@BjornSeverinLarsen The name apple is evoked from a social construct. < The same person who wrote that is now telling me what the USA is doing around the world, who my Dad is, and how much better they are than I am. The problem Bjorn is that if your evokations are socially constructed then why isn't it your society that rules the world, the one that rejects God?
I do my friend no honor exchanging compliments for your insults. Lecture some others please.
@shizzleman8 As son as you start thinking about the goal and its implementation, you create brain states to represent what you imagine. These are just not as obvious as overt acts. Peace, Dennis
@dfpolis A few minutes after commenting about my "mission project" in an unrelated search I just found out who Father Junipero Serra is. He was "beautified" September 25, 1988 (like I know what that means) just 13 months before my son Jason was born. He'll be 22 this Halloween.
I suppose I'd still believe mostly the same stuff I do today had I never met you, but now I just get to be smarter than all the atheists and agnostics too.
@shizzleman8 Beatification is a step in the process of a person being declared a saint. After beatification they may be called "the blessed". The next step is canonization.
@dfpolis After I showed everyone in Riverside a picture of Dad putting the cross on Mt. Rubidoux a lot of our country's religious leaders began addressing me. Michael J. Fox and a Bishop did a program on PBS. It seemed like they were talking to me, and then a lot of Hollywood stars, and notably Father Michael Manning. I got the picture after discovering who Frar. Junipero Serra is. The Christian ministers also showed me how Christians feel about people with money. I got that picture b4 too.
Intentionality is directly causal to our behavior. To say otherwise would be nonsenisicle. If i do something it is with an intent. You cannot do anything without an intent, be it move your foot or choose a major in college. However to say that this cannot happen inside the naturalistic worldview is also makes no sense. To say that intentions needs to be outside our physicality doesn't make sense either - You lack to explain what intentionality is to you, where it comes from.
@BjornSeverinLarsen I agree that intentionality is causal. Many, if not most naturalists disagree & hold casual closure, i.e. that physical events have only physical causes. Our intentionality comes from our minds, but not from their physical aspect (our neurophysiology), but from the aspect that is aware of the contents represented by the brain. That aspect is natural, but it is missed in abstracting physics & neuroscience, because abstraction leaves data behind. Peace, Dennis
@BjornSeverinLarsen For me it's been my spritiual/supernatural experiences, several dozen. I've seen an inanimate object move around by itself, I've been touched by an Exorcist, Pastoress Barbara Purcell, witnessed an object disappear from my hand, and experienced my "soul" outside of my body. After that I stopped studying the Bible, and started living my life from my heart. The whole of human experience falls directly in line with there being a cause for why we exist in the first place.
@shizzleman8 Well i respect that - it is your experiences and experiences is allways true, to the person experiencing it. However what would you say to people who hasn't shared these experiences, how can you deny their truth about their experiences only based on your own? This is one of central aspects about the spiritual and naturalistic worldviews - spirituality is always based on own experiences, where naturalistic is almost always based on objective evidence and not subjective experiences
@BjornSeverinLarsen Relevance, in the common law of evidence, is the tendency of a given item of evidence to prove or disprove one of the legal elements of the case, or to have probative value to make one of the elements of the case likelier or not. Probative is a term used in law to signify "tending to prove." The whole of human experience is that 1 in 3 people have experienced the supernatural according to Dr. Polis. I tell people to ASK, and you shouldn't have to ask for too long, see?
@shizzleman8 Well here is the thing about me asking you for your experiences, they make no sense to me. First I have not experienced it, second I don't believe you saw what you saw. It doesn't make it any less true to you,but it has no truth value to me. So unless your experience can be somehow investigated based on principles that fits the scientific method, your claim wont have any truth value to me. It could simply be your brain's dying cells behaving abnormally that gave you your experience.
@BjornSeverinLarsen Of course they make no sense to you, YOU'RE A NATURALIST/MATERIALIST. Naturalism is a belief that only natural explanations exist for all the phenomenon in the universe. If you had studied Theology for the last 30 years like I have and gone to 1000 church and miracle meetings you'd have a different set of experiences. I know people who can control the spirit realm. They can send spirits to you and cause your soul to leave your body. You think we're jokers in the USA?
@shizzleman8 Well yes you are correct, I am a naturalist. Which is also at the core of my disagreement with this video. Basically the video uses a metaphysical claim to say something about a naturalistic oriented theory. It would be the same as saying the theory evolution disproof the biblical genesis account therefore christians are not correct. I find both these approaches to be dishonest because a naturalistic theory can say nothing about a metaphysical theory and vice versa
@BjornSeverinLarsen The term I would use is misleading or irrelevant. Naturalism is an untestable theory. Naturalists reject the supernatural as where most "supernaturalists" don't deny or reject nature just that it doesn't have all the answers. Try to incorporate some law into your study of sociology, the mind and Doc Dennis' videos. This is easy to follow: The Four Types of Evidence Yahoo associated content. Heather Zarkah
Doc Polis may not check in again for up to a week.
