A difficult puzzle..

I cannot correct your mistakes until you actually make them. Trans-Internet telepathy is not among my gifts.

Your assumption was in error, and now another source of your confusion has been cleared up.

 

Well, consciousness and feelings and perceptions of "blueness" and "redness" have nothing to do with mathematics because they're qualitative properties that can only be understood once you feel them, unlike anything mathematical in nature. That's been part of my point forever.

You do believe in abiogenesis and evolution, right? So you also believe that planets, under the right conditions, are perfectly capable of developing intelligent life, right?

What makes you think that it's so well-nigh utterly impossible for these right conditions (of stabile sunlight, planetary mass and density, chemical composition, water content and atmosphere) to all exist such as to produce a single, in fact, not a large number of, intelligent lifeforms, within this entire universe? Do you know how many 1. stars and 2. planets are out there? Based on what I've read, there's an insane (like, trillions) of planets just in this local corner of the universe.

Not ONE of them, other than Earth, had these simple conditions right?

THAT is absurd.

 

I understand now, but it makes very little difference with respect to my argument.

 

Nonsense. They are merely your personal experiences of light at the wavelengths of 450-495 nm for blue and 620-750 nm for red.

Note the numbers. Perfectly mathematical.

How you experience them has nothing to do with what they actually are. You happen to posses the neural machinery to sense them and distinguish between them. Not all people do. That doesn't change what they actually are.

That neural machinery delivers to you an experience that, through convention, you have come to call "blueness" or 'redness." That doesn't change what they actually are.

My neural machinery is apparently similar enough to yours, and reliable enough that we can have a shred understanding of "blueness" and "redness." That doesn't change what they actually are.

That neural machinery behaves mathematically. Every step of the process from stimulus to perception is mechanical and automatic. Ultimately you have an experience because you are sentient.

Where do you find any room or need here for something more mystical?

Yes.

I have no reason to doubt that there are other intelligent life forms in the universe.

 

The wavelengths of light yes, the biological mechanisms behind perceiving them maybe (quantum mechanics and it's relationship to life probably isn't understood to that level by anyone yet), but the qualitative mathematically indescribable phenomenon itself? No. No matter how good you are at math, you'll never know what "blue" "looks" like or what "pain" "feels" like until you've felt it.

It's also obvious that these things are qualitative perceptual signals that aren't sets or spatial or algebraic, but nevermind about that obvious thing.

What about life forms much more intelligent and complicated than humans? I think there most likely are. They might have no way of ever getting here, but based on abiogenesis theories etc., and the known size and scope of the universe, there are pretty much certainly such life forms somewhere out there, probably in numerous places.

 

There are lots of things you'll never know about. That says nothing about the things, only your personal experience or lack thereof.

Your perception is not the phenomenon. It's just your experience of it. The phenomenon remains completely mathematically describable... whether you experience it or not.

Every time you call something "obvious," I have learned that it means you have no evidence for it whatsoever and won't even pretend to try to make an argument.

What about them?

I suspect they are capable of fully comprehending the universe too.

 

And whether the experience itself is mathematically describable or not.

It's impossible to give evidence of such a claim other than that it should be obvious. I'd have a hard time giving "evidence" that 2+2=4 if someone asked me to give "evidence" for it and wouldn't accept "it's obviously true that 2+2=4 by identity" as an explanation.

If one doesn't view them as qualitative mathematically indescribable phenomena, they never will.

 

There are no such experiences. All of them are mathematically describable.

You can go all the way back to my very first post in this thread and see that you have now come full circle. Your experience is a neurological event in your brain. That neurological event is completely material/physical/mathematical. It can be completely quantified. I can see it, measure its size, time its beginning and ending, account for the changes that take place during, map every firing of every neuron involved.

Your first hand experience of that event is simply different from my third hand experience of the same identical actual event. The differences in our experience do not change the event. They do not make it any less material/physical/mathematical. The fact that you imagine some ineffable quality to the experience is meaningless... you have to experience it some way, and your experience of "blueness" is it. It could have been different, but it's not.

