You do realize that the link you posted states in the last paragraph that the view is subjective. I want to ask you a question. What is science and what is the process of science? Also, what in quantum biology proves your position? All I see is you trying to use philosophy to refute science and repeating that philosophy is greater than the scientific method at determining reality. If that were the case, then why did we abandon the pursuit of philosophy for the scientific method during the enlightenment? Philosophy doesn't answer questions about the nature of reality. If it did, we would have never developed the scientific system we have today.

jfraatz wrote:

Thomas Eshuis wrote:Please fix your quotations Johanan as it's completely unclear to whom you're responding.
Also dismissing things out of hand only shows you cannot refute them.

No, I dismissed them because they were already refuted on a priori grounds. Such things as positivism, eliminativism, and conclusions based on these views are internally inconsistent, despite the elaborate semantic games played to the contrary.

Mere assertion and therefore still empty dismissal.
Your refusal to adress criticisms is telling.

tolman wrote:

jfraatz wrote:Neuroscience is not showing us anything about consciousness because remember, neuroscience only studies the CORRELATES of consciousness NOT consciousness itself. Surely you are familiar with the difference? Neuroscience =/= neuroscientism.

As far as I can see, half-arsed amateur philosophy isn't showing us anything about consciousness, because it's just people intellectually masturbating with words like 'consciousness' to try and prove whatever they already decided was true for other reasons, often fooling themselves (if not anyone else) that pseudo-philosophers can use words like mathematicians can use numbers.

/thread

How did I miss this thread?
bookmarking...

jfraatz wrote:

BKSo wrote:

Then how do you measure the existence of a Cartesian theater? How do you know YOU are not a zombie?

Self-awareness is the measurement of the Cartesian theater. And I'm aware I'm not a zombie because I am self-aware.

You did not really answer my question. How do you know you are self aware? Indeed, if you really understand the hard problem, you would see it is impossible to tell.
http://forum.richarddawkins.net/viewtop ... 6bc817e5a0

If you simply assert that the existence of Cartesian theater is a prior true, it is you who is begging the question.

There's a difference between question begging and a priori knowledge. Question begging is to assume something as true that is not known to be true and then to build circular arguments off of that. A priori knowledge is when you start from something that you already know to be innately true. Now in this case, the Cartesian ego is known to exist because it's rejection would be self-contradictory as per Descartes First Meditation. You know if you say "I doubt that I exist," then logically it follows that "you doubt that you doubt that you exist", meaning you don't really doubt that you exist and are instead contradicting yourself. Therefore by reductio ad absurdum the "I" exists.

When you say "I doubt that I exist", you are implicitly assuming some singular object, the first 'I' is needed to initiate the doubt. In fact one only needs to PRETEND such existence. Therefore you are indeed begging the question.

Really, you have nothing to respond to Dennet's objections.

Dennett's objections are self-refuting. If qualia do not exist, then we don't actually observe anything. If we don't actually observe anything then science including neuroscience is impossible. Thus his argument destroys its own foundations.

Wrong. All that is needed for the scientist is to form beliefs whether the experimental result fits the theory. No qualia is needed. Even a zombie can do it.

This proves your idea of 'materialist' is nonsense.

Let me clarify. Forget the word "materialism" and replace it with the word "objective realism." Objective realism has been experimentally falsified. And in particular that is what the Quantum Randi Challenge was all about. If you can prove objective realism then you will win the Nobel Prize.

But you said 'refresh rate' is fundamental in information procession, not an illusion.

Ok, this is a good objection. Perhaps I should have been more clear though. By "illusion of time" I was referring to a B-theory -meaning rather than the flow of time is the illusion.

The B-theory of time still assumes a block spacetime. In other words 'object realism', therefore fails your own quantum challenge :Naughty

hackenslash wrote:

jfraatz wrote:

hackenslash wrote:I'd settle for a response to my demolition of the idiotic syllogism.

Begging the question is not a logical rebuttal.

What? When I said take all the time you need, I expected at least a fucking response. This is nothing but trolling behaviour.

Well I'm not the one trolling. Much of the argumentation I have seen on this forum (with some exceptions) has been shall we say "less than rational."

So in other words, when you're faced with a counter argument you can't address, you dismiss it and act like it doesn't exist...

No, it was dismissed because the whole thing was built on a fallacious premise: that empirical neuroscience actually studies the non-empirical subjective properties of mentality.

This isn't science, it's scientism, and I have better things to do with my time than to keep repeating why it is wrong.

