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What you are missing here about the "default" (also egregiously misunderstood and dismissed by others) is that at the very LEAST a default position of a non-conscious reality MUST have some basis in reality itself.
The fact that the universe as a whole behaves very differently than the only conscious beings we do know if is a pretty good reason to conclude that there's a difference between humans and the universe in that respect. What evidence do you have that suggests otherwise?
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Unfortunately, the very mechanism we use to investigate this premise USES the very consciousness that is postulated to NOT exist.
Please provide references demonstrating that atheists assert that consciousness doesn't exist.
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The consistent harping on lack of ANY evidence for God conveniently ignores and rules out the most powerful evidence of all . . . the existence of consciousness.
I'm perfectly willing to accept the idea that I have a conscious mind. Are you willing to accept that my conscious mind is your god? If not, then perhaps you should reconsider where this idea of yours really leads.
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If atheism cannot rule out a conscious reality
That which is asserted without reason can be dismissed for no reason at all. Come up with some evidence for this alleged universal dark-matter powered self-creating god consciousness energy field and then maybe we'll have something to talk about. Until then, all you have is what you saw in your vision. That magical vision might be convincing to your faith, but it doesn't put any burden on the rest of us.
This is clearly the preferred argument by the atheist . . . attack a specific God (Abrahamic bible God) for obvious reasons. But atheism cannot stand or fall on the refutation of specific weakly presented versions of God.
Absolutely correct. But I was explaining a specific response to a specific argument. The OP is not interested in your type of god, he was trying to show something different. Shiloh's argument poses a large problem for the OP. The concept does not pose an issue for your god concept, a fact which I freely acknowledge.
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Originally Posted by MysticPhD
It stands or falls on the generic concept of God, period . . .
And this is why myself, Arequipa, Gaylenwoof, and many others have been very clear, over and over, Some god-concepts we can actively refute as illogical, some the best we can do is note that they are unfalsifiable and quite simply unknowable ( and thus irrelevant) one way or the other. If you define a god in such a way that is has and can have no impact in the physical, empirical world, then it's existence is essentially a mental curiosity.
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Originally Posted by MysticPhD
The consistent harping on lack of ANY evidence for God conveniently ignores and rules out the most powerful evidence of all . . . the existence of consciousness. If atheism cannot rule out a conscious reality and establish the initial premise of a non-conscious reality . . . the logical syllogism for God will be easy to produce from a premise of a conscious reality . . . the opposite is not true for atheism.
I finally see the issue here. All you are doing is moving the bar back one step. What you are saying is this:
There is consciousness (whatever that means) -> Assume all of reality is conscious -> God = consciousness
Then you say that the atheist point is something like this :
There is consciousness (whatever that means) -> Assume reality itself is not conscious -> consciousness could be a result of unconscious processes and thus does not require a god
You then go on to say that because the second term of this argument is not proven, it cannot be defaulted to, preferring a conscious reality as the default position I assume.
At this point you are just rehashing the whole standard theist argument that "if you can't prove there is not a god , then there is one", except you replace the word "god" with "conscious reality".
At this point, as far as I can tell we can't even agree on what consciousness is, what it entails, and who or what has it. To go further and claim that we know for sure what the mechanism must or must not be seems a bit premature. Certainly the claim that consciousness must come from consciousness is incredibly speculative, and gives rise to the whole infinite regression problem, just like a standard god definition would. In fact it seems that redefining god as conscious reality does very little to solve or even change the logical objections to it.
At this point everything we know about the world in any reliable objective sense comes back to empirically observable processes. Ultimately the way to find out how many teeth a horse has is not logical argument, but looking in the horse's mouth. Until we have some falsifiable, testable, god hypotheses, it seems to make much more sense to pursue alternatives that can provide us with a way to test them.
I am not sure you do because all you have done is repeat your reference which writers you were talking about. Which does not answer the question I actually asked you.
Sorry, but did you not earlier claim to have fully read and understood this thread?
Galenwoof's posts are very detailed, scholarly and comprehensible to the layman, MysticPhD's are argumentatively elegant and incisive. If you can't understand their arguments, then I've no obligation to babysit you through entry-level philosophy. If you understand their arguments, but don't appreciate them, then I'm perfectly happy to leave your opinions as they are.
If all this obfuscation and time-wasting is an obscure strategy by which to seek closure in some way, then you're perfectly free to interpret my non-response as 'victory' for you.
If and when you get past speculation and fantasy then by all means present a case. I would be massively interested to hear it.
