[Mr. Vega]

No, it isn't. It makes "total skepticism" possible, but this possibility is also meaningless to me, since I was never interested in the "absolute truth" in the first place. We live in our empirical reality and we form our theories in this world, about it and nothing else.

Like it or not, not everyone is an instrumentalist or pragmatist, and those who aren't, aren't all as stupid and delusional as you make them out to be.

Idealism is great. I love it. I love the sheer chaos that it usually brings, the smell of revolution in the morning.

Yet, all that is poetry in action. If you are willing to concede that God is a poetic character, then we will be alright. If however you are on to proclaim the truth of his existence as a fact, as something that even trasncends reality as we are here describing it, I must say that you are indeed delusional, although not stupid (since I've seen amazingly intelligent people falling into the same trap, it mustn't be a question of intelligence).

To me God has always been a teleological moral dream, like the ultimate muse. It need not to exist in any other place than in men's hearts as a "call". It's the ultimate romantical figure that "saves us" from our "materialistic doom", from death. It tries to do this by inspiring a supernatural way of thinking. A way of thinking that trasncends the egotistical genes and the "fake" altruism that abounds in us.

It is a revolutionary way of thinking. And I don't mind that bit at all. Like I said, I love idealism, it shatters the world and crushes all status quos.

For instance, I myself am an idealistic anti-theist. I really do believe that we cannot base our romantic bursts with bronze age myths with its obsolete moralities and barbaric tropes, and what I see in the middle east happening with the population, specially the women and the kids is like a punch to the stomach. I hate it. With all my heart.

I am not referring to idealism. I am referring to scientific realism. The belief that the fact that the sun has come up every day at a set interval depending on the season for a very long time means that you can be absolutely certain that it will continue to do so (after taking into account like the earth's slowing rotation and the like). That true knowledge is possible, that a theory need not be an approximation. As in, anti-total-skepticism. I wasn't referring to God or that all's right in the world. That's that strawmaning I talked about. Like I said, I am an atheist (certainly in regards to the idea of God taking on personal characteristics). I am also not a materialist or an empiricist. The anti-god arguments you all throw out are born from radical empiricism, the kind Hume advocated. I think these arguments are bad ones. I agree with one particular conclusion of yours, just not the reasoning that led you there.

[Mr. Vega]

Watisname, you can detect neutrinos by getting them to collide with hydrogen in water, causing a flash. You gain knowledge of their existence by sensory means.

That was exactly the point I was making, good job.  Now you've expanded your description of sensory means from the five senses you used originally.

You see the flash by sight. Use of one of the five senses is still required.

Sure, this is valid if we consider any form detection of EM waves, despite the type of detector, as an extension of one of our five senses, namely vision.  However, if we go with that then what makes thought any different?  Despite our limited understanding of the details of cognition, we can decipher quite a lot about thought through the use of fMRI and the like.

There is also still the option of defining 'what is real' to be anything that can affect or be affected by other things in detectable ways.  Herra mentioned this, too.  This definition is nice because it works for neutrinos just as much as it does for thought, and it also provides an effective criterion for determining if various 'supernatural' phenomenon are 'real' or not.

So you are designating the production of thoughts in the mind, be they images, recalls, or abstract, as falling under the category of something that is "sensed". A sixth sense, apparently. I am challenging this. At least on a surface level, thoughts cannot be classified as sensory data. Any material object, no matter how far removed from ordinary experience, still has to involve some use of the five senses to be detected. UV light can be sensed by looking at photographic plate, or by feeling the affect of a sunburn, but still one of the five is involved regardless. Can you say the same for thoughts? The very obvious answer is no. You need a better argument to convince me otherwise.

And as for the correlation argument you use with MRI scans, that the scans correlate with thought is irrelevant. That they correlate does not mean that they are the same. I do not understand why you place senses on a pedastal, and ignore internal thoughts, when they are equally real. Even an ultra empiricist like Hume criticized correlation arguments.

And I never used the word supernatural.

By that logic quantum particles don't exist for you either... I guess. I mean, brain activity is actually measurable... while several quantum particles exist in theory, but can not be reliably measured at all lol.

Seriously... measuring brain activity isn't even the bleeding edge anymore as far as physics go...  I mean heck... we're already seeing the first gadgets that can be controlled by concentrated thought.... so with respect.... uh: Pfffffft!?

