Arguments against materialism - how to refute?

[PIT2]

In this view, consciousness can be detected, it just loses the personal (and perhaps emotional) relationship that you feel for it as one of your experiences. You can't make the connection between your experience and the scientific explanation of it.

That really just describes the best way we have (what we have to settle for) to infer consciousness, but it becomes problematic in cases where the subject does not behave like a typical human, as in the case of people in a vegetative state (such as this one), or other organisms (or objects) with no brain at all. Because we can infer consciousness through brainactivity in certain cases with fair certainty, does not mean that we can infer in organisms/objects with no brains no consciousness with any certainty.

I don't think most neuroscientists have any investment in any particular view of consciousness. Unless it can guide their research they aren't interested in high falutin' theorizing.

Most probably dont, and their findings (like the experiments u mentioned on the previous page)also do not in any way show that physicalism is more plausible than panpsychism or even dualism. The physicalists that do theorize on the nature of consciousness often invent vague metaphors that have the same purpose for consciousness as putins hitmen have for annoying journalists: to make it disappear.

But they continue to narrow the range in with the IFSM can fly, and the wishful thinkers continue to get more and more far-out.

The opposite may be happening. Just like upon studying the cosmos, people found out that our planet wasnt the incredibly special center of the universe, it may also hold true for the brain: that it isn't the incredibly special center of consciousness.

 

[alexsok]

I'm only willing to accept the possibility of transhumanism though, that we might be immortal in the future, or uploaded to a setup of supercomputers (in case we find out what is the nature of consciousness, if not then that is unrealistic as well) or that the technological explosion will lead to a point of singularity where unimaginable things might happen.

Why? because Transhumanism is the ONLY option that actually does something more than speculate of what *might* nature really be or how it operates, it actually has solid grounds for predicting the things it does (although the timeframes might be a bit too skewed), what's with the nano-bots, etc.

Hell, eventually, as in Tippler's scenario, intelligence may become so complex that it would be able to answer any question, including the questions of the meaning of our lives, etc.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here. First we need to get rid of our biological components, since I'm too freakin tired of seeing people aging, suffering from debilitating diseases, and dying.

What does this has to do with the original topic? Well, nothing really. The universe is exactly as we see it, there is nothing beyond it. Nature is NOT alive, the cosmos is NOT a living & breathing machines. If we manage to reconstruct the entire human brain, neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse (and without losing consciousness too!) with a specific set of nano-bots, the space for possibilities is really endless!

 

[Pythagorean]

That really just describes the best way we have (what we have to settle for) to infer consciousness, but it becomes problematic in cases where the subject does not behave like a typical human, as in the case of people in a vegetative state (such as this one), or other organisms (or objects) with no brain at all. Because we can infer consciousness through brainactivity in certain cases with fair certainty, does not mean that we can infer in organisms/objects with no brains no consciousness with any certainty.

how is it problematic?

 

[selfAdjoint]

Most probably dont, and their findings (like the experiments u mentioned on the previous page)also do not in any way show that physicalism is more plausible than panpsychism or even dualism.

There's no point in discussing it with you if all you're going to do is make bald assertions like this. Never mind how much or little of consciousness the experiments account for, how is panpsychism at the same level of plausibility as what you annoyingly call physicalism? The successes of science over the last four centuries have left nothing, really, but consciousness left (at the level of ordinary human experience) to explain. An ordinary understanding would say this gives an enormous plausibility to the expectation that consciousness too will find a physical explanation, insofar as it has not already done so (which is controversial).

Panpsychism, on the other hand requires an enormous investment in an alternative construction of reality (a la Rosenberg's "new causality"). This is surely wildly implausible unless you already believe its conclusions?

 

[alexsok]

SelfAdjoint
Not only Panpsychism. Pretty much any philosophy that is not backed up by science requires a good amount of "suspension of disbelief".

Do you think that, in the future, when/if consciousness is proven to be a direct corollary of brain activity, the argument will finally be closed?

 

[selfAdjoint]

SelfAdjoint
Not only Panpsychism. Pretty much any philosophy that is not backed up by science requires a good amount of "suspension of disbelief".

Do you think that, in the future, when/if consciousness is proven to be a direct corollary of brain activity, the argument will finally be closed?

To your first remark, I agree. I mostly consider philosophy an art form, rather than a field of knowledge.

