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... the non-material side of reality must be left outside of science , obviously , but science can shed some light on some parts of the non-material side of reality as well, by shedding light on its material basis ...
Quote from: DonQuichotte on 14/10/2013 18:41:58... the non-material side of reality must be left outside of science , obviously , but science can shed some light on some parts of the non-material side of reality as well, by shedding light on its material basis ...So non-material reality has a material basis? Is consciousness part of non-material reality? If so, does that mean science can shed light on it by shedding light on its material basis? if not, why not?On the other hand, if consciousness is part of material reality, science can shed light on it directly...
you cannot but confuse materialism with science , logically , as a result
After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus."Boswell: The Life of Dr Johnson
It's all been done before, and more succinctly:QuoteAfter we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus."Boswell: The Life of Dr Johnson
Source : http://forums.intpcentral.com/showthread.php?15753-Why-Materialism-is-FalsePrior Note : The following article does not necessarily reflect my own opinions or views on the subject : ....In short, I think materialism is false. Below is why, with a detour through the reasons why Materialism isn't false..... ...The first and easiest is the problem of life. The problem arises from the unique properties and capabilities of living organisms; it had seemed incomprehensible that the mechanical world of physics could explain the biological. Something else was needed, so it was postulated that a vital force animated living matter, imbuing it with lifelike qualities. The doctrine held that life was inexplicable in terms of physicochemical interactions. If the Materialist could not explain life, then Materialism must be false. The Materialist did not get his answer to this problem in one sweeping theory, but rather a cumulation of experimental findings, from William Harvey's discovery that the circularitory system was a cleverly engineered mechanism to pump blood around the body, to Fracis Crick and James Watson's discovery of the double helix structure of DNA. The march of scientific progress has unveiled the fine structure of cellular machinery, all working impeccably from physicochemical laws without the need for a vital animating force. Here the Materialist can explain how life works without appealing to any immaterial vital essence, but there still remains another problem to be solved. This is the problem of design. How is it that this incredible arrangement of organised matter came into being? The odds that such organisation would occur by chance are astronomically low, but life is bustling all around us in a multitude of forms. If the Materialist cannot explain this design, then Materialism must be false. In 1859, in a joint paper by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace that explanation was provided. The Materialist now had The Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection i.e. The gradual accumulation of adaptive organisation by selective advantage. This elegant theory has provided the Materialist with an answer to the problem of design, which has in time been corroborated by a vast amount of evidence, from practically every field of scientific study. The problem of design had been solved, but an interesting disagreement between Alfred Russell Wallace and Charles Darwin persisted. The problem of thought presented itself. To Wallace, the human capacity for reasoned thought was beyond the reach of evolution, a feat which could simply not have been achieved by anything other than supernatural intervention, or in other words: God given. How could it be that a physical system could possibly think? If Materialism cannot explain how it is that we think, then Materialism must be false. The answer to the problem today is all around us, in front of anyone reading this at this very moment, i.e. computation. Alan Turing's Turing machine and the advent of modern electronics are a vivid illustration that complex computational architecture, obeying only the laws of physics can perform intelligent operations. The Materialist can now look to neurobiology, where cognition is explained as the consequent of neurocomputations occurring in parallel throughout the central nervous system. The Materialist now has his answer to Wallace's conjecture that the capacity for reason is unevolvable and must be God given. So the Materialist has provided powerful arguments to solve the problem of life, the problem of design and the problem thought. Unlike these three problems, the final problem on my list cannot refute Materialism. If Materialism is indeed amoral, it would be a nonsequitor to conclude from Materialism's amorality that it is false. For this reason, the problem of morality is a special case, but nonetheless very powerful. Briefly, the argument claims that if we are nothing but an unintentional consequence of natural selection, nothing but elaborate machines and built by selfish genes, then there is no reason to work for a higher purpose. For what reason should we treat our fellow man with compassion? What becomes of right and wrong with no God? The answer to this problem is the combined product of evolutionary biology, neurobiology and philosophy. The combined solutions to the previous three problems set the stage for solving the problem