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]

Of course it does.  Ideas as a something is opposed to ideas as nothing.  That's taking a position.  Only by contrasting the world of ideas with the world of things do you come up with the notion of "what ideas are."  Relationships among objects is a category of idea but it doesn't explain what an idea is.  Our experience is completely noninformative about the nature of ideas.  The only non-position position about their reality is pure agnosticism.  They could be material.  They could be a substance in and of themselves.  They could be illusions.  By describing them as a substance in and of themselves, you're taking a metaphysical view about them as sure as materialism is.  What's worse, you're defining them as the negation of the material.  That's borrowing the concept of the material in defining the idea.  It's an example of the use of the stolen concept.

It is from sensory experience that people explain things in terms of matter and its operations. From that stance, the materialist reinterprets the original sense data and experience - either trying to force mental properties into a materialist paradigm (making it a kind of substance) or dismissing mental properties as illusions because they don't conform our notions about how matter works. But if our knowledge of matter and how it works originally come from sensory experience then denying the reality of sensory experience undermines the reason that knowledge about matter exists in the first place. To me that sounds self-defeating.

When you put a pencil partially in water, it appears to be bent. Does talking about how what appears to be the case isn't actually the case "undermine" our understanding of the phenomena? Or does it deepen our understanding? In the same way, talking about how our experience is not what it appears does not undermine our knowledge of material interactions. We are talking about how our experiences are derived, instead of actually using our experiences to derive knowledge. That's a sort of use-mention error. If we talk about how there is a blind spot in our visual field, one that we don't "see", we come to a deeper understanding of the reality of our perception, not a lesser one.

"It is from sensory experience that people explain things in terms of matter and its operations." (from above)

I would argue that our sensory experience embeds the quality of object permanence on all our percepts. Just as we can't perceive the world around us as having less than 3 dimensions, we can't perceive objects without them being imbued with a sense of permanance. It is a pre-experience given that things have permanence. This quality of object permanence implicitly contains the idea that things are made of 'stuff'. Even when we imagine the mind of someone else, we imagine it as a thing existing inside that person; we don't attribute the consciousness of a person to their leg or their big toe. There is the image of someone trying to catch a sunbeam. Implicit in that image is the pre-rational thought that the thing--the sunbeam--is made of stuff, and thus can be caught. So it isn't so much that from experience we explain things in terms of matter, but that materialism is a base property of thought. If we talk about how the desk in front of me may really be just a thought in the mind of God, with no object permanence, no material 'stuff', would that undermine our experience of it as 'stuff'? Only in the sense that we are replacing one, pre-rational explanation of the desk with a different one. This is neither lesser nor self-defeating. At bottom, our experience of things, like the pencil in the water, is a theory about how things are. Replacing one theory with a different theory may be a movement into greater realism, rather than lesser.

This is not to say that no one can know anything about ideas. Ideas are that with which we are most intimately familiar. For that reason, I believe they should be treated on their own terms and not forced to fit in some Procrustes bed fabricated by materialist assumptions.

Ideas don't have an "on their own terms" -- as Kant noted, our experience of them comes with a structure already given. That structure, for better or worse, is a theory about ideas. It is likely more Procrustean to try to force them into an abstract space, not structured by the givens of thought. This is not to say we shouldn't entertain the notion of thoughts under some other theory, but that the materialist experience is how we experience ideas "on their own terms." As noted in the previous message, we imagine our thought in a sort of Cartesian theater, existing in space. It's natural that this experience of our minds existing in space comes pre-structured with the same structure as other objects in space, as being composed of 'stuff'. Perhaps it is our pre-rational tendency to attribute object permanence to things made of stuff that explains why we instinctually imagine the mind continuing on after the death of the body. Could this be the source of all our dreams about an afterlife?

...Schopenhauer described transcendental idealism as a "distinction between the phenomenon and the thing in itself, and a recognition that only the phenomenon is accessible to us because "we do not know either ourselves or things as they are in themselves, but merely as they appear."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendental_idealism

[downbeatplumb]

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.

Pain is information, it is what the brain tells us to feel given certain stimli. There are people who can't feel pain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital...ty_to_pain 
Interestingly they can still feel touch.

[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]

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

Pain is information, it is what the brain tells us to feel given certain stimli. There are people who can't feel pain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital...ty_to_pain 
Interestingly they can still feel touch.

There's also pain asymbolia.

Pain asymbolia, also called pain dissociation, is a condition in which pain is experienced without unpleasantness. This usually results from injury to the brain, lobotomy, cingulotomy or morphine analgesia. Preexisting lesions of the insula may abolish the aversive quality of painful stimuli while preserving the location and intensity aspects. Typically, patients report that they have pain but are not bothered by it; they recognize the sensation of pain but are mostly or completely immune to suffering from it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_asymbolia

Once again we see that supposedly 'unmediated' aspects of consciousness are very much mediated by parts of the brain. 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.

[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?