@shizzleman8 Well if I where to incorporate some metaphysics into my sociology, it wouldn't be sociology any more - at least not a science. It would become pseudo - science. This is the thing about science ( science is naturalistic philosophy at its core) it is testable. It is part of why science is succesful. It makes hypothesises, and then they are tested by naturalistic methods. It works - the interpretation as to why it works, isn't neccesary true - but that doesn't matter
@BjornSeverinLarsen It would still be sociology it would just be right. Please forgive me for being a one note Johnny but the law is sociology at it's very core. A foundaiton of objective morality. "this is the first precept of the law, that good is to be done and promoted, and evil is to be avoided. All other precepts of the natural law are based on this" - St. Thomas of Aquinas
My Dad had a great saying, "If you're so f*cking smart why aren't you rich?. < Law of parsimony.
@shizzleman8 Okay, then since you know what sociology is better than me. Then explain to me - what is the question that sociology tries to answer and what are the thing that we look at to answer that question?
@BjornSeverinLarsen Sociology is both topically and methodologically a very broad discipline. Its traditional focuses have included social stratification, social class, social mobility, religion, secularisation, law, deviance. - wiki
My family owned the number 1 dealership of mobile homes in California for SEVENTEEN YEARS! I made thousands of collection calls in association with my Dad's 27 finance companies. I've been practicing the law and ministry for THIRTY YEARS! We owned hospitals 8)
@shizzleman8 The question sociology tries to answer is: How is society possible? The thing that we look at is interactions. As easy as that - the categories you cited are all forms of interactions, both from a structural functional perspective and a symbolic interactive and pure interactive perspective. So since you still now more about how sociology works than me, what does the interactional chains in your family buisness ventures tell you about your families view on human nature?
@BjornSeverinLarsen Now I know that you can't feel good about yourself unless you put me down. What's that say about you? The Americans have become the saviors of the world and like I said before, "the vikings, the ones where you live, have become taint." < You don't know what that word means? Basically it means that when you can't DO anything worthwhile in society you try and teach others how great you are.
@shizzleman8 Look you keep telling me that I'm an idiot through the mouth of your daddy so stop taking the highroad. So I guess you are taint - the saviors of the world - lol. Perhaps after the second world war but things has surdently changed. USA meddles in everything, they have inserted dictators, overthrown democraticly elected goverments and they still call themselves protecter of freedom etc. Hypocritical. Your politics is like a awesome batch of stupid - tsk the savior.....
@shizzleman8 What does being smart have to do with riches? Not all want to be rich, some of us is quite happy having enough to live a good life. Besides what does your dad think they pay scientists? He sounds like a the perfect specimen of my assumption about what republicans must be like...
@BjornSeverinLarsen Subjectively your life is GREAT I imagine but objectively you'll never be well known as where my Dad's family of 750 years of Jewish Bankers has provided a life of fame and fortune.
You have no "good". You rejected that up front with the acceptance of naturalism. How is what you believe one wit different than LaVeyan Satanism? "Oh, I have happiness, and that's a true measure of 'real' wealth" < F*ck that! That's LOSER talk.
@dfpolis Well the reason they ignore intentionality in their explanations isn't that they can't measure it yet? If we get to a point where intentionality, consciousness and awareness can be measured, I'm sure that they would be called phisical aspects. The thing is that they don't know - but just cos they use them as causal atm doesn't mean that they are not physical causal - meanning the mind is part of a physical causal explaination of a phenomenon, if or when the knowledge is gained
@BjornSeverinLarsen What makes you think intentionality is measurABLE? It is not extended in space. It is a relation between a subject and an object. When we do physics, we abstract away the knowing subject. We do not care about the subjective experience of the physicist, but only about the objects experienced. Thus, there is NO DATA in physics dealing with subjectivity, and so no data about intentionality. Thus, physics lacks the resources to explain intentionality. Peace, Dennis
@dfpolis If I understand your comment correctly then you just rationalized all social science as redundant. The social sciences does research intention and subjectivity. The empirical evidence in these cases are either direct experiences by the subjects, which then can either be generalized from data or theory or it is indirect evidence based on theory. However when dealing with these subjective experiences the theorectic framework allways point back to a physical causation.
