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Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Posted: Mon Apr 15, 2013 8:32 am
by Metacrock
met wrote:
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.
you may have a good point there. I was just focusing on the way your example was sort of opposite of mine. I said there's no natural reason why we are conscious and you said we could build an automaton that would appear form the outside to be conscious. obviously related but not exactly the same. Although it might end up in the same place as my comment but starting from another perspective, which is what i like about your thinking.

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?" :?[/quote]

that's not really Derridian. Derrida even though he's not reductionist is atheist. he hated Christianity. So would not agree with my TS argument. My argument is also called "reverse Derrida." I'm saying he got part of it right but his solution is wrong. If you reverse his solution it's a god argument.

Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Posted: Mon Apr 15, 2013 10:18 am
by met
Yeah. I was thinking u could fold your The Heraclitus paradox into that (TS) argument to demonstrate how u "reverse Derrida" more clearly, if u haven't done so yet...

Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Posted: Tue Apr 16, 2013 9:12 am
by fleetmouse
[I haven't bailed on this thread, just having a stressy week, back soon!]

Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Posted: Thu Apr 18, 2013 3:52 pm
by Metacrock
fleetmouse wrote:[I haven't bailed on this thread, just having a stressy week, back soon!]
that's cool. I can't be on much now because of the heat. But I'm looking forward to your answer.

Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Posted: Sat Apr 20, 2013 2:55 pm
by fleetmouse
runamokmonk wrote:
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.
On the one hand you posit that things that are conventionally not thought of as conscious, such as rocks, are alive - which I take it to mean conscious, in the context of this discussion - though maybe I've misinterpreted you here - and on the other hand, you speak of the brain as an intermediary between mind and body. This strikes me as a contradiction - on the one hand you want to posit that everything is alive (conscious?) - but then what's the need for an intermediary, in that panpsychic scenario?

Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Posted: Sat Apr 20, 2013 3:00 pm
by fleetmouse
runamokmonk wrote: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:
Hm, it was a passing thought - I was lazily trying for a copernican revolution - what if conscious minds emerge from thoughts, and thoughts are originally in the form of non-conscious algorithms embodied in biological circuits - dumb programs, so to speak? I'd have to develop the idea further. I'm not prepared to really expound on and defend it.
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...
But then there's no difference between a thing and a conception of a thing. I will go into this further in my response to met.

Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Posted: Sat Apr 20, 2013 3:02 pm
by fleetmouse
runamokmonk wrote: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.
I'm not interested in defending your straw man definition of physical. You may thwack away at it with impunity.

Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Posted: Sun Apr 21, 2013 11:43 am
by fleetmouse
Meta, this is an excellent post full of briefly expressed and insightful observations. [hi-5s you]
Metacrock wrote: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.
OK, so if I understand you correctly, you're saying that debate about monism of various sorts versus dualism - trying to philosophically ferret out the one or two things "behind" everything - is actually distracting or unnecessary?

Now, what you say about Heraclitus and action / stasis is interesting - I think of mind as a verb more than a noun - it's only alive and working while it's in flux. A thought is like a little fly-wheel, a process, an action. But certainly, there's something static about it in the sense that the pattern the action takes is constant to the extent that the thought is consistent.

Now the problem with debate about consciousness in terms of substance, over and above the interaction problem which we can set aside for now if you like, is that it doesn't regard the mind in terms of this dynamism, but tries to locate the essence of mind in the "stuff", so to speak. And minds, or people as a whole, or many other complex phenomena, exhibit processes or behaviors that simply aren't in evidence in the stuff they're made of - the arrangement and action is far more important, because you can take the same substance in a different arrangement, place it in a bucket and get nothing.

So I completely agree with you that reductionism in this sense is the enemy of understanding the mental. I think you won't understand consciousness at all by starting out saying that it's made of stuff that has mental properties - matter, or mental substance, or panpsychic fluff, or what have you.

(Massimo Pigliucci makes some points about the idea of mind as verb rather than noun, and anti-reductionism, in this post: http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.ca/2 ... thout.html )

Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Posted: Mon Apr 22, 2013 8:34 am
by Metacrock
fleetmouse wrote:Meta, this is an excellent post full of briefly expressed and insightful observations. [hi-5s you]
thanks. :mrgreen:
Metacrock wrote: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.
OK, so if I understand you correctly, you're saying that debate about monism of various sorts versus dualism - trying to philosophically ferret out the one or two things "behind" everything - is actually distracting or unnecessary?
Basically.
Now, what you say about Heraclitus and action / stasis is interesting - I think of mind as a verb more than a noun - it's only alive and working while it's in flux. A thought is like a little fly-wheel, a process, an action. But certainly, there's something static about it in the sense that the pattern the action takes is constant to the extent that the thought is consistent.
I don't think we know enough about mind to say one way or the other. I tend to think of it as a secondary brain which stores info and can be drawn out latter. I don't really know if that is right or if it makes sense, but I'm informing of my habit. I think our culture leads us to think of it that way.
Now the problem with debate about consciousness in terms of substance, over and above the interaction problem which we can set aside for now if you like, is that it doesn't regard the mind in terms of this dynamism, but tries to locate the essence of mind in the "stuff", so to speak. And minds, or people as a whole, or many other complex phenomena, exhibit processes or behaviors that simply aren't in evidence in the stuff they're made of - the arrangement and action is far more important, because you can take the same substance in a different arrangement, place it in a bucket and get nothing.
that relates to what I just said in a way. I think you are trying to ferret out the ghost in the machine. while I think we should move beyond that idea, to set that out as a target and shape our view of mind as getting rid of that when we don't know enough about mind yet to even say what it is exactly is a bit ideologically based, or at least per-mature.
So I completely agree with you that reductionism in this sense is the enemy of understanding the mental. I think you won't understand consciousness at all by starting out saying that it's made of stuff that has mental properties - matter, or mental substance, or panpsychic fluff, or what have you.
sure, good point. what is mind? It's mental. What is mental? well its' pertaining to the mind. that doesn't work. circular. That's like "what is the good?" the good is what is right. what is right? what is good. ect ect.
(Massimo Pigliucci makes some points about the idea of mind as verb rather than noun, and anti-reductionism, in this post: http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.ca/2 ... thout.html )
OK I'll take a gander.