I just said that there IS a correlation between thought and brain activity. Are you all completely incapable of representing my position correctly? Correlation does not even imply causation, let alone that the activity and the thought are one in the same, let alone that you can it's even possible to reduce the thought (if I have to use the term thing in itself, I will) to sensory data anyway. That there is interaction does not prove materialism. It might prove monism, but not materialism.

[Nuke]

(But just for the sake of doing so, the "burning bush" was never viewed as some distinct person of God, in the same way that the Trinity represents that.  Instead, you could more properly view it as God manifesting himself in some physical form to Moses.  This happens multiple times in the Bible; the Holy Spirit is traditionally associated with a roaring wind and "tongues of fire," so it's very similar imagery.)

moses was quite fond of hallucinogenic plants. the burning bush is supposedly one of these plants. moses was quite high when he wrote the 10 commandments.

[Ghostavo]

Watisname, you can detect neutrinos by getting them to collide with hydrogen in water, causing a flash. You gain knowledge of their existence by sensory means.

That was exactly the point I was making, good job.  Now you've expanded your description of sensory means from the five senses you used originally.

You see the flash by sight. Use of one of the five senses is still required.

Sure, this is valid if we consider any form detection of EM waves, despite the type of detector, as an extension of one of our five senses, namely vision.  However, if we go with that then what makes thought any different?  Despite our limited understanding of the details of cognition, we can decipher quite a lot about thought through the use of fMRI and the like.

There is also still the option of defining 'what is real' to be anything that can affect or be affected by other things in detectable ways.  Herra mentioned this, too.  This definition is nice because it works for neutrinos just as much as it does for thought, and it also provides an effective criterion for determining if various 'supernatural' phenomenon are 'real' or not.

So you are designating the production of thoughts in the mind, be they images, recalls, or abstract, as falling under the category of something that is "sensed". A sixth sense, apparently. I am challenging this. At least on a surface level, thoughts cannot be classified as sensory data. Any material object, no matter how far removed from ordinary experience, still has to involve some use of the five senses to be detected. UV light can be sensed by looking at photographic plate, or by feeling the affect of a sunburn, but still one of the five is involved regardless. Can you say the same for thoughts? The very obvious answer is no. You need a better argument to convince me otherwise.

And as for the correlation argument you use with MRI scans, that the scans correlate with thought is irrelevant. That they correlate does not mean that they are the same. I do not understand why you place senses on a pedastal, and ignore internal thoughts, when they are equally real. Even an ultra empiricist like Hume criticized correlation arguments.

And I never used the word supernatural.

By that logic quantum particles don't exist for you either... I guess. I mean, brain activity is actually measurable... while several quantum particles exist in theory, but can not be reliably measured at all lol.

Seriously... measuring brain activity isn't even the bleeding edge anymore as far as physics go...  I mean heck... we're already seeing the first gadgets that can be controlled by concentrated thought.... so with respect.... uh: Pfffffft!?

I just said that there IS a correlation between thought and brain activity. Are you all completely incapable of representing my position correctly? Correlation does not even imply causation, let alone that the activity and the thought are one in the same, let alone that you can it's even possible to reduce the thought (if I have to use the term thing in itself, I will) to sensory data anyway. That there is interaction does not prove materialism. It might prove monism, but not materialism.

There are a lot of studies linking parts of the brain with various processes, like memory, emotions, sensory input, muscle output, reasoning, language, you name it. Since every one of these influences thought, I would assume it would be a natural phenomenon and so measurable.

Can you describe what you mean by thought in more detail?

[Mr. Vega]

The thought itself. What you are thinking right now in your head. You are aware of these thoughts without having to sense them. Scientific theory, which is all about sensory analysis, direct and indirect, can explain everything except the existence of these thoughts, because they appear to fall outside the senses. So the goal is to somehow explain thinking as something that is actually sensed after all (which smacks of behaviorism), or reduce sensory information to a special kind of thought, or accept mind-body dualism.

Also, it don't think it was glue. Sorry.