@BjornSeverinLarsen Did I? I did not notice. Social sciences generally study behavior as an object. Psychology on the older model used introspection and so studied subjectivity per se. In the absence of introspective methods (1st person reports) there is no direct data on subjectivity. I am not denying the role of physical processes in informing the mind or expressing intent. I am saying that physical observations alone will never reveal that we are more than zombies. Peace, Dennis
@dfpolis The study of the social reality is by definition the study of something allready interpreted. therefore the social scientist will be interpreting something allready interpreted. Basically when investigating something subjective like values and reasons for behavior (intention) a social scientist is investigating it's subjects introspections. However a subjects introspection is allways based on a construction of a phenomenon therefore it is not directly used as evidence TBC
@BjornSeverinLarsen I am unsure what "already interpreted" means to you, but it seems irrelevant to your point. Stated purposes are subjective data. Since they are subjective, it is not directly available to physical observations & so not measurable -- my point. Still, committed intentionality is a disposition to act, & so has physical effects. Having physical effects does not make it material in se or directly measurable. Your claim that introspection is always a construction is dubious.
@dfpolis When I was in school and had to make a model of a California Mission I had a committed intention to do the project periodically and THEN it was a disposition to act and had physical effects even though I didn't act there was content in my brain, the image of the Mission would have showed up on an MRI for instance? My intention had extension in reality even though I was procrastinating?
@shizzleman8 The intention would not be visible, but the encoding of it would be. Fro example, if you have an image of what you intended to build in mind, the encoding of that image would be a brain state. the details might not show up in an fMRI as it is too low resolution, but the activation of your visual cortex might. Peace, Dennis
@dfpolis "Already interpreted" means that the subject of social sciences is humans and we our existence in this world is based on our ability to interpret our experiences and from this interpretation make sense of it. It is what Giddens calls double hermenuetics (or something close to that). My comment about the construction of introspection is minded towards how we create memory and recall them - see any pschological texts about the subject later than the 1990s.
@BjornSeverinLarsen To interpret we must be operational interpreters. So our existence is logically prior to interpretation. Making sense of ourselves is knowing our prior existence, & requires existence as potential objects of thought as well as thinkers. It is not our existence, but the articulation of our self-experiences that requires interpretation. We have experiences, & project them into a conceptual space of largely social origin. We can't have memories w/o prior experience. Peace, DP
@BjornSeverinLarsen Why does Dr. Dennis get to talk about zombies, but vampires aren't real? Zombies don't sleep vampires do. Do the vampires get more sh*t done? I don't think so.
@shizzleman8 Zombies was used as a metafore, maybee you used vampires the same way. I just didn't get your point. What does sleeping has to do with anything, in the context of our disagreement?
@BjornSeverinLarsen December 7th 1941 shortly after the sun rose but before the sailors at Pearl Harbor had awaken Japan launched 180 aircraft strike fighters in a first wave assault. We had no fighters.
That's the difference between sleeping and being awake. Please don't lecture me anymore. I hope you do well with your schooling and all I just can't help you.
@dfpolis 2nd part - The social construction of social reality is here put under light. I am not saying that reality is socially constructed, I am saying that the reality we as humans percieve, IS socially constructed. This also means that how we see intentionality, awareness and consciousness is also constructed - the definition of these traits are our own (not individual but collective). So the investigation of the subjective interpretation is the investigation of that construction TBC
@BjornSeverinLarsen I disagree. The immediate origin of the conceptual space we use to classify & analyze reality is mostly social. Ultimately, however, it is the product of individual insight. Reality must be able to evoke our concepts for us to apply them. If apples could not evoke the idea apple, I could never call them "apples." So the power to evoke ideas is in reality prior to their being evoked. What has an objective basis in reality is not a construct, but a projection of reality.
@dfpolis 3rd In this way it is not intentionality, awareness or consciousness that are researched but their representations to us humans. Though how can the representations of these traits be removed from the traits themself? IMO rather easily by simply accepting that we don't really know what these traits are and accept that the only way to investigate them is by looking at their representation as constructed by us. We don't know what these traits are objectivly in reality, only subjectively
@BjornSeverinLarsen Ideas come from human interactions with reality. Reality is intelligible, but to actualize that potency, we need awareness. The mind can be aware, but to know it needs to be informed by intelligibility. It is as much an error to leave reality out of ideogenesis as to leave out the human mind. We do not exhaust reality in our knowledge, but we do know a projection resulting from a specific power to act in the object. Every act of knowing has a knowing subject & a known object.