On the second, there is a movable bar built into the qualia; the magical consciousnesss crowd even touts it. No matter what the scientists are able to demonstrate, the partisans can always say "naw that ain't it". This is kind of the dual of non-falsifiablility, call it unverifiability.

But I think the scientists will get to the point when any unbiased observer, if there are any, will agree that there's no more hard proble.

 

[octelcogopod]

Yet the fact still remains that there is no physical data detected of any alleged qualia.
Just because this is the case, does not mean that one can discard the theory of qualia.

Best example is color.. You have the light, you have the eyes, and you have the brain, but the perceived color is nowhere to be found..
This is unaccounted for in any science, and thus the science of color is incomplete, and that's a problem, don't you think?

 

[PIT2]

There's no point in discussing it with you if all you're going to do is make bald assertions like this. Never mind how much or little of consciousness the experiments account for

Im simply pointing out that panpsychism is plausible as well as logical, but u seem to have the idea that fMRI and other types of experiments indicate physicalism is right. The fact is that those experiments can be interpreted in both panpsychistic and physicalistic ways, and the acquired results do not answer the metaphysical question.

how is panpsychism at the same level of plausibility as what you annoyingly call physicalism? The successes of science over the last four centuries have left nothing, really, but consciousness left (at the level of ordinary human experience) to explain.

Of course i won't deny science is succesful. However, science does not depend on physicalism, and it may be just (or perhaps even more) successful if panpsychism became the dominant view. The origin of the universe, life, consciousness and intelligence so far are completely unexplained, and thus it is only logical that people are skeptical that these will be explained through physicalist theories.

Also, i find the the strong resistance to panpsychist ideas surprising. What is the big deal? Cant we all just objectively look at the universe without our god and anti-god complexes?

An ordinary understanding would say this gives an enormous plausibility to the expectation that consciousness too will find a physical explanation, insofar as it has not already done so (which is controversial).

A clown can be very good at making children laugh, but that doesn't make it in any way plausible that he's very good creating a theory that unites general relativity and quantum mechanics.

Panpsychism, on the other hand requires an enormous investment in an alternative construction of reality (a la Rosenberg's "new causality"). This is surely wildly implausible unless you already believe its conclusions?

Look at the investment in constructing physicalist explanations of mind, this is enormous aswell. Btw how do materialist theories of mind explain the causality between mind and matter? Wouldnt they need some kind of new causality aswell, and on top of that explain why this causality is limited to the brain?

 

[PIT2]

how is it problematic?

I remember that they didnt agree whether she really was conscious or that her brain was simply responding to the instructions. Also, detecting brainactivity in plants is impossible

 

[selfAdjoint]

Im simply pointing out that panpsychism is plausible as well as logical, but u seem to have the idea that fMRI and other types of experiments indicate physicalism is right. The fact is that those experiments can be interpreted in both panpsychistic and physicalistic ways, and the acquired results do not answer the metaphysical question.

Well of course you can explain the experiments with panpsychic assumptions. Since you are assuming a whole world of new parameters in addition to those understood by science, but (in the Rosenberg style) keeping the ones from physics, you can explain anything physics can explain but just decorating their answers with your new garlands. And as I said elsewhere the metaphysical question is a moveable bar that can always be set to block any advance in scientific understanding. This is not knowledge, it's just sophistry.

 

[Pythagorean]

Well of course you can explain the experiments with panpsychic assumptions. Since you are assuming a whole world of new parameters in addition to those understood by science, but (in the Rosenberg style) keeping the ones from physics, you can explain anything physics can explain but just decorating their answers with your new garlands. And as I said elsewhere the metaphysical question is a moveable bar that can always be set to block any advance in scientific understanding. This is not knowledge, it's just sophistry.

The point we're making here, PIT2, is that while it may not be a 'wrong' view, it's not a particularly useful view for prediction. It can't help us to make new predictions, it just piggybacks (or inteprets) old theories.

It might be useful for your personal gratification, and that's fine (like I said, even I will use similair views in social situations) but you can't come to a physics-based scientific forum and expect people to agree with you if you're not willing to consider they're all-physical model.

