A difficult puzzle..

Well first of all, lol, why the heck would you expect reality to be composed of only a finite number of unique concepts (such as mathematics)? If you assume that, then you're saying that you essentially understand reality itself, assume you understand mathematics. No one could possibly understand reality itself.

 

There is no ghost in the machine. The mind works no differently then the rest of the body.

 

It is not an expectation. It is the tentative conclusion based on empirical evidence.

It certainly could have been otherwise, but based on the evidence it isn't.

I have no problem at all understanding reality. It's not really a very difficult concept.

 

If I see someone whom, by physical indicators (their facial expressions etc.) are experiencing a feeling (the first hand experience), that does not equate to me experiencing that feeling (the third hand experience). I'd only be aware of the visual appearance and/or sounds the person was making. That =/= feeling that emotion (the first hand experience).

This should be obvious..

There are an infinity of real things (objects, relationships, characteristics, and in general, concepts).

Absurd arrogance and ignorance. You're only even aware of the existence of things that your finite mind is even capable of understanding, at the very most.

That's a ridiculous:

1. flaw of assuming that just because we, in our TINY local area of the universe, haven't observed anything more (based on our already understood theories of physics, which are not infallable), that the ENTIRE HUGE VAST universe has nothing in it more complex. You gotta look around before you assume there aint nothin there. Especially when you consider that, according to abiogenesis, any solar system can produce intelligent life if it has the right conditions. Also this universe is unfathomably large, according to recent science, but I'll pull up sources for that later. It's like, not just hundreds of billions of light years in diameter, but more like millions OF billions of light years in diameter; something insane like that.

To assume that our almost negligible corner of the universe has the most complicated or deep things in it, is retarded.

2. So you assume that our brains can't comprehend anything more complicated than the human brain? Why so?

I'm saying that if you assume everything is mathematical, then youre claiming that you do basically understand the fundamentals of reality itself (assuming you understand mathematics), which, you don't.

 

I believe in "emergent properties", especially when you consider that the sensation of "blueness" is totally indescribable to someone who's never seen anything blue.

 

Reality is independent of time so saying "it (reality) could have been otherwise" is impossible and makes no sense.

This is insane ignorance, in fact, intentional ignorance at that.

 

Everything that exists is quantifiable. Just because there is not a mathematical model of the brain today does not mean there can't be one tomorrow.

 

Everything is quantifiable? Cool. Give me a count on the number of electrons passing from point "a" to point "b" in a single wire having a diameter of .ooo1 inches and a gross resistance of .01 ohms between those two points, when a 12 volt potential is applied for a period of 2.5 seconds. When giving that count, be sure to provide the objective empirical evidence.

 

That doesn't even make sense from a mathematical perspective; I agree that it's maybe possible to count every possible object that exists, thus basically naming the cardinality in a set of similar objects.

That means nothing with respect to this discussion.

 

It's important to mention that a lot of people have pointed out that reality cannot be, fundamentally, mathematical, because mathematics cannot "describe" itself. Along with other objections by the Langan and myself etc.

 

Well, a stone circle can have effects on things and people without being interconnected. The fact that I use a circle instead of other easily identified patterns is irrelevant.

I suggest that emotions are a pattern. A complex and time dependent one, but nothing fundamentally more complex than a pattern.

Our brain can identify my stone circle as existing, just as it can identify emotions to exist. Do we have any other reason to believe that our feelings are one object at a time and not a combination of objects than our mind?

If you say that the pattern is not physical, then I challenge the statement that only physical things have impact on the physical world, since patterns, such as those found in statistical physics and so on, can indeed affect the physical world.

If you consider patterns to be physical, then I don't have to challenge that statement (at least not for this purpose). After all, patterns are information, information is energy (according to some).

 

It's important to mention that nobody has ever suggested that reality is anything other than a state of being. You are attacking a straw man.

 

Perhaps emotions have the capability to appear or manifest in patterns that are recognizable, but are the emotions themselves truly patterned?

Please clarify your intent with those words in emphasized text above. It seems to be an open-ended statement... one that is not completed.. please explain.

Our brain only processes data received from various input sources. The 'mind' is what identifies the data being processed.

Do you KNOW of any non-physical thing that can interact with the physical? Statistics are derived from observing and and analyzing data that is received from the physical world. "statistics" (which form those patterns) have no volition of its own and is therefore incapable of directly asserting any force against the physical world. Furthermore: Because those statistics are comprised of numbers, and those numbers are forming patterns, then it can be safely asserted that the use of such numerical patterns and the interpretation of those numerical patterns are in FACT a modern version of the old religious practice of 'Numerology'. So essentially, you are saying that mathematics application as described by you, amounts to the practice of religion. One religion vs another religion, , ,

"sta·tis·tics (st-tstks)
n.
1. (used with a sing. verb) The mathematics of the collection, organization, and interpretation of numerical data, especially the analysis of population characteristics by inference from sampling.
2. (used with a pl. verb) Numerical data."


