Farren

Another consideration: If there's something so compelling and just... wunnerful about our experience of being, then since logical patterns/forms can be be recognised in all things living, dead and non- most rocks must be having a smashing time since very little interferes with thier rockiness compared to all the things that make us feel neurotic and threatened.

c'mon, tell me how our experience of being is "special". More "special" than a rock or say, the vastly more dynamic feedback loop at the heart of a star.

peace
Farren

Theophage

As is the logically inchoerent way of the Mighty yet Materialistic Theophage, Quoted material by Filip Sandor shall be informationally represented in the bold format:

Theophage, your argument for the physicallity of 'information' is the most logically incoherent one I have seen yet; it makes absolutely no sense at all.

Does this mean I am no longer in "favored materialist son" status? Why just yesterday you were fawning over how wonderful our discussion was going. But I suppose our ephmeral era of mutual respect must come at and end some time.

In all, I have seen materialists call the mind: a notion, information, a physical pattern, a physical arrangement, a code, a symbolic representation, and who knows what else.. but basically, it seems like no materialist actually knows what they are talking about.

No, I suspect you have misunderstood (either willingly nor unwillingly) each of the descriptions given, and are simply misrepresenting them here. See the example below:

You on the other hand, represent another group of materailists who calls the mind a physical 'arrangment' or 'pattern'.

No, in fact I didn't call the mind those things at all. In fact, as any semi-intelligent reader of this thread would recall, I called the mind a function of the brain. I called thoughts and "mental images" arrangements and patterns of electrochemical reactions. Don't believe me? Go back and re-read my posts, assuming you read them the first time. Who exactly are you trying to fool (other than yourself?)

You claim that as long as there is a 'reader' to read something else called a 'code' which apparently 'holds' information 'inside' a physical arrangement, then the physical arrangement is information.

So you've neglected everything I've written so far in this thread and decided to focus upon one concept that I mentioned in passing at the end? How incredibly disingenuous of you. I wish I could determine whether or not you are being willingly decietful or merely agonizingly stupid. Perhaps you can clear that up for me?

What is the arrangement of matter if it is not the matter itself?? Is the 'arrangement' of matter another entity that forms apart from the matter itself, when a 'reader' is incorporated?

Passages like this tip the scales toward "agonizingly stupid". Gee, Filip, what does "arrangement of matter" mean? Is there a 6th grader in the house who can explain this to Filip?

What the hell is a reader?? How do you define a reader, in physical terms?

We never even got this far, Filip. To date: You've claimed that the qualities of thoughts and the qualities of electrochemical brain patterns are qualitatively different, and yet the only two qualities of thoughts you could give me match exactly with the qualities of the brain patterns. You've also asked me semi-retarded questions like "Does a harddrive weigh more when information is added?"

Once you manage to understand the basic concepts Filip, perhaps we can move on to the more complicated things like bunnies and kittens. Forget all about "readers", that's quantum physics to you.

And then he writes the most ironic statment of all:

Does any materialist here REALLY have a CLUE about anything they say..??

It would seem, Filip, that the only one here missing a clue would be you.

I tell you what, read my posts again, and then apologize for misunderstanding my definition of mind. I will apologize for insulting you personally in this post, and we will continue. Otherwise, consider this my last post to you on this subject.

Daniel "Theophage" Clark

Filip Sandor

I'm tired Theophage...

You must realize, I have posted several hundred posts attempting to explain materialistic fallacies, but I do get tired too you know. <img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" />

[ January 29, 2002: Message edited by: Filip Sandor ]</p>

Farren

Sorry, I had a lot of material in the logical box and I didn't want it to fall apart.

re my next post I wasn't joking.

I actually do think that everything around us and patterns of matter that we are part of but not the whole of are experiencing the "nice" and "yuck" experiences that make us feel like we aren't what we assume machines to be.

