On naturalism and consciousness

[bennyboy]

No, the words 'evidence' & 'mechanism' are an attempt to railroad facts into a discussion that is otherwise devoid of them. Show that there's a mind-without-a-brain (thanks whateverist!) because all the evidence at the moment demonstrates direct causal link between brain & mind.

Hmmmm. It's fun when people make assertions for me. Then I don't have to bother making my own.

If mind is in fact the fundamental reality upon which all is built,

Again, what's the evidence for this assumption?

The fact that there is nothing one can be truly gnostic about but direct experience.

Your simple assertion is like asking someone to show by what mechanism the universe exists.

Indeed it is. And you know what, there are people working on that problem right now. And all the evidence tells us that it was a naturalistic, physical mechanism.

Hmmm. And what philosophically water-tight non-experiential method are you using to confirm the validity of this evidence, or your means of collecting it?

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.

Why strange? It's all that the evidence suggests.

Reality must be considered by default purely experiential, unless proof can be made that this is not so

Nonsense. Reality would exist irrespective of our ability to experience it. We know this because we've been able to demonstrate mechanisms which work irrespective of the existence of experience.

Really? I think we should slam on the brakes right here, and you can explain how we demonstrate things without the necessity of them being experienced.

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.

Not quite, we're only able to collect information about experience because we can experience. There's no evidence to show that our experience is causal (creates our reality) but it's the mechanism by which we can interact with it and is developed & even improved by those interactions.

You use the word "evidence" too much, and wrongly. You imply that only experiences which are sharable can be true, valid, or valuable. But this is false, because qualia are not sharable, and they are the only thing that can be said to be real without making any philosophical assumptions.

Anyway, what does "evidence" actually mean? You clearly take it to mean objective support for a positive assertion. But that's not what evidence really is-- it is actually an experience which one uses to demonstrate coherence with ideas about past experiences. See? Here you are arguing for an objective reality, and the only means you have of arriving at that conclusion are subjective. Escher, eat your heart out!