of morality. First, evolutionary biology, far from undermining the basis of morality, can explain why we have a moral sense in the first place. Second, neurobiology has provided scientists with evidence of how the human brain computes moral decisions. Finally, philosophers have raised objections to the accusation that Materialism is inherently amoral, refuting the accusations with powerful solutions and counterarguments. Note: I am sure many reading this may object to the solutions I have presented to the 'four problems,' such objections are welcome and I encourage further criticism. ________________________________________________________________ I have taken this detour through the successes of Materialism to drive home that I have no political agenda against the philosophy, religiously motivated or otherwise. I now wish to draw attention to my fifth problem for Materialism: 5) The problem of consciousness A single element of conscious experience is called a quale, a group of quale are known as qualia. A quale might be the subjective experience of red, cold or pain. All quale are symbolic representations of frequencies and angles. The problem for Materialism is explaining qualia, the subjective experience of life, the very subjective experience without which we cannot imagine life being worth living at all. How can a physical system such as the brain be responsible for consciousness?. This is no small problem, for if Materialism cannot explain consciousness, then Materialism is false. No matter where you look in my brain, even if you are looking at that particular cluster of neurons responsible for my conscious experience of red, you cannot sensibly say that you are looking at the quale redness. The redness I see is qualitively independent of the neural substrate that is responsible for that quale. To put this another way, I would argue that qualia are ontologically irreducible to the neural substrate, that is, qualia have independent qualities which cannot be explained at the physical level. However, I also would argue that consciousness is entirely caused by the neural substrate, that consciousness has no informational content or cognitive ability above that which occurs on the neurocomputational level i.e. consciousness is causally reducible to the neural substrate. ________________________________________________________________ A possible criticism of my theory is that consciousness is an emergent consequence of brain activity. This is a tempting view to take, analogous to the quality of wetness. A body of water is wet, even though no particular element of that body of water is wet. To clarify, a single molecule of H2O cannot be wet, because the quality of wetness is dependent upon the interactions of the constituent parts, without belong to any of those particular constituent parts. Wetness is an emergent property. A critic might conjecture that consciousness is also an emergent property of brain activity. I do not think that consciousness is an emergent product of brain activity. The difference between wetness and consciousness is that the quality of wetness follows from the physical laws governing the behavior of H2O, that is, given only the laws of physics I could predict that particular chemical substances would have the emergent property of wetness. The same cannot be said of consciousness. Given only the laws of physics, I could not predict the emergence of consciousness, it simply does not follow that from any complex neurocomputational system that consciousness should be." End Quote.
,,,But my main point is, that the statement in the article you posted: “it simply does not follow that from any complex neurocomputational system that consciousness should be” is not a reasonable assumption.
Quote from: cheryl j on 15/10/2013 02:22:00,,,But my main point is, that the statement in the article you posted: “it simply does not follow that from any complex neurocomputational system that consciousness should be” is not a reasonable assumption. Indeed; and there's something about the phrasing of that statement that seems curiously ambiguous in isolation.It also seems to me that the alternative, the immaterial ghost in the machine, the Cartesian theater, is far more unsatisfactory, raising more unanswerable questions than it attempts to answer; at the analytical extreme it results in an infinite recursion of theaters and viewers, and at the the other extreme, a hand-waving vagueness of indeterminate ontology and epistemological vacuity, that effectively limits rational enquiry in much the same way as the god idea terminates rational enquiry into the chain of causality. Whether the universe is deterministic or indeterministic, I've yet to see anything to dissuade me that the god idea and the immaterial consciousness are lazy philosophical bedfellows of causal abrogation without explanatory or predictive utility.
Quote from: alancalverd on 14/10/2013 23:28:34It's all been done before, and more succinctly:QuoteAfter we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus."Boswell: The Life of Dr JohnsonTrue - one of my favourite stories; empirical, pragmatic, and succinct. But then, of course, Bishop Berkeley would have grasped his point without elaboration.
Quoteyou cannot but confuse materialism with science , logically , as a resultSpeak for yourself. I have no problem distinguishing betwen the two. Science is a process, materialism is a belief or a way of life. No similarity, no connection. I'm sorry for those who find such a simple distinction confusing but that's not my problem.
