What is "real"?

Explain how a light switch works, preferably to the level you'd want consciousness explained (perhaps how electons do their thing etc).

Every time I see something that looks like a correlation, I'll insert some sort of magical alternative.

There is a difference between organic and inorganic, you do realize that? Are you implying consciousness is a kind of light switch?

My Best,
Bertha
 
Okay, now we know that you really have no idea what sort of evidence would satisfy you. Please demonstrate that we are wrong.

~~ Paul
Uh? You have yet to demonstrate a single fact regarding how consciousness is a product of the brain. Whatever I may say consciousness is logically or scientifically has no bearing on what you claim is a scientific fact. So please Paul, just provide just a single fact. Should be simple enough for a scientific genius like you right?

My Best,
Bertha
 
Yes. They are entirely nonoverlapping domains. Such as temperature and justice.
Do you have a definition of nonoverlapping domains that is crisp enough to present a proof that material processes cannot be consciousness? I'm suspicious that there is no such proof, only just-so assertions.

~~ Paul
 
Do you have a definition of nonoverlapping domains that is crisp enough to present a proof that material processes cannot be consciousness? I'm suspicious that there is no such proof, only just-so assertions.

~~ Paul

I didn't say they couldn't *be* consciousness...that's a different issue altogether. But if material processes ARE consciousness, then we have NM or PP. Nonoverlapping domains cannot cause each other because the properties they share are the empty set. And if you claim that they CAN, and this is not sophistry, then I say that the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate how, in principle, that would be possible. For example, I give you a miscarriage of justice and a hearth of coals, and ask you to demonstrate to me how the former can cause spontaneous ignition in the latter (I am not, of course, talking about indirect causation...)
 
I didn't say they couldn't *be* consciousness...that's a different issue altogether. But if material processes ARE consciousness, then we have NM or PP. Nonoverlapping domains cannot cause each other because the properties they share are the empty set. And if you claim that they CAN, and this is not sophistry, then I say that the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate how, in principle, that would be possible. For example, I give you a miscarriage of justice and a hearth of coals, and ask you to demonstrate to me how the former can cause spontaneous ignition in the latter (I am not, of course, talking about indirect causation...)
What are NM and PP? Oh, PP must be panpsychism. Whether we have panpsychism depends crucially on its definition.

I am not saying that nonoverlapping domains can cause each other. I'm saying that the claim they are nonoverlapping is a just-so claim. It requires a proof if we are to eliminate any possible explanations of consciousness.

~~ Paul
 
What are NM and PP? Oh, PP must be panpsychism. Whether we have panpsychism depends crucially on its definition.

I am not saying that nonoverlapping domains can cause each other. I'm saying that the claim they are nonoverlapping is a just-so claim. It requires a proof if we are to eliminate any possible explanations of consciousness.

~~ Paul

But Paul, experiential and nonexperiential, are by definition, nonoverlapping domains. The proof is self-contained in the premise. Just as it would be absurd to ask for a proof that the square root of minus one could meet up with you this Sunday for beer and pizza.
 
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There is a difference between organic and inorganic, you do realise that?

Sorry. I clearly didn't fully realise the rules of the game. But matter is just matter, no? That's where the term materialist comes from. If your point is that some types of matter can perform incredible processes, then we may be finding some common ground.

Are you implying consciousness is a kind of light switch?

I thought I was clear (and I suspect that you are being deliberately obtuse to avoid the point - as usual). The explanation of anything can be presented as a series of correlations.

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All of us here use the term but though most of us know it means different things to different people we seem to just ignore that.

So, what does the term mean to you?

Something lying within the bounds of our qualitative conscious experience.

As Clifton points out, this empirical evidence is a rather big problem for materialists.
 
I thought I was clear (and I suspect that you are being deliberately obtuse to avoid the point - as usual). The explanation of anything can be presented as a series of correlations.

Cause is something which leads to another, hot weather is a cause of increase in ice cream sales, but increased sun block is correlated with increase ice cream sales.

