Idealism is more Rational than Materialism

[Rational AKD]

Pretty sure you just attempted definition by synonym - I'm afraid I still have no idea what you mean. I suppose I was hoping for a more robust explanation of what consciousness was from your POV.

I attempted to define it the same as how everyone else defines it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness
I don't understand how this definition confuses you...

Oh, you mean....like an OR gate?

kinda... when you believe something, you express a level of certainty of it. when you doubt something you express a level of uncertainty of it.

OR gates can..........why can't I?

uncertainty is not exactly like an or gate. uncertainty requires knowledge. or gates require syntax. the two are not equivocal. knowledge requires awareness.

Of course..because the cogito assumes it's conclusion, as we do.

it doesn't assume anything. "I doubt" requires an I. you cannot doubt without being.

and to say so is to assume your conclusion.

no, to say I doubt assumes there is I. by doubting you are already assuming you are aware. it's not that proving your consciousness assumes the conclusion. it's that doubting your consciousness assumes you are conscious. see the difference? in order to doubt you need to think and in order to think you need to be. so your ability to doubt consciousness affirms consciousness. assuming you are able to doubt that is... but that would be your assumption not mine.

Nevertheless, neither position speaks to any disagreement between materialism and idealism....understand?

I never claimed in the OP or anywhere on this thread to affirm idealism. I claimed because we can't deny consciousness but we can deny material, why do we need material?

Except that my head is a physical place which holds my physical brain which does in fact appear to be required for that "world" to exist.

yes but the place you perceive in your dreams is not a physical place. it is imaginary. so even as a materialist you can't deny perceptual states don't necessarily correspond to physical reality. so why think there is a physical reality to correspond to if that reality is unverifiable and unnecessary to explain your perception. you either have a mind that creates a world you perceive from brain interpretations responding to stimuli or you just have a mind that creates a world. which makes fewer assumptions?

Uh, yeah, it can, because I think that dreams, again, are a description of the state of a physical machine.

but descriptions are all we perceive. we do not perceive actual physical states. just how our minds interpret it. we have no way of knowing how accurate these descriptions are or even if they are descriptions rather than creations. our minds created the descriptions. we already know the descriptions are different from how reality is since material reality is apparently void of color, taste, smell, and sound yet we can't associate material without these descriptions. how do you know what is behind your perception of reality? why assume there is a reality beyond this perception?

Why would I, but I understand that "mental" is a category of physical things.

because mental states aren't non-existent in a materialistic world... they are just derived from material rather than their own fundamental substance.

strange........seems to...are you denying your experience?

no, i'm just denying these senses as material descriptions even though they are always associated with material. we perceive color, but color doesn't exist in materials... just mental projections.

Sure, they're all descriptions of the functions of various machines.

they are not descriptions of the functions of machines. they are descriptions of reality that the mechanisms project as part of our perception. which means we only perceive this projection... not reality. we can't know what reality truly is behind this projection if it's even there.

Not causing - the brain -is- the perception.

what? the brain is the perception? I thought it was the mechanism.

because we understand quite a bit about the machine, it's limits, it's faults.

all of our understanding is derived from our perception. there's no way to know what's behind this perception as that requires to perceive something besides what we perceive... which is incoherent.

That's an awfully big assumption. Especially since things with no "mind" appear to be able to observe this "unobservable substance" of yours.

the only substance we observe is mental... we do not observe physical substances. in a materialist view, our perception is a model of reality. in an idealist view, our model of reality is reality. you can't observe anything outside your model, so why assume there is something outside it?

No...I think that they -are- that physical process...not that they are created -by- it.

you're just playing semantics now... physical processes are still caused by other physical processes... so saying it's caused by physical processes and it is one is not saying anything different.

sure..and?

imaginary is different from real. we only imagine what reality is based on what we perceive. we have no way of differentiating what we perceive as real and what we perceive as imaginary. we only claim something is real because we assume something is behind our perception other than imagination.

Sure, but it isn't the difference that you need it to be, it isn;t a difference relevant to materialsim vs idealism.

it is relevant. because the only difference between what we call a real object and what we call an imaginary one is the underlining assumption that one is in reality and the other is just in our thoughts. we cannot verify this assumption as that would require us to observe what's actually in reality rather than what's in our model of reality. all we can perceive is a model with no knowledge of how accurately it corresponds to reality. this is the materialist view.

exactly, descriptions of a physical machine taking inputs from a physical world and doing physical work with them.

your descriptions of the physical machine is given to you by the physical machine corresponding to its interpretation of reality which contain descriptions that aren't actually in reality. you have no way to know if these descriptions actually don't tell you what reality is. therefore you can't know what reality is, you can only know what you perceive reality is. you can't describe what's beyond your perception. why do you assume something is beyond your perception other than the created description?