There's a flip side: physical scientists who are blindly devoted to their physical model and think it's the only description of reality. Of course, this model is quite useless to them when it comes to social prowess and humanity. Most people (scientist or not) have developed a different set of rules when interacting with other living things, but this doesn't mean a physical set of rules wouldn't work, it would just be too complex to be useful in each unique situation, most of us have instincts or intuition to deal with this.

Instinct and intuition are not logical. They're a mix of common sense and biological impulse. They can sometimes give is us strange and irrational views of the world, but that doesn't mean they don't work. This is where a non-physical model is handy.

 

[PIT2]

it's not a particularly useful view for prediction. It can't help us to make new predictions, it just piggybacks (or inteprets) old theories.

I don't see why it couldn't lead to new theories, especially in areas where physicalism is little succesful?

It might be useful for your personal gratification, and that's fine (like I said, even I will use similair views in social situations) but you can't come to a physics-based scientific forum and expect people to agree with you if you're not willing to consider they're all-physical model.

While there are undoubtedly people who get their gratification by panpsychism or physicalism, this is irrelevant to the question of which is right. Also, who said I am not willing to consider the all-physical model? I am simply skeptical because consciousness and the physical are so completely unlike each other. A person who strongly believes that consciousness is physical and wishes to convince others will have to demonstrate this (if this is even possible at all). Would u believe it when someone claimed the world around u consisted of nothing but someones imagination? Why believe the opposite?

Most people (scientist or not) have developed a different set of rules when interacting with other living things, but this doesn't mean a physical set of rules wouldn't work...

I think the proper way of looking at these different sets of rules, is that they indicate that they are a different set of rules. And not: "hey look, that set of rules is nothing like the physical set of rules! Wow, that means they must be a physical set of rules!".

Instinct and intuition are not logical. They're a mix of common sense and biological impulse. They can sometimes give is us strange and irrational views of the world, but that doesn't mean they don't work. This is where a non-physical model is handy.

But consciousness has also shown itself quite handy at being the origin of all of science and rational thinking. So a non-physical model can be handy there too.

 

[PIT2]

Well of course you can explain the experiments with panpsychic assumptions. Since you are assuming a whole world of new parameters in addition to those understood by science, but (in the Rosenberg style) keeping the ones from physics, you can explain anything physics can explain but just decorating their answers with your new garlands.

If that what it takes to explain our minds, then so be it.

And as I said elsewhere the metaphysical question is a moveable bar that can always be set to block any advance in scientific understanding. This is not knowledge, it's just sophistry.

The only way in which it would block scientific understanding is if:

1. it is false and
2. other options arent looked into

Which, for all we know, may be exactly what's happening right now with physicalism in charge.

 

[Pythagorean]

I don't see why it couldn't lead to new theories, especially in areas where physicalism is little succesful?

Firstly, 'leading to new theories' isn't enough. They have to be applicable to reality, or somehow testable or provable, otherwise it's a useless theory.

If they are, the principles of physicalism can be changed to fit the new observations. That's how scientific revolution takes place.

The caveat here is that these revolutions come from people who are trained in traditional scientific method, and are able to find and repeatable phenomena that doesn't fit our current understanding. These revolutions come from people who can take bizarre obsevations and adapt equally bizarre theories that work, regardless of how much they defy our former physical intuition.

Take Quantum Physics as an example. It behaves in ways that you wouldn't consider physical in the traditional view of the word. It's absolutely bizarre and dynamic how subatomic particles work. They can do amazing things, and they didn't follow 'physical rules' of the time (in fact, much of the scientific community did a lot to slow down the process of the new physics development because they couldn't believe the things that were happening in the laboratory).

If you had some argument you were trying to prove about a non-physical model, and you proved it, and were able to duplicate the results, than your theory would be adopted to the physical scientific theory. It wouldn't be a non-physical model anymore, because by proving it, you've shown that it's part of our physical existence.

If you aren't able to make predictions and prove them with your model, than it's useless.

 

[alexsok]

If sophistry would be all that we had going for us (as humanity), we wouldn't get anywhere.

 

[selfAdjoint]

If sophistry would be all that we had going for us (as humanity), we wouldn't get anywhere.

And indeed, the "hard problem" meme hasn't gotten either science or philosophy anywhere that I can see. Dozens of papers and books, and "Ever more I come out by that same door wherewith I came in."

 

[octelcogopod]

Yet you elegantly ignored my question and the core issue of the problem selfAdjoint..

