Idealism

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Hi 91,

You mean you may never know if the light bulb in your refrigerator is off???

Tadzio

Everything we can perceive and cannot perceive is as old as the universe.

If it didn't exist we could not have perceived it. I may perceive that I have cheese in my hand, but unless I actively go and get the cheese, it simply is not so.

If a tree falls in the forest ...

It makes a sound. It always will. No matter what it hits (unless the friction of the air somehow freezes it in place, and even then it probably will still make a sound) it will make a sound.

Open the door and feel the bulb quickly. If it is warm, it did not turn off.

ruveyn

If matter is not conscious, devoid of mind, without intention then how can consciousness arise from it? I can't quite get away from believing that 'mind' must have had to somehow exist for mind to then arise from matter. I mean, matter just isn't capable of getting started on itself or imagining the scope of what might come to be.

I don't think this point has really been addressed yet in this thread.

Consciousness is just matter anyway.

Well, in a sense. Conscious exists in our brains. Without a brain, a person has no conscious.

The brain is just a large, vastly more complicated nucleus. Our body is essentially one cell made up of billions of smaller cells.

First of all you need to define 'consciousness'. My point is consciousness as subjective experience is just a wrong concept. It is a delusion.

You are just conflating epistemology with subjective experience. Epistemology concerns forming the 'right' belief (warranted BELIEF). The mechanism of belief forming is irrelevant. You can have god planting a belief in you without you experiencing anything (that is divine sense AFAIK). You can talk about proper function of an information collecting robot or an automaton.


How can you separate your memory 1 nanosecond ago from your experience? Any attempt of introspecting the content of the 'experience' would take much longer than that.

I didn't think I was talking about consciousness as a concept, although I will have to reconsider this, rather I was describing naively that taken for granted something that is what we might call subjective experience. I don't understand how you're crtiticism of the concept of consciousness speaks to something more like the phenomenological level of reality that we experience in each moment and in everyday life. Can you elaborate on this?

But saying consciousness is just matter seems to collapse the meaning of the word 'matter' from something like 'stuff we can touch' to 'everything that exists'. If you want to have matter include consciousness then there is still something very puzzling about matter can have these 'touchable' properties as well as these experiential, perceiving, thinking and feeling etc. ones. If you want to say everything is matter, you might as well say everything is mind. There's just no distinction in the concepts that describes how things show up to us in the world in everyday experience. We generally and for the most part take ourselves to be having an experience of a material world. You know what I mean?

No, I am just stating what is accepted within the disciple. That theory of knowledge; is the study of truth and belief: Belief, in our case, entails subjective experience.



No, the mechanism of belief forming is highly relevant; for example empiricism is entirely based on perceptual obersvation; what you are claiming here is fundamentally incorrect.



Yes you can, but none of it would escape my criticism. I am struggling to understand your constant intransigence on this issue. I have criticized your position, but not by using anything which is not generally accepted. A robot or automaton would reason from axiomatic precepts but this would not be properly basic on their own. The precepts would fall heavily into the third part of the Münchhausen Trilemma.



Sure, I have no problem with this. Subjective experience entails a certain degree of time. What you fail to appreciate is that the objection from past memory is moot because someone who is evaluating something from the position of absolute skepticism faces the same problem. When you embark on your quest through eliminative materialism, you are still reasoning; hence a position which rejects reason is self-defeating. Not even skepticism escapes the assumptions made within Epistemology and highlighted in the Münchhausen Trilemma.

Let me rephrase that:

Consciousness is just a *function* of matter. Without the matter forming your brain, you (your conscious, personality, ideas, etc) would cease to exist. The mind requires the brain to function. We do not observe any sign of conscious in vacuum, or something without a brain (say, a rock).

Saturn's point is sound, within it's own paradigm. Your position is sound, within your own paradigm. I don't know if Saturn is a materialist, but your own position certainly seems to be. The problem is that one cannot defend materialism by referencing materialism; that would be circular reasoning. I can certainly see some attraction to materialism but citing it's presuppositions will no more sell me on it's claim to be foundational than citing the Ten Commandments will convince you of the attraction of Judaism. The reasoning you have given here, is powerful, but not to someone who is not already a materialist. World-views are basically impossible to ground through raw induction, if you want to convince someone of the benefit of the position you have taken you will need to start reasoning for it from outside of the paradigm.