Why I don't believe in secular atheism. Happy Thanksgiving

[mfbukowski]

1 hour ago, clarkgoble said:

I think he's asking if by mental state you mean brain/nervous states or if you mean conscious states. I'll confess I'm a bit confused on your view there as well. Rorty typically talks brain states in Mirrors of Nature as I recall. (It's been a few years though) But my impression is that when you're talking about these things you mean conscious states.

If you do mean conscious states then it's easy to show you know things without being conscious of knowing them. When you're driving and thinking of one thing you show you know how to get home. (This is what Heidegger describes as phenomena withdrawing - it's still knowledge but is no longer conscious - when typically become aware of it just when there's a breakdown of some sort)

Both. Obviously if they are not in your nervous system they cannot be either conscious or unconscious. It never occurred to me that that would not be obvious.

We cannot know anything that the human mind cannot create. It's a tautology to me. I don't know why this is so hard. If you know something obviously it is somehow in your brain /mind. I cannot conceive of how you could even debate that. Destroy some brain tissue and suddenly you don't know it anymore. Does anyone actually think that's wrong?

Culture is the human created pool of human perceptions of the world encased in language. We cannot know the "color"of cosmic rays because the human brain is not designed to perceive such things. We can create machines that can perceive infrared for example but the display that shows us what the infrared sees is always in our own visible range of light which we can perceive. 

All our machines can do is translate what is out there into what humans can perceive. We still don't know what is really out there. One could say that we know the world in so far as it is translated correctly.

In 14000 BC Nuclear Physics as we know it did not exist.  As Rorty would say there were causes which did not include mental States happening in the world but those causes were not defined by a human mind as nuclear physics.

And obviously there are also now causes which we still have not defined and subject matter which is yet to be created from matter unorganized.

It is what humans do.

Edited November 28, 2017 by mfbukowski

[clarkgoble]

2 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Both. Obviously if they are not in your nervous system they cannot be either conscious or unconscious. It never occurred to me that that would not be obvious.

How can it be both? The point is distinguishing between two positions. Are you saying the positions are the same or are you just saying the only states you care about are nervous system states? If the latter then how do you deal with spirit? Further to me this seems to me to confuse mediation with what is mediated.

This is again why I bring up the Cartesian charge. All that's happened is you've changed dualism from the physical world and an immaterial mind into an external to the nervous system world and internal to the nervous system. The ontological claims about the substance changes but the dualism of inside and outside remains. I know "Cartesian" is perhaps problematic to bring up again - especially after recently acknolweding it seemed not to help the discussion. But it's this essential inside/outside divide that seems at issue.

Quote

If you know something obviously it is somehow in your brain /mind. I cannot conceive of how you could even debate that.

But you are inconsistent about what mind is. You change language on that point. Sometimes it seems like you don't think the difference matters, yet clearly it's a difference that in theory could be tested. If mind isn't just the nervous system then we can't say mental states are the same as nervous system states. The externalist claim is that talking only about nervous system states is insufficient to describe the information claimed to be in a mental state. Again that seems a pretty easily testable claim. 

Edited November 28, 2017 by clarkgoble

[mfbukowski]

1 hour ago, clarkgoble said:

How can it be both? The point is distinguishing between two positions. Are you saying the positions are the same or are you just saying the only states you care about are nervous system states? If the latter then how do you deal with spirit? Further to me this seems to me to confuse mediation with what is mediated.

This is again why I bring up the Cartesian charge. All that's happened is you've changed dualism from the physical world and an immaterial mind into an external to the nervous system world and internal to the nervous system. The ontological claims about the substance changes but the dualism of inside and outside remains. I know "Cartesian" is perhaps problematic to bring up again - especially after recently acknolweding it seemed not to help the discussion. But it's this essential inside/outside divide that seems at issue.