I don't see how everyone can be so sure there is no hard problem..

 

[alexsok]

octelcogopod
There is a philosophical system espoused by many philosophers, devised by Kant, Schopenhauer and other powerhouses:the world is a representation.

It means that we can never truly know what is behind the "perception of color" in the world and we can't really know what the "true nature" is of anything.

Have you ever thought about this? That science is all we have going for us and anything beyond that is just "bonfire speculations"?

Moreover, science has already looked into this issue (the holographic universe is another way of seeing the "world as a representation") and there were books written on it, but the evidence is nowhere to be found, except in some dedicated experiments which couldn't be replicated anywhere else.

The way I see it, there are two options:
1. Either we acknowledge the existence of a problem, perhaps an insoluble problem (which is the most likely scenario, sorry) and try to run along with what we do have (which we have been doing till now and will continue doing in the future - you think the "singularity" of transhumanits is anything but science taken to the extremes?).

Or

2. We keep babbling about it, refuting the claims of science, refuting everything and anything and be STUCK at where we are now (or if you suggested that earlier, then back at the stone-age).

To regurgitate: YES, WE CAN'T KNOW. And what is YOUR alternative?

 

[nannoh]

Once again, this is not logical.
Just because all neurological sequences are physical, does not make the pain itself physical. There's a step there you are jumping over.
That step has torn billions of people up for centuries also.

What is not logical is to think that pain is not physical. Pain is a sensation that is dependent upon neurology. The logical way to prove pain is not physical is for you to prove that pain exists without a neurological system present. Otherwise, logically, pain is a signal and therefore physical. What you are proposing is like claiming radio waves to be aphysical.

You can interrupt pain-signals with drugs, discipline or surgery but because the pain is not registered by your brain doesn't mean it is absent.

For example, when you interrupt X-rays with a lead apron the X-rays remain a physical event. What isn't happening are the effects of the physical event. And just because you are not aware of an event doesn't automatically classify it as non-physical.

 

[PIT2]

If you had some argument you were trying to prove about a non-physical model, and you proved it, and were able to duplicate the results, than your theory would be adopted to the physical scientific theory. It wouldn't be a non-physical model anymore, because by proving it, you've shown that it's part of our physical existence.

So it then becomes a matter of redefining 'physical', and panpsychism would be called physicalism?

 

[octelcogopod]

nannoh first;

I never said pain wasn't physical, or that there aren't physical components.
What I'm saying is that there is no way to measure what pain FEELS LIKE.
Pain as it is experienced by the organism, is not physical in the sense that the pain itself does not exist physically.

In fact, the whole world, universe, can't be proven to exist, as it were.
Everything we know is 'qualia', and in a sense we can never prove that something exists until we perceive it, or know of it with our senses, thoughts or emotions.

But still, the problem is separate in that we have explained a lot with science, but we still can't comprehend anything subjective, mental or anything related to consciousness.
What science is explaining is our representation of the world.

 

[Pythagorean]

So it then becomes a matter of redefining 'physical', and panpsychism would be called physicalism?

I don't know how philosophy tends to work and how terms dominate thinking in that respect, but you might say something to the effect of panpsychism doesn't conflict with physicalism.

I don't think panpsychism would become physicalism, because papsychism's main point seems to be (simply put) that rocks are sentient, not so much about whether existence is wholly physical or not, that appears (to me) to be a sub-point that could be revised. I see no evidence against the main point of panpsychism. To me, this is equivalent to saying our thought process is a lot like a rock's existence.

I would actually agree with this as a physicalist, but I wouldn't say that rocks are sentient, I'd say we are as willful as rocks. That is... a rock may only respond to a couple simple forces like gravity and electromagnetism, but we only respond to our electrochemical potentials (as well as gravity and electromagnetism). We call this phenomena consciousness when it happens in us, and disregard the rock's (mostly because it's a simpler set of interactions the rock has, compared to the way biological systems operate.) Because we're kind of stuck in the middle of this phenomena we call conscioussness, it's a lot more complex and there's more variables than with the rock. Don't get me wrong, there's much more to a rock then gravity. It has a molecular structure that can interact with light and magnetic field and electric fields in different ways. It has thermodynamic properties like a bioling point, and it has ductile deformation points, it's a very dynamic system, but it's not the whole system.

