On naturalism and consciousness

[bennyboy]

Yes the desk I see is really there, because I can test it with my other sences that are independent of each other.

You are stuck in this idea that "I can only have experience, then all is experience."

No I'm not. I'm stuck on the idea that everything I can know as a human being is based on experience, and that the source of those experiences cannot be determined.

You are correct that ideas exist in a mind. The mind is a set of processes in our brains. A process is a set of interactions between neurons. So whats the problem?

The problem is that you are asserting as reality a model which cannot explain the mind, cannot identify what physical systems do/do not have a mind, and does not include mind in any part of its calculus of mechanical interactions. The problem is you keep saying, "Mind is X," when you have no means of proving this to be the case.

No, we are not bringing in family members. That could too easily lead to personal attacks and away from the discussion. Come up with another example.

huh? I'm talking about the relationship between how you actually experience people you know well, and the physical "reality" of a human being that your model of choice actually supports. The physical model does a poor job of explaining your experience of humans and relationships between them. Pick another person you know very well, and the point still holds. So go ahead, pick a person, and describe the relationship between your experience of them and the physical description of what they "really" are.

Sorry, but you first have to show that idealist monism is a good model before inserting it. You have not.

I'm not inserting anything. The only fundamental truth is that experiences are experienced. The default position for a model of reality is that this capacity for experience is the only reality.

It is assertions about the underlying reality from which our experiences come that represent an insertion. But in the case of physical monism, too many of our experiences are disregarded and unexplained.

Being through this, ANN is a workable model. The details are still being actively researched by people way more qualified than me.

Nope. Redefining mind in physicalist terms is just begging the question. Nobody has shown that an ANN actually experiences qualia, or could. Saying "Data processing of style X, resulting in output Y, is qualia" fails to the fact that I actually experience qualia, and that word "qualia" is reserved for communicating this fact.

Your conflating "me not knowing" with "we can never know."

No I'm not. I'm conflating "We have no idea at all why or how mind would be created by matter" with "we shouldn't make positive assertions we can't prove and claim them to be proven facts."