Re: Criticism
Posted: Tue Nov 16, 2021 11:27 pm
That’s an evasion. How do you know you are experiencing anything at all outside your imagination? And what about your computer?Eugene I wrote: ↑Tue Nov 16, 2021 10:52 pmWe already discussed that, so here it is again.JeffreyW wrote: ↑Tue Nov 16, 2021 10:03 pm Nonsense. That would mean you can only assume your own consciousness, an error stemming from your misconception of consciousness as a hermitic container rather than entanglement with the world - a relic of subject/object metaphysics. It’s a pose you don’t actually believe or you wouldn’t acknowledge the existence of me, this board, or your computer - which you implicitly do every time you respond.
I do make an abstraction-inference that other conscious experiences exist outside of my own consciousness, I'm not a solipsist. The way I do such inference is that I take the facts that I already know from experience - the existence of my own conscious phenomena, and then extrapolate by inference that similar conscious experiences exist outside of my own consciousness, including the conscious experiences that exist in your consciousness. The "board" and "computer" are only content of my and other personal conscious experiences, I honestly do not believe that such "things" as non-conscious computers exist anywhere "outside" consciousness. I also accept that it is only my unprovable hypothesis that there are conscious phenomena existing outside of my own consciousness. But I think it's a reasonable hypothesis to hold because I'm not inventing the existence of something that I experientially can not prove to exist outside of my consciousness (like any non-conscious stuff). I'm only suggesting the existence of the stuff outside my consciousness that is already experientially proven to exist - conscious phenomena.
What you are doing is different. You invent by abstraction that there exist some "stuff" or objects (like "energy", computers or "external world" of non-conscious objects) that you can never experience directly (because all you can ever experience are the phenomena of your own conscious experience). You cannot prove that such things even exist, you can only hypothesize about their existence. Then you extrapolate by inference that such objects or "energy" actually exist in the world outside your consciousness, and you as consciousness experience it as an object of experience. It is plain metaphysics - you claim an existence of things you can never prove to exist, and you refuse to accept that it's only your hypothesis.
And yes, consciousness is entanglement with the world - with the world of consciousness outside of my own consciousness. But consciousness can not in principle entangle with anything that is unconscious by nature (per interaction problem).
It is ironic that this is the only argument that materialists are left with. Materialism started by establishing scientific method and scientific truth criteria
of coherence, internal consistency, parsimony, explanatory power and empirical adequacy. But when it turned out that it can not withstand such determinants, so it rejected them and turned instead to "poetic mysterianism" as the last resort.
By the way, claiming that consciousness "emerges" from non-consciousness is materialism, renaming "matter" with "energy" does not change anything here, the premise remains the same: claiming that consciousness is an emergent byproduct and epiphenomenon of something originally non-conscious. And then refusing to face the "hard problem of consciousness" that inevitably arises from such premise.