@dfpolis 4th - So as explained about the social science there is a problem when stating that the traits discussed (though not with you, so sorry to drag you into this) is either material or immaterial when we don't really know what they are outside human perception. We only know our own construction of the traits. Before any comment about the nature of these traits and natural selection can be made, we need to understand the constrution. So I still contend that the premise of the video is flawed
@BjornSeverinLarsen As I discussed in my #36, every act of knowledge gives us a projection of an object's essence because every act of knowing is the result of an action the object is specifically capable of & its essence is the specification of all the acts it can do. If it acts so with me, then it can act so. Of course, this is never exhaustive, so all human knowledge is a projection (a dimensionally diminished mapping) of reality. We do not need to know the social origin of ideas. Peace, DP
@dfpolis This will be a comment towards all your above answers/ comments: "I could never call them apple" - The name apple is evoked from a social construct/ definition, it is but a name - it has no ingrained meaning other than what it has been given. It is like a table. Does a table has any ingrained meaning other than the meaning we give it? I guess it is about what gives objects and subject meaning. Is it naturally given or given by us? tbc
@BjornSeverinLarsen The idea apple is latent in the fruit's objective intelligibility. Apples' repeatable ability to evoke the idea in normal subjects shows objectivity. Still, intelligibility is usually actualized by a culturally trained subject. Once an idea is first actualized, it may be passed on culturally. Your hypothesis can't explain new concepts. Mine allows a culturally received conceptual space as well as novelty and objectivity. Ideas are not words & signify differently. See my #25.
@dfpolis 2nd part - Does the name of a thing define it in reality? The example with the apple - will its properties be different if I call it an orange? This can be related to intention - the difference is that intentionality is a name or definition that humans has given. If I understand you correctly you would say that intentionality has meaning in itself, not the meaning we give it, right? Here is my position: intentionality is something humans has define and given meaning tbc
@BjornSeverinLarsen Names aren't ideas. They enter a ternary sign relation, ideas a binary one (see my #25). There is no language of thought. To posit one leads to an infinite regress. We do think in words, but some though is wordless: We occasional can't find the words to express our thought. Names are not the reality. They express thoughts which may in turn intend real objects. (A 3 term relation.) Intentionality is prior to naming & articulation. The idea apple intends real apples (2 terms).
@dfpolis 3rd part - Our definition of it might not reflect what it really is. It appears to us as one single trait in our minds, however that might not be what it really is. What it really is might be many things working together in our brain seeming to be only one trait. So the origin of intentionality IMO properbly is materialistic, we just don't know what it is. I agree btw with your last statement: that we do not need to know origin of idea, but we better know the consequenses of them. tbc
@BjornSeverinLarsen 4th part - The idea of what things are, controlls our definition of them. There by it has real consequenses on our lives. The objects essence, which you mention, is that what I mean when I say meaning? If that is so, then I guess you mean that we by thinking about something, can find it's purpose and from there it's essence? Basically by thinking finding reality? If that is how, then I must say I disagree. I'm gonna stop here and let you answer :)
@BjornSeverinLarsen Essences are WHAT objects are: the specification of everything an object can do. They might act on us. If so, we can know them. Still, we can only know what objects do to us, & so we have only a partial knowledge (a projection) of essences. If we refer to essences, we are referring to something partly known & partly a mystery. Purpose is reflected in essences, but is different. Essence is what an object can do. Purpose is a role in context. Reality inter-acts with us.
@BjornSeverinLarsen Physics has no concept of reference, i.e. indicating the signified isn't a physical property. Materialism, as articulated by physics, has no concept from which one can derive meaning & intentionality. All signs require a human mind to actually signify. What does "cat" mean? Physics can define the shape & constituents of a material text object, but not its reference. Only a mind can. Minds are irreducible to physics. As signs change material form, meaning is invariant.
@dfpolis 5th part - Oh I just to say that I am not a proponent of reductionism, but I am saying that something appearing immaterial does not neccesary need to be. It can be a combination of other attritubutes which by themselves can't be reduced to merely electric activity in the brain and also my argumentation is clearly speculative. But unless I'm missing something I find that the same can be said about your argumentation.
@BjornSeverinLarsen Yes, appearances can deceive. But, we know what physical facts are. If there are other kinds of facts, not expressible in terms of matter and motion, then they are immaterial. The laws of nature are an example. It is foolish to ask what they are made of. Since they explain matter and motion, they are not explained by matter & motion -- that would e circular. As I said above, reference is another example. So is being a knowing subject. Physical things are objects, not subjects
@dfpolis So emotions are also immaterial? How do you know that natural selection isn't immaterial aswell? If natural selection is what you then call immaterial, then other immaterial traits would play a role in the natural selection (as long as it helped an individual to survive compared to other individuals). What makes you think that matter is not immaterial? To clarify - the Higgs Boson, that theoretically gives matter weight has not been found yet. Is that then immaterial or not? cont.
@BjornSeverinLarsen 2nd part - Your critism of how evolution sees natural selection as to intention and other immaterial traits I find based on a misconception of natural selection. You call natural selection some kind of mechanical natural something... meaning that it is firmly based on matter and nature i guess. However this is your interpretation of natural selection - natural selection is just: if an individual genetically gains a better chance of surviving compared - cont.
