(December 8, 2020 at 7:12 pm)Klorophyll Wrote:(December 8, 2020 at 10:45 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: Once again, with no additional information, I am being asked to believe we're being incoherent and dishonest if we don't infer from the direct experience of our own minds and the indirect evidence of other people (and to a lesser extent, some animals) of other people having minds; the existence of disembodied minds via an admittedly weak analogy. And somehow it's on me to do the research that would supposedly show this convincingly. I call BS.
Maybe I wasn't clear enough. Let me clarify again : the argument as I presented it here is complete, and valid. And you didn't bother raising any objection about either of its premises. And we're not arguing for the existence of some nebulous disembodied mind, we're arguing for the existence of the specific mind behind the existence of both the external world and other minds around us. If you think these other minds are uncaused, or the product of a mindless process- which would need a starting point anyway, you have an irrational position.
Assertion that the argument is valid doesn't make it valid. I don't have a problem with the premises, my problem is that your desired conclusion does not follow them. The evidence that we use to infer minds in other people is not the same kind of evidence you're using to infer a disembodied mind. We can talk to people, cross-examine people, watch them design and build things. When we see a beehive or a beaver damn we can compare and contrast the evidence for those minds with the evidence for the minds behind the eyes of my fellow humans and also compare the evidence that would lead one to infer whether bees or beavers are conscious and the evidence that leads us to infer that other humans are conscious.
That a rock constitutes evidence sufficient to justifiably infer the existence of a disembodied mind that designed it and arranged the series of events that led to its existence not only doesn't follow from the presumed existence of other human minds; the reasoning to come to that conclusion is incoherent and dishonest; and frankly, ridiculous.
I'm not anti-Christian. I'm anti-stupid.