The Materialism/Physicalism Con

As long as that evidence was acquired without the use of consciousness, then you have a point. If consciousness was required to obtain that evidence, then your statement is logically flawed. We don't know what the universe looks like from outside of our perception. Just because a bunch of us agree that the universe appeared to exist before life doesn't mean that it's true. We can only view the universe from inside of our collective perception. You would have to be outside of consciousness to know this for sure. That, of course, is impossible.
I don't know it for sure. My point is that we don't know the opposite for sure, either.

We learn of the evidence through consciousness. But the evidence does not suggest that the universe was created by consciousness or that there were conscious beings right away. Instead it suggests there were no conscious beings until some time after the universe was created. If this model is incorrect, then someone or something is fooling us.

~~ Paul
 
Right, but physicalist push this over the edge of absurdity by implying that consciousness is itself an illusion. An illusion playing in what? :)
No consciousness, no illusion.
The physicalist (Dennett anyways) is saying that the feeling of a you separate from your experiences is a type of illusion. (Arouet is correct, I suspect, that "illusion" is the wrong word).

I don't think that is the same thing as saying consciousness is an illusion (but that would depend on your personal definition of "consciousness").
 
The physicalist (Dennett anyways) is saying that the feeling of a you separate from your experiences is a type of illusion. (Arouet is correct, I suspect, that "illusion" is the wrong word).
The feeling of self and also the feeling that consciousness is all-of-a-piece, wholistic. It could very well be a pile of disjoint processes with a veneer of wholism. After all, it wouldn't be quite as useful if my feeling of consciousness were a big jumble of different experiences that don't seem consistent and unified.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysprosody#Emotional_dysprosody

~~ Paul
 
Craig, I said:

"I agree that a nonconscious entity cannot reach conclusions about the universe. But I wouldn't take that as proving that the only thing that exists are conscious entities. It might be true, but there is no proof."

~~ Paul

Your quote:
But there is a huge quantity of evidence that the universe existed before life. To ignore it, you have to believe that some cosmic entity is playing an elaborate trick on us.

Your statements are contradictory.
 
The physicalist (Dennett anyways) is saying that the feeling of a you separate from your experiences is a type of illusion. (Arouet is correct, I suspect, that "illusion" is the wrong word).

In his exposition of the "Cartesian Theater" he states that consciousness must be made of lesser agencies that are distributed in the brain and are themselves not conscious. [1]
How does this work? He then goes on for 20 minutes blabbing about magicians, magic tricks and illusions, none of which can really support his argument.

There is no analogous to consciousness, so the real trick here is to arbitrarily get rid of the subjective and explain it by the way of the poor model that neuroscience offers.
In the end this philosophical position requires a shit-ton of unwarranted assumptions, it's not even grounded in empirical evidence and it is sadly constrained by the materialistic dogma.

The analogies with magic tricks and illusions are so poor and unsophisticated that it is very hard to take it seriously. He ends up painting a caricature of consciousness.
 
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