Why materialists are predominantly materialists

[Neo-Scholastic]

We don't know "the experience itself", we know what we tell ourselves about the experience.

Clearly false. No one experiences pain after they form a concept of pain. Pain is the experience itself - primal and unmediated.

I think consciousness is just an illusion.  Do you have any actual evidence that it isn't?

Of what is consciousness an illusion? Again you engage in self-refutation. You cannot think consciousness is an illusion without consciously thinking about it.

[Angrboda]

We don't know "the experience itself", we know what we tell ourselves about the experience.

Clearly false. No one experiences pain after they form a concept of pain. Pain is the experience itself - primal and unmediated.

I was speaking metaphorically. To be precise, we don't have experiences somewhere located in a "space" where consciousness occurs, we simply have the brain's self-report that experiences occur in a "space"; we don't have an experience of this space, only our brain constructing a model which includes a spatial element. What I'm talking about is a different way to view consciousness. It's a construct created by the brain which includes the notion that we have a "thought" located "somewhere", usually imagined as being inside one's head. OOBE experiences are an example of this aspect of the construct going haywire. They did an MRI of a woman who could have out of body experiences at will. They found that her visual cortex would shut down, and the center for imaging the body in space would light up. This is an example of the brain "telling itself" that it is located differently than it normally tells itself. Other properties of this constructed model that we call consciousness are that it is unified (brain trauma shows that various parts of experience occur at various parts of the brain, thus unity is a false property), that it occurs in the now (experiments such as those of Libet show that events aren't integrated in real time), it is composed of sensory data including content generated by our linguistic centers, and it has a structure (ala the structures picked out by phenomenology). These "base properties" make up a mental model of an object -- our Cartesian theatre -- but the Cartesian theatre which we imagine in our heads is nothing more than a set of (semi)fixed properties that the brain is using as a map of our ability to control the environment. It is like a fly by wire system in an airplane. The flight stick doesn't correspond to anything real about the plane, it is just a set of data which tells the plane how to behave in an analogical sense. Similarly, a unified, spatially located, thought center doesn't exist anywhere in reality, it is just a collection of data that the brain uses to coordinate control of the body, the memory systems, our senses, and our language centers. It "creates" a model of reality that includes a Cartesian theater, but that theater is just an illusion; it is just the brain telling itself that such a thing exists.

I think consciousness is just an illusion.  Do you have any actual evidence that it isn't?

Of what is consciousness an illusion? Again you engage in self-refutation. You cannot think consciousness is an illusion without consciously thinking about it.

See above.

[Angrboda]

[downbeatplumb]

[Neo-Scholastic]

Clearly false. No one experiences pain after they form a concept of pain. Pain is the experience itself - primal and unmediated.

I was speaking metaphorically.

Fair enough.

To be precise, we don't have experiences somewhere located in a "space" where consciousness occurs, we simply have the brain's self-report that experiences occur in a "space"; we don't have an experience of this space, only our brain constructing a model which includes a spatial element. What I'm talking about is a different way to view consciousness. It's a construct created by the brain which includes the notion that we have a "thought" located "somewhere", usually imagined as being inside one's head…. a unified, spatially located, thought center doesn't exist anywhere in reality, it is just a collection of data that the brain uses to coordinate control of the body, the memory systems, our senses, and our language centers. It "creates" a model of reality that includes a Cartesian theater, but that theater is just an illusion; it is just the brain telling itself that such a thing exists.

I think you are trying to have it both ways by reducing consciousness to brain states and saying that that’s where the experiences are located (but not really). It seems that because you cannot conceive of experiences occurring anywhere within your model of reality you conclude that they do not exist at all. That too, as you like to say, is an argument from ignorance. Perhaps your model of reality is deficient if it cannot account for the existence of both non-local sensation and local physical events.

[downbeatplumb]

I was speaking metaphorically.

Fair enough.

To be precise, we don't have experiences somewhere located in a "space" where consciousness occurs, we simply have the brain's self-report that experiences occur in a "space"; we don't have an experience of this space, only our brain constructing a model which includes a spatial element. What I'm talking about is a different way to view consciousness. It's a construct created by the brain which includes the notion that we have a "thought" located "somewhere", usually imagined as being inside one's head…. a unified, spatially located, thought center doesn't exist anywhere in reality, it is just a collection of data that the brain uses to coordinate control of the body, the memory systems, our senses, and our language centers. It "creates" a model of reality that includes a Cartesian theater, but that theater is just an illusion; it is just the brain telling itself that such a thing exists.

I think you are trying to have it both ways by reducing consciousness to brain states and saying that that’s where the experiences are located (but not really). It seems that because you cannot conceive of experiences occurring anywhere within your model of reality you conclude that they do not exist at all. That too, as you like to say, is an argument from ignorance. Perhaps your model of reality is deficient if it cannot account for the existence of both non-local sensation and local physical events.

[Angrboda]

To be precise, we don't have experiences somewhere located in a "space" where consciousness occurs, we simply have the brain's self-report that experiences occur in a "space"; we don't have an experience of this space, only our brain constructing a model which includes a spatial element.  What I'm talking about is a different way to view consciousness.  It's a construct created by the brain which includes the notion that we have a "thought" located "somewhere", usually imagined as being inside one's head…. a unified, spatially located, thought center doesn't exist anywhere in reality, it is just a collection of data that the brain uses to coordinate control of the body, the memory systems, our senses, and our language centers.  It "creates" a model of reality that includes a Cartesian theater, but that theater is just an illusion; it is just the brain telling itself that such a thing exists.

I think you are trying to have it both ways by reducing consciousness to brain states and saying that that’s where the experiences are located (but not really). It seems that because you cannot conceive of experiences occurring anywhere within your model of reality you conclude that they do not exist at all. That too, as you like to say, is an argument from ignorance. Perhaps your model of reality is deficient if it cannot account for the existence of both non-local sensation and local physical events.

No, it's not anything of the sort. I have a model of what consciousness is that can be explained in terms of brain states. I just don't know how to explain my model very well. It isn't that I can't imagine what you are referring to, it's that I don't see it as being as parsimonious as my model. That's not an argument from ignorance. It's an argument that one hypothesis is more likely true because it incorporates fewer assumptions than one which postulates consciousness as being a non-material phenomenon. That's not a negative argument, but a positive one. While parsimony isn't a law of phenomena, it seems that a model that includes mechanisms which we already know exist is more plausible than one which postulates fantastic entities of which we have no experience.

[Angrboda]

[Neo-Scholastic]

Parsimony is fine if it accounts for all the relevant phenomena. You seem to be discounting the most important phenomena, namely intentionality. You cannot assign meaning to brain states without tacitly accepting the reverse, i.e. assigning brain states to meaning.

Not all alternative theories propose "fantastic entities of which we have no experience." For me the lack of a mechanism is not a problem because I do not have a mechanistic outlook; but rather a participatory one. Triangular objects do not need a mechanism to participate in the idea of triangularity and triangularity does not need to exist as an independent entity before objects can manifest as triangles.

[Neo-Scholastic]

Consciousness, experience, and feeling are composites.  Just as frontal lobe damage patients can appreciate risk without being averse to it, and cerbral achromotopsia patients experience an internal world devoid of color, we note that consciousness is a piecemeal affair, and those pieces correspond strongly to specific parts of the brain.

And what ever happened to the concept of "emergent properties"? Does that just disappear too?