You could have experienced "blueness" as a sound, but you don't. You could have experienced it as a number, but you don't. You could have experienced it as a voice in your head, telling you "This is blue."

But you don't.

Your personal neural machinery responds to inputs, creates the neurological event, and you then either experience something or you don't. You have come to learn that one particular experience is "blueness."

Where here is room or need for a mystical input anywhere in the process?

But it's not obvious. By all evidence it is not even true. If it were true, you wold not have to resort to dismissive hand waving. You would simply give us the evidence.

And I would have no such problem. I would simply begin assembling things in groups of two and then combine them to make groups of four. Lemons. Coffee mugs. Paper weights. My fingers. Each demonstration would add to the evidence that 2+2=4. I would demonstrate repeatedly not just that 2+2=4, but that it always equals four... no matter how many times I perform the operation. I would eventually reach the empirical conclusion that 2+2=4 is not an accident, it is a rule.

See how that works?

You haven't given us a good reason to.

 

Then I will repeat my challenge from months ago. Capture a single thought, weigh it, measure it, analyze it, and provide a detailed scientific report on your findings, which would include all of the data such as weight, measurements, chemical analysis of the particular thought as opposed to another thought.

Prove your claim to be true.

 

That's the conclusion you're supporting. You're saying it before you even mention the relevant assumptions/criteria for it.

Assuming such is true, which it very well could be, that does not prove your conclusion, or even address it, that you stated before your reasoning for said conclusion.

"First hand"? I should've been asking this a long time ago, but precisely define "first hand".

Actually before that's even answered, who or what exactly is capable of "having an experience"?

So?

So?

By the way you're ignoring "synesthesia", but that doesn't matter since this whole point is not possibly relevant. You keep missing the entire point.

What is "mystical"? I don't find my feelings mysterious at all. I know and understand them, even if I were a caveman who never even knew anything about even atoms or electrons or protons or ions or molecules or neurons or cells existing.

Sets, spatial and algebraic objects and relationships are not qualitative perceptual signals. Pretty much by definition, they couldn't be, because they're, well..sets, spatial and algebraic objects and relationships. Not qualitative perceptual signals.

But what if they didn't even appear to understand the concept of "2", and said that numbers are equal to the objects, when they are separate non-identical concepts?

 

It is an empirical conclusion. It requires no assumptions beyond the base assumption of human existence... that there is an external reality and our senses reliably allow us to observe it.

There is no such thing as proof. There is only evidence and reason. Evidence like this:

http://pinktentacle.com/2008/12/scientists-extract-images-directly-from-brain/

What comparable evidence do you have to contradict it?

Received directly from a source.

Any sentient being.

So, the first hand experience is what it is purely as a result of contingent history. There is nothing magical, mysterious, ethereal or intangible about it. It had to be something. It is what it is.

Then let's not ignore it. Synesthesia helps demonstrate that the entire process of perception is physical and can be altered by ordinary physical processes to include illness, damage, drugs or stress. If I can manipulate, alter and or destroy every and any aspect of mind simply with ordinary physical processes (and I can), it can only be a physical thing.

So why are you trying to argue that they are connected to something other than the ordinary, prosaic and physical? Are not arguing for somthing supernatural? if you don't like the word mystical, suggest another.

Well, that was entirely tautological.

All perceptual signals are mathematical. Look at an EEG. Look at the signals we record passing over nerves. Look at the patterns in the brain during PET scans and the activation of specific regions associated with language, memory, vision, emotion. Look directly at the neurological activity that you experience as "feelings."

Find the ghost in machine... and show it to the rest of us.

Ultimately the brain must convert all this activity into something you can experience else it has no utility.

And so it does.

No individual intellectual deficit makes any difference to objective reality.