But you are inconsistent about what mind is. You change language on that point. Sometimes it seems like you don't think the difference matters, yet clearly it's a difference that in theory could be tested. If mind isn't just the nervous system then we can't say mental states are the same as nervous system states. The externalist claim is that talking only about nervous system states is insufficient to describe the information claimed to be in a mental state. Again that seems a pretty easily testable claim. 

NO THE POINT IS NOT TO DISTINGUISH THE TWO POSITIONS BECAUSE THERE ARE NOT TWO POSITIONS YOU ARE THE ONE CREATING THE DUALISM BY EVEN ASKING THE QUESTION THAT WAY!!!!   CAN'T YOU SEE THAT????????

 You asked me "which" it is- my answer was "both" and now you say it cannot be both!!!   That is precisely the problem!

There IS no "mediation" as if it is an abstract dichotomy- all that is the way your mind works- nothing more nothing less.

In all your linguistic dichotomies of abstractions between internalism and externalism , the mediated and unmediated, you confuse yourself and ignore LDS doctrine which agrees perfectly with - Dare I say it- Rorty and the position I am holding.   With you it is either black or white.  With me it is all grey.

DC 88

15 And the spirit and the body are the soul of man.

ONE- no dichotomy

DC 131

7 There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes;

8 We cannot see it; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter.

ONE NO DICHOTOMY!

Rorty is showing that reality as we know it is a unified spiritual/mental phenomenon working within the mind/brain which are indistinguishable- and that is exactly what D&C is saying

He is saying that the world as we know it is created by intelligence.

Language by its very nature creates these alleged dichotomies because language IS NOT REALITY nor can it even represent reality except in a very weak and symbolic way.   We might as well be speaking in cartoon pictographs

You are so tied to signs "pointing" to something "real" that you cannot see it.

Sorry about the formatting- I don't care anymore but for you I will keep answering until we can agree on something.   You are creating the dualism with the way you ask questions and the way you think

Even the distinction between language and reality is pointless to talk about because all we can speak about is IN LANGUAGE

"Reality" is an undifferentiated mass of chaos until our perceptions put it into focus and create the "things" around us

I am very busy and will always respond to you though, but pardon the formatting

stock-footage-blurred-grass-background-with-water-drops-comes-into-focus.mp4

 

Edited November 28, 2017 by mfbukowski

[mfbukowski]

CLARK

Read some more Nagel

Physicalism doesn't work because it leaves out the phenomenology of consciousness- it describes the richness of the color "red" in terms of say, angstrom units of light reflected.  But angstrom units are not "red".

Total poetic descriptions of red however do not include the angstrom unit concept.

So what is "red" really?   Something which is neither and both angstrom units AND the poetic richness of a setting sun seen from two perspectives.   It is both but to describe it automatically distorts the ONE experience of the sunset including its awe and wonder and beauty.

We can watch a sunset and consider "both" models and add to that other sunsets we have remembered - THAT is the "experience"- the fusing of all those experiences individually into the one sunset we see before us at that moment- the phenomenon, the poetry, the memories all fused into one experience.

[Not Sure]

7 hours ago, clarkgoble said:

How can it be both? The point is distinguishing between two positions. Are you saying the positions are the same or are you just saying the only states you care about are nervous system states? If the latter then how do you deal with spirit? Further to me this seems to me to confuse mediation with what is mediated.

Is the term mental states really valuable if no one can agree what it even no one can agree on what it refers to?  My point was also how can it be defined to be both?  It loses distinction to me if you do that.  I would also argue that even if it is only most of the time both, but it is easy to in the same paragraph to shift the usage to be only conscious states.  

7 hours ago, clarkgoble said:

Further to me this seems to me to confuse mediation with what is mediated.

That was my exact problem with "everything you know are mental states".  If you confuse mediation and mediated you end up with an non-nonsensical statement.  The statement also has a ambiguous "you" in it (you - your brain or you - your conscious awareness).

[Not Sure]

6 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

We can watch a sunset and consider "both" models and add to that other sunsets we have remembered - THAT is the "experience"- the fusing of all those experiences individually into the one sunset we see before us at that moment- the phenomenon, the poetry, the memories all fused into one experience.

