On naturalism and consciousness

[FallentoReason]

Your belief that spoons are curved is akin to a classification of the object "spoon" with the qualifier "curved". That's why I started with "your example", and not "your proposition".

I realised possibly on page 2 or so that my example wasn't the best to use, because it's more of a thought than a true proposition. But anyways..

These "beliefs" you want to claim are impossible to hold as brain chemicals and structures.... why can't they be?
If beliefs can't be held in the brain, then how can memories? visual memories, conceptual memories, textual memories, etc...

Given how Alzheimer's disease affects the brain it seems inevitable that memories are held in the brain.
Can you otherwise explain how memories are formed in the brain?
The concepts we hold can be thought of as memories, too... they too should reside in the brain.
Concepts such as beliefs... I know of no disease that affects this sort of mental constructs alone, so I cannot say for sure that they're in the brain, but I see nothing hinting they're anywhere else.
Actually, brain damage can lead to a different set of beliefs... isn't there a person who had split personality and one persona was religious while the other was atheist?

Correlation doesn't mean causation; yeah sure, memories are found in the brain, but that doesn't directly imply that a set of particles are in relation to something external in the world - whether past or present. I forgot who I said this to in this thread, but it seems to me like our memories could be seen as books at a library and we as the conscious being are the person browsing through the library accessing different books. Therefore, we're still at square one: a bunch of particles arranged in a particular way (the books) can't be arranged in such a way as to represent "beliefs". It takes an already conscious being to give meaning to these particles, but particles don't intrinsically hold any "belief".

---

That would be trying to prove a negative. How can I show you that no matter how you arrange atoms, you won't ever form my belief that "these nachos are tasty"?

That's your problem for taking on the claim that matter can never have intentionality. It's not my fault you've chosen to make extraordinary claims.

What?? Don't you see how silly your request is..? Tell me how you can *show* someone that something is impossible. This discussion is about something practical; the arrangement of particles into beliefs. If it so happens to be impossible to actually achieve this, then how can I show you practically that it's impossible?

Well, like I stated, I thought it was quite intuitive. I mean, "thoughts" are just that: a metaphysical relation between the 'soul' and some aspect of the universe. If they're not that, then I don't know how we as conscious beings would go about business seeing as this is our *only* way of acting upon this universe.

(emphasis added)

Then you simply don't know. You don't know how matter does it, and that the soul "just does" is a lousy argument. You're simply at an impasse.

It's not just a matter of knowledge, likewise with square circles: I don't know what that would look like, but that's irrelevant because it seems to be impossible to produce such a thing. Same business here.

If we have shown that consciousness from matter "just isn't", then what's left on the table?

And we're back to arguments from ignorance. You haven't shown this. That you personally don't know how matter can solve the problem gets you nothing.

There's nothing for me to show, as showing a negative is a rather impossible task in of itself. And as for knowledge, same thing applies as above.

Like I said, I think language is a different topic altogether.

I was talking about both. And I think it's the same problem in both. If you can't show with rational argument how a thought is "inherently about" something else, you're simply at an impasse. You don't know how souls do it, and you don't know how matter does it. Maybe it's because your "intuition" about intentionality is simply wrong.

Basically, you have a theory of meaning. You need to demonstrate that your theory about thoughts having inherent intentionality is correct before you go banging on your neighbor's theory. You haven't done this. You've just assumed it. That's pretty much begging the question. I think talking about the language question makes sense because it's a smaller version of the same problem, without all the distraction of folk psychological theories about "consciousness."

There's no rational argumentation needed to show that 'thoughts are inherently about something', because the simple negation of that statement shows you how non-sensical it would be otherwise.

Maybe you'll understand my point if we drop the 'inherent' bit for now and say, 'thoughts are about something'. If we can agree on that, then we can also agree that 'thoughts aren't about something' certainly can't be the case. Well, now considering that a thought *not* being about something means a 'thought' is now a trivial idea (as a thought not being about something means a 'thought' is all but an empty word) it must mean that the entire essence of what we call a 'thought' *must now be* that it's about something. Ergo thoughts are inherently about something.