[Luis Dias]

Here we go again, to the core of the woo. This is, I should say, the nth discussion about woo in consciousness that I have in the internetz tbh, and in every single one of them, there's always the amazed one about the very glorious magic zero-point of "awareness!". To go to the damned path of dualism reeks of some lack of self-discipline in the thinking about this theme, I am afraid. Perhaps as an introductionary lecture, I'd advise you mr. Daniel Dennett, who has some good videos on the issue. Perhaps starting with this one, which is rather witty in general, about consciousness and that magical spot within it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48ol4sHasA8&feature=gv

[Mr. Vega]

You can brand it woo or a delusion, but you can't make it go away. And your understanding of sensory analysis is dependent on the woo. And as for his video, that our minds form additional patterns from sensory input according to loosely set rules isn't much of a hammer blow against consciousness.

[Aardwolf]

So the goal is to somehow explain thinking as something that is actually sensed after all (which smacks of behaviorism), or reduce sensory information to a special kind of thought, or accept mind-body dualism.

I'ma go with the first/second one. Neurons transmit sensory information to the brain, and the neurons in the brain make us think.

No, it doesn't explain why I feel like a viewer in the control center for my body... but as far as I am concerned, nothing useful will come out of trying to understand that.

[666maslo666]

No, it isn't. It makes "total skepticism" possible, but this possibility is also meaningless to me, since I was never interested in the "absolute truth" in the first place. We live in our empirical reality and we form our theories in this world, about it and nothing else.

Like it or not, not everyone is an instrumentalist or pragmatist, and those who aren't, aren't all as stupid and delusional as you make them out to be.

Idealism is great. I love it. I love the sheer chaos that it usually brings, the smell of revolution in the morning.

Yet, all that is poetry in action. If you are willing to concede that God is a poetic character, then we will be alright. If however you are on to proclaim the truth of his existence as a fact, as something that even trasncends reality as we are here describing it, I must say that you are indeed delusional, although not stupid (since I've seen amazingly intelligent people falling into the same trap, it mustn't be a question of intelligence).

To me God has always been a teleological moral dream, like the ultimate muse. It need not to exist in any other place than in men's hearts as a "call". It's the ultimate romantical figure that "saves us" from our "materialistic doom", from death. It tries to do this by inspiring a supernatural way of thinking. A way of thinking that trasncends the egotistical genes and the "fake" altruism that abounds in us.

It is a revolutionary way of thinking. And I don't mind that bit at all. Like I said, I love idealism, it shatters the world and crushes all status quos.

For instance, I myself am an idealistic anti-theist. I really do believe that we cannot base our romantic bursts with bronze age myths with its obsolete moralities and barbaric tropes, and what I see in the middle east happening with the population, specially the women and the kids is like a punch to the stomach. I hate it. With all my heart.

I am not referring to idealism. I am referring to scientific realism. The belief that the fact that the sun has come up every day at a set interval depending on the season for a very long time means that you can be absolutely certain that it will continue to do so (after taking into account like the earth's slowing rotation and the like). That true knowledge is possible, that a theory need not be an approximation. As in, anti-total-skepticism. I wasn't referring to God or that all's right in the world. That's that strawmaning I talked about. Like I said, I am an atheist (certainly in regards to the idea of God taking on personal characteristics). I am also not a materialist or an empiricist. The anti-god arguments you all throw out are born from radical empiricism, the kind Hume advocated. I think these arguments are bad ones. I agree with one particular conclusion of yours, just not the reasoning that led you there.

Watisname, you can detect neutrinos by getting them to collide with hydrogen in water, causing a flash. You gain knowledge of their existence by sensory means.

That was exactly the point I was making, good job.  Now you've expanded your description of sensory means from the five senses you used originally.

You see the flash by sight. Use of one of the five senses is still required.

Sure, this is valid if we consider any form detection of EM waves, despite the type of detector, as an extension of one of our five senses, namely vision.  However, if we go with that then what makes thought any different?  Despite our limited understanding of the details of cognition, we can decipher quite a lot about thought through the use of fMRI and the like.

There is also still the option of defining 'what is real' to be anything that can affect or be affected by other things in detectable ways.  Herra mentioned this, too.  This definition is nice because it works for neutrinos just as much as it does for thought, and it also provides an effective criterion for determining if various 'supernatural' phenomenon are 'real' or not.