@BjornSeverinLarsen 3rd part - compared to the population around the individual. Then the genetical difference gives this individual a larger chance to reproduce and spread his genes in the population, thus in time, the trait that gives the advantage is spread in the population. A "better" intentionality in an individual which is based on genetics would give the individual a better survivability, then it is part of a natural selection process. Immaterial or not - doesn't matter
@BjornSeverinLarsen I do not think of NS as "some kind of mechanical natural something" as can be seen from my response to part 1: it as a law-driven physical process. Yes, individuals with certain unpredictable (not ontologically random) mutations have a higher chance reproducing than others. Why? Because the intentional laws of nature (see my #14) make it so. Behavior, not awareness, is tested by NS. So, if awareness can't cause behavior (epiphenomenalism), NS can't select it. Peace, Dennis
@dfpolis How can NS select something? It is not a conscious mechanism. It is but the fact that those best suited to survive, has the highest chance to do so and to pass on their genes. How is that behavior testing? How does intentionality or awareness not influence behavior. What is behavior but an extension of our intentions and reactions to our perceptions (awareness (simple form, need to be aware to percieve consciously))?
@BjornSeverinLarsen Your question is like asking how an election can select a candidate. Neither elections nor NS are voluntary agents. They are the processes by which such agents express their will. NS does not select genotypes directly, but the resulting phenotypes in virtue of superior performance (i.e. behavior). I have no problem with my freely willed intent being expressed in my behavior, but then I'm not a physicalist. Only some behavior is intentional, i.e. that which I will. Peace, DP
@BjornSeverinLarsen Emotions have 2 components: (1) a physical state, (2) awareness of that state. The 1st is hardly immaterial, while the 2nd can in no way be reduced to matter and motion. Natural selection is a process, not a thing. It is driven by immaterial laws acting on material states. Unless consciousness can change physical states, NS can't affect it. Your question on the Higgs Boson assumes an argument I have not made. I've not said ignorance implies immateriality.
@dfpolis I don't really understand your argument about immateriality - which is also why I'm trying to stear around it. Actually emotions has 3 aspects. They are physical, cognitive and social. On the physical and cognitive you can see changes in the body - I would argue that awareness is part of the cognitive. The problem with this in understanding emotions is that the social aspect of emotions can't be measured other than from it's cause and effect.
@BjornSeverinLarsen We can project reality into many conceptual spaces, just as we can project events into many frames of reference. Some conceptual spaces facilitate the solution of a given problem better than others. Awareness, as I use it, is not our state of readiness to accept perceptual data, but standing as a subject to objects. I have no problem with a social aspect of emotional life, but as you point out, it is relational rather than intrinsic. I can emote in isolation. Peace, Dennis
@dfpolis So awareness is the fact that we are aware that we are apart from other things? That our body is that barrier which defines a person as a person? If we project reality into conceptual spaces (I understand this as: we percieve, interpret and give reality subjective meaning) then how is our understanding of reality not relational? I find it hard to see how we are to find the intrinsic value of anything, when we allways relates reality to ourselves.
@BjornSeverinLarsen I did not give a circular definition of awareness, but defined it by its relational role. I don't know what you mean by the body a barrier. It is one aspect of an integral human person. Projecting into a conceptual space is actualizing some objective notes of intelligibility by attending to them, while ignoring others, leaving them potential & unactualized. Our understanding of reality is thus relational. We find value to us as human. Peace, Dennis
@BjornSeverinLarsen Did I? I did not notice. Social sciences generally study behavior as an object. Psychology on the older model used introspection and so studied subjectivity per se. In the absence of introspective methods (1st person reports) there is no direct data on subjectivity. I am not denying the role of physical processes in informing the mind or expressing intent. I am saying that physical observations alone will never reveal that we are more than zombies. Peace, Dennis
Natural selection is organically mechanistic. It effects physical characteristics with genetics. Intentionality is about purpose or design. Cognition plays a role in the organic design.
There is an element of choice in the selection of a mate for a relationship. Natural selection for the species indirectly entertains that element of choice, but the survival of life has subliminal and transcendent concerns for thoughts, feelings and beliefs about personal selection.
@sbkidde What? Intention is about purpose and design. That makes no sense. So my intention to eat a banana, caused by my hunger is about design? How did you put design and purpose together? Where is the link? If humans had no intentions we would do nothing. All animals have intentions, they usually revolves around eating, fighting or mating ( atleast that is my understanding) - if intentions didn't exist we would be dead long ago and so would all other life (unless food comes to it automaticly)
@BjornSeverinLarsen There are different levels of meaning associated with intent. There is intention according to design and there is intension according to desire as an aspect of design. Intention is not all about your intension. Purpose is not all about your opposition to the free exercise of religion. Design is not all about an individual's absolute freedom.