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerology
"The term can also be used for those who place excess faith in numerical patterns, even if those people don't practice traditional numerology."

At most, information is the product of expended energy and which requires the expenditure of more energy to process that information. Therefore you propositional relationship between energy and information, only shows the requirement of expending energy before information can be gathered and or processed

 

It is obvious only because you are comparing apples and pears. Watching another person is not a third hand experience of their emotion. It is a first hand experience of their behavior.

A third hand experience of an emotion or feeling would be the direct observation of the neurological event in the brain, something we come closest to with PET scans. After all... that is the physical entity that is the emotion or feeling. And it is the identical thing that you experience first hand as a feeling or emotion.

They are simply two actors experiencing the identical thing from two different perspectives. And there is nothing "intangible" about either.

Who cares?

You have yet to identify a single one that is not entirely physical. If there are an infinity of real things then there must (if you are correct) also be an infinity of things that are not entirely physical. How then do you account for your inability to show us just one?

Once again you resort to insults as your argument continues to wither from malnutrition. I can only take that as concession that you have no counter argument since we both know that insults are not one.

Your task then is a simple one. Prove me wrong. Show me one thing in the universe that actually is more complex.

Grow up.

A straw man, unworthy of my attention.

And again, you are setting up straw men given your inability to argue against what I have actually said. I will repeat myself in the faint hope that you will actually make an effort to listen this time.

I do not assume that everything is mathematical. I conclude that everything is material because the evidence of the universe empirically indicates that this is so.

Your task for this entire thread has always been trivial. Prove this wrong with a single counter example.

 

And yet light of the blue wavelength exists and is entirely physical, even when it is never perceived by a living thing.

 

"It could have been otherwise" is also independent of time. But nice try attempting to salvage a rhetorical score out of an abysmal logical loss.

You may as well have called it a pink unicorn covered in fairy flowers. That would be as strong an an argument, and as meaningful a response.

 

Well my goodness. That same "logical" approach can be applied to the existence of God. Just because no-one has seen God or because science has not been able to determine the "wavelength" of God, does not mean that God does not exist.

BTW: Show me a single solitary photon of any wavelength.

 

Exactly. The fact that first hand experience vs. third hand experience of feelings is fundamentally different, does not hurt my claim but helps it.

If you can't get everything from experiencing something third hand, that you could get from experiencing it first hand (in this case, the emergent phenomenon of qualitative feeling), then there is something more to the first hand experience, than the third hand experience.

In this case, it's the emergent property of neurological activity, that are not themselves describable by mathematics, that are usually called "feelings" etc.

There is a difference between the non-emergent properties of the brain, and the emergent properties of feelings. That's the whole point.

In order to experience something "identically", the experience would have to be, well, identical. Which means if one person feels pain, the other person would have to feel pain themselves, for the experience to be "identical".

Define "physical"? I used it vaguely myself in the beginning of this thread, but I should have used "mathematical" instead.

So precisely define "physical".

We haven't observed (nearly) enough of the universe to safely say that there aren't things vastly more complex than the human brain. In order to make such a claim, we'd have to observe a lot of the universe, in fact, logically, we'd have to observe more than 50% of it, to say with more than 50% confidence, that there isn't anything as complicated as the human brain in the universe.

We haven't observed barely any of it. A negligible amount. Essentially, nothing.

"Material" =/= mathematical.

 

Exactly. The emergent property of "blueness", that only certain brains can experience, is..unique to brains which can experience "blueness". This is true even though the wavelength of these photons is the same no matter who observes them.

Which means that the wavelength of these photons, and the emergent property of "blueness", are not the same thing. If they were, then everything that could experience an observation of a photon of that wavelength, would also experience the emergent property of "blueness". Robots do not experience any such emergent properties.

 

I admit now, as I have admitted before in this thread that this is not something I view as necessarily true, the original question was based on the notion that there was no solution to this problem of the mind. I present mine, not to say that my explanation explains everything, but to say that there are explanation that do not require paradoxes.

Then there is the fact that I happen to believe in it. I don't think I can persuade people all around with it, but I base it on a sort of Occam's razor argument. What we see as emotion doesn't really have a lot of quantifiable features, and the ones it does have can be made up by our brain.

Yes, I believe I got lost in some grammar there. Let me try again.

