12-04-2018, 12:18 AM
(This post was last modified: 12-04-2018, 12:28 AM by EvieTheAvocado.)
My Take on the Moral Argument
My Take on the Moral Argument
(12-03-2018, 11:52 PM)Bucky Ball Wrote: It is an emergent property of brains.
So how does completely non-conscious stuff develop consciousness?
Quote: "Intrinsic nature of matter" is nothing but woo. Matter is matter. It has no intrinsic nature.
You do realize that by saying "matter is matter" you are saying that the intrinsic nature of matter is material, right?
Instead of just barely asserting that things are "woo", when you might be strawmanning your opponent: try providing an argument against my position.
That's what I think as I say that ... but that's not quite fair of me. Because, it is at the same time, perfectly understandable for you to see my position as woo for at least three reasons:
(1) If my view is correct it's extremely counter intuitive
(2)Myself less than a year ago would have equally said such a theory was woo until I heard all the arguments.
(3)I haven't even provided you a clear argument so it's not clear what my position actually is or how wooey or not it actually is.
Here's an argument:
RationalWiki Wrote:In contemporary philosophy, panpsychism is offered as a naturalistic solution to various problems inherent in classical physicalism[3];
1. Eliminativism denies internal existence (including qualia; such as the redness of red, or the specific taste of an apple, as distinct from the neural processes/information representing these experiences). While popular amongst some philosophers, eliminativism goes against human intuition; existing beliefs regarding the sentience of intelligent biological systems (given that the agent/"software" encoded in the brain has evolved to believe that it is conscious; see self-directed theory of mind).
2. Reductive physicalism reduces mental properties to physical properties, such as the firing of individual neurons. This prospect is becoming increasingly unlikely based on neuroscientific research concerning how information processing mapped to specific mental events is distributed across neural networks (multiple physical events).
3. Non-reductive physicalism assumes that mental reality supervenes on physical reality; that although there is a correspondence between mental and physical events, their mapping is not 1 to 1. Mental properties under non-reductive physicalism are seen to be emergent, that given the right physical conditions they will arise (see Chalmers on strong emergence). Emergent mental properties are however redundant to the evolution and function of the physical system (see Jaegwon Kim on overdetermination[9]).
Panpsychism 1. does not attempt to deny internal existence (eliminativism), 2. takes into account current neuroscientific findings regarding the distribution of information (unlike classical reductive physicalism), and 3. does not suffer from the problems (barring teleology) inherent in the emergence of redundant mental properties at specific points in space-time. It may be that we need to reconceptualise physical properties to facilitate their reduction to mental properties however (in the case of panpsychism/the combination problem), or at the very least; to reduce mental properties to physical properties (eg as probability waves; Dawkins).
Quote:
I get that philosophers need to make up this shit so they can pretend they actually are doing something other than mental masturbation.
That's not an argument at all.
Quote:You got somewhere else it emerges from ?
How do you think you can get the conscious from the totally non-conscious?
This isn't like a standard kind of emergence where everything can be explained by the physical or chemical parts or by biological evolution.
This is a case of us already knowing that there's at least one kind of stuff in the universe: experience ... and how exactly does it come out of non-experiential stuff? And what possible reason do you have for believing in anything non-experiential when literally all evidence that we've ever had for everything ever has always been empirical and empiricism is knowing through the senses and through experience?
Where is your evidence? Where is your argument? I'm not seeing either.
Quote:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_implantation
I've already addressed this. How is the experience of having a false memory not an experience? And if what the experience refers to didn't happen outside your mind, then how exactly is the non-existence of something that never happened evidence of the non-experiential?
All evidence is empirical and empiricism is experiential/sense-based. There's no way of getting around that.
Science is the study of phenomena ... so science works phenomenologically.
Many scientists found it helpful, when doing science, to postulate a totally non-experiential universe beyond the senses. But there's never been any evidence of any non-experiential world ... there's only been evidence of our experience of an experiential realm that is consistent and can be consistently tested.
You don't appear to have any evidence or argument.
I know that you're unable to provide evidence because evidence is experiential by nature. So, I'm really only asking rhetorically to demonstrate a point just like the both of us would to a theist when asking them for evidence, even when we know they haven't got any. I KNOW you haven't got any evidence for something that by definition would have to be experiential/empirical in order for it to be evidence.
But an argument? You can have arguments. A totally non-conscious and totally non-experiential aspect of the world could exist. And it's possible, I guess, that you could somehow show that an experiential world is logically contradictory or incoherent ... (although I don't see how you could do that any more than anyone could provide evidence against the existence of non-experiential stuff) ... but the advantage that an experiential realm has is parsimony. It appears to be just a total bias and a prejudice, nothing but an intuition, to assume that what the universe in which we live in is not made of an extremely reduced and much less complex version of the same sort of stuff that we are all already aware of and all already have evidence of all the time. To assume that there's the stuff we already know and experience is not difficult and all evidence points to what we have evidence/experience of ... but what of this non-experiential stuff? We kick a table and say "That isn't made out of the same sort of stuff as my experience" ... but that intuition and that premise has absolutely nothing to do with the successful history of empirical science.
You say that it's nonsense to talk about the intrinsic nature of matter ... but either matter is experiential or it isn't, right? And either the universe is material or immaterial, right?
Sure, it could be two kinds of stuff. But I'm sure that you would at least agree that dualism is sillier than monism.
I mean, look at it this way, when consciousness is simplified to the very base level it's almost completely indistinguishable from total non-consciousness ... but why and how would it it ever reduce to an absolute zero? Why would there be two kinds of stuff? Don't you see dualism as a problem?
If there's only one kind of stuff ... if monism is true ... then either everything is conscious or everything isn't... right? The difference is purely a matter of being on a spectrum. If you say there's both conscious and nonconscious stuff ... don't you fall into the traps of dualism? Doesn't that make you a dualist? That's not very scientific.
If there's one kind of stuff it's ultimately either all down to experientiality on some level or it's ultimately all down to non-experientiality on some level (that's a true dichotomy) ... and in either case there is a clear spectrum. The idea that there's both and a sudden shift from one to the other ... or even a gradual shift from one to the other ... radical emergence from two kinds of fundamental substances is *totally different* to the normal kind of emerge whereby it's just a case of the evolution of one kind of stuff.
I mean, ultimately, scientists are breaking down reality down into smaller parts seemingly forever. Down to atoms. Then down to protons and electrons. Then down to quarks, etc. No matter how far down we go ... we just keep getting further down ... these are all parts of something, right? Reality itself right? So we know that at least some of reality involves consciousness/experience ... so where's the argument or evidence for ANYTHING non-experiential when all evidence is already by definition empirical and therefore experiential?
There doesn't seem to be any sort of rational, logical or scientific response to this. "Philosophy is rubbish" is neither argument or evidence. At the end of the day you just have to deal with the fact that not only did philosophy give rise to science in the first place ... but evidence is by very nature empirical and experiential and no one has ever nor can they ever give evidence of something that by very definition would require knowledge through the senses in some way, whether directly or indirectly. Do you not see the problem there?
My Argument Against Free Will Wrote:(1) Ultimately, to control your actions you have to originate your original nature.
(2) But you can't originate your original nature—it's already there.
(3) So, ultimately, you can't control your actions.