@sbkidde I must admit, I don't follow your reasoning. Please break down what intention is then, what design is and what purpose is. How do they related to a persons agency and how do they related to anything really. Is desire only an aspect of design? What does aspect of design mean? If intention is not about my intention - what are they then?
intentions can't do anything natural selection can test and select for. It is impossible to believe intentionality, consciousness to evolve and intentionality is powerless to effect our behaviour. If it is powerless to effect our behavior then there is no traction for natural selection to select conscioussness or improve it and make it more veretical. < is that last word right, varetical (variable)? How does emergence offer oppostion, an atheist used this word to explain the mind?
@shizzleman8 Well that is the assumption made by the author in this video - but he is wrong. He totally misrepresented Jaegwon Kim. His assumption is that intentionality can't evolve in the physical world. To say that natural selection wouldn't be affected by intentionality is ignorant at best. If the intention to eat or to mate desapeared it would be a deathblow to a species. I don't even understand what he means by intentionality - all animal life has it - or it would be dead.
Physical facts are not mental facts. 1. content (physical) 2. Awareness of content (immaterial) Dr. Dennis explains exactly how natural selection can't select, test, or improve intentions on my featured video (my channel) #34 Mind and evolution part 2. The main point Bjorn is that we don't inhereit intentions. Eating and our sex drive are instinctual not intentional. He covers that point as well with the "zombie" argument. Look with new eyes. Abandon bias.
@shizzleman8 So when you get hungry and take the bread out and put something on it, it is not intentional? Who says awarness of content is immaterial? When you meet a woman you fancy, it is not intention that makes you go over and talk to her? When you cook a romantic dinner for your wife it is not wirth intent? The way intentionality is used in this video is fuzzy and selfexplanatory - then it is a shame when intentionality is not selfexplanatory especially when you talk about origin of it. TBC
@BjornSeverinLarsen Awareness creates intention. My dogs are whinning now to go for their walk, it's their intention that I take them. I'm intending to take them but as the saying goes, the best intentions pave the road to hell.
Think consciousness. I'm aware that I need to eat, but that's different from a lizard needing to eat. Carl Sagan explains how our brain evolved from the inside out, that our old reptile brain was the center for controlling our body's functions. UR not a lizard
@shizzleman8 Why is that different from a lizard eating than you eating. The functions is still located in the lazardpart of our brain. So basically you are saying. When humans eat, we do immateriacally because we are aware that we eat, or soemthing to that affrect? The best intention comment made no sense - you made no connection to anything atleast, what is intentions since they apparently have to be immaterial?
@shizzleman8 2nd part - We don't inherit intentions??? What does that mean? Why shouldn't a higher awarness of your soroundings be a trait that natural selection would favor? If it improves survivablilty and reproduction it is favored by natural selection. Why shouldn't awarness or intentionality be apart of that? This assumption that the mind is not just part of the brains function, is at best an unfounded assumption. TBC
@BjornSeverinLarsen You're trying to build an entire case based on a single assumption about a single piece of evidence that will never become a part of the record. Telekinesis has been proved. The video you need to watch is #22 at least the last 1/2 of it. My soul "popped" out of my body back in 1999, there's no denying that it happened to me. It's direct evidence. Over a half a BILLION people have experienced the same thing. You have to use ALL THE INFORMATION/SCIENCE => form conclusions
@shizzleman8 Again - why should telekinesis be something immaterial. Why can't it be a function of our brain, which is very physical? This is not an argument against your dualistic assumption of our existence!
@BjornSeverinLarsen I'm not a dualist, that would be David Chalmers ph.d I'm an Admiral's favorite Son.
The term psychokinesis (from the Greek ψυχή, "psyche", meaning mind, soul, heart, or breath; and κίνησις, "kinesis", meaning motion, movement; literally "mind-movement"),[1][2] also referred to as telekinesis[3] < It's not a function of the brain because it's effecting phyically something outside of our bodies. You're fighting an uphill battle. Lesson 1 Deal from strength.
@shizzleman8 Ofcourse you have a dualistic assumption about your existence. You are arguing that part of you are immaterial. You are mind and body - your mind is not part of your body, they are seperated by something you call immaterial. I am arguing that the mind is part of body as much as my toe are. They have different functions but are still part of the same structure
@BjornSeverinLarsen Maybe I was a dualist for the second that my soul was outside of my body but for the other 55 years it's just me, and I subscribe to a collective consciousness, a from of Christian mysticism where all people and animals are One. We all, everything in existence, came from a singularity and the laws of nature Self Sustaining that sustains. "I am like God and God like me. I am as large as God. He is as small as I. He cannot above me nor I beneath him be." - Angelus Silesius
@shizzleman8 Just a comment about your direct evidence. It is direct subjective evidence. The experience is real to you however it doesn't have to be real objectively. Therefore it is not direct evidence to anyone other than you and others to who this kind of experience makes sense. There are some other natural explanation of what happend to you ex. the starvation of oxygen in your brain = a long tunnel with a light in the end of it. Just saw something about out of body experience too.
