a way I’ve found to think about our experience in which materialism no longer makes sense, but one that requires some new concepts, and redefining some old ones. Does it make science “wrong”? No. I’ve come to understand that science and materialism are two different things, and the first doesn’t need the second. Does it mean that “the brain” has nothing to do with our experience? No. It means that the relationship isn’t that represented by the materialist worldview. Does it mean that neurologists are “wasting their time”? No. It means that there is another way of thinking about what they are doing. In the end, it’s not about, “let’s all throw away rationality, join a commune, rip off our clothes and play bongos in the sun.” It’s about taking rationality in a direction which materialism will never, on its terms, allow us to go.
All I can tell you is to watch the first video or two and see if it tweaks your interest. I suspect that a person almost has to already have some dissatisfaction with the materialist worldview to approach my ideas with an open enough mind to start to see that it makes sense. If you go into it “looking for ways to shoot it down,” you’ll certainly not get anything out of it. Then there’s the fact that people can think in very different ways. Will a person – say a computer programmer for example – understand my ideas the way I –thinking very differently from a computer programmer – do? Possibly not. But we can all have fun throwing these ideas back and forth. That I look forward to!
I'll try to think of a productive way to start a new thread on this.
