(June 17, 2022 at 2:06 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: If you don't know whether you believe in gods..then you don't believe in gods. Believing in gods is a positive affirmation. It's like saying "I don't know if I believe that the us is the greatest country on earth" - well, there you go, clearly a person who doesn't believe that the us is the greatest country on earth.
Your claim about right and wrong not being objective and measurable is just that, a claim, as it's always been. There's a significant amount of scientific evidence..ironically..that that's not true - fwiw. While any worldview can be limited by it's axioms and application, that's a non-example to that effect. In the end, there's no need to jeoulously guard any of those things. By all means, explain consciousness by way of the immaterial better than it's explained by way of a brain.
I think, in mere reality, it's the other way around. Some people jealously guard their own ignorance hoping that it allows space for some x of value to them where materialism or monism (at least to them..also generally in ignorance) does not. I honestly long for the day someone gets truly creative and insightful..and rather than hastily declaring that science can't explain -insert the usual silly many times disproven shit here- they say "cabbage". Why is cabbage.... is.... legitimately, a more profound and difficult question to answer than why our solar system is here, or arranged the way it is, or why a living creature might be sentient.
We've had these discussions before. I'm trying to think if there's new ground to cover-- I suspect not. But I'm interested in finding out.
re: belief
You can take any postive affirmation and flip it. "Do you believe in a material monist reality?" No, to the same degree and for the same reasons-- an inability to demonstrate that sensation represents an adequate vehicle for the formation of positive affirmations about the nature of reality (or the things in it).
re: consciousness / brain
I know nothing about the brain that has not involved some experience. Therefore, if I doubt the validity of sensation in establishing the nature of reality, experiences of listening to professors or reading science textbooks fall into under that same agnostic cloud. All I CAN say is what seems true in the context of given axioms: "In the context where reality is material, and where the brain is a discrete and identifiable solid object rather than (say) a collection of quantum wave functions in a virtual space projected from an n-dimensional object lacking time, then the brain seems most related to the consciousness of animals and people."
Asking an agnostic to provide a "better explanation" doesn't make much sense, since my position is that no explanation can be known to represent truth, at least absent the context of axioms which beg the question.
re: jealous guarding
Well, let me give an example. I'd say in order to knowingly do science of consciousness, you have to be able to establish that any given material structure experiences what things are like, rather than what they are. I know what it's LIKE to drink hot chocolate, for example. It's easy to know that a particular structure has encountered hot chocolate-- it's impossible to know that it has experienced what hot chocolate is LIKE.
A "jealous guarding" would be an insistence that something other than knowing what things are like is consciousness, and then demonstrating a facility in working with that other thing. Saying, "Consciousness is the ability to take information from the world, process it, and output a behavior," for example, and then claiming that science can study that better than Buddhist meditation can, would be such an insistence.