All I can advise is that if you fill your head with isms, religion or philosophy, you will waste an otherwise satisfying and productive life, and possibly learn to despise others or hold them in contempt.
... So what would a reasonable person prefer:the idea (immaterial consciousness) that has a fundamental contradiction or inconsistency at its core (how material & non-material can interact, and if they can, what differentiates them), for which there is no supporting evidence, explanatory model or mechanism, and which is not consistent with the available evidence...Or the idea (consciousness materially generated) that is consistent with the available evidence, has an increasingly detailed model and explanatory mechanism and has at its core not a contradiction or inconsistency, but an as yet unanswered question?Your choice; are you a reasonable person?
How the immaterial, non-physical, non-biological can affect or influence the material, physical, biological does seem to be a serious challenge for the immaterial consciousness idea. To influence the material means having a material effect, which suggests a material basis, but to be immaterial suggests the opposite.
Conversely, for immaterial consciousness to be aware of what's coming in through the senses and what is going on in the brain, it must be influenced or affected by material brain activity. A control system can't operate 'blind', without feedback.
Which raises the question, if something can both affect and be affected by the material, in what sense is it not material?
And if the non-material can both affect and be affected by the material, the assertion that it can't have a material basis seems fatally undermined.
These appear to be fundamental problems for the idea of immaterial consciousness, but the idea is testable, if not entirely falsifiable.
If consciousness is immaterial and controls all voluntary behaviours, such as memory, judgment, planning, personality, etc., we might expect to observe apparently spontaneous neural activity arising as the appropriate neurons are somehow influenced by consciousness to cause or modify these activities, and we would not expect to see changes consistent with consciousness being a process of the material brain, such as broad or non-specific influences on the brain (e.g. narcotics, stimulants, sedatives), having correspondingly broad influences on the functions of consciousness; or local and specific influences on the brain (e.g. localised damage or stimulation) having correspondingly specific effects on consciousness.
However, when we examine the evidence, we don't see the levels of spontaneous activity that we might expect if some external influence was supplying memory, judgment, planning, etc. But the brain is extremely complex, so we can't be certain this influence is absent.
On the other hand, we do see that both specific local and broad non-specific influences on the brain have effects on consciousness entirely consistent with consciousness being the product of brain activity, and inconsistent with the immaterial consciousness idea.
So what would a reasonable person prefer:the idea (immaterial consciousness) that has a fundamental contradiction or inconsistency at its core (how material & non-material can interact, and if they can, what differentiates them), for which there is no supporting evidence, explanatory model or mechanism, and which is not consistent with the available evidence...
Or the idea (consciousness materially generated) that is consistent with the available evidence, has an increasingly detailed model and explanatory mechanism and has at its core not a contradiction or inconsistency, but an as yet unanswered question?
Your choice; are you a reasonable person?
I can say that God is behind everything and at every moment in the universe and beyond
Don, I notice you still haven't addressed my earlier post where I asked:Quote... So what would a reasonable person prefer:the idea (immaterial consciousness) that has a fundamental contradiction or inconsistency at its core (how material & non-material can interact, and if they can, what differentiates them), for which there is no supporting evidence, explanatory model or mechanism, and which is not consistent with the available evidence...Or the idea (consciousness materially generated) that is consistent with the available evidence, has an increasingly detailed model and explanatory mechanism and has at its core not a contradiction or inconsistency, but an as yet unanswered question?Your choice; are you a reasonable person?Fancy a go? :
QuoteI can say that God is behind everything and at every moment in the universe and beyond ....and I can say "bullshit". Since my statement involves nothing undefined, nothing unprovable, and no assumptions, it is a better statement than yours, and more likely to be true. Occam's Razor is a very sharp tool.
How did you deduce from that silly reasoning of yours that consciousness can be affected and influenced by the brain ?
Did you read the book or watched the movie concerning the extremely inspiring story of Helen Keller : The story of my life ? She was born blind and deaf.....
Who said consciousness can be affected and influenced by the brain through our senses ? Why not say that consciousness gets somehow informed by the brain via the senses ,or something like that , instead of assuming that consciousness gets affected and influenced by the brain through the senses
Brain and consciousness do interact and correlate with each other , how ? = that's anyone's guess , once again ...
