On naturalism and consciousness

[bennyboy]

For me, it's quite simple: there's no evidence for any mechanism of consciousness other than the brain.

That's kind of a quirky statement. Both "evidence" and "mechanism" are an attempt to railroad any view of consciousness into a physicalist vocabulary. If mind is in fact the fundamental reality upon which all is built, then there's no mechanism, and no evidence to which we could have access. Your simple assertion is like asking someone to show by what mechanism the universe exists.

The reality is that we have experiences, and that we are trying to understand why this is so. Given this, it would be strange to take physical monism as the default position. Reality must be considered by default purely experiential, unless proof can be made that this is not so. The problem is that you are only able to collect information about experience BY experience. Anybody should be able to see that this is a highly suspect process.

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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.

It can be infered! Do you not understand how you can reasons things out?

Do you not understand how circles work?

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.

If you want to bring up human relationships, then just say a "human relationship like a mother and her son." I do not like using terms like "your mother" because it can lead to an emotion response rather than to a logical one.

I apologise if any hard feelings were led to. I will change my terminology in the future.

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.

No, a physical model does a pretty damn good job of explaining human relationships.

Does not not not.

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.

So solipsism is the default model of reality, right?

No, even solipsism requires an assumption. The purest model of reality would be a complete lack of a model, IMO.

Because you can't prove you're not hallucinating all of your experiences. How do you go from solipsism to idealist monism?

For pragmatic reasons, I accepted some philosophical assumptions-- in particular, the existence of minds other than my own.

Did you infer a third body from your experiences? Did you weigh the probability of a third person against the probability of a hallucination? What is stopping someone from infering the existence of an inanimated object (like a desk) from their experiences? I would really like to know.

Nope. Redefining mind in physicalist terms is just begging the question.

I'm not redifining the mind. I'm explaining how it can arise using physicalist terms.

I don't see that you've actually made this explanation. Maybe I missed that post. Or maybe you're using a narrative that seems to explain, but is really just a string of confidently-coined words strung together in a non sequitur.

Nobody has shown that an ANN actually experiences qualia,

Did you miss the part about people are working on it? Do not conflate "haven't shown" with "cannot show."

Either something has been shown, or it has not been. You don't get to write a raincheck, even (especially?) in the name of science, because "yet" is a statement of faith-- Scientism rather than science. You only get to say "we're working on it" when the conclusion is only a function of time-- for example, if you say, "We haven't finished mapping the genome of this particular species of butterfly yet, but we should be finished sometime early next year."

On a seperate note, another requirement of a good model is that it has to be falsifiable. What test can be done where the results would be inconsistent with idealistic monism?

I'd start with the inclusion of mind in physical formulas, with physical descriptions which adequately describe what mind is, with concrete criteria which can be used to establish whether any given physical system does or does not experience, and with an even halfway-plausible mechanical description of subjective experience.

So far, all I've heard are made-up narratives: "Oh, of course it was a great benefit to animals to develop consciousness, because this allowed them to survive better," for example. But this is a kind of Science-of-the-Gaps argument: we don't know why and how mind exists, so must have been evolution."