- Sep 16, 2011
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What is b-flat other than a frequency of sound?
It depends what you mean by b-flat. The experience or the sound wave.
Perhaps the experience itself is not fully scientifically knowable, I am not sure I can say that for certain, I am not the authority of what science will be able to investigate in the future.
That said, an investigation that explains the how and why of subjective experience and how it arises would be enough knowledge to reduce the mind to the brain.
Ok.
Look at other explanations all you like. If you come upon one that adequately explains the phenomena I will be all ears.
Well that was going to be the point of this thread until it became apparent that people didn't understand the mind/body problem on the first place.
I think I have heard an explanation that makes alot of sense when before I had no idea what a possible explanation would look like. I don't know if there is much point in explaining it, because you seem to have alot of faith in materialism.
I don't know of any explanation for consciousness.
I know you don't.
Certainly none that would justify dualism.
I'm not talking about dualism. I'm talking about monism.
The brain is the most complicated physical structure known to man, you should probably give people some time to work on it.
Yup.
I was actually talking about letting you experience it.
If we could hook a shark brain up to your consciousness we should be able to let you experience it for yourself.
This would mean your hypothesis about subjective experience being beyond science is untrue.
How would it? Connecting brains doesn't mean it has any clue what it is doing.
I do agree that rocks and brains seem very different. Life and brains are very exotic forms of matter.
But which are all explainable in terms of atoms.
I do not agree that subjective feelings and experiences do not "do" anything. From my view they are very integrated into the physical state of our being.
What do they do then?
I don't have a mind-body problem in my philosophy, you do.
Well it is easy not to have a problem if you sweep it under the carpet. You know I assumed it could be explained materially until recently, but even then I was able to recognize the problem as a major problem.
Indeed! See you have it. Sometimes systems of things take on properties that the building blocks do not posses on their own.
I didn't say that.
The relationships of their positions and inherent physical qualities have given rise to this ability. The problem here is that positional relationships and configurations of systems do add much to the original material.
Nothing more is happening then atoms moving around according to laws.
Atoms are meaningless, life (made out of atoms) on the other hand, creates it's own purposes, identities and abstractions.
Well, it depends what you really mean by this.
Atoms are not by their nature alive. Life itself is an emergent property.
I would say life is an invented category, there is no big distinction between life and non-life objectively.
Why should I believe that consciousness is not an emergent form of matter?
You don't have to. I just assumed that consciousness would be explained by science as emergent in the future. I'm just trying to say be open minded and try to understand the problem of the difference between mind and matter. The reason you might change your mind is if you understand the difference and you hear an elegant theory that explains the world well.
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