If instead you locked at the rock as a 'limb' of the Earth, then it would be even easier to believe that the Earth is alive (after all, the Earth as a system is one of the more complex in the universe) but in that case, life is merely a limb of the Earth itself (a sub-system).

You can take this further and say the Earth is a sub-system of the the system called the universe. It's very difficult to observe this universe since we're a system operating within it, we contiously interact with our environment, regardless of our attempts to be safe observers.

Anything you want to measure/test/observe in science has to interact with the physical world somehow or we wouldn't be able to measure/test/observe it. You also interact with the physical world (scientists try to reduce how much they interact with their experiment so that the experiment can just react with them, but they're not always wholly succesful, we're always leaking into our environment and our environment into us, thanks to entropy)

 

[nannoh]

nannoh first;

I never said pain wasn't physical, or that there aren't physical components.
What I'm saying is that there is no way to measure what pain FEELS LIKE.
Pain as it is experienced by the organism, is not physical in the sense that the pain itself does not exist physically.

In fact, the whole world, universe, can't be proven to exist, as it were.
Everything we know is 'qualia', and in a sense we can never prove that something exists until we perceive it, or know of it with our senses, thoughts or emotions.

But still, the problem is separate in that we have explained a lot with science, but we still can't comprehend anything subjective, mental or anything related to consciousness.
What science is explaining is our representation of the world.

This is an old argument.

If you want quantification of the "feeling" of pain you need to go to a neurologist's study on pain. They have a system they use to measure pain so that they know what measures to take to reduce, mask or eliminate pain.

Let's say that I alone cannot prove gravity is physical or even exists. Yet everywhere and everyone that observes the goings on in the universe observes a force at work that "represents" gravity at work.

In fact, 6 billion people on this planet will agree that something is creating a condition where they remain on the ground and water falls down and their body parts slowly sag toward the same ground. As far as humans go, this is universally accepted.

If 6 billion people agree upon the physical attribute of gravity then what is the criteria that sets the standard to make gravity an illusion or non-physical?

Is gravity an illusion because you say it is? Or because you and 20 other's agree that it is an illusion?

Why does majority and minority get left out of the equation when it comes to deciding if the human interpretation of the physical universe is right or wrong? This is where my existence poll would come in handy.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion when it comes to designating "physical" or "non-physical" causes but, when the numbers are stacked against you its a good idea to keep your opinion to yourself.

You'd never convince 5.999 billion inhabitants of the Earth that they are a representation of something non-physical.

It would be idle speculation to do so. Depending upon how hungry and desparate they are, the people might eat you.
Tell them they're not hungry and that they'll survive on visions of cake that they can have and eat too. To the guillotine! Then the non-physical will become more familiar.

This sort of tail chasing is just that. Its a cyclical argument that depends on the presence of a physical neurological system.

Tell me if plants and animals have decided whether they are physical or not. There is no question amongst them. They simply are what they are.

 

[Pythagorean]

What I'm saying is that there is no way to measure what pain FEELS LIKE.
Pain as it is experienced by the organism, is not physical in the sense that the pain itself does not exist physically.

measuring isn't the only way to explain something physically. Measuring is, indeed, a small part of analyzing.

We can analyze what pain feels like if we are willing. The word 'pain' does physically exist.

Think of your interaction with the environment in three parts. These is the brain/nervous system of your body.

1) Input
2) Compute
3) Output

1) and 3) are rather trivial. 1) is where you would admit that pain is physical, the actual process of the sensor detecting an incident on our body and sending a signal to the brain.

2) Is where you're mistaken. In our computation of input, and trying to tie it to output, we also have something called imagination, which indeed helps us to tie inputs to outputs.

In the end, what something feels LIKE can only have three values, just like electricity. It can be + (good), - (bad), or 0 (netural).

Pain is BAD, it's negative. Your brain will process it in such a way that your output will avoid that action in the future. It's one physical process (you) building a repulsion to another physical process (a hot stove).

 

[PIT2]

I would actually agree with this as a physicalist, but I wouldn't say that rocks are sentient, I'd say we are as willful as rocks. That is... a rock may only respond to a couple simple forces like gravity and electromagnetism, but we only respond to our electrochemical potentials (as well as gravity and electromagnetism).