You're being intentionally obtuse here. So you're claiming that we have all the knowledge regarding the system of the brain (ignoring neuroscience aka internet trolls but we'll get to that) and that your position has it all? Prove it? Show me there is nothing else for us to learn regarding the biological system we know as the human brain.

I didn't say that. What I was saying is that we have everything there is to know about the brain AS FAR AS the Hard Problem is concerned. Meaning we can find more out about the brain, but it will never be able to solve the Hard Problem because it will all be categorically empirical only, and subjective mentality is by definition not empirical.

The brain still exists. If those firings stop indefinitely, you're dead. The structure of the brain still exists. When surgeries are done, the brain's activity decreases until you are clinically brain dead due to anesthesiology. You cannot and will not remember anything from the surgery under those conditions. When the brain is taken of of the drugs, it resumes its normal activity. If your position was right, you'd still remember the surgery if your brain's activity was slowed to that critical number. In cases where people have remembered their surgeries, it was because somebody messed up on anesthesiology.

From the reality frame of the neurosurgeon yes. That's not a problem for my position though.

Aka, I can't argue against them.

Ok, let's "take it seriously" then. Please empirically verify the verification principle for me. Go and give me some peer-reviewed papers as to where the verification principle was located, and what means they used to empirically verify it's existence.

Until then, you have no evidence for positivism.

What beef do you have against science?

I don't have a beef against science. I have a beef against conflating science with scientism.

We're having this round and round discussion and you fail to understand the methodology of how one goes about determining what is correct and what is not.

Huh? Oh no, I understand proper epistemology. A priori knowledge comes PRIOR (hence why it is called a PRIORi) to a posteriori knowledge which comes POSTERIOR (hence why it is called a POSTERIORi). Makes sense now?

You dismiss my argument summarily out of hand because you can't and will not address it. I hold my position. a priori is conclusions first then force fit data to say, "look fire" when in reality it's fluttering painted paper.

Ok, let's "take this seriously" as well. Without a priori knowledge that it is, how do you even know that your sensory data is reliable anyway? Might your senses be fooling you? How do you know?

Saying that we know because the data told us so, is the same as saying that "We know the Bible is God's Holy Word, because we looked it up in the Bible." (in this case it's "We know sensory data about the world is valid, because we looked it up in the world")

Please take your argument to Sye Ten Bruggencate. I'm sure you and he will get along very well!


Really? Yet here we are arguing. Why am I not reading about you in Nature if your position is testable? Oh that's right, anyone who does actual peer reviewed science is a troll. Makes perfect sense.

Again, dodging what neuroscience is showing us.

Actually neuroscience does not show us anything about the mind, because neuroscience does not study the mind -only its empirical correlates.

As far as I can see, half-arsed amateur philosophy isn't showing us anything about consciousness, because it's just people intellectually masturbating with words like 'consciousness' to try and prove whatever they already decided was true for other reasons, often fooling themselves (if not anyone else) that pseudo-philosophers can use words like mathematicians can use numbers.

Well I guess then nothing can tell us about consciousness, because neuroscience doesn't study mentality either -only it's empirical correlates. (which are of course non-mental as empirical correlates are third person and mental properties are first person)

Sovereign wrote:You do realize that the link you posted states in the last paragraph that the view is subjective. I want to ask you a question. What is science and what is the process of science? Also, what in quantum biology proves your position? All I see is you trying to use philosophy to refute science and repeating that philosophy is greater than the scientific method at determining reality. If that were the case, then why did we abandon the pursuit of philosophy for the scientific method during the enlightenment? Philosophy doesn't answer questions about the nature of reality. If it did, we would have never developed the scientific system we have today.

No I'm not. I'm using philosophy to refute scientism. (Attempts to use science to answer questions that are not in the empirical domain -which is of course a category error)

And philosophy does have answers about the nature of reality. We know this because philosophy is the basis of the scientific method.

Thomas Eshuis wrote:

jfraatz wrote:

Thomas Eshuis wrote:Please fix your quotations Johanan as it's completely unclear to whom you're responding.
Also dismissing things out of hand only shows you cannot refute them.

No, I dismissed them because they were already refuted on a priori grounds. Such things as positivism, eliminativism, and conclusions based on these views are internally inconsistent, despite the elaborate semantic games played to the contrary.

Mere assertion and therefore still empty dismissal.
Your refusal to adress criticisms is telling.

I did address them below now. I didn't feel I had to because they were obviously wrong. But I decided to spell out the obvious below now.

BKSo wrote:

jfraatz wrote:

BKSo wrote:

You did not really answer my question. How do you know you are self aware? Indeed, if you really understand the hard problem, you would see it is impossible to tell.