My Best,
Bertha
 
I guess what your saying, is one could claim heat is a correlation of boiled water. No, in scientific terms we know that heat causes boiled water. But we don't know scientifically, what causes consciousness in the brain right now. We have no scientific data about how the neurons in the brain cause consciousness. The best that we know right now is brain activity is correlated with consciousness. This by the way doesn't absolutely rule out that the brain may actually cause consciousness, but there is no scientific evidence of that yet.

In my opinion, as well, I believe scientific evidence is pointing away from the brain causing consciousness given the scientific work in NDEs, parapsychology and unconscious psychology.

My Best,
Bertha
 
In my opinion, as well, I believe scientific evidence is pointing away from the brain causing consciousness given the scientific work in NDEs, parapsychology and unconscious psychology.

I wonder how this trend might work. I figure the multiverse will be increasingly abandoned, which guts the God vs Multiverse arguments some pseudoskeptics try to promote. Perhaps more importantly we've been told that among the alternatives to the multiverse is consciousness influencing reality at the subatomic level. Combine that with the challenges to realism from the work of physicists like Zeilinger, along with the abandonment of materialism by certain mainstream scientists, and you open up the door for more acceptance of "fringe" science.

That said, I don't know if one could say that NDEs or Psi divorces the mind from the brain? After all even guys like Braude aren't sure about that, and even when Anthony Flew became a theist he still didn't believe in an afterlife.
 
I wonder how this trend might work. I figure the multiverse will be increasingly abandoned, which guts the God vs Multiverse arguments some pseudoskeptics try to promote. Perhaps more importantly we've been told that among the alternatives to the multiverse is consciousness influencing reality at the subatomic level. Combine that with the challenges to realism from the work of physicists like Zeilinger, along with the abandonment of materialism by certain mainstream scientists, and you open up the door for more acceptance of "fringe" science.

That said, I don't know if one could say that NDEs or Psi divorces the mind from the brain? After all even guys like Braude aren't sure about that, and even when Anthony Flew became a theist he still didn't believe in an afterlife.

It's interesting how much of a can of worms quantum physics has opened up, and kind of amazing how little we still know, even with all our billion dollar colliders and labs around the world. Who would have thunk?

Interesting you ask the question if you don't know if NDEs "divorces" the mind from the brain. There is a lot of questions even here. For example, is any material reality divorced from consciousness given the observer effect in quantum physics? How does what we know in QM relate to the brain-mind question?

Also, you do have the now very well-established non-local entanglement phenomena in QM. So are the non-local attributes discovered in psi just attributes of the brain we are unaware of?

This kind of is a bit reminiscent of the long debate by many of the early pioneers in psi research when studying Mrs. Piper. Richard Hodgson spent 16 years with her. Hyslop and James a few years. Myers some. The debate was primarily whether the phenomena they were observing in Piper was some kind of super-telepathy or access to some world bank of stored knowledge of all events, or if she was really a kind of medium for spirits in another reality? All of them ruled out fraud. And any reasonably astute fair-minded individual studying all the work involving Piper, especially Hodgson's work would have to come to the same conclusion. Skeptics love to come up with one or two silly examples (like some unsatisfied sitter who visited Piper, did not get any kind of evidentiary reading, so therefore all the rest of her recorded sittings over several decades must have been bunk and very smart scientific men were fooled by her year after year - which is simply utter intellectual garbage).

So was Mrs. Piper just a case of super telepathy? There were a lot of problems with this hypothesis. First, a number of her sittings she presented information that not even her sitters were aware of. Her mind would have had to reach out in the far corners of the earth, or into some cosmic knowledge bank and picked out just the right information. Secondly, as is well known in mediumship, she sometimes adapted the mannerisms and even mimicked the voices of those spirits who were communicating. This would take super-telepathy to a whole new level - being able to pick out information,and then do an awesome acting job mimicking convincingly the demeanor and mannerisms and phrases of someone the medium had never ever met in her life. Thirdly, perhaps one of the more powerful problems in the super-telepathy hypothesis, was the fact of the many many errors Piper would transmit, or the very near misses. Such as writing out Sharry - when attempting to get the name Sharon. Or describing an argument over a toy with certain words, and being precise in words spoken but that the argument was not over a toy but a blanket etc. Then there are indeed the many flat misses in sittings where Mrs. Piper simply did not provide anything evidentiary, and some sitters came away pretty disappointed if not upset. Now assuming the "Super Telepathy" hypothesis of her ability, why would Piper go to such levels of mis-direction, of half-misses and partial information, when she could simply pick the information right out of someone's mind? It defies a reason and was yet another reason not to buy into the hypothesis. Then of course, near the end after Myers passed, you got the cross correspondence, between multiple mediums, not just Piper, where there very much appeared to be an active working intelligence across all the mediums. The idea of super-telepathy would be stretched even further to include the capability of each of the mediums to act like some kind of classical scholar that Myers was.

