(September 3, 2013 at 12:41 am)bennyboy Wrote: When you infer a black hole, it's because you know there's something affecting the path of objects or light moving through space. You are observing properties, and inferring the existence of an object which explains them. The black hole is a necessary addition, because there's no other good way to explain some apparent oddities of things observed in space.
In the case of all the behaviors you mentioned, we already have a sufficient explanation-- the mechanism of the brain. It is not necessary to posit the existence of fairies in order to explain all the behaviors-- unless you think the brain itself is NOT sufficient to explain the behaviors. So the idea that actual awareness is inferred from the brain or its behaviors is baloney. The fact is that you already "know" that people experience awareness, and you follow your conclusion back to the criteria that would arrive at that "knowledge."
The sufficient explanation you refer to is experience. The brain mechanism is not an explanation for the behavior, it is an explanation for experience.
To use your own analogy, when I observe light moving in an odd manner I posit the existence of something that I cannot perceive and I call it a black-hole. Then I go on to examine the nature of the back-hole and, upon investigation, find that it is made of superdense matter. Even if my investigation had instead revealed that the black-hole is made of fairy-dust, the fact of black-hole's existence would not have changed. Either way, I wouldn't be assuming anything.
Similarly, I see specific human behavior being caused by something and I call that thing 'experience'. The added advantage here is that I have knowledge of its existence due to my own capacity to experience. And upon investigation of what this experience is, I find it to be a specific brain-mechanism. If I had instead found a soul, I'd have said, soul is the explanation for experience. But instead, I find that brain-mechanism is the explanation.
(September 3, 2013 at 12:41 am)bennyboy Wrote: We've both agreed that we are willing to believe that other humans actually experience, based on behavioral and physical similarities. The difference is that I accept that position as intrinsically agnostic, while you have to convince yourself that it's based on a careful consideration of physical facts, and therefore worthy of the word "knowing." You are wrong to do so. When you know what you want to believe, and conflate confirmation bias with an actual scientific process, you are not pitting science against philosophy. You are pitting your personal truthiness against BOTH science AND philosophy.
If conclusions drawn from careful consideration of physical facts cannot be regarded as knowledge, then there can be no such thing as scientific knowledge. So, by your standard, we all are necessarily agnostic about all of reality. We don't know that Earth is round -we believe it is. We don't know that dinosaurs existed - we believe they did. We don't know that law of gravity works - we believe it does. And by the same standard, we don't know that we don't know - we believe that we don't know. Is this your position? Because it is self-refuting.
