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Split Thread Science cannot explain consciousness, therefore....

Tommy Jeppesen said:
Solipsism, it is!

First off, this is not a problem of metaphysics, ontology or existence. It is an epistemological problem and it goes to show that there is no evidence or if you like knowledge about the mind-independent reality.

Part 1: Are you a Boltzmann brain?

...snip...)
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A Boltzmann brain wasn't even very clever when it was thought up. There is no reason to think that a "disembodied" mind would somehow be "simpler" and therefore more "likely" than one arising from a physical process in humans, that's just an assumption.

It's the soul-seekers' equivalent of Anselm of Canterbury's ontological argument for god.
 
RecoveringYuppy said:
That explanation seems to lack any explaining.

How about you provide the explanation? To me an explanation should be something that would allow us to, at least in principle if not in practice, recreate the phenomena.
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What do you think in principle we can't recreate? We can reliably and repeatedly switch your consciousness off and on using our "in principle" theories.
 
ynot said:
Evidence, please.

What credible religious evidence is there to be rated?

Evidence you're on the 20th floor of a building isn't "Objective Authoritative Evidence" so you would be happy to leave the building via a 20th floor window? Yeah right!
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Evidence that being happy is a scientific term?

What international scientific measurement standard is being happy measured in?
What is the scientific theory of being happy?

Hi ynot.
You tricked your self into a trap. Religion, but not just religion, is about first person beliefs and feelings and emotions and religion can give no evidence for physical facts. It deals with the mental and not the physical.

On the other hand you can't used the natural/hard science methodology for giving evidence for being happy. So you shot yourself in the foot, because you gave an example of the limitation of science.

#1 Science is a limited methodology and only works on some aspects of the human condition.
#2 It can be observed that most humans use feelings and emotions when giving reasons for what matters. Just as you did, i.e. e.g. life, death and happiness.
#3 Feelings and emotions can be observed and explained using science, but feelings and emotions can't be done using science.

This is the sub-forum for religion and philosophy. If you want to explain the physics of jumping out of a 20th floor window, go to the correct sub-forum. If you want to debate how life matters, then you can in general term explain that using science in the descriptive sense, but you can't do normative claims using science.
That is religion and/or philosophy :)
 
ynot said:
There's reality as humans perceive it and there's reality as it really is. Perceived reality isn't necessarily actual reality. So what? Perceived reality is all we have and it's far better than fantasy reality
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Actual reality is a fantasy reality, because it can't be perceived.
 
Dancing David said:
This is why I support philosophical naturalism, regardless of ontology: dancing energy, godthought, BIVs or butterfly dreams, the end result is the same.

All you have is the apparent reality
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And all of the apparent reality is not physical and objective, some of it is mental and subjective.
Or all of the apparent reality is not science, because science is not everything. Just as religion, philosophy, psychology and gravity are not everything on their own in an individual sense.
 
Darat said:
A Boltzmann brain wasn't even very clever when it was thought up. There is no reason to think that a "disembodied" mind would somehow be "simpler" and therefore more "likely" than one arising from a physical process in humans, that's just an assumption.

It's the soul-seekers' equivalent of Anselm of Canterbury's ontological argument for god.
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So you have evidence for that fact that I am religious, i.e. a soul-seeker. Or have you run into the induction problem of white and black swans, but you are unable to understand that I am a black swan?

I can use a Boltzmann brain argument without being religious, unless you can give evidence for the fact that I am indeed religious.
 
Darat said:
I agree it goes back long before humans of any description, for example I doubt anyone would say chimpanzees aren't conscious. I think humans hit on a particular way of modeling the world and the key part to that was our evolution of language and the narration that then allowed. As the late philosopher of note Pratchett put it we are*pan narrans, the story telling ape.
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I agree. It's also quite possible that our memory, and hence our consciousness, is qualitatively different from animals', due to the involvement of language in the process.
 
IanS said:
Here's an idea for a very simple experiment to disprove the idea that reality is just something that we create in our minds (or the idea that reality is significantly different from what we see and detect as the world around us) ... it's so simple that others have probably suggested something similar before, and maybe it does not hold-up anyway, but lets see -

- take a camera (an old film camera may be better, since it's not introducing any extra complexity from digital processing or computerised effects), and go to some clear high ground where we are looking down at a large historic building (it could be anything though, not just a detailed structure/building). First we draw a coloured sketch or painting of the building (assume you are an excellent artist, so your painting is of a high detailed standard) … and after you've finished your painting, you take a photograph of the building from the same observation point (so that your photo will show the same view as the one you just painted).