But how does this relate to NDEs? Well, here's the thing. We got lots of Skeptics throwing out lots of hypothesis (so far none have them have really stuck to the wall well) regarding what an NDE is. Is the mind really divorced from the brain? Well, look - how possibly can the brain operate without eeg activity? We know when a person has a heart attack, and the heart stops, within 15 seconds almost all brain activity ceases, after 30 seconds or more, it will be some time before the patient will even return to consciousness, and the patient is profoundly unconscious if not considered clinically dead. How then is it even possible for someone to report having an experience during this time, an experience that is highly organized, vivid, and has in many accounts, veridical information provided by the patient whose brain is inactive at the time? And furthermore, how is it possible that these accounts coincide with each other in many different parts of the world, and even children have reported them? Children who would have no idea of the NDE literature, and would have even less conception of what may be happening to them in a near death situation? What are we to make of it? Other than come up with some absurd irrational rebuttal that Skeptics do, to avoid having to look at the obvious elephant in the room. How possibly can we have a cohesive, organized conscious experience while the brain is clinically dead??

I'm curious Patel, what your assessment here is. You say you don't know how NDEs divorce mind from the brain. Are you saying you don't know the mechanism? Yes, that is a big thing for science to grasp someday. Or are you saying you don't know if there might be some activity in the brain when all of our current medical science tells us is that is impossible if there is no electrical activity happening in the brain, and there is no blood pumping?

My Best,
Bertha
 
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You can't pick something out of somebodies brain that they are not conscious of. In any case you would just be admitting that actual memories were stored in the brain, rather than just access - via associations.

However access to non-conscious information seems possible by the person themselves, if they genuinely believe that they have given over control to another. UBCs Ouija study.

You can't make the idea fly that EEG readings mean the brain is non-functional during cardiac arrest. On one hand we have activity present that we are unable to measure with our current technology. On the other, organisms exist which don't contain any neurons that can fire. These organisms have memory, learning, navigation, organisational, and processing capabilities - without any neurons present - but they all contain a centriole.

Sure, I'm open minded that the brain is still just an observation... my understanding of something else, after it has been processed into space time for manipulation... Affecting future observations.

But I can't see the point in ignoring the issues I've listed above... that's what I've got to work with, so work with it we must, together... To make whatever is going on here, more accurate, and more truthful.
 
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Distant planets do interact with us. We can, for example, detect them with the appropriate instruments. So I agree that they are real.

No, I mean objects that are millions of light years whose radiation never reaches us.

As I said, it is certainly the case that there are real objects that we do not know about. But as soon as you propose an object that cannot interact with us even in principle, then we might as well say that object does not exist.

The idealists / constructivists would agree with that, but not metaphysical realists, for which the real is what is given in space-time, but if a spacetime unrelated to ours (from another universe), then this spacetime never could relate to us but it is real according the metaphysical realism.
 
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But Paul, experiential and nonexperiential, are by definition, nonoverlapping domains. The proof is self-contained in the premise. Just as it would be absurd to ask for a proof that the square root of minus one could meet up with you this Sunday for beer and pizza.
So the claim begs the question? Anyway, I still think you're making a just-so claim based on unspecified definitions of experiential and nonexperiential. Also, I don't understand how this relates to whether we say consciousness is material processes or consciousness is a product of material processes. It sounds as if you think there is a difference.

~~ Paul
 
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