But isn't this reasoning from our ignorance, instead of from our knowledge? We know that humans are conscious, so we if we were to reason from knowlegde, we would say that a rock is conscious as a human. But we do not know whether a rock is conscious, so if we were to reason from ignorance, we would say that a human is conscious as a rock.

Btw i don't think panpsychism says rocks are sentient, because it doesn't say which configurations of matter form a conscious whole. It only says that consciousness is a part of all the physical. This is from wikipedia:

Materialism generally, the view that ultimately there is only matter, is compatible with panpsychism just in case the property of mindedness is attributed to matter.

Because we're kind of stuck in the middle of this phenomena we call conscioussness, it's a lot more complex and there's more variables than with the rock.

I am not sure if consciousness is a complex phenomena. I agree that our mind is very complex, but that it works on a much simpler basis(consciousness). Like electricity is a very basic force, but when u build a computer around it and install all kinds of software on the computer, it results in very complex and specific computations.

Don't get me wrong, there's much more to a rock then gravity. It has a molecular structure that can interact with light and magnetic field and electric fields in different ways. It has thermodynamic properties like a bioling point, and it has ductile deformation points, it's a very dynamic system, but it's not the whole system.

So do u think properties of our mind are present in the rock?

If instead you locked at the rock as a 'limb' of the Earth, then it would be even easier to believe that the Earth is alive (after all, the Earth as a system is one of the more complex in the universe) but in that case, life is merely a limb of the Earth itself (a sub-system).

So what do u think is the proper way of looking at life: life as a subsystem of earth, or Earth as alive? Or something in the middle?

I think the first idea mistakes the size of the object for an indication of its importance: life = small, Earth = big, thus Earth is more important. And the second idea can be too antromorphic.

Anything you want to measure/test/observe in science has to interact with the physical world somehow or we wouldn't be able to measure/test/observe it.

But science isn't the only way to gain knowledge. We can observe and know things that science has never been able to demonstrate to exist at all.

Someone in this topic said "all X's are Y's, but not all Y's are X's".
Here the Y = 'knowlegde through observation' and X = 'knowledge through science'. All science is based on knowledge through observation, but not all knowledge through observation is based on knowledge through science.

In the end, what something feels LIKE can only have three values, just like electricity. It can be + (good), - (bad), or 0 (netural).

What about qubits, which can be both + and - at the same time (or neither + nor -, but something different altogether). Someone can feel pain and it can hurt, but he can still enjoy it, so that's good and bad simultaneously. Experiences can influence each other intersubjectively and form a new 'whole' experience altogether.

 

[Singularis]

All we can do is speculate...

 

[PIT2]

If you want quantification of the "feeling" of pain you need to go to a neurologist's study on pain.

They will ask u (the only person who can experience the pain) how the pain feels. Also, interaction between nervous system and pain only demonstrates interaction, nothing else. Similarly, posting on a forum doenst doesn't prove that ur a website (even though there is interaction between the u and the website).

Everyone is entitled to their opinion when it comes to designating "physical" or "non-physical" causes but, when the numbers are stacked against you its a good idea to keep your opinion to yourself.

Are we living in opposite universes because the majority of humans in mine do not believe they are entirely physical?

2. We keep babbling about it, refuting the claims of science, refuting everything and anything and be STUCK at where we are now (or if you suggested that earlier, then back at the stone-age).

Panpsychism doesn't refute any claims of science, and it accepts any of sciences experimental findings, just like physicalism does. Also, it does not destroy science or get it stuck, it simply opens up new areas of theorizing, and thus might slow down or speed up scientific progress. We may not be in the stone-age right now, but that doesn't mean were not in the physical-age.

 

[nannoh]

They will ask u (the only person who can experience the pain) how the pain feels. Also, interaction between nervous system and pain only demonstrates interaction, nothing else. Similarly, posting on a forum doenst doesn't prove that ur a website (even though there is interaction between the u and the website).
Are we living in opposite universes because the majority of humans in mine do not believe they are entirely physical?

Panpsychism doesn't refute any claims of science, and it accepts any of sciences experimental findings, just like physicalism does. Also, it does not destroy science or get it stuck, it simply opens up new areas of theorizing, and thus might slow down or speed up scientific progress. We may not be in the stone-age right now, but that doesn't mean were not in the physical-age.

Great answers. Basically the decision comes down to the individual and whether or not they perceive and react to their experiences as physical, non-physical or both.