One thing that still frustrates me: Although my hypothesis is wildly speculative and perhaps even downright outlandish, the NEED FOR (or, at least, the rational desire for) some sort of hypothesis to address the nature of qualitative subjectivity is (as I see it) not the least bit speculative or fanciful. As I see it, you are not actually comprehending the concept of qualia. (By "you" I mean qualiaphobes in general.) I've used this analogy before: You are like fish denying the existence of water. Your actions clearly indicate that you "understand" water in some non-conceptual way (you "swim in it" with perfect efficiency), but you don't seemingly don't comprehend the need for a conceptual understanding of water AS water - i.e. "that stuff" that ultimately accounts for why you flap your tail to move, or why your gills keep opening and closing.
I might have missed or forgotten some things in this thread, but right now I cannot recall anyone seriously addressing the nature of radical skepticism. I think that perhaps if you take a few moment to try to prove to me that there is anything beyond my own personal private experience, you might catch a glimpse of the problem presented by qualia. (Comprehending the problem or radical skepticism is probably not sufficient for understanding qualia, but I suspect it is an essential exercise to motivate the right sort of understanding.)
Qualia are simply the elements that constitutes your direct experience from your current perspective (linguistically expressed in term of "indexicals" e.g., this is my experience here and now.) There is absolutely nothing in this conception of qualia (as I have formulated it) that contradicts materialism, or implies dualism. If you think my concept of qualia contradicts the idea that we are all made of matter/energy, or if you think that qualia logically imply dualism, then you are not really understanding what I've said. This is why I've emphasized the need to think about skepticism. To understand skepticism is to confront the qualitative aspect of experience, but it is possible to understand the problem of skepticism without actually becoming a solipsist or a dualist. You can't prove the skeptic wrong (the skeptic's argument is epistemologically self-sealing), but you can propose an ontology that identifies qualia with the attributes of a publicly accessible objective world. This is what materialism tries to do, and it is essentially I have done.
The problem is that standard materialism is a naive sort of materialism. The naive materialist makes the necessary ontological move, but then he gets a case of alzheimer's and forgets that he made the move. He seems to completely forget that an implicit understanding of qualia and the problem of skepticism drove him to make an ontological assumption in the first place. He thinks that THIS qualitative experience JUST IS "that stuff that I study in physics class," and I would agree. What makes me different than the naive materialist is that I do not ignore the problem of skepticism, which motivated me to make the ontological move in the first place. I understand that an assumption of identity between "two" things was required. These "two things" are not really "two" things (e.g., Venus and the morning star are not really "two" things). If mind JUST IS matter, then matter has the attributes of mind. (If Venus just is the morning star, then any attribute we assign to Venus must, by default, apply to the morning star, even if we can't always see exactly how this can be.)
Gaylenwoof,
I agree with most of your post. I tend to think that to get beyond radical skepticism we have to make a leap. For me that leap is that I have to assume the the noumenal world is roughly approximated by the phenomenal world (to borrow Kant's terminology). I feel justified in doing so, because for a large portion of our experience we can show that this analysis leads to repeatable, verifiable results for other observers as well. For example, gravity holds true for other people, not just me. We can formulate general rules that hold true across the board, an can be improved by empirical means. I think that is is easy to forget that there is a difference between reality and what is observed, precisely because in so much our experience they correlate very tightly. It is at these philosophical corner cases that we have to pay attention to the difference between what we observe or experience and what is.
That being said, I did think your final analogy has got a bit of a problem to it.
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Originally Posted by Gaylenwoof
I understand that an assumption of identity between "two" things was required. These "two things" are not really "two" things (e.g., Venus and the morning star are not really "two" things). If mind JUST IS matter, then matter has the attributes of mind. (If Venus just is the morning star, then any attribute we assign to Venus must, by default, apply to the morning star, even if we can't always see exactly how this can be.)
I would think that a more appropriate analogy would that mind has the attributes of matter in the same way that a computer has the attributes of sand. They are both built of a particular substance, but it is the structure and arrangement of both that give rise to complexity and behavior that is not present in the underlying material. I don't think it absurd at all to say that if the mind is simply specific matter arranged in specific ways, then specific matter arranged in specific ways has the attribute of mind. In fact, I strongly suspect that is the case, although I have no more proof of that than anyone else. But the reason I am fairly comfortable with this assumption is that, as I mentioned before, the correllation between the noumenal and phenomenal has a pretty good track record. It is an assumption, but a reasonable one I think, at least until we come up with some way to test the alternatives. That being said, no one should be discouraged from hypothesizing alternatives, we just need to work out ways to evaluate those hypotheses.
What idea is that, I have asked for your theory on causality and you have not offered anything other than assertions - which is ironic since you accussed me of doing that.