 

http://pinktentacle.com/2008/12/scientists-extract-images-directly-from-brain/

 

Ahh! The "Pinktentacle". Is that akin to the Invisible Pink Panda? Is it the hallmark of some famous center of higher education? I scanned the page but did not see any images to which the article title alludes. Where are those images? Was the brain that was under survey thinking about apples, oranges, pinktentacles or what? Your so-called authoritative information is slightly lacking in FACT. Have any more fairy tales that you would like to propagate?

 

Many mathematical conclusions are provable. If reality is mathematical, many things in reality are provable.

The only thing studies like that do (and it has since years ago been easily conceivable for me that results like that from said studies would happen soon), is show that there are biological events which go on at the same time as the qualitative mathematically indescribable perceptions go on, and that we can measure biological/chemical/ionic flows/changes in the brain, and that we can input this data into a computer in a code where the computer can produce a display (sound or images).

The point that is so elusive, yet so obvious once the elusiveness is gone, is that sentience is the "ghost in the machine", even if generated by "the machine".

That just means you can manipulate "the machine", and that the machine generates "the ghost".

Obviously being analytical and not literal.

So again, the machine generates the ghost. The only way to observe this elusive ghost is if you ARE that machine. You are your brain. But the "ghost" is "within" (being very figurative by "within") you.

Again..refer to my previous few points.

I've got ahold of it now.

Impossible to do unless you're God. (I don't believe in God, however).

 

About your signature..someday, the police will get ahold of machines that can detect one's thoughts, and if they include fantasies of aggression against someone, that person will be confiscated, even without doing a single aggressive thing.

Of course, the only way to truly "get into one's mind" is to magically transform your consciousness and feelings into that persons', but references to outside objects such as another persons' body and things and anything else, could perhaps someday be detected.

 

Then perhaps you should read rather than scan.



Here... let me google that for you.

 

I did that also, and the bulk of the comments in the forum posting section pretty well sums it up. Especially the one where the speaker gave consideration to the use of a computer to draw the images... Pretty good programmer on that computer... making the monitor display what the viewers are hoping to see.

 

Wrong.

The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world.

Occams razor is your friend. Don't fear it. Because as rationalizations go to avoid confronting your argument's fail, that one was just sad.

Its not elusive at all. Real scientists have understood it for a long time. only folks like you still fight it. The ghost is not merely generated by the machine... it is the machine.

Demonstrating that they are the same thing.

Mind is what brain does.

Again... no. That is not the only way to observe the ghost... because the ghost is the machine. I can observe your ghost, simply by watching the machine.

That's one possible reason. Another is that there is no ghost.

 

Don't allow your fantasies to run away. Science is too far detached from metaphysics to even give consideration to such ideas. The wonderful world of Hollywood has given the general public much anticipation and expectation regarding the scientific community, but few members of that general public are even remotely aware of the complexity of the human brain or even the brain of a snail.

Things, outside objects, another persons body, and anything else is already detectable to the human senses. As for getting "into ones mind".... I will stand by the dictates of that supreme court decision... That is a law that the scientific community will have to prove incorrect or invalid and so far, the scientific community is experiencing a complete failure on their part.

 

So because they're "empirical", they're uncertain? Sounds like solipsism.

I can observe qualitative mathematically indescribable perceptions more directly than I can observe anything else, because these qualitative mathematically indescribable perceptions (the 5 senses etc.) are the very things that allow me to observe anything external.

Occam's Razor says that the external reality is less likely, including the very studies about biological mechanisms that you present, than said qualitative perceptions.

That assumes the ghost is identical to the machine.

Assumption 1: if A is identical to B, I will understand both of them, if I understand even one of them.

Assumption 2: cavemen didn't know the first thing about biology or neurons or physics or chemistry (modern theories), so they didn't understand the machine, but they certainly understood the ghost (senses and feelings etc.).

The only possible conclusion is that they aren't identical. This is also so obviously true that it becomes elusive.

