(February 18, 2013 at 12:13 am)Ryantology Wrote: 1. It is likely that it was created because we have never found evidence of cards, or three-story houses, occurring naturally.
2. This is certainly not true of consciousness.
My main argument was not about the evidence of the cards themselves, but rather how they are arranged, i.e. in an organized state. Organization is the key word here, not cards or three-story houses. For example, if you see some cards lying flat on the floor in a disorganized state, you would automatically deduce that it was most likely caused by an accident or by an action with little conscious effort. But, if you saw the same set of cards arranged in the shape of a house (especially considering how they are balanced on top of each other), you would automatically think that most likely there was a plan and a conscious effort behind that arrangement, not an accident.
So what is wrong with extending that same logic to the existence of consciousness as well as our eyes, brains, hearts, intelligence, DNA, etc.?
(February 18, 2013 at 5:33 am)apophenia Wrote: Induction involves reasoning from the known to the unknown (from a pattern in a small sample to a pattern in the total sample, for example). Since you are attempting to reason from an unknown (the nature of consciousness) to an unknown, yours is not an example of induction, but is, as noted, the fallacy of argument from ignorance.
Known = the greater the level of complexity of a system, the less likely it is that it was created merely by some probabilistic physical interactions.
Actually, to me, that is just common sense, therefore it doesn't even have to be "known" or "proven."
