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So, I learned I was supposedly smart enough for Mensa just a few minutes before my hands smarted enough that I couldn't wait to cool them in the snow outside.
I've always wanted to take the Mensa test. I'm just chicken.
I agree that realizing my non-specialness and unimportance had profound implications -- for ME anyway. I doubt MY realization had much impact on YOURS. So ... it remains to be seen whether you are making distinctions without difference or whether your way of seeing yourself and others is testable, descriptive, predictive and actionable.
Some of the weirdest and greyest areas of philosophy arise with these questions of identity, and it is tempting to say that they are differences that make no difference. And yet, with the emergence of certain types of technology, people could be forced to make intuitive decisions about where their personal identity is rooted, and the decisions could, in fact, be "life or death" even though we might have no objective way to test the alternatives. Suppose your atoms could be disassembled by a machine that then constructs a functionally perfect duplicate (composed of different atoms but functionally atom-for-atom identical). The duplicate steps out of the machine and has all of your memories, etc., and feels like he the one and same person who stepped into the machine, but he is made of different (albeit functionally identical) atoms. Would you step into this type of machine in order to, say, visit a different planet? As far as everyone is concerned, you are the same person who leaves, and later comes back with stories to tell about your vacation on Mars, or whatever. But is an atom-for-atom duplicate of you still you in the way that matters most to you? Or does your real identity cease to exist and get replaced by the duplicate? Does it matter to you, either way? Would you voluntarily step into such a machine? (The writers of Star Trek gave Dr. McCoy this type of existential angst. He hated the transporter technology partly because he was never fully convinced that he actually survives the machine, even though everyone seems to survive the process.) This is just a far-fetched sci-fi intuition pump, but real-life questions of personal identity-over-time can be just as deeply puzzling.
I won't belabor the point here, but the bottom line is that people's intuitions differ over which position bears the burden of proof when it comes to questions of identity over time and change, and it is unlikely that we will have an objective test for who's intuitions on this are correct. I go with the "complimentarity" approach. The "One Self" and the "many selves" are both correct, depending on what we have in mind when we ask the question. The "many selves" is intuitively easier for most of us to see, since we have different bodies, but the "One Self" is just as intuitively compelling, once we understand the perspective.
Talk about missing the entire point! "Underdetermined" problem IS the point, eg., insufficient knowledge to find a specific answer but enough to find some answers dependent upon the perspective you choose.
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Originally Posted by KCfromNC
Great. So what's your wonderful fantastic new perspective and how do we know it is better than what has worked really well for the past few centuries?
That consciousness is so completely unique a phenomenon from what we have used it to discover that we must not limit our consideration of its implications by what we have discovered.
Okay, but the acceptance of those limitations does NOT make reality actually HAVE those limitations. That tends to be the corollary to the materialism espoused by most atheists here on the forum. They exclude from the possible those things that cannot conform to or currently be explained by science. They reject legitimate hypotheses DERIVED from existing knowledge in science because of the limitation. They lump them into the same category as the illegitimate and completely fanciful hypotheticals, like tooth fairies, unicorns, leprechauns and Flying Spaghetti Monsters. THAT is the fallacious and illogical reasoning that characterizes most atheist thought, Gaylen notwithstanding. They consider the philosophical, logical and extrapolative reasoning to be pointless and illegitimate despite its quite legitimate provenance and history of success in advancing the cause of science on the frontiers.
QED!!!
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Originally Posted by KCfromNC
Please be specific - what legitimate hypotheses are people rejecting? Is this your pet religion that has god's mind is powered by dark energy flowing out of the thoughts of alien species throughout the universe or did you mean something else?
This post reveals that the problem with your request lies in your attitude toward my conclusions (Beliefs) extrapolated from my hypotheses, NOT the hypotheses themselves. You seem to have difficulty parsing those things and I doubt more specificity would cure that difficulty. Are you reading Gaylen's superb posts on the central issues with materialism? I notice you seem to have similar difficulty parsing existing knowledge from abstract philosophical speculations about extant knowledge on the frontiers of that knowledge.
Some of the weirdest and greyest areas of philosophy arise with these questions of identity, and it is tempting to say that they are differences that make no difference. And yet, with the emergence of certain types of technology, people could be forced to make intuitive decisions about where their personal identity is rooted, and the decisions could, in fact, be "life or death" even though we might have no objective way to test the alternatives. Suppose your atoms could be disassembled by a machine that then constructs a functionally perfect duplicate (composed of different atoms but functionally atom-for-atom identical). The duplicate steps out of the machine and has all of your memories, etc., and feels like he the one and same person who stepped into the machine, but he is made of different (albeit functionally identical) atoms. Would you step into this type of machine in order to, say, visit a different planet? As far as everyone is concerned, you are the same person who leaves, and later comes back with stories to tell about your vacation on Mars, or whatever. But is an atom-for-atom duplicate of you still you in the way that matters most to you? Or does your real identity cease to exist and get replaced by the duplicate? Does it matter to you, either way? Would you voluntarily step into such a machine? (The writers of Star Trek gave Dr. McCoy this type of existential angst. He hated the transporter technology partly because he was never fully convinced that he actually survives the machine, even though everyone seems to survive the process.) This is just a far-fetched sci-fi intuition pump, but real-life questions of personal identity-over-time can be just as deeply puzzling.