Never said it 'needed' to. When one uses the terms cause and effect and hence is talking about causality one assumes a change from state A to state B. If no other theory is offered and philosophy can't agree on a theory of causality I will assume the standard usage of such terms to mean that A actually 'causes' something to become something else - an effect. Pretty simple. The OP clearly never offered anything close to a theory of causality and neither have you. I am not sure what the hell 'full potentiality' actually means - is this a rigorous scientific or philosophical theory on causality that I never heard of? Please explain! If the terms cause, effect, and causality, are in play then by no means am I misunderstanding anything by using the term affect to explain my point particualarly in light of what we do know about causality in the physical realm. The burden needs to met by you, if you want to abondon such thinking, to explain yourself and this full potentiality theory in light of what the OP was trying to show with regard to his specific God.
Then, once again, explain how this works. Give me you theory of causality. It is not a strawman if this is the state of existence - God exists alone and nothing else and then an effect appears that is wholly ontologically different than this God. Explain Away! I am waiting!
It was not just the phrase 'causally prior' but other information he supplied in his posts. Go read his posts he is talking about a certain type of God comensurate with the Abrahamic God and specifically implied a creatio ex nihilo scenerio.
Well then since it is so 'elaborate' I can't wait for your simple interaction theory of causality that allowed the matter/energy to pop into existence from nothing just because you fill the term 'God' with the phrase 'full potentiality'. Weee! now there's some explanatory power.
Still waiting for you to explain how a God who is ontologically unique created matter/energy that is wholly seperate from himself when he alone existed. Please do this w/out telling me again about this full potentiality. I will ask again - how does full potentiality affect nothing given the above points? You basically have an affectless effect.
Have you already forgotten that 'ex nihilo, nihil fit' is a metaphysical principle regarding causation? This is a foundational principle intimately associated with Identity, no less, and clearly takes precedence/priority over the various formal theses on causation, such as Aristotle's model or the Humean model.
This has been mentioned to you on at least four occasions now, including one explicit acknowledgement of the idea on your part. From this principle, is it apparent that a cause must 'act upon' something to produce an effect? Does the principle allow for the full potentiality for an effect to exist within a cause?
Any claim that this is metaphysically absurd can be easily refuted, simply by citing verifiable examples in which the full potentiality for an effect exists within the cause: A radioactive isotope releasing gamma radiation, or an explosion produced by the detonation of a time-bomb in the vacuum of space.
I would think that a more appropriate analogy would that mind has the attributes of matter in the same way that a computer has the attributes of sand. They are both built of a particular substance, but it is the structure and arrangement of both that give rise to complexity and behavior that is not present in the underlying material.
The problem is this: We can, in principle, explain the behavior of any material structure in terms of the component materials. This is because, in principle, there is no serious metaphysical puzzle involved in explaining behavior in terms of behavior (in this case: macro-behavior in terms of micro-behavior). The emergent behaviors will often be inherently unpredictable, but they are still essentially just behaviors. But why should a bunch of micro-behavior give rise to phenomenal experience?
There is no deep metaphysical mystery in the idea that a complex collection of atoms might run to get a camera in order to take a picture of a sunset. This is weird behavior for a collection of atoms, and hard to engineer, but such behavior is not metaphysically baffling. A zombie could do the job; a programmed robot could do the job. No real problem; no experience necessary. It is experience itself that is the problem. It's the sentient appreciation of beauty; it's the "redness" of the red; it's the feeling of awe - these first-person feelings are the metaphysical puzzles. A computer with photo-receptors can detect red light and respond; no experience necessary. But the feeling of what it is like to enjoy the sight of red - this is where the problem arises.
04-19-2013, 07:46 PM
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Originally Posted by Citizen401
Have you already forgotten that 'ex nihilo, nihil fit' is a metaphysical principle regarding causation? This is a foundational principle intimately associated with Identity, no less, and clearly takes precedence/priority over the various formal theses on causation, such as Aristotle's model or the Humean model.
This has been mentioned to you on at least four occasions now, including one explicit acknowledgement of the idea on your part. From this principle, is it apparent that a cause must 'act upon' something to produce an effect? Does the principle allow for the full potentiality for an effect to exist within a cause?
Any claim that this is metaphysically absurd can be easily refuted, simply by citing verifiable examples in which the full potentiality for an effect exists within the cause: A radioactive isotope releasing gamma radiation, or an explosion produced by the detonation of a time-bomb in the vacuum of space.
What you fail to realize is that the bolded part is irrelevant. It does not matter, given the parameters of the OP's God, that a cause entails full potentiality. No one has said that this is metaphysically, if that has any worth to begin with, illogical or absurd (strawman). Furthermore, once again you have failed to give any explanatory power to this metaphysical concept in relation to the OP's conception of God and creatio ex nihilo - I am still waiting....?
