figuer

There is nothing "supernatural". Anything that exists is part of the natural order.

Consciousness being non physical (if it were), would mean that there is a non physical aspect to nature, not that it is 'supernatural'.

Lekatt

No, I have never taken drugs.

The spirit world is detected by millions of people every day.

I am glad you replied so we wouldn't waste our time on each other.

modernPrimitive

It's funny how physicalists conflate their phenomenal ideations with noumenal knowledge.

GenesisNemesis

That didn't answer the question. :huh:

modernPrimitive

It doesn't need to answer the question because the question is fundamentally flawed.

javarush

I'd be interested in first knowing how you frame the idea of a "thought".

Do you believe that it exists like multiplexed EEG waves, carried by some broadband aether to be de-multiplexed, interpreted, and manipulated by the neurons of the body electric, to be eventually returned and preserved in that original primoridal aether?

Or do you believe that it is the result of parts of chemistry and cellular structure and specialization, coordinated into an self-organized unit, in a likewise but incredibly more complex way as a storm in the North Pacific produces distressed chaotic seas which yet in due course, appear as lines of mathematically periodic waves which crash as gigantic surf on Hawaiian shores?

NumberTenOx

OK, I take it that you don't think that the real world "exists" separate from our view of it? So what? Whether it "exists" or not, it exhibits persistence and uniformity that can be measured, tested, probed, and prodded. What else is required?

Seriously, do you think it's not possible to know anything? That my mind is the only thing I can ever be sure is "real", and so examining the universe is a waste of time?

Apostate1970

i want to thank you for your considered reply.

a few things, refering to the underlined portions:

firstly, your claim is based on a distinction between primary and secondary qualities (with touch/extension vs. color as paradigm cases but pressure vs. pain sensation could be another case, as could many others). reasoning that since surface features of objects result in certain tactile qualia that they must result in certain visual qualia is unfounded. similarly for reasoning that since our fingers must recognize knives as sharp they must recognize knives as painful... in fact, in this latter case, we know it to be false... as with local anesthetics. moreover, your example would only answer why pillows can't feel like knives and wouldn't answer why pillows or knives or anything else have any feel at all, sharp or painful or anything.

personally, i think that the entire primary/secondary distinction needs to be deflated because it rests on nothing more than the fact that some qualities get cross-modally confirmed and others do not. in other words, the only "inconsistency" in feeling a knife as pillowlike and not as knifelike arises from the discrepancy between seeing the knife on only one part of my hand and feeling something over more of my hand. but how is this an inconsistency? it is certainly unexpected and abnormal, but is no inconsistency anymore than, say, seeing our hand in a fire and feeling no pain. the problem with color vision is that there is just no other sensation to check it against for "correctness".

if the claim is merely that there could be an entailment from one to the other (primary to secondary), then no one has been able to show what such a connection could possibly consist in. it is not enough to say that there is indeed a brute fact that connects certain wavelengths with the red quale or whatever, because the hard problem would then just be the problem of why this fact is brute in ways that others are not. in hundreds of years no one has shed the slightest hint of light on this or even gotten the foggiest notion of how they could go about finding out. they're not even able to form any sort of testable hypothesis for such a connection... they're utterly groping in the dark. nowhere else in the sciences are scientists confronted with such a complete incapacity to even begin an investigation. epiphenomenalism provides the reason for why science fails so abyssmally on this point and succeeds so dramatically on others. it is in this negative sense that epiphenomenalism is scientifically supported. but really, we do not need to await the findings of those groping in the dark, because it is proven to anyone that does in fact have personal experience that there can be no reduction... their experience itself is all the evidence they need, and it it not a mere "intuition" but is evidence of the most direct possible sort. that brings us to the second point...

secondly, the problem of other minds is intimately tied to the hard problem. someone who has a mind/personal experience knows that he does, but can't have the same sort of knowledge that there are any other cases of minds/ personal experience. you should be able to clearly see (if you have a mind) how this is tied to the question of why there should be any personal experience at all. the hard problem is, in a way, a limit case of the problem of other minds.

thirdly, i specifically said that none of the qualia business justified any talk about "supernatural".

-------------------

lastly, not a response to any of the above. it occurs to me when thinking about the problem of other minds that there is a way of connecting this issue with religious experience and talk of the divine. that would be via the fact that, while we ordinarily are "locked inside" our own minds and can not possibly have any direct experience of another mind, in mystical or religious experience, sometimes in very stressful or crisis situations, and in a few drug-induced experiences i hear about but would not myself know about we very often have a sense of a generalized other or even of a specific consciousness that is somehow communicating with us or just watching us or whatever like that.... not a conscioussness with any body or usually in any specific place but somehow still present. i'm not talking here about the sorts of negative experiences that people with pathological dissociations or temporal lobe problems or with schizophrenia or whatever have, though those may be related in some interesting ways as cases of abnormal function of what is essentially a normal (and natural) human capacity. i'm talking about experiences that people report to be, although perhaps surprising or even slightly disturbing, fundamentally positive in some way. i've personally spoken with someone who was involved in a serious accident who said at some point shortly before the accident they felt a very distinct presence literally next to them (in the passenger seat) and that they attributed it to protecting them. this person was by no means religious, had no seizure history or anything of that sort, and they were just neutrally describing their experience and their attribution. i've had an experience of a "watcher" in a dream that wasn't me but, when i became aware of it, it "talked to me" and, as a result, i also became aware that i was only dreaming. i've read about many other such reports and i think that this felt presence of another mind is the basis for a lot of religious claims and things like the doctrine of dependent origination in mystical traditions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependent_origination and cosmopolitanism and universalism in philosophical ones http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmopolitanism .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face-to-face

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_and_Thou

so basically i'm talking here about religious experience as a way out of the most fundamental of all isolations, the privacy of your own experience.

modernPrimitive

It's not that I assume that the world is or isn't separate from our perception of it - I simply make neither assumption. Why is the assumption necessary for the acquisition of knowledge about reality.

Not at all, empiricism is useful. Don't conflate the notion of rejecting the physicalist assumption with replacing it with another assumption. Neither are necessary.

However, what is absurd is that the only thing we can actually know noumenally (as a thing-in-itself) is our own mind (and I'm referring to all states of consciousness not only the one's we are most familiar with) is disregarded in favour of ideations (hypotheses) of the mind acquired via phenomenal perception and cognized anthropocentrically (aka not noumenal knowledge of the mind in itself but rather imperfect perception and ideated models of it - neurophysiology for example).

This is ridiculous. The only thing we can truly know we actually reject!!!! :banghead:

Lekatt

You are your mind. Yes, the only thing that is real is you.