jj

Bletch.

He assumes that material things don't lead to thoughts and thought patterns, despite the evidence otherwise.

He presumes the existance of "mental states" that are not physically implemented, in exact opposition to all of the available evidence.

Ergo, not only does he not have a proof, he's got faulty premises, his "logic" is suborned, and his conclusions worthy of the only belief I hold, which is:

Everybody has to believe something, I believe I'll drink another Guinness.

And, of course, to my position on hatred:
Everybody has to hate somebody, I guess I'll hate bigots.

If you sense that I'm hooting at his proof, well, believe it or not I'm trying to suppress adjectives a great deal stronger than 'absurd' and 'preposterous'.

But I hear you guys have made him go 'way, which is why I'm here. I've dealt with enough sophists in my life.

crocodile deathroll

Then would there be athiest bees, agnostic bees, fundamentalist bees?. Bees I am sure are capable of very complex behavior, but I am of the opinion that that is mere genetically encoded instinctive behavior. Instinctive behavior may of been a precurser to consciousness but it is not at all conscousness any anthing akin to a belief system
I believe consciousness is an emergent property just like iron is an emergent property when baryons being reconfigured into iron atoms when a supernova explodes and I do not buy any of this panpsychism that rocks and dead matter are the slightest bit conscious any more than diamonds are made of iron.

Synaesthesia

Or that silicone contains just a dash of the internet's essence.

Adrian Selby

can i add two books to that list

'Bright Air Brilliant Fire' by Gerald Edelman
'The Mental as Physical' by Edgar Wilson (one of my old lecturers) that is now part of the International Library of Scientific Method, along with Honderich and other luminaries.

Adrian

excreationist

An animal doesn't have to be able to understand the concept of God to have beliefs!
Beliefs just involve an animal learning to form an internal representation of the world so that it can make predictions. And beliefs can be mistaken.
I think an example would be Pavlov's dog experiments - before food was served, a bell was rung. After a while, the dog expected food to come and started salivating even before any food was brought out. So it believed that food was on its way. This wasn't an instinct - dogs don't naturally salivate when you ring a bell. Similar behaviour would happen in bees except I haven't read much about bee experiments.

boneyard bill

Gurder writes:

No. I am not relying on metaphor. I am relying on inference. If mind cannot be explained in materialist terms, yet mind appears to arise from matter, matter and material processes must be more than the materialist assumes. The alternative is to separate mind from matter altogether, and you can't go anywhere from there. You could also opt for complete idealism, but that requires completely re-thinking physics.

Dogmatic and wrong. Would you care to provide your materialist explanation for mind? It should cause quite a stir in both the scientific and philosophical communities.

But that completely misses the point. From the failure of materialism to come up with an explanation you have look for other solutions. The point I am making probably cannot be tested because it is too general. But people with greater scientific knowledge can develop specific theories that could be tested. You can't falsify materialism either. You can only try to prove materialism on the basis of a more specific and detailed theory. And when that theory fails, it does not defeat materialism altogether. Otherwise, the title to this thread would be absolutely true.

And I repeat, how is this begging the question?

boneyard bill

excreationist writes:

But there have been far more sophisticated efforts to answer this question, and some of them have had quite large sums of money to spend. (The Pentagon is willing to spend a lot on things like this). Still, they haven't been able to confirm this type of thinking. The question isn't whether aware systems are machines. The question is whether or not they are only machines.

That would be fine if it actually explained, but the explanation itself is lacking. A materialist needs a mechanism to complete his explanation. Competing theories do not necessarily require such a mechanism.

Of course we can explain computer belief systems in mechanistic terms because we have built the machines. But that doesn't tell us about human belief systems. You once posted a link to some people who were working on a robot, and they were trying to replicate consciousness by getting the robot to learn. Now that's an exciting project, and I'm anxious to see how it turns out. But the implications of this are that matter (understood as matter and material processes) can learn. But learning is a mental characteristic and is not a part of the materialist description of the world. And I still don't see how it would get us past the explanatory gap from the claim that, for example, visual inputs produce vision, to the claim that visual inputs are vision.

Yes, I've read quite a few. But the mechanics alone won't solve the problem. It's also a matter of interpretation. Let me give you the following link. It lists lots of on-line papers on this subject with reference to many books some of which I've read and others that I have not.


<a href="http://www.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/" target="_blank">http://www.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/</a>

boneyard bill

Synaesthesia writes:

But I don't see where materialism has any more of an epistemic nature than any other hypothesis. But if it is epistemic in nature, then we must presuppose it to believe that anything is true just as I must presuppose that my reasoning processes are valid for rationalism and must presupposed that my senses are reliable for empiricism. And I don't see where materialism fits that model. It's rather like a persuppositionalist argument for God.

boneyard bill

excreationist writes:

Exactly. And therefore why should I accept a materialist account over any other? The scientific data can be interpreted many ways. Materialism is only one way. I don't accept the materialist account of the origins of life. But I don't find any alternative that is persuasive either. That's not the case with the present discussion. The idea mind arises from matter quite naturally implies that mind is inherent in matter.

Gurdur

Given the plethora of ideas imaginable, I repeat my question, slightly changed:

How do you infer a rock has mind-stuff?


Dishonest, Boneyard Bill, dishonest.

The bibliographies I gave here give you excellent starts to various theories of mind; you cannot simply wave them away with your petulantly polemical hand.

No, the point you are making cannot be tested - you have not answered my examples of mental states being changed through simple changes in neurophysiology - since you have left it all so vague, and you are simply dressing up analogy as inference.

We're beginning to see that already with your failure to answer my case-examples, and your failure to provide any chain of inference that rules out alternative theories.

Now how about answering my questions on the changes in mental states through simple changes in neurophysiology ?

[ February 08, 2002: Message edited by: Gurdur ]</p>