As mentioned before I already acknowledged that a cause can entail potentiality - that is what Aristotle's efficient cause is:
'For Aristotle, this principle is the art of bronze-casting the statue (Phys. 195 a 6-8. Cf.Metaph. 1013 b 6–9). This is mildly surprising and requires a few words of elaboration. There is no doubt that the art of bronze-casting resides in an individual artisan who is responsible for the production of the statue. But, according to Aristotle, all the artisan does in the production of the statue is the manifestation of specific knowledge.This knowledge, not the artisan who has mastered it, is the salient explanatory factor that one should pick as the most accurate specification of the efficient cause (Phys. 195 b 21–25). By picking the art, not the artisan, Aristotle is not just trying to provide an explanation of the production of the statue that is not dependent upon the desires, beliefs and intentions of the individual artisan; he is trying to offer an entirely different type of explanation; an explanation that does not make a reference, implicit or explicit, to these desires, beliefs and intentions. More directly, the art of bronze-casting the statue enters in the explanation as the efficient cause because it helps us to understand what it takes to produce the statue; that is to say, what steps are required to produce the statue.'
Finally, by using a physical analogy you error in two ways - 1) equivocation - by using material causation as a reference for an explanation of immaterial causation, and 2) failing to give an explanation of 'how' this metaphysical causation works - at least the physical gives us an explanation and some understanding. This is not the case with your immaterial God and his creation which is ontologically different from God himself. It does not matter if God has the full-monty-and-Grand-Wizard-potentiality or whatever other adjectives you want to instill this meta-Being with - the stuff that is the physical reality is ontologically different than God-stuff and since there was nothing except God - how does God bring about this other stuff from nothing? Your repeated answer 'he has the full potential' explains nothing and frankly is just metaphysical mumbo-jumbo that is no be better than 'magic.'
The problem is this: We can, in principle, explain the behavior of any material structure in terms of the component materials. This is because, in principle, there is no serious metaphysical puzzle involved in explaining behavior in terms of behavior (in this case: macro-behavior in terms of micro-behavior). The emergent behaviors will often be inherently unpredictable, but they are still essentially just behaviors. But why should a bunch of micro-behavior give rise to phenomenal experience?
There is no deep metaphysical mystery in the idea that a complex collection of atoms might run to get a camera in order to take a picture of a sunset. This is weird behavior for a collection of atoms, and hard to engineer, but such behavior is not metaphysically baffling. A zombie could do the job; a programmed robot could do the job. No real problem; no experience necessary. It is experience itself that is the problem. It's the sentient appreciation of beauty; it's the "redness" of the red; it's the feeling of awe - these first-person feelings are the metaphysical puzzles. A computer with photo-receptors can detect red light and respond; no experience necessary. But the feeling of what it is like to enjoy the sight of red - this is where the problem arises.
I agree that we don't know a lot about it, we are just really beginning to explore the human mind. This is kind of me talking through what I have been pondering through the course of this conversation, so please don't assume this is some hard and fast conviction. I welcome any critique of my thought process, as I am still trying to work through all this.
First, I want to point out that we have evidence that our experiences, what it is like to be or do something can demonstrably be affected by different things. Drugs, electrical stimulation, physical alteration or trauma, even social conditioning and peer pressure can change the way we experience or perceive things. This leads me to believe that how we experience the world, our qualia if I understand the term correctly, are deeply and intimately tied into the biochemistry of our bodies. Change the body and you change the experience.
Secondly, one way to look at the body would be to view it as an incredibly complex state machine. A myriad on inputs and outputs all triggering automatically to run all of the processes necessary for life. There is clearly a part of us that is able to make "conscious" decisions, the ones we are aware of making, but that part is also subject to biological, chemical and social control, so it somewhat rules out the homunculus idea of consciousness. In addition it can be experimentally shown that our rational decision making is greatly affected by unconscious evaluations and judgements on the same data, so clearly this is not some sort of hierarchical process with rational thought at the pinnacle. It is all interconnected.
My thought is that our experience of something, what it is like, is essentially a state of our internal system. I tend to think that the experience of something is kind of like a flag or an indicator. It is a way of combining a whole host of sensory input, chemical and electrical information, with learned behavior to provide a way for our brains to make quick judgements and decisions.
Imagine a car that instead of a light that came on when the fuel was low, showed a continuous readout of the rate of fuel flow through every connector in the car. To determine how much how much fuel you have at any point you would need to solve the differential equations relating rate of fuel flow to the amount of fuel at any point in time. We would never be able to make a decision to fill up before we ran out of gas. Instead we design indicators, shortcuts to combine all these different variables and alert us when it is important.