Because I'm self-aware of it. If I was not, I would never be self-aware so as to contemplate the question in the first place.

Saying that you do not know if you are self-aware is akin to saying that you do not know if objective truth is objectively true, or that you know that knowledge is impossible. In these cases, we can tell these ideas are wrong because they entail internal self-contradictions.

When you say "I doubt that I exist", you are implicitly assuming some singular object, the first 'I' is needed to initiate the doubt. In fact one only needs to PRETEND such existence. Therefore you are indeed begging the question.

Which is why eliminativism is self-refuting. It needs to implicitly assume an "I" to doubt and "I." (I am assuming that Dennett or the Churchlands would say "I came to this conclusion," yes?)

If they didn't then, eliminativism is not an actual position as it is not held by anyone.

The B-theory of time still assumes a block spacetime. In other words 'object realism', therefore fails your own quantum challenge :Naughty

Well I don't see B-theory and block spacetime as necessarily related to objective realism or lack of objective realism. The block space-time could exist as an additional illusion in its own right. B-theory and block space-time are really more about the nature of the flow of time, rather than the reality of time.

BTW, I want to say that this is an actually interesting line of questioning here. The positivism elsewhere on this board is driving me nuts.

jfraatz wrote:

Sovereign wrote:You do realize that the link you posted states in the last paragraph that the view is subjective. I want to ask you a question. What is science and what is the process of science? Also, what in quantum biology proves your position? All I see is you trying to use philosophy to refute science and repeating that philosophy is greater than the scientific method at determining reality. If that were the case, then why did we abandon the pursuit of philosophy for the scientific method during the enlightenment? Philosophy doesn't answer questions about the nature of reality. If it did, we would have never developed the scientific system we have today.

No I'm not. I'm using philosophy to refute scientism. (Attempts to use science to answer questions that are not in the empirical domain -which is of course a category error)

That's actually question begging. You don't know that it's the case these things are not amenable to empirical investigation. All you have to respond with here is to define the subject matter in such a way, but that'll just be more question begging.

jfraatz wrote:

Sovereign wrote:You do realize that the link you posted states in the last paragraph that the view is subjective. I want to ask you a question. What is science and what is the process of science? Also, what in quantum biology proves your position? All I see is you trying to use philosophy to refute science and repeating that philosophy is greater than the scientific method at determining reality. If that were the case, then why did we abandon the pursuit of philosophy for the scientific method during the enlightenment? Philosophy doesn't answer questions about the nature of reality. If it did, we would have never developed the scientific system we have today.

No I'm not. I'm using philosophy to refute scientism. (Attempts to use science to answer questions that are not in the empirical domain -which is of course a category error)

And philosophy does have answers about the nature of reality. We know this because philosophy is the basis of the scientific method.

Funny how, if philosophy have answers, nobody seems to have found them. Except all the people who claim to have done so, but has shit to show for it but grandiose metaphysical castles erected into thin air. They can't demonstrate anything, they can just sit there and mindlessly assert. Their assertions don't lead to anything, they don't predict anything of value, and when they do it's either practically untestable or eventually shown false empirically.

Same old tiresome hubristic philosophical bullshit, day in, day out. They write gigantic tomes of wibble, supported by the previous generation's gigantic tomes of wibble, all the way back to the dawn of civilization. What has it done for us? What has it given anyone but just more gigantic tomes of wibble?

It's never helped anyone harvest their crops, combat infectious disease, pave a road, build a hospital, get food on their table, relieve them of painful wearing labor and stress. It's done SHIT. It's a fucking game played by people who like to stack endless amounts of rules on top and then "play" each other at "define term" and "spot the circularity/question begging". That's what philosophy is. At least, all the kind I've seen.

jfraatz wrote:We know this because philosophy is the basis of the scientific method.

Ah, according to Feynman, here's the Scientific Method, just for you: 1) Come up with a question 2) Think really hard 3) Write down answer.

Philosophy never came up with step 3.

Another way of expressing this: If your theory disagrees with observation, it's wrong.

He's started his own thread http://www.rationalskepticism.org/general-debunking/can-anyone-refute-the-introspective-argument-t38020.html

Edit: posted in wrong thread.

Rumraket wrote:Edit: posted in wrong thread.

I'm sure that's immateial.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzbQzRKMn5Y[/youtube]

You can just feel Matt Dillahunty's pain in that video.

Johanan really put that up himself?

Shrunk wrote:You can just feel Matt Dillahunty's pain in that video.

Johanan really put that up himself?

Yep, as well as the one from the week before where he called the first time:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5g5v36J7i4[/youtube]