@shizzleman8 3rd part If you look into the more resent research into emotion and intentionality, you will see that this idea of a human being a dualistic creature stands on shaky grounds. IMO the mind is as much part of our physicality as is our toes and there is no evidence against this - so it is as informed an oppinion as any. BTW i like you comment about abandoning bias and calloing me a blashpiemer (or whatever the term is). It made me laugh
@BjornSeverinLarsen Thank you! All of our media this last weekend has been to commemorate 9/11. I just watched one about our religious views in the aftermath of the tragedy. One guy was talking about collective consciousness. That we're one with the extremists who flew the planes into the twin towers. Evil is not a separate entity, nor good, but that whatever one of us is all of us are. Check out nderf doht org for the people like myself who've encountered the afterlife, there's God.
@shizzleman8 Perhaps God exists, That is not what I am arguing. What I am arguing - Why can't intention, awareness and consciousness be physical things? Why can't it effect evolution, if the traits makes a species more likely to survive? Why does the existence of God have anything to do with intention, awareness and consciousness being physical??? Please stop walking sideways and answer these questions directly or admit that you can't
@BjornSeverinLarsen Awareness, intentionality, consciousness and free will choice can't be physical because they have NO EXTENSION IN REALITY. < This is what I was "connecting" with intentions paving the way to hell. Without action, without our intention conveying will that our brain moves our body to donate time to the eldely at the senior citizen center then our intention never meets the criteria to act saintly.
What can be reduced to physical facts and what can't be?
@shizzleman8 No extension in reality - what do you mean? The world around you doesn't create your awareness or? Basically action is intent, or there is always intent in action and action is very much physical. I am however in doubt about our free will. This is again based on our emotions, they predisposes us for action but our emotions are part of the social world around us, so the field you are part of limits your possible actions. It is very elequatly explained in the book I referenced earlier
@BjornSeverinLarsen@dfpolis I'm convinced animals have souls the same as we do, maybe everything has a soul. Omni presence or collective consciousness. I know I came from a primate, everytime I look in the mirror I see a big hairy ape. I know they have souls. I just don't know when God inserted them or if everything his them. I loved the movie Avatar where he mercy kills the Orynx and then says "I see you". Maybe the Native Americans had the best religion. The departed raised above ground
@BjornSeverinLarsen Dr. Polis has made a bunch of new videos recently I'm sorry I wish I could remember the one where he talks about the difference of awareness and content in relation to the MRI research. The machine picks up on WHAT we're thinking but not on our consciousness, our awareness, or our intentions. The content of what we think has extension in reality it can be see on an MRI, the rest is who we really are. Are you your thoughts? Of course not. We can choose. ( ;8~D)
@shizzleman8 Well what are our emotions then? You can't seperate intentions from emotions, since it is our emotions that predisposes actions. The emotional response to action done by other or yourself will then reveal your intentions towards any given situation ( I have a source to this: Poul Poder (2004): "The power of feelings or the feelings of power"). Besides a MRI scanner doesn't pick up what we are thinking - only that there are electric activity in different part of the brain. TBC
@BjornSeverinLarsen I have an amazing boss, she went 24 years as Judge Advocate General as a prosecuter 12 years and a defense attorney for 12 years ALL WITHOUT A LOSS! She ran the whole thing for our entire military she had 37 attorneys working under her! I'm working for her now because when she was our condiminum assoc. President I watched as person after person would yell at her for various selfish reasons and she wouldn't respond. She's just like Dr. Polis. Emotions don't have to rule us.
@shizzleman8 2nd part - to make the connection between an MRI can't see my intentions therefore intention, consciousness and awareness is spiritual is valid. Just because a machine measuring activity in the brain can't see the intentions doesn't mean they are not part of our physical world. We just don't know where they are located and how they physical comes from. Just because something is unknown doesn't mean that magic exists. It might - but the logic is still off TBC
@shizzleman8 3rd part - I wont get into identity, cos that will take alot of comment parts. So short: We are complicated. We are part will, part genetics and part society. All this mixed up creates a socially reliant and compliant person who can change his own curcumstances to a degree but is always bound by how the world views him. Part self identity and part social identity - if you wish to know more about this read some Giddens, Schutz and Mead
@BjornSeverinLarsen Twins. I've dated girls, Vicki and Shawnie, who were each a twin. Vicky & Nicky, and Shawnie and Tawnie. The twins have the same DNA, family and environment but couldn't be any more dissimilar. If we can change our own circumstances to a degree we can change them! Imagine you're in charge of the space mission to the moon. You can't make any mistakes. Here's one. The universe didn't create itself. Whatever existed before and now maintains and sustains us is immaterial.