 

Then you use entirely subjective material. Interesting. Then how does your subjective material differ from the subjective material of anyone else? What makes your subjective material any better than the subjective material of anyone else. Don't come back now with a claim relating to anything belonging to the empirical world, because you have already stated that "..they are not about the empirical world."

 

Empirical... not subjective.

It is empirical. Not subjective. That is what makes it superior.

Once again we are confronted with a demonstration that you either cannot comprehend what you read, or are being deliberately dishonest.

 

Not true. You previously stated in regards to your use of the "final proofs of logic and mathematics" that they "flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. "


You obviously do not have a good comprehension of the words you are using. "deductively" is a subjective attribute; and your further claim that "they are not about the empirical world", immediately restrains those 'final proofs of logic and mathematics" from having anything to do with the 'empirical world'. Are you now suggesting that you told a lie?

Once again, you are made to be the dishonest person that you are, when you are caught in such deliberate lies. There is nothing superior about telling a lie.

 

It is bizarre that you would think so. There is nothing even vaguely solipsistic about it.

You continue to argue in a circle. This constant assertion of yours that there are "qualitative mathematically indescribable perceptions" is still, after days of discussion, sterile of the tiniest trace of evidence or reason in its support. When asked directly for examples, you have admitted you have none.

But yes... your first hand experience of the neurological event that is "blueness" is more direct (ergo: "first person") than my third person experience of the same neural event through a PET scanner or EEG. This accounts entirely for the difference in our experience of the identical actual thing. But we are still observing the identical neurological event.

Your first person experience is the result of millions of years of contingent evolutionary selection that has tuned the experience purposefully. That purpose is the generation of behaviors that will contribute to your safety, well being and reproductive success, and the avoidance of behaviors that would lead to your Darwinian failure. But selection cannot account for "qualitative mathematically indescribable" things. It can only account for things that are physical and tangible, that can affect the physical world and be stored genetically. As long as your first person experience can tell the difference between wavelengths of light, it does not matter what that experience is. Selection has done its job. The neurological machinery has done its job. Had it not you would not be here to have this discussion.

You have to experience the event some way, else it can have no impact on your behavior. As mentioned earlier, that experience could have been very different from what it is. It could have been a sound, or a number, or an overwhelming compulsion to dance. But it had to be something. And it is. You experience "blueness."

But this does not alter the simple fact that neurological event remains entirely an ordinary, quantitative, mathematically understandable phenomenon.

Wrong. Occam's razor says that all other things being equal, the simplest explanation is the one with the best chance of being true. And your explanation inserts into an otherwise ordinary physical process an additional supernatural/mystical/magical "layer" for which there is no evidence and no explanatory need.

What problem does your theory solve that is not already solved without it? What fact does it explain that is currently without a more prosaic explanation? What useful results have derived from its exploration?

Again... this not an assumption. It is a conclusion from empirical observation.

Ergo... they did not understand the event in any sense bordering on "completely." They had a partial understanding, specifically that most immediately useful to them. In this way their understanding met the only real standard necessary for biological evolution to select for it... it was good enough for their needs.

And so that's all that was selected for.

This is so patently false you should be a bit embarrassed at the poverty of intellectual flexibility demonstrated. In the real universe, there is almost never "only (one) possible conclusion."

Another possible conclusion is that our current understanding is more complete than that of a caveman. This is certainly true for any vast number of ordinary physical things we have already talked about. This is true of the sun. This is true of lightning. This is true of the seasons. This is true of emotions.

We actually do know more about the sun today than our cave dwelling fore-bearers did. But it is still the same sun.

And we actualy do know more about our emotions today than our cave dwelling fore-bearers did. But it is still the same neurological phenomenon.

 

Yes I did. But you do not appear to care what that means.

So you launch instead into your standard routine of pathetic semantic quibbling, obfuscation and equivocation, fleeing completely from the poverty of evidence and reason that supports your magical and illogical weltanshaung.

I hope it makes you happy.... because to the rest of us it's just boring. There is nothing of substance in your post worthy of response.