Idealism

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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.

True.

While I am a materialist, idealism versus materialism is a question I think will never be completely answered.

Both sides make a kind of sense, in their own way.

^^^^^

I agree totally. For myself, I am not a materialist. Each of the world-views are logically coherent; that does not mean that one cannot make a good case against adopting one. Materialism is very good, in that we assure ourselves of the intelligibility of the universe, the cost is that we have, in my view, a strong defeater for the reliability of our own faculties. As such I like materialism and Falsificationism, as epistemologies of science but find them lacking when applied internally. Idealism, solipsism etc are very difficult to reconcile with science, there is no reason to think the outside world is any more logical or coherent than our own internal thoughts and as such we have less grounds for thinking the universe is intelligible. Constructivism is essentially idealism + post-modernism and as such has few benefits at all. For myself I hold to a sort of Theistic Coherentism; where the basic axioms you reason from reinforce one another but you accept that none can really be proven but you also more-or-less accept that God has made you and the universe intelligible (this is a Judeo/Christian assertion) and that therefor you expect to be able to understand the universe and you expect your cognitive functions to be more or less reliable.


[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Bd37W31dxw&feature=g-all-u&context=G20537e6FAAAAAAAACAA[/youtube]
I will leave it to the physicist turned theologian John Polkinghorne to describe, in rough terms, theistic epistemology.

By saying the universe could be unintelligible, do you mean the view point of not being able to understand the universe, or that it was not intelligently designed?

While I don't believe in intelligent design, I do believe that humans could eventually understand the universe, if our species lasts long enough.

Hi abacacus,

I'm more focused on prejudices involving epilepsy and autism, and the notions of "responsiveness" with "impaired consciousness". Otherwise, the radical Skinnerian Behaviourist vantage that "consciousness" is not a valid and objective scientific concept, is best entertained in pursuing the Scientific Method as applied to Human Behaviour, and it works best in philosophy too.

Daily activities are impacted, like driving and eye-contact, and very adverse prejudices are practiced against individuals with neurological impairments, including those of epilepsy and autism. "Consciousness As A Neurological Concept In Epileptology: a critical review" by P. Gloor (Epilepsia. 1986;27 Suppl 2:S14-26), notes the major practical problem from categorizing such impairments with needless conceptual weights:

Abstract at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3720710
"This essay explores the usefulness of the concept of consciousness in epileptology and concludes that it does not further the understanding of seizure mechanisms and brain function. The reasons for this are both theoretical and empirical. Consciousness cannot be adequately defined. This may explain why attempts at accounting for it in neurobiological terms have failed. Epistemological and scientific arguments are reviewed which suggest why a satisfactory explanation of consciousness is not now and may never be possible. There are, however, aspects of conscious experience such as perception, cognition, memory, affect, and voluntary motility that are open to neurobiological research. Careful observations of epileptic seizures with "loss of consciousness" often reveal that only some components of consciousness are impaired. "Loss of consciousness" during a seizure, often presenting as unresponsiveness, may be due to aphasia, inability to perform voluntary movements, ictal or postictal amnesia (sometimes with preservation of memory during the ictus itself), or to diversion of attention by a hallucinated experience. A plea is made to observe accurately and interact with the patient during an attack in order to distinguish between these various behavioral disturbances masquerading as 'loss of consciousness.'"

"Brain Damage" makes using the phrase "distributed neuronal matrix" for "holographic" more revealing (this article and many of its references are cited in scores of books that use the buzzword "holographic"), "Experiential Phenomena of Temporal Lobe Epilepsy" by Pierre Gloor (1989), (Brain (1990), 113, 1673-1694), and on the Full Text PDF download: pages 1686-1691 (Mona Lisa for Liberals, the other guy for conservatives): http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content ... 3.abstract

I don't much like the concept of "consciousness" (I prefer "self-induced autoclitic(?)" Skinner version), but others use "wild & wide" concepts of consciousness (consciousness during sleep (unconsciousness consciousness)???): "How To Study Consciousness Scientifically" by John R. Searle (1998), (Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B (1998) 353, 1935-1942)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article ... 854266.pdf

Here's a big list: http://www.philosophie.uni-mainz.de/met ... essBib.pdf

Then, it is often held that a rock has a "consciousness", with the cyclical buzz-fad of Panpsychism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

Tadzio