The process of making the decision between experiencing life as a non-physical state or a physical state is cyclical and seems to rely on whether or not the observer has a nervous system. This doesn't necessarily hold true for all organisms with nervous systems.

If the decision relys on the presence of a neurological system wouldn't this prove the existence of a physical universe? Neurology studies the singular and combined firing of neurons. The study literally counts the number of neurons firing when presented stimulus. This is how pain is measured and its how we could measure the actual physical nature of this discussion.

 

[vanesch]

But still, the problem is separate in that we have explained a lot with science, but we still can't comprehend anything subjective, mental or anything related to consciousness.
What science is explaining is our representation of the world.

Amen to that

To give another twist to the "what is pain like" or better, "is there pain", consider the following gedanken experiment. Consider that there is a person, which is experiencing pain. Or at least, it's a normal person, you hit his feet with a hammer, and he tells you that it hurts. You can relate to that, and so it seems to be a reasonable assumption for you to assume that, indeed, he has pain.

Now, cut away more and more pieces of body of that person (its a *gedanken* experiment, all right ? ). Replace all functionally necessary parts of his body with machines. You start by replacing his foot, and you connect, to the nerves ending there, the right stimulus generator for them to be identical to what happens when you hit his foot with a hammer. You can consider him having each time you do that, pain.
In the end, you'll just have a big machine and a piece of brain left.
That brain is "having pain", although there's now for you no way to really know, given that the "person" has no means of expression anymore.
You can now even start to eliminate parts of the brain that are supposed not to have anything to do with feet or pain, and replace them with rudimentary processing power in order to keep the "rest of the brain functionning".
In the end you have a small piece of brain left, the "pain center" or whatever, and a machine around it. Is that small piece of brain tissue now "experiencing pain" ? Imagine you analyse its neurological structure and stimuli, and you find that yes, it is (of course, by construction) still stimulated, and reacting, exactly as it was inside of the brain of the person when he was still a "whole". You can now carefully remove more and more tissue, replacing it with more and more processors. In the end, there's nothing left, but a machine. Is it now the machine which has pain ?
Imagine you can model this on a computer. If you run this simulation program on a computer, does the computer now "have pain" ?
If you write the entire memory dump on a disk, during the entire simulation, is the disk now "having pain" ?

See, we can (in principle) model entirely the physical situation, with all physiology and input/output reactions and so on understand all that, know exactly how things are physically going to react... and you will not have found the slightest clue of what subjective experience has really been experienced - or not.

As I sometimes say, jokingly: how do you know that a stone, when you cut it, doesn't feel pain ?

 

[PIT2]

If the decision relys on the presence of a neurological system wouldn't this prove the existence of a physical universe?

Well the identification of a neurological system depends on the existence of an observer, so no it doesn't prove it. But i think there is a physical universe, only this doesn't explain what 'physical' really is. It isn't defined properly and if it were it would be changed the moment science discovered something new about it. There are now scientific theories which propose that matter is made out of spacetime, so what would this say about the physical?

 

[nannoh]

There are now scientific theories which propose that matter is made out of spacetime, so what would this say about the physical?

It wouldn't seem to matter much what "physical" is made of. The question is how to refute arguments against materialsim.

I would ask the person who argues against materialism

how they know about the material?

Where did they hear about it?

How did they hear about it if they don't have ears and a brain?

Are there mysterious ways to communicate without being material?

What are they?

If you communicate how do you communicate and with whom?

Is it another disembodied, immaterial entity?

If the physical is made of space/time then it would hold that space/time is physical/material.

 

[PIT2]

It wouldn't seem to matter much what "physical" is made of. The question is how to refute arguments against materialsim.

Then what do u mean with materialism here?

How did they hear about it if they don't have ears and a brain?

How would they know they have ears and brains without being conscious first?

Are there mysterious ways to communicate without being material?

We know for a fact that communication takes place in beings that cannot fully be described physically. Does that make humans mysterious, or does it make materialism mysterious?

 

[Castlegate]

If the physical is made of space/time then it would hold that space/time is physical/material.

You are making an assumption of the physical. What if the physical is a possession of the mind. What if all things currently considered physical by us are nothing more than conceptuals. The result is the same, but the distinction is very important indeed. I am extremely doubtful that the color red will be explained by physical means, but conceptually it is doable.