So you are designating the production of thoughts in the mind, be they images, recalls, or abstract, as falling under the category of something that is "sensed". A sixth sense, apparently. I am challenging this. At least on a surface level, thoughts cannot be classified as sensory data. Any material object, no matter how far removed from ordinary experience, still has to involve some use of the five senses to be detected. UV light can be sensed by looking at photographic plate, or by feeling the affect of a sunburn, but still one of the five is involved regardless. Can you say the same for thoughts? The very obvious answer is no. You need a better argument to convince me otherwise.

And as for the correlation argument you use with MRI scans, that the scans correlate with thought is irrelevant. That they correlate does not mean that they are the same. I do not understand why you place senses on a pedastal, and ignore internal thoughts, when they are equally real. Even an ultra empiricist like Hume criticized correlation arguments.

And I never used the word supernatural.

By that logic quantum particles don't exist for you either... I guess. I mean, brain activity is actually measurable... while several quantum particles exist in theory, but can not be reliably measured at all lol.

Seriously... measuring brain activity isn't even the bleeding edge anymore as far as physics go...  I mean heck... we're already seeing the first gadgets that can be controlled by concentrated thought.... so with respect.... uh: Pfffffft!?

I just said that there IS a correlation between thought and brain activity. Are you all completely incapable of representing my position correctly? Correlation does not even imply causation, let alone that the activity and the thought are one in the same, let alone that you can it's even possible to reduce the thought (if I have to use the term thing in itself, I will) to sensory data anyway. That there is interaction does not prove materialism. It might prove monism, but not materialism.

Correlation surely implies causation, in absence of credible alternative explanations (compatible with Occams Razor), and in the absence of evidence to the contrary. In fact, when you think about it, all we can observe in the world are correlations. So while correlation does not prove causation with 100% certainty (nothing can be proven with 100% certainty), it sure is a good hint.

[karajorma]

For ****'s sake! You guy's need to learn how to quote properly.

[Mefustae]

I find the black hole of unintelligible rhetoric quite fitting for this thread.

[Nuke]

once again another page of unintelligible gibberish.

[Luis Dias]

You can brand it woo or a delusion, but you can't make it go away.

Indeed not. For instance, people still believe in astrology while having an university degree.

These kinds of things will never go away.

And your understanding of sensory analysis is dependent on the woo.

As much as you'd like that to be true, it isn't. I don't need the "woo", just empirical questioning, experimentation, lots and lots and lots of work. Eventually, we will have a good theory about consciousness. And people won't like it.

And as for his video, that our minds form additional patterns from sensory input according to loosely set rules isn't much of a hammer blow against consciousness.

Ah, so you haven't seen the video entirely, coz you just missed the entire thesis of it. That's ok, you skimmed and you didn't like it, just don't pretend you have seen it because it's obvious you didn't. It's your loss anyway, and I don't really care that much since I don't even know you.

[Luis Dias]

once again another page of unintelligible gibberish.

Come on, there is no need to advertize your incapabilities so clearly...

[NGTM-1R]

Eventually, we will have a good theory about consciousness.

I do believe you have just conceded defeat.

[LordPomposity]

No, it isn't. It makes "total skepticism" possible, but this possibility is also meaningless to me, since I was never interested in the "absolute truth" in the first place. We live in our empirical reality and we form our theories in this world, about it and nothing else.

Like it or not, not everyone is an instrumentalist or pragmatist, and those who aren't, aren't all as stupid and delusional as you make them out to be.

Idealism is great. I love it. I love the sheer chaos that it usually brings, the smell of revolution in the morning.

Yet, all that is poetry in action. If you are willing to concede that God is a poetic character, then we will be alright. If however you are on to proclaim the truth of his existence as a fact, as something that even trasncends reality as we are here describing it, I must say that you are indeed delusional, although not stupid (since I've seen amazingly intelligent people falling into the same trap, it mustn't be a question of intelligence).

To me God has always been a teleological moral dream, like the ultimate muse. It need not to exist in any other place than in men's hearts as a "call". It's the ultimate romantical figure that "saves us" from our "materialistic doom", from death. It tries to do this by inspiring a supernatural way of thinking. A way of thinking that trasncends the egotistical genes and the "fake" altruism that abounds in us.

It is a revolutionary way of thinking. And I don't mind that bit at all. Like I said, I love idealism, it shatters the world and crushes all status quos.

For instance, I myself am an idealistic anti-theist. I really do believe that we cannot base our romantic bursts with bronze age myths with its obsolete moralities and barbaric tropes, and what I see in the middle east happening with the population, specially the women and the kids is like a punch to the stomach. I hate it. With all my heart.