In your neurons state you also have multiple representations of red including symbolic, emotional, association with heat, color, even shape.  There is a cool term in neural science, that neuron that fire together wire together.  Thus red can even have a sound (an actual sound, not just the spoken word).

[Not Sure]

On 11/27/2017 at 8:39 AM, mfbukowski said:

This is a good one:

Yeah, that pesky epistemology stuff whatever it is.

And then we wonder why I am dismissive and sound arrogant.  Self contradiction everywhere.  Here he says there is no difference between what you BELIEVE and what is "real" and yet the whole discussion is about that issue.

Self contradiction

What I said was 

On 11/27/2017 at 8:39 AM, mfbukowski said:

People don't always make the distinction between "I believe I see a UFO" and "I see a UFO" and use the terms interchangeable

I am not "People".  How is what you said I said even close to what I actually said? Also   Again with putting words in people's mouths, isn't that supposed to be against this forum's guidelines?  Also, again with the condensation, I am starting to believe that you are not a nice person.  I wouldn't mind you being so dismissive and sounding arrogant as much, if you were representing my statements.  Please, all I request it to be professional and treat me as a peer if you if you feel like I don't deserve it.   

I most definitely did not say there is no difference - I am not sure it is possible to get any farther from my actual viewpoint.  I said people often don't make the difference clear "I believe I see a UFO" and "I see a UFO".  They might not even understand the linguistic difference.    And yes, people often use the terms interchangeable and sometime a person (including you and myself) need to ask follow up questions to understand what the person's intent was.  Again, this is not a statement of what people ought to do.   But it is sometimes ok, hte brain has an amazing ablity to autocorrect statemnts of othrs.  https://www.brainhq.com/brain-resources/brain-teasers/scrambled-text. 

Thus, my statement was on the behavior of people and not the difference between what you BELIEVE and what is "real".

 

[mfbukowski]

1 hour ago, Not Sure said:

What I said was 

I am not "People".  How is what you said I said even close to what I actually said? Also   Again with putting words in people's mouths, isn't that supposed to be against this forum's guidelines?  Also, again with the condensation, I am starting to believe that you are not a nice person.  I wouldn't mind you being so dismissive and sounding arrogant as much, if you were representing my statements.  Please, all I request it to be professional and treat me as a peer if you if you feel like I don't deserve it.   

I most definitely did not say there is no difference - I am not sure it is possible to get any farther from my actual viewpoint.  I said people often don't make the difference clear "I believe I see a UFO" and "I see a UFO".  They might not even understand the linguistic difference.    And yes, people often use the terms interchangeable and sometime a person (including you and myself) need to ask follow up questions to understand what the person's intent was.  Again, this is not a statement of what people ought to do.   But it is sometimes ok, hte brain has an amazing ablity to autocorrect statemnts of othrs.  https://www.brainhq.com/brain-resources/brain-teasers/scrambled-text. 

Thus, my statement was on the behavior of people and not the difference between what you BELIEVE and what is "real".

 

Go back and look at the post. You attributed what I quoted you saying as what I said.

I do not confuse adverbs with adjectives.

The correct word would be "interchangeably "

Have a nice life.

[mfbukowski]

On 11/27/2017 at 12:04 AM, Not Sure said:

Rorty is an interesting philosopher but I hope that you are not completely like Rorty - "Rorty was paramount among those thinkers who advance their own opinion as immune to criticism, by pretending that it is not truth but consensus that counts, while defining the consensus in terms of people like themselves" 

As a scientist, I fall into a more pragmatic consequentialist view of the world rather than an anti-realist.  Although, philosophy of science occasionally interests me with challenging conceptions of science.

I would like to point out to others that Correspondence theory while definitely a useful model has its objections from realists, idealists, and skeptics.