Now compare your painting with the photograph.

Are they in effect identical?

How can you explain that result if reality is not what you were seeing with your eyes?

Point being – the camera recorded the scene without any use of your eyes or your brain. The photo is independent of your senses. But the image in the photo is exactly the same as the one you produced in the painting where you were relying entirely on your senses and your brain.

How is it possible to produce exactly the same image, unless the scene you create using your eyes & brain is indeed precisely the same “reality” that was recorded independently by the camera?

Just off-hand, I don't see any credible explanation except to conclude that although the camera is acting independently of your brain and your senses, it is recording exactly the same view of reality.

Of course it's true that when you view the photo you are again using your eyes and brain (just as you did to create your painting), so philosophical solipsists might try to claim that the photo is not fully independent of your eyes and brain. But I don't think that can be a valid objection as if to suggest that every time you look at a photo your mind changes what is actually in the photo, to make it just like your painting (that would be a whole new level of different and even more fanciful un-evidenced solipsist-type claims).
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Nonsense! Obviously the camera is looking into your mind when it creates an image. How else could it accurately identify, for instance, things that appear green, so as to represent them as parts of the photograph that also appear green, when the color green exists only in our minds and not in the real world? (Quantum mechanics says so!)

All that makes perfect sense when you understand that the camera also exists only in your mind. And your sketch. And the historic building. And this post.
 
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Myriad said:
All that makes perfect sense when you understand that the camera also exists only in your mind. And your sketch. And the historic building. And this post.
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I've always thought that one of the best arguments against solipsism is that my memory isn't good enough to get all the details right.

Dave
 
Tommy Jeppesen said:
So a Boltzmann brain is not about religion. Okay.

Do you want to discuss/debate whether it can be know if a Boltzmann brain is possible?
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As I read it on Wikipedia (not the best source, but hey...) Boltzmann theorizes that disembodies self-aware brains that happen to pop into existence are more likely than evolved brains connected to sensory systems, because the former would require a smaller thermodynamic fluctuation.
Which doesn't make sense, because it does not mesh with what we observe about the world and how feedback systems emerge from organisation in living things, and because the thermodynamic cost of something in and of itself does not say much about the likeliness that that particular thing or process will come into existence.


Hell, setting myself on fire would create less entropy than a star burning out, therefore it's more likely that I was completely reconstituted from ashes than that the Sun exists... No.
 
Dave Rogers said:
I've always thought that one of the best arguments against solipsism is that my memory isn't good enough to get all the details right.

Dave
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I would argue that I'm not creative enough to make in my mind every pop song, painting, book and movie that I have ever seen or heard.
 
Porpoise of Life said:
As I read it on Wikipedia (not the best source, but hey...) Boltzmann theorizes that disembodies self-aware brains that happen to pop into existence are more likely than evolved brains connected to sensory systems, because the former would require a smaller thermodynamic fluctuation.
Which doesn't make sense, because it does not mesh with what we observe about the world and how feedback systems emerge from organisation in living things, and because the thermodynamic cost of something in and of itself does not say much about the likeliness that that particular thing or process will come into existence.


Hell, setting myself on fire would create less entropy than a star burning out, therefore it's more likely that I was completely reconstituted from ashes than that the Sun exists... No.
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The problem is that you can't determine the different probabilities between being in a "fair" reality and being a Boltzmann brain without running into Agrippa's trilemma. You are assuming that your experience can tell you something about the probability, i.e. your experiences are "fair", but then you are begging the question, because the question is: Are your experiences "fair" or that of a Boltzmann brain. And you can't start by assuming that reality is "fair", when you ask if reality is "fair"?
 
Darat said:
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychiatry for a good starting part in learning how science measures and evaluates and changes human behaviours.
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Yes, in an indirect manner you have a point, but not in the sense that you can observe a happy life. Happy is first person experience. Further you can't answer ynot's example as to whether it would be wrong to jump off the 20th floor of building or leave the floor through the window.
 
Tommy Jeppesen said:
Yes, in an indirect manner you have a point, but not in the sense that you can observe a happy life.
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Nor can I observe an electron directly, but there are well-known techniques to detect them and study their properties. The fact that I don't know what it's like to experience being an electron is of no particular importance, and neither is the fact that I can't experience living someone else's happy life. Both are nevertheless amenable to study.

Dave
 
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