I tend to think that qualia may in fact be these type of indicators, and internal representation of a particular environmental, physical, biological, and emotional (biological also at its core) state, allowing us to make quick decisions. I also tend to think it isn't necessarily related to consciousness, because it appears that our minds make these kinds of quick decisions without our conscious input at all. An interesting book about this is "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman. Certainly we react without actually thinking about it to the qualia of pain. It functions as sort of a system interrupt, if you will, to override current behavior and priorities. Possibly the fact that we experience it in a certain way is a side effect of its function, to get us to stop what we are doing and pay attention.
The question of why does pain feel like pain, and not something else seems to be more related to semantics. I mean we have a neurological experience and we eventually learn that it appears other people have similar experiences and that there is a name for them. It seems like much of it is a social exercise in labeling experiences that we assume we share. It is clear that these things are not absolute and that there are a lot of factors. There are people in the world who experience things that I would label pain, and find them enjoyable or exhilarating.
The other thing that makes me very suspicious that this is all a physical, biological process, is that we can see in other animals things that look like cognition or consciousness. As best we can tell, a rock doesn't appear to feel pain. A cat does. The similarity of an organism's response to our own appears to be related to the similarity of its neurological system to ours. Essentially the more like us biologically something is, the more it's behavior matches patterns that for us are related to what we experience. Just as a cat doesn't see the same way we do, I assume it does not experience the same way either, but it does appear to experience. In the same way that differences in biology cause differences in vision, perhaps what it is like to be something varies based on biology. If this is the case, it would seem to make a good case for why a non corporal consciousness unrelated to biology is not necessarily a good model.
Anyway, this is a lot of what I have been churning on over the past couple weeks as this thread has unfolded, and I thought I would try to articulate it. I have been steeped in state space equations and algorithmic sort of thinking recently, due to some coursework and projects, and I am sure it has colored my approach, but I am just struggling to understand why a complex biological system is assumed to be unable to contain or manifest qualia, in and of itself.
Like I said to Mystic some time ago, I hope you do not feel that just because I do not agree with your viewpoint, or in this case, understand fully why you find it compelling that you have somehow wasted your effort. I have spent considerable time and mental energy pondering the topic, and trying to understand and learn. In my view, broaching the topic in the manner that you have and causing quite a bit of thought among a lot of people is a rousing success, even if no one is ever convinced of your position. Please do carry on provoking as much thought as possible.
The problem is this: We can, in principle, explain the behavior of any material structure in terms of the component materials. This is because, in principle, there is no serious metaphysical puzzle involved in explaining behavior in terms of behavior (in this case: macro-behavior in terms of micro-behavior). The emergent behaviors will often be inherently unpredictable, but they are still essentially just behaviors. But why should a bunch of micro-behavior give rise to phenomenal experience?
There is no deep metaphysical mystery in the idea that a complex collection of atoms might run to get a camera in order to take a picture of a sunset. This is weird behavior for a collection of atoms, and hard to engineer, but such behavior is not metaphysically baffling. A zombie could do the job; a programmed robot could do the job. No real problem; no experience necessary. It is experience itself that is the problem. It's the sentient appreciation of beauty; it's the "redness" of the red; it's the feeling of awe - these first-person feelings are the metaphysical puzzles. A computer with photo-receptors can detect red light and respond; no experience necessary. But the feeling of what it is like to enjoy the sight of red - this is where the problem arises.
But Sensei, didn't I suggest that evolution accounted for that and, when you said that was the behaviour, but not the experience, you shifted to the mechanics of atoms of swetness or in this case particles of light from object to bod and stll wanted to know what this experience actually was. And didn't I suggest that it actually wasn't anything more than a label? I can't shake this idea that philosophy seems to have followed some elaborate in - house rules to postulating the existence of something (rather like morality ) apart from evolved instincts and reasoned conclusions doesn't Exist at all and those who want to know what it actually Is are trying to hunt down a chimera.
Given that you see that this is a hypothesis which I fully agree with, isn't it time to ask yourself what this experience actually 'Is' rather than asking materialists.
Can you imagine how it looks to atheists when a theist demands that atheism explains exactly what 'god' is and if we can't, then atheism is unable to explain god and is somehow discredited. I don't wish to be impolite and I risk being told roundly that I don't know what I'm talking about, but that is sure how it comes across to me.
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) apart from evolved instincts and reasoned conclusions doesn't Exist at all and those who want to know what it actually Is are trying to hunt down a chimera. 