I start by assuming that I feel positivity (as opposed to positive charge) and negativity, and proceed to the conclusion that the universe in which I am evidently quantumly hoplessly entangled and therefore indistinguishable from is has this as a general feature.

ergo the ecosystem of which I and the rocks are part is going "whoo this is one of those peaceful moments right now" or "ouch" in some equivalent way that make sense to it, but it doesn't speak my language so I'm debating with you and you're debating with me and that re-inforces the belief that OUR experience is just the most important thing in... our experience.

btw what appears to be a premise of both buddist and taoist thinking (that I concur with) is that the experience of a thing is dissimilar from the label of the thing as a signpost is dissimilar to the city to which it points. The signpost (words) help you find the city but it is not the experience of the city.

When we talk about our beingness/experience, we digitize with words what quite literally is an infinitely complex and entangled experience (analogue) and then feel like the words are inadequate (which they are, if you extend them beyond their utility).

This does not give human consciousness an elevated status over say, atmosphere consciousness, it simply makes it indescribable.

&lt;edited cos I keep leaving out words like "not" which can turn a sentence around 180 degrees&gt;

[ January 29, 2002: Message edited by: Farren ]</p>

Theophage

Excellent post, Farren. I, being a materialist of course, subscribe to option 2.1.

Its funny that Filip responded to this post in a seemingly positive way, even though it totally falsifies his "mentalist" position. Apparently, my posts aren't the only ones he doesn't seem to understand

Daniel "Theophage" Clark

Christopher Lord

Farren, your position I can respect. Although there is no way to 'prove' that there is a oneness, at least it fits the truth where it intersects (in that we are simply part of the universe)

If a dualist could simply illustrate where the other half of their 'coin' is, it would gain a fair amount of respect and converts.

I mean really, why must a materialist defend what should be the default position from the advances of those who propose a supernatural element to the mind?

Theophage

If that is your version of an apology, Filip, I accept. And I apologize for the insults; it seems that being either deceptive or stupid is a false dichotomy. I do understand how easy it is to misunderstand when you're tired. Please re-read my posts so far and try to understand them correctly.

Perhaps you should spend a bit less time "attempting to explain materialistic fallacies" and a bit more time trying to understand an actual materialist viewpoint. You might find it more satisfying than knocking down strawmen.

Let me know when you wish to continue, and we shall...

[ January 29, 2002: Message edited by: Theophage ]

[ January 29, 2002: Message edited by: Theophage ]</p>

excreationist

Filip Sandor:
About the whole information thing:

Let's say we were training an artificial neuron network to classify the gender of faces.

So we might show it a picture of Madonna's face. Initially the neural net would be random (e.g. "42% female, 39% male"), but we'd reinforce that the correct answer is "100% female, 0% male". After a while it would get pretty close to this - "99.9% female, 0.1% male". And that is good enough.

Then we might show it a picture of George W. Bush. It might initially give the answer of "34% female, 61% male" but we'd train it to give the answer of "0% female, 100% male".

Then we might try Michael Jackson. This might throw off the other things it has learnt, so you'd need to retrain everything until it gives the right answer.

To make it good at classifying the genders of faces you'd have to train it with hundreds of faces.

The patterns which it has learnt which lead to the two outputs "female %" and "male %" would consist of thousands and thousands of numbers (assuming that you used thousands and thousands of artificial neurons). These numbers weren't programmed in - the artificial neural net derived these values during its training. Each time it got something wrong, these numbers ("weights") were adjusted.

So say it now had to classify a face that it had never seen before... it might give the result of "5% female, 40% male". And then using a maximum function, it would classify it as probably male. (It might have been a cartoon face - that's why the values were low)

So this neural net has captured the essense of "femaleness" or "maleness" of faces... the process was completely physical. If that example isn't good enough, consider bees that are trained to associate food with certain behaviour (e.g. going through mazes). So they are learning fairly abstract patterns. And they could learn like that in the wild too - a conscious human isn't necessary.

madmax2976

Filip says he is tired of materialist fallacies. I suppose we can now include a third category in which his arguments can be placed into. In addition to basing his case on human ignorance and invoking other mystery's to solve a mystery (which doesn't even answer his own question by the way), we can now add unimpressive grandstanding. I've yet to seem him actually demonstrate a single "materialist" fallacy.

