we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Discuss arguments for existence of God and faith in general. Any aspect of any orientation toward religion/spirituality, as long as it is based upon a positive open to other people attitude.

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runamokmonk
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Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Post by runamokmonk » Sat Apr 13, 2013 11:07 pm

And there is also Pluralistic Idealism

Pluralistic idealism such as that of Gottfried Leibniz[44] takes the view that there are many individual minds that together underlie the existence of the observed world and make possible the existence of the physical universe

fleetmouse responded
That sounds like relativism or subjectivism to me...
Pluralistic Idealism makes sense for how I understood it.


But I'm not so sure I would say that individuals minds make possible the existence of the physical world. Although, I would be interested in that. I would tend to believe we are in God's mind and the individual minds, being made in God's image, may also interact and create (or worse, from being fallen, or from ignorance). Sort of like a shared dream, in the dream God is dreaming us up in, as well.

Fleetmouse said
OK, let's say that everything is a thought in God's mind - we STILL have to account for why humans are conscious and rocks and trees are not, and it must be an account in terms of structure and function rather than substance - because those rocks and trees are also thoughts in God's mind, and so are made of the same "stuff" ultimately as we are.

(I've bolded and underlined that passage because it's the main idea I'd like to see followed up on in my flurry of posts today)

(will have to read up on objective and pluralistic idealism, thanks for the pointers!)

I have no idea if they are conscious or not. I have had an experience where everything looked and felt like it was alive. But that is also subjective just as your perceptions of the universe is. I start from knowing that I am here, aware and experiencing the world. That would be my personal base of knowledge. It seems that would be the case for any human. To define the base of reality as physical, and non-mental, you would be using your subjectivity to do so. Not all humans, through out all history, thought the world was non-mental or not "alive".

And I have already stated there are some who have the idea that the brain acts as a two way transmitter to the mind. The brain being the intermediary of body and mind.

In a previous post, I have touched on a similar idea, poetically, about the brain being knotted energy acting as a parameter, or filter, for our minds. And God being the knot pattern-er. In a non-mechanistic theory of the universe, such as a 'dream', in a way. I could understand it in my mind better than in a well described theory.
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Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Post by runamokmonk » Sat Apr 13, 2013 11:16 pm

fleetmouse
Even thoughts or abstract ideas are not themselves conscious or are thought of as conscious. Does the logical principle of non-contradiction remember, know and feel?

I said
What? I am not sure where else a thought or idea would come from but a conscious mind. I guess the sentences I am writing is not conscious either but they appear to be products of a mind which the sentence originated in.

fleetmouse says
If thoughts are themselves not conscious then consciousness is not a necessary element of thought. I have shelves full of books that are full of thoughts but not a single book is conscious, as I understand consciousness. Wikipedia isn't conscious either.

Perhaps thoughts aren't dependent on minds, but rather minds are dependent on thoughts.

All those books of yours are thoughts written down, originating from minds. This seems silly to now argue that thoughts aren't conscious, or that minds are dependent on thoughts.

Explain how a thought does not originate from a mind, please. :lol:


Actually, I have no idea how you define a thought. Is awareness a thought? Because, I said before that the one thing we do know, is that we have awareness and experience. All other ideas and thoughts, including philosophical physicalism, comes from thoughts, after having awareness and experience.

My point I have repeatedly made about dreams is that in a dream you will likely have first person perspective, similar to waking life experience, but all that which is in your dream, is mind. Whether your awareness of it as mind or not is moot. The point is that dreaming shows one can have an experience of an apparent non-conscious environment or things, such as a rock, and yet it all be mind. Most humans can say they have dreams. The experience of a universe, that is mind, is experienced in the dream. Mind made that universe...

If one can dream, than one can experience apparent and perceived non-mental things in a universe, that is all mind. This can be imagined as possible, if however fleeting*.

This is better than a thought experiment because, if one dreams, one can experience the possibility, and understand, that just because something seems non-mental, it can actually not only be mind, but one's own mind!

(*no pun intended but I liked that that word happened)
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Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Post by runamokmonk » Sun Apr 14, 2013 12:21 am

As far as I can tell no one can prove materialism, physicalism, pan-psychism or idealism. But you can pick which one best fits, or has explanatory value, for the phenomena.