You talk of emotions as things. For instance, fear is an emotion. It is one emotion. I propose that our emotions are many processes and the only thing that makes them into one addressable notion is our mind. However, our mind has a tendency to see and use patterns, and be affected by patterns. Thus, it is not unlikely that emotions too are a pattern.

Well, to me, the mind also is a bunch of processes in the brain, something that the brain does.

Here's the thing. I can't tell if emotions are non-physical or not, because I don't know what you mean by physical.

Patterns can be thought of as physical. In which case, emotions, which are patterns, are physical.

Patterns can also be thought of as non-physical. I see no real support for this other than that rule that says that everything must have mass and whatnot. Then again, I've never seen that rule before, but I have seen counter examples to it, so I'd take it with a pinch of salt. If it is non-physical, then there must be an interaction process between physical and non-physical things (either that or our emotions do not depend on our surroundings, which wouldn't be the classical understanding of emotions). One of our problems is this interaction process. Such processes have never been seen or shown likely or even possible. If there was such a process, it would revolutionize the world of physics, it would mean our brains can create a small simple process using only water and carbon and whatever else is in a brain that can contact the supernatural. That's where the Occam's razor comes in.

There is also the earlier "rule" that physical things have to be able to interact only with physical things. Again, this depends on what you mean by physical. But if you abide by that rule, perhaps you wouldn't be saying that patterns are non-physical.

Side note: I'm not saying that patterns affect the world in some way that isn't the sum of its parts, so to speak. I'm saying that that sum of its parts effect can go in a desirable way. In reality, it's not the presence of a pattern that is important, it's the fact that all processes in the brain work in a pattern. It can be broken down into its parts, but that would make it hard to discuss and hard for our brains to understand.

 

(To anyone else reading this wasn't to me, but in any case)

Emotions and the emergent properties of feelings themselves are signals/representations/indicators (whatever word you want to call it, but both are appropriate here) for various things such as "the 5 senses" and emotions etc.

Similar to how, these geometric 2-dimensional symbols are signals/representations/indicators of various meanings.

The geometric 2-dimensional symbols which are signals/representations/indicators of various meanings, are NOT identical to each other in any way shape or form.

Even if you can have many different signals/representations/indicators of some exact same meaning, 1. those different signals/representations/indicators are not identical to this exact same meaning, and 2. that meaning itself is not the same thing as those signals/representations/indicators themselves.

Conclusion: the emergent property of "feelings" etc. are signals/representations/indicators of various things, but they are not identical to each other. For example, if a neuron is damaged, the emergent property of the "feeling" of pain, is not the same identical thing as that neuron being damaged.

To clear up any lasting confusion, another example would be for emotions. If you feel a negative emotion about an event happening, that "emotion" is a signal/representation/indicator not of that actual event, but a signal/representation/indicator that something, according to certain parts of the brain, are "wrong". Although, this will get more subtle and difficult than the previous example because the term "wrong" in this context, is difficult to really define.

 

No it can't. There is no evidence for God comparable to that we have for light.

Bogus straw man. Nobody has claimed this.

 

It doesn't help your claim the tiniest bit. It merely accounts for your persistent confusion. The experiences are different, but they are still experiences of the identical actual thing.

That could just as well be true with two different third hand experiences. The thing experienced would still be the identical actual thing.

No such thing exists. The emergent properties of neurological activity are the same identical properties, regardless of whether they are being experienced third or first hand. It is not the experience that possesses the emergent properties, it is the neurological event itself.

But there is no difference. You continue to merely describe different experiences of the identical event.

Of course.

But the pain exists even if only one person experiences it. I may not experience your pain at all, but that doesn't change your pain. I may also experience your pain third person, but that also doesn't change your pain. The event exists and different actors experience ti differently or not at all. In fact, you may be completely unconscious and never even experience it yourself. Yet the neurological event still exists, it can observed, it can be measured, it can be modeled by mathematics.

It is its own objective material "thing" completely independent of any experience at all.

I use physical as an exact synonym for material to include the concept of being understandable by mathematics. I use it to distinguish from the mystical/non-material stuff you are trying so hard to make a case for.

Stop hand waving and give me a single example of something more complex. If you cannot, then I remain firmly on empirical ground and you have nothing to contradict it.

 

Nonsense.

The emergent property of "blueness" exists even if it never experienced at all. It existed before the first living thing existed on the planet to experience it.

 

The only way to even assume that there's evidence of anything whatsoever (other than the existence of "you"), is to assume that what you perceive, actually exists as it is. An example of this not being true, would be if we all lived in some kind of matrix. But that is only one example.