rationalskepticism.org

archibald wrote:

Little Idiot wrote:In seriousness awareness is not (only) the process that generates things to be aware of, it is also the awareness which is aware of the products of the process.

This was pointed out loads of times, but it never sinks in. I don't hold out much hope now that the closed minded set will accept that there are two coherent ways to interpret the world, not one.

Yes, but not all interpretations are equally coherent. I could say that I believe there are elves living in a rock in my garden. Is that coherent? To me, it's on a par with your belief that conscious awareness is not solely a product of the physical processes going on in a brain and that awareness continues after death, without any substrate. Your problem is that every single piece of reliable, testable evidence suggests this and you have nothing to set against it other than blind belief, which is why elves would be on a par.

You don't even have personal experience of it to tell us an anecdote about the last time you yourself had awareness without any brain activity. Do you?

Pro tip - stick to asserting what you could, at least in principle, know about.

This is the equivalent of saying that not only are there elves but that they have never been detected, even by the person saying they exist. How coherent is that?

Basically, you've been coming in here for goodness knows how long saying the equivalent of 'there's elves you know' and taking sustenence from nothing more than no one can prove there aren't elves and wonder why no one takes you seriously. That you can't tell anyone a single thing about the elves is not helping either, though hardly surprising since you've never detected or experienced them. We might as well re-arrange the letters and assert that there are veels. It's as coherent. What's a veel? I don't know, but they exist. Or something.

Here's a question for you. How come, in certain neuroscientific experiments, the experimenters can tell, from looking at patterns of 'pre-conscious substrate' brain activity on a screen, what a subject is going to consciously think before the subject consciously thinks it? This has been demonstrated in repeatable experiments. I'd be interested to hear what you think is happening.

I won't necessarily accept 'elves did it' as an explanation.

Ah welcome back to that well worn phrase 'all the scientific evidence' all be it in a new form 'every single piece of reliable, testable evidence suggests this'.
Exactly which evidence is it that shows 'conscious awareness is solely a product of the physical processes going on in a brain and that awareness doesn't continue after death'.

After showing, say a hand full of the best bits of evidence you may be able to explain how ever could we know even in principle that, say my dead grandad's awareness wasnt watching me right now, tut-tutting?
Obviously I don't claim that is the case, but I think its impossible to have a single piece of evidence, let alone 'all the evidence' you are on about to show that.

You don't need me to point out that lack of evidence for the (deliberately ridiculous) claim is not the same as all the evidence being against it.


Regarding your question about brain scanning predicting conscious thought; why exactly should it be a problem to idealism that there is a difference between brain activity and conscious awareness? Isnt it the physicalists who have been saying 'brain activity is awareness' who have to do some back tracking in face of the evidence? By asserting they are the same thing the physicalists have had belief that they could overcome the explanatory gap between physical brain and conscious thought, now this evidence showing a difference will take some explaining away.

As far as idealism, why cant we just say 'so what?' We never said brain activity was conscious activity so what exactly is the issue with a time difference. So far as there being a correlation, again, so what? we never denied a correlation.