It does seem to me that physicalism can encompass previously rejected phenomena. It appears to me physicalism could, in theory, eventually accept PSI phenomena (if mind is, or defined as, physical). And for that, I do wonder what the explanatory value there is, if that is the case.


fleetmouse
I take physical to mean capable of interacting with the physical. Look at mass and energy for example - according to physics they're interchangeable, but energy can seem intangible at times. We're unaware of radio wavelength energy unless we have a radio or cell phone or (so I've been told) dental fillings that are arranged in the right way to interact with it. So the mind might be ultimately physical, but operating in an analogous way, in which it only interacts with systems that are "tuned in" to it (or that produced and emitted it in the first place...?)

It would seem to matter more 'what' is asserted as physical rather than physical being defined as capable of interacting with the physical.

Because physical appears to mean real, or whatever happens. And so appears to lack explanatory value for me.

(It looked like Metacrock tried to take this to the end at 'charges' and what are charges.)

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Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Post by fleetmouse » Sun Apr 14, 2013 7:05 am

met wrote:
fleetmouse wrote: What is an interrelationship?
:o Well.... um ... think of it in formal logic or set theoretical terms. Call it a relation, in a formal sense. Formal relations can be transitive, reciprocal, commutative or whatever. But they always define a pattern, either between elements or between other relations, no matter whether chaotic or regular. There may be be basic elements defined in (the most primal) sets in our model. OR, as is case with a lot of number-modelling set theory constuctions, there can be a rule that sets contain only other sets, no basic elements exist. And we don't even need to know what's contained to study the relations according to the rules. But in the second case, if there is no primal "stuff" in our model, only patterns of relationships, it seems more like a model of a model, not a model of a "real" thing. Indeed, seems rather more akin perhaps to "thoughts in a mind" - patterns for modelling "stuff" - than to "things" in themselves....
But our thoughts can have intension without extension - they can connote without denoting. We can posit false connections and there can be real ones that elude us. So it follows that there's something outside of our models.
... only problematic when EVERYTHING is defined as energy. Or potential energy - ie the possibility of dissolving existing relations and creating different ones....
If you object to everything being ultimately the same substance then surely the same objection applies to idealism - unless you aim to apply it unfairly. ;)
fleetmouse wrote:And I'm saying the opposite - that I recognize that total understanding (if that's even a coherent concept, which I have my doubts about) eludes us no matter how well we know how something works. And I'm reconciled to that. I don't think we should treat it as a crisis. Feel free to have panic attacks over it if you wish.
Wishing? How does wishing enter into it? :o I suppose Nietchze would say wishing enters into it because we observe and define, or attempt to observe and define exactly and only the relations we WISH for? ;)
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Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Post by Metacrock » Sun Apr 14, 2013 8:37 am

I love colored things! I love those straws! I love them.!! :mrgreen:

We don't have to be full blown idealists to reject reductionism. My point about rejecting it is not to enforce some arbitrary predilection for dualism or to save the world from monism or to satisfy some need for one number over another; to save reality itself from being controlled by some particular ideology that would segment it for the sake of control.

why don't we keep specific attributes like number available for further use if need be and not worry about that? But reducing it all to one things--that thing is the knowledge we control--is the problem.

When one starts worrying about things like the one and the many, then we run into what I call The Heraclitus paradox.. That is Heraclitus thought there was all action and no stasis. But when viewed form a larger perspective his view of realty actually contained a larger stasis, that of constant motion which worked like a frame around a picture.
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Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Post by Metacrock » Sun Apr 14, 2013 8:45 am

As far as I can tell no one can prove materialism, physicalism, pan-psychism or idealism. But you can pick which one best fits, or has explanatory value, for the phenomena.[quote][/quote]

I can't help but feel that there's a lesson in the fact that all reality comes to us from conscoiusness as a medium of perception. Yet we have no real need to be conscious. Not only could we be philosophical zombies but we could also be actual zombies, or actual automatons and nature would function the same. There is no actual reason why we are conscious.