I won't belabor the point here, but the bottom line is that people's intuitions differ over which position bears the burden of proof when it comes to questions of identity over time and change, and it is unlikely that we will have an objective test for who's intuitions on this are correct. I go with the "complimentarity" approach. The "One Self" and the "many selves" are both correct, depending on what we have in mind when we ask the question. The "many selves" is intuitively easier for most of us to see, since we have different bodies, but the "One Self" is just as intuitively compelling, once we understand the perspective.
I truly marvel at your creative explanations to expose the central issues in materialism, Gaylen. This SciFi transporter poser relies on the belief that we are ONLY the atoms that comprise our physical bodies, which is, of course, false. Our inability to directly measure our consciousness belies that idea. At the very least, it is of a kind with the "dark stuff" we also cannot measure directly.
That consciousness is so completely unique a phenomenon from what we have used it to discover that we must not limit our consideration of its implications by what we have discovered.
And what concrete results has this particular approach given us that normal scientific investigation couldn't? Please be specific.
This post reveals that the problem with your request lies in your attitude toward my conclusions (Beliefs) extrapolated from my hypotheses
Considering you can't seem to explain what your actual hypothesis is, I find it hard to take this objection seriously.
Quote:
You seem to have difficulty parsing those things and I doubt more specificity would cure that difficulty.
If you had anything of substance you wouldn't have to retreat to "everyone who disagrees with me is a big fat poopy head". This kind of nonsense just reinforces how little there actually is behind all the bluster.
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Are you reading Gaylen's superb posts on the central issues with materialism?
Yes. I'm still waiting for a better alternative.
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I notice you seem to have similar difficulty parsing existing knowledge from abstract philosophical speculations
Just not in any way you can actually demonstrate. More empty claims to hide behind, I guess.
But is an atom-for-atom duplicate of you still you in the way that matters most to you?
Identity is a feeling the brain produces. So yeah, if you make an identical copy you'd be just as you as you were before because your brain would keep producing the same feeling that your body was you.
One of my primary complaints against Intelligent Designer types of theism - even the most liberal forms - is that they don't actually explain the key thing I want to explain. Of course it is possible that I'm asking for something that is impossible. ID could be true, and it could be that God's intelligence is flat-out eternal/fundamental - a brute fact upon which all other facts depend. But, for various reasons, I'm trying to suggest a better alternative.
But, I have to wonder: Given what appears to be your current acceptance of materialism, what "better alternative" could you possibly accept? And how would you recognize a better alternative it if you saw it? My main complaint about materialism is that some people depend on it and cling to it with as much tenacity as most theists cling to theism, but traditional materialism falls short of theism in a critical way. Even though I don't believe theism, I can see how some versions of it are logically consistent, and could be true. Materialism, in its traditional form, fails to acknowledge the deep epistemological problem of how to get subjectively qualitative feelings from objective material facts. The promissory note is simply not credible. The problem is not "matter," as such, but the dependence on objective confirmation for meaning. The concept of objectivity is, itself, arrived at by subjective means. A particular subjective feeling can exist objectively, but knowledge of the objective nature of its existence depends on a bunch of subjective agreements. There is a deep epistemological asymmetry between subjective experience and our conceptions of an objectively-existing world. Scientifically, we tend not to believe in the objective existence of a thing until we have inter-subjective agreement. Objects, shall we say, have to "prove their existence" by appearing qualitatively within the subjective experiences of many different people.
The alternative metaphysics I'm proposing is one that acknowledges the epistemological asymmetry and, in fact, explicitly puts it to good use. Subjective qualitative states are objectively real, and we can study their objective aspects but, as with any objective knowledge, we need to arrive at this objective knowledge via inter-subjective agreement. In this case, we track down the physical correlates of subjective feelings by gathering subjective reports from the people who say they are having these feelings, and we inter-subjectively agree that, "Yes, people report these feelings when and only when X physical processes are recorded." We do not claim that these subjective feelings are "nothing but" the physical correlates; we acknowledge that they are, first and foremost, subjective feelings. The physical correlates are the means by which we can objectively study the subjective feelings, but we refuse to conflate the feelings as such with the aspects by which we objectively study them. The primary phenomena, we have to admit, are known at least to some extent subjectively; the physical correlates are the objective signs of the primary phenomena. If there is an epistemological rock-bottom, it rests with the subjective aspect of phenomena, although the objective aspect will be essential for deeper investigations. Once the correlates are known, the objective signs of phenomena may reveal more than the subject themselves knew - or, perhaps, even more than they ever could have known by means of pure introspection. This is because the physical behavioral consequences of psychological states depend, to some degree, on physical aspects of the subjective feelings that are not fully accessible to introspection. In other words, the "true nature" of a subjective feeling is probably deeper than what can be accessed by either introspection alone or objective modeling alone. If I am right, then the fundamental "raw reality" of a subjective feeling is deeper than either introspection or objective investigation can achieve independently, but deeper knowledge of these raw realities my be obtainable by a synergistic combination of introspection and objective model-making.
This is a fairly literal "dual aspect" theory, in which the raw reality of a mental state can be metaphorically compared to, say, a cylinder that can be viewed either edge-on (where it appears to be a rectangle), or end-on (where it appears to be a circle). These perspectives are complimentary: mutually exclusive in some sense, yet both required for a full understanding that emerges only when a synthesis of the independent perspectives is achieved. Right now we have mostly the introspective aspect ("red feels like this"); cognitive science is working to reveal the objective aspects. My own version of a promissory note is that, down the road, a combination of the two aspects of investigation will lead to a comprehension that we currently do not have. This will go beyond materialism as most people currently think of it, but I don't think it will completely invalidate it.
Last edited by Gaylenwoof; 06-01-2016 at 10:00 AM..
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