I am not referring to idealism. I am referring to scientific realism. The belief that the fact that the sun has come up every day at a set interval depending on the season for a very long time means that you can be absolutely certain that it will continue to do so (after taking into account like the earth's slowing rotation and the like). That true knowledge is possible, that a theory need not be an approximation. As in, anti-total-skepticism. I wasn't referring to God or that all's right in the world. That's that strawmaning I talked about. Like I said, I am an atheist (certainly in regards to the idea of God taking on personal characteristics). I am also not a materialist or an empiricist. The anti-god arguments you all throw out are born from radical empiricism, the kind Hume advocated. I think these arguments are bad ones. I agree with one particular conclusion of yours, just not the reasoning that led you there.

Watisname, you can detect neutrinos by getting them to collide with hydrogen in water, causing a flash. You gain knowledge of their existence by sensory means.

That was exactly the point I was making, good job.  Now you've expanded your description of sensory means from the five senses you used originally.

You see the flash by sight. Use of one of the five senses is still required.

Sure, this is valid if we consider any form detection of EM waves, despite the type of detector, as an extension of one of our five senses, namely vision.  However, if we go with that then what makes thought any different?  Despite our limited understanding of the details of cognition, we can decipher quite a lot about thought through the use of fMRI and the like.

There is also still the option of defining 'what is real' to be anything that can affect or be affected by other things in detectable ways.  Herra mentioned this, too.  This definition is nice because it works for neutrinos just as much as it does for thought, and it also provides an effective criterion for determining if various 'supernatural' phenomenon are 'real' or not.

So you are designating the production of thoughts in the mind, be they images, recalls, or abstract, as falling under the category of something that is "sensed". A sixth sense, apparently. I am challenging this. At least on a surface level, thoughts cannot be classified as sensory data. Any material object, no matter how far removed from ordinary experience, still has to involve some use of the five senses to be detected. UV light can be sensed by looking at photographic plate, or by feeling the affect of a sunburn, but still one of the five is involved regardless. Can you say the same for thoughts? The very obvious answer is no. You need a better argument to convince me otherwise.

And as for the correlation argument you use with MRI scans, that the scans correlate with thought is irrelevant. That they correlate does not mean that they are the same. I do not understand why you place senses on a pedastal, and ignore internal thoughts, when they are equally real. Even an ultra empiricist like Hume criticized correlation arguments.

And I never used the word supernatural.

By that logic quantum particles don't exist for you either... I guess. I mean, brain activity is actually measurable... while several quantum particles exist in theory, but can not be reliably measured at all lol.

Seriously... measuring brain activity isn't even the bleeding edge anymore as far as physics go...  I mean heck... we're already seeing the first gadgets that can be controlled by concentrated thought.... so with respect.... uh: Pfffffft!?

I just said that there IS a correlation between thought and brain activity. Are you all completely incapable of representing my position correctly? Correlation does not even imply causation, let alone that the activity and the thought are one in the same, let alone that you can it's even possible to reduce the thought (if I have to use the term thing in itself, I will) to sensory data anyway. That there is interaction does not prove materialism. It might prove monism, but not materialism.

Correlation surely implies causation, in absence of credible alternative explanations (compatible with Occams Razor), and in the absence of evidence to the contrary. In fact, when you think about it, all we can observe in the world are correlations. So while correlation does not prove causation with 100% certainty (nothing can be proven with 100% certainty), it sure is a good hint.

epic quote muhahahahaha

[Nuke]

once again another page of unintelligible gibberish.

Come on, there is no need to advertize your incapabilities so clearly...

for me im more concerned about the lack of entertaining reading material than debate over crap that should have been figured out by the end of ones high school years. when you get into these damn exchanges, the thread gets really really really boring. lest drivel, more trolling pls.

[Grizzly]

once again another page of unintelligible gibberish.

Come on, there is no need to advertize your incapabilities so clearly...

And there is no need to question why people call you a troll .

[Mefustae]

once again another page of unintelligible gibberish.

Come on, there is no need to advertize your incapabilities so clearly...

And there is no need to question why people call you a troll .

*Sigh* I wish an0n were here...

[redsniper]

*Sigh* I wish an0n were here...

Second. He trolled with a purpose.