New poster must be me?  I think you misunderstood my position.  I would say that "I believe I see a UFO" is a true statement.  "I see a UFO" can be false.  "I will see a cheerful person behind me when I turn around" can be false and was false for the person in the example.  A true statement would also be "I feel like there is a person behind me".  When the person turns around, they could say "I don't believe I see a cheerful person now" which a true statement.  

"I believe I sense a presence a spirit from the spirit world" is a true statement.  'When you thought there was someone in your house it had to be a spirit, not your "brain misfiring my danger sense"' can be false as that statement requires multiple perceptions from multiple people (or instruments) and those perceptions may not actually correspond .  As an anti-realist, is the "had to be" part not interesting?  The person didn't say "I believe it had to be".

That said only philosophers go throw this exercise.  People don't always make the distinction between "I believe I see a UFO" and "I see a UFO" and use the terms interchangeable.  A common complaint against anti-realism is that it really good at making something that should be obvious seem dubious more than is merited.

Finally, mfbukowski has assumed (again) that I was referring to philosophical perception which I most definitely was not.  I was referring to perception as neurological function of classification or in this case miss-classification.  My point is that neurons work pretty much excursively on the fact that (biological sensory) perceptions are often wrong (or are noisy).  There is no controversy on that statement, it's how neurons work - they have weights, biases, and thresholds that all handle this.  If fact your brain even auto corrects what you see - the classic example, https://www.sporcle.com/games/carambajr/Spot_the_Mispelled_Words.

Here is your quote proving who said what

[Not Sure]

8 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Physicalism doesn't work because it leaves out the phenomenology of consciousness.

How do you know that physicalism leaves out the phenomenology of consciousness?   Sure, physics might leave that out (unless you count some fringe theories such as quantum consciousness) but isn't neuroscience a physical based system (as it is practiced today) that does not attempt to leave it out?

8 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

it describes the richness of the color "red" in terms of say, angstrom units of light reflected.  But angstrom units are not "red".

Your sub-conscious also has a model of the richness of the color of red.  Why you see a stoplight, your foot has already the break down (50ms response time) before the conscious brain is even aware of it (typically 500ms response time). 

A neural network is a system of classification.  "Red" is a classification (often called a label or symbol in classification theory).  A neural network is a heavily layered system where each layer builds on the previous layer for more and more abstract symbols and then encodes the result if a match was successful.  Is that surprising that some of the deepest layers encode a lot of abstract symbols (also the reason why it takes 500ms for the conscious part of the brain to process it is because of the shear amount of layers and connections to get that deep).

Science can also be considered to be beautiful.  I would hope we all could agree on that   I don't think poetry and the arts have a monopoly on it.  I think it is amazing that we now have artificial neural networks that are considered to be truly artistic at many levels such as creating novel art and pictures to creative strategies to beat the world's best at Go.  One of the most mind blowing papers I have ever read is how build a neural network with a sense of awareness/attention, curiosity, exploration, and intuition to be pretty good at an adventure video game.  It didn't get the point of the video game previously and basically got a score of 0 without these pathways.  It all started with how you build a neural network that detects interesting things via a model of awareness and attention.  It feels a sense of reward when it makes it's way to the interesting thing.  If that interesting thing was useful then also feels rewarded.  If it goes to a place does not recognize it gets rewarded as it was looking to explorer and try something different.  All using neural models and not your typical hard coded AI that you would fine in video games.

Now one may say that what the neural network is doing is not consciousness because neural networks can't have consciousness.  I would argue that the state of the art neural networks are close to being able to exhibit the behaviors of animals that are typically considered consciousness.  Self driving and self exploring vehicles exhibit a lot of qualities associated to consciousness (awareness, concentration, higher order symbolic represents of the environment. moral decisions, etc).  That's not to say that neural networks are going to be passing the turning test anytime soon.  The best neural network has only about 10% of the neurons of a human brain and some neural structures are harder to model than others.

 

[Not Sure]

Thanks for the conversation in this thread this is my last post in this thread.