With such a weak case as he has presented, his boast is all the more empty.

Farren

Filip, Theophage, since you guys seem to have reached the (inevitable) junction of discussing the discussion, I'll just blather on a bit more.

There's a greek tale about the goddess Kallisti (chaos) wanting to cause strife, so she rolls this golden apple down a table where the gods are dining.

Of course _her_ golden apple looks like each one's deepest desire, so they have a major squabble over the apple, only each one is arguing about a different thing, they just don't realise it.

I've been on this forum one night (yup, didn't sleep, gotta see a client just now) and I've already been labelled a materialist

Part of my point is that the vocabularies and their supporting logic give the appearance of diametric conflict when what we have here seems to me to be conflict of greater and lesser utility.

I don't think the mentalist or even some spiritualist (a very small subset of non creator-theist spiritualist positions, i should qualify) positions conflict in the sense of cancelling each other out. Of cause it depends on which mentalist and which materialist you talk to. Take me, I just found out I'm a materialist and I can see a confluence of reason in both positions. That's why I was carrying on about blind men and elephants.

What I do think is that a "strong" mentalist position adds lots of extra terms to the description of the phenomenon _sometimes_ without utility. For instance, it is true to say that a coin has two sides but not useful at all to try to calculate their paths in space individually when the coin is flipped, if the intention is to find where it lands.

Why do two calculations when in this case a single one will yield the same result? What if, in doing the seperate calculations, you err slightly when calculating the side showing the value, and predict that the two faces will land several meters apart?

Real world examples of this kind of thinking (which has tangible effects on the quality of mental health care) abound: Consider the mental abuse of parents of autistic children by mentalist-oriented psychologists who believed through much of the sixties and seventies that cold parenting was to blame.

Autism is now widely considered to be a neurological condition which would require revolutionary techniques in brain surgery or medication to truly solve rather than slapping the parents about.

Why were these parents made to feel bad for two decades? Because the more error prone, higher level (but not "incorrect") - mentalist vocabulary came up with a "reason" before lower-level - materialist avenues had been adequately explored.

Filip, you regard the internal experience/external appearance (I remember a cat, you see neurons firing) as a clear discrepency in the materialist position. Its not. Its a weakness in the _behaviourist_ position (one golden apple).

Some materialists may claim that looking at a thing from the outside is the same as being the thing. But they're wrong, and I think you've adequately illustrated that so I won't dissemble.

But (disregarding any sollipsist perspectives*) if one simply says that everything experiences itself and experiences everything else according to their effects on itself and the same holds for everything else's experience, it all hangs together.

The core of the materialist position is the bit that says "the same holds for everything else's experience". i.e. there aren't "special" materials (read, the most generic sense, classes of things), that in all respects occupy the same phase space of axis but experience it in a completely different, special or inconsistent manner (like "souls" with "free will" which somehow "cause" and are "affected" without having a causal - material - relationship like all that other spiritually impoverished stuff).

I don't think the materialist position is in any way contrary to the concepts of general dynamic patterns and forms or local experiences. I do think that there is a tendency among naive materialists to deny the "higher level" patterns(see earlier post) simply because the discourse that embraces consciousness and complex feedback as universal characteristics (Gaia hypothesis, Universal consciousness) is not yet widespread enough.

In other words the "generating" idea of materialism is basically useful and sound, but a number of ppl are subtracting, rather than adding it to other useful mental tools (having applied occam's razor to eliminate medieval superstitions, new "higher level" ideas are equated with the superstitions and vilified, mind with soul etc...).

What I'm groping to say is that a materialist/mentalist debate is similar to a biology vs chemistry debate

*or taking an _extreme_ sollipsist position: the universe experiences itself. To experience itself, like a fractal, it must enfold itself in itself (to "know" itself it must "store" itself in itself). As soon as it enfolds, it has aspects. The aspects "know" themselves and other aspects, which involves enfolding the composite of both, which enfoldments have aspects...