You're a stupid person, blinded by the irrational false materialist faith, despite your relative intelligence , scientific qualifications , ...in the same fashion Stephen Hawking , Dawkins and all the rest of those materialists are ..............
Why do you think it's not possible that the immaterial consciousness can interact and correlate with the brain via unknown immaterial ways , either way ?
Even atoms are conscious ,their own atomic degree of consciousness .
I doubt octopi and aardvarks could be predicted from fundamental particles either, so consciousness is not special in that regard.Materialism is not the same as reductionism. As I mentioned earlier, probability and statistics has studied higher order relationships since the 1800s. It is rooted in empirical data, measurements of observable events, but a single dot on the graph tells you nothing. You cannot predict the traffic patterns in Los Angeles, when and where accidents are most likely to occur, by looking at the length of screws in cars, the construction of tires, the components of the internal combustion engine. Those are the wrong levels of organization for obtaining the information you are looking for.
I’m not crazy about “wetness” as an example of an emergent property, as it would involve a circular definition, the property of having a lot of water or some other liquid in it or on its surface. But I do like dlorde’s example of brass being stronger than either tin or copper. David Cooper said a while back that a system cannot have properties that are not in its components, but I disagree. None of the cells in a bird are capable of flight, but a bird flies. So, if offered a choice, should I believe that flight is a property that emerges from the bird’s interacting components? Or should I believe that a bird becomes infused with the non-material spirit of flight, or is somehow given flight by non material morphic resonance?
Flight is also the result of the bird's physical interaction with its environment, the air pressure difference above and below the wing. One thing we have not discussed very much, if at all, in this thread is the effect of environment on the brain. Not everything the brain does can be accounted for by its parts because it does not exist in isolation. Genes are big factor in human behaviour and ability, but environment has a major influence on how this is manifested. Several gene variants have been associated with things like anti-social behaviour disorder (aggression, violence, criminality.) Statistically speaking, the genes alone do not predict anti-social behaviour unless combined with an abusive, neglectful childhood. To put it simply, bad genes, good home: you’re fine. Good genes, bad home: still fine. Bad genes, bad home: disaster.
Another higher order, environmental effect is learning, which changes both the structure of the brain and its function. It also changes consciousness, or what you are conscious of. When you were first learning to type, you had to look down and hunt for every letter. Now your fingers seem to fly effortlessly over the keyboard, as you focus on what you want to say and how you next want to insult me. Curiously, if I asked you where the letter “V” is on the key board, you will probably have to look, or at the very least think about it a lot longer than you do when you are typing. Why? One explanation is that a learned skill is first obtained consciously, but its execution eventually becomes a process that happens just below the level of conscious awareness, where it works faster and more efficiently, and incidentally, with less energy consumption. So why doesn’t the entire brain function by these automatic processes?
One possible reason is that automatic programs are inflexible. A rat in a cage where there is both a juicy morsel of food and an electric shock will approach, withdraw, approach and withdraw. He becomes stuck in the middle of the cage. One thing that distinguishes humans (and even chimps and dogs) from, say, reptiles is the number and variety of ways they can respond to a stimulus or situation, a kind of flexibility. But flexibility requires a number of things, a way to switch back and forth between programs, and acquire new ones.
Consciousness seems most active, not just in terms of certain types of brain activity on imaging, but also from people’s subjective experience of it (which you are so fond of,) when the environment violates your brain's expectations. If hitting the letter V on the keyboard started producing a T every time, you would stop thinking about the falseness of materialism, become aware of what your fingers were doing, and look down at the keyboard, puzzled. You can drive down the road, thinking of other things, barely remembering what you saw the last few miles, unless there’s a car flipped over in the ditch. When someone across a noisy room mentions your name, you hear it, and turn around, even though you have no recollection what else they were saying and feel as though you weren’t even listening to them. Neuroscience can explain these things, rather specifically. I don’t know about morphic resonance. But my main point is, that the statement in the article you posted: “it simply does not follow that from any complex neurocomputational system that consciousness should be” is not a reasonable assumption.