RE: Is God a logical contradiction?
February 10, 2020 at 9:37 am
(This post was last modified: February 10, 2020 at 9:39 am by John 6IX Breezy.)
(February 10, 2020 at 8:02 am)Gae Bolga Wrote: You have some broader objection to the theories and study of mind, in mind, John. If we really took it down to the basement, you're likely to object to the notion that science can properly study mind at all.
I don't find that objection compelling. Our best evidence indicates that consciousness and it's products (like conscience) are a widely leveraged tool in the animal kingdom. Different in degree, clearly...but not in kind. It may even have effective analogs in the plant kingdom. More than one way to skin a cat, and all that. What is the problem here? What part of your worldview would accepting this endanger?
So what if consciousness and it's products weren't the sole possession of human beings? You think it's a problem for me because I'm a big dummy...fine, but why is it a problem for you?
This is what I do; at the beginning of last year I took a course on the topic of consciousness. When you say things like different in degree not in kind, where's your reference? What does that even mean when many animals have sensory inputs far different from our own? How can conscious perception for things we have no experience of, not be different in kind? And if you're going to talk about degrees of consciousness that means you have a way to measure consciousness, right? The only theory on the market that I know of, which even suggests such a thing as degrees, is IIT. Have you read any of Tononi's work?