Yet all that hold true and dear is known to us, along with all fact and everything scientific, only becuase we are conscious, and it makes sense in a big picture only becuase we are conscious. Consciousness is for us like water for a fish. It's an invisible medium in which we live and move have our being and yet we don't see it because it's too much a part of our lives. We don't even understand it fully and we have to explain it to those who would reduce it to brain function. Yet without none of the problems of reductionism would have any meaning.

That makes me think that consciousness has to be some kind of fundamental medium that is universal and necessary and beyond us yet we are centered in it.
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Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Post by met » Sun Apr 14, 2013 10:37 am

fleetmouse wrote:But our thoughts can have intention without extension - they can connote without denoting. We can posit false connections and there can be real ones that elude us. So it follows that there's something outside of our models.
No. Cuz the "stuff" outside our models could still just be more relations, more patterns. Thoughts that are to deep for us. Still doesn't have to be any actual "stuff."

Think of a computer program stored on some portable storage device. You can start the program on different computers, but no-one thinks of that as different things, different "copies" of the program. It's the same program. We see it that way cuz the media the program runs on when it's activated - electrical charges defined in some RAM - are too tenuous. Haven't got enough solidity to be "real."

That's the point. :P
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Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Post by met » Sun Apr 14, 2013 11:21 am

Metacrock wrote:We don't have to be full blown idealists to reject reductionism. My point about rejecting it is not to enforce some arbitrary predilection for dualism or to save the world from monism or to satisfy some need for one number over another; to save reality itself from being controlled by some particular ideology that would segment it for the sake of control.
Meta, one philosopher from somewhere once said (in Time magazine, I think) if you could build an automaton that acted perfectly human, that you couldn't tell from a human being at all, it wouldn't prove humans were actually automatons and consciousness wasn't real, but would just demonstrate how odd and superfluous human consciousness really is in this universe.

You can't just put away the essential phenomena of perception and consciousness and pretend its not there, no way.
The “One” is the space of the “world” of the tick, but also the “pinch” of the lobster, or that rendezvous in person to confirm online pictures (with a new lover or an old God). This is the machinery operative...as “onto-theology."
Dr Ward Blanton

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Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Post by Metacrock » Sun Apr 14, 2013 12:18 pm

met wrote:
Metacrock wrote:We don't have to be full blown idealists to reject reductionism. My point about rejecting it is not to enforce some arbitrary predilection for dualism or to save the world from monism or to satisfy some need for one number over another; to save reality itself from being controlled by some particular ideology that would segment it for the sake of control.
Meta, one philosopher from somewhere once said (in Time magazine, I think) if you could build an automaton that acted perfectly human, that you couldn't tell from a human being at all, it wouldn't prove humans were actually automatons and consciousness wasn't real, but would just demonstrate how odd and superfluous human consciousness really is in this universe.

You can't just put away the essential phenomena of perception and consciousness and pretend its not there, no way.

that's not what I said. the idea that consciousness is below the surface s not relevant either. I said there's no reason why we are conscious, we don't have to be. Meaning, there's an explanatory gap, it can't be expalined away by brain chemistry. It's Charlmer's argument.
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Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Post by met » Sun Apr 14, 2013 2:10 pm

that's not what I said. the idea that consciousness is below the surface s not relevant either. I said there's no reason why we are conscious, we don't have to be. Meaning, there's an explanatory gap, it can't be expalined away by brain chemistry. It's Charlmer's argument.
Isn't that saying the same thing? Living organisms could function perfectly well as self-replicating stimulus/response machines without all that messy business of perceptions and consciousness. It's not necessary.... it's superfluous.

Metacrock wrote:When one starts worrying about things like the one and the many, then we run into what I call The Heraclitus paradox.. That is Heraclitus thought there was all action and no stasis. But when viewed form a larger perspective his view of realty actually contained a larger stasis, that of constant motion which worked like a frame around a picture.
I like that. Is that what Derrida achieved too, with his "it's all just differance?" :?
The “One” is the space of the “world” of the tick, but also the “pinch” of the lobster, or that rendezvous in person to confirm online pictures (with a new lover or an old God). This is the machinery operative...as “onto-theology."
Dr Ward Blanton

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