@shizzleman8 How do you know this and why does it need to be immatariel? Comment towards the twins: One twin was properbly the dominant one, therefore having other reactions to her action. this might have shaped her social reality in a different way than the other twin. To say what makes some twins be similar and some be dissimilar is nothing immatrial either - it has to do with their experiences and their temper. Space mission to the moon... huh? No social conditioning there or?
@BjornSeverinLarsen I know the soul is immaterial a part of the incorporeal universe by the perturbation research and meta-analysis of random number genteration studies per #22 video. Currently 90+ random number gen. labs are running all around the world. It's been proven. I come from a background of law, and what you're attempting to do can't be done. You can't start off with a position and then deny material facts and expect for your presentation of "evidence" to carry the day. Can't be done
@shizzleman8 Perhaps we have a soul and perhaps it is immaterial. That however doesn't make awareness, intentions and conscious part of the soul. Why does it need to be? It can be explained within our physical reality. The field of emotional sociology is rather new but it can be the connection between our thoughts and action - thereby connecting these three seemingly immaterial things to the physical reality. We also control reality on a subatomic lvl, this doesn't mean we do it spiritually.
@BjornSeverinLarsen What we are, what created everything in the first place is everything we don't inherit from our parents. People say we are a partial product of our environment. I don't think so. The Reverend Arthur Blessitt the man who carried the Cross around the world said that people would tell him what he was doing was great, and he's say "O.K.", and that people would tell him that he was all wrong, he'd say "O.K."
@shizzleman8 Who said we cooked ourselves up? And what does your story have to do with that? To be partially socially shaped, part genetically shaped and part will shaped - how is that equal cooking oneself up? To say it in only a few words: The society we live in creates strutures which we have to live within but within these structures we have room for creativity, there might even be more than one plausible structure system to choose from. So not cooked up by ourselves but very complicated
@BjornSeverinLarsen I'm referring to the laws of nature in relation to ourselves NOT cooking ourselves up. The laws of nature didn't cook themselves up. C below: Spontaneous creation. < That's the laws of nature/natural selection? wtf? I've been listening to Dr. Polis for awhile and spontaneity isn't a word he uses to describe physics.
Bjorn, I used to explain to Christians who believe God gives them a license to sin that is not what Jesus sacrifice does. I have a working theology/science.
@shizzleman8 Why are we talking about spontaneous creation now? The natural laws in relation to ourselves - what do you mean? Well I do not have a theology degree but a BA in psychology and working on a masters in sociology. So to return to the subject of our disagreement - why do consciousness, awareness and intention have to be immaterial and part of the soul? Why can't these play any role in natural selection because as I contend they ARE material?
@BjornSeverinLarsen efficacy /ef·fi·ca·cy/ 1. the ability of an intervention to produce the desired beneficial effect in expert hands and under ideal circumstances. 2. the ability of a drug to produce the desired therapeutic effect. Pay atttention friend, you're going to know more than all of the people around you if you just keep watching Dr. Dennis' videos. If there were an emergent mechanism then billions of peoople's experiences would be falsified. It would have been found BY NOW also!
@shizzleman8 First: why would it be found by now? We can't even explain matter or gravity - how on earth should we be able to explain something we can't see or measure? So efficacy explains why the awareness, consciousness and intention are immaterial? I still don't feel I have gotten an answer to that one. An experience cannot be falsified - it is always true to the one experiencing it. The experience however does not necessarily mirror reality - but that doesn't falsifies it
@BjornSeverinLarsen I know the soul is immaterial a part of the incorporeal universe by the perturbation research and meta-analysis of random number genteration studies per 22 video. Currently 90+ random number gen. labs are running all around the world. It's been proven. I come from a background of law, and what you're attempting to do can't be done. You can't start off with a position and then deny material facts and expect for your presentation of "evidence" to carry the day. Can't be done
@shizzleman8 I know of this experiment in passing. It is true that the random number generators is influenced by different mood in the populace. However in the same program i also saw evidence of foresight and telepathy (or mentally shared stimulation) and these things can still be explained with physics. There are no direct evidence yet - but it doesn't mean that I have to assume they are immateriel. My position is this - everything can be explained inside our reality of existence.
@BjornSeverinLarsen I'm interested in people's theories. What I see is that if I bring up a subject like life after death atheists immediately answer with a play from their book, DMT. Genesis? Spontaneous creation from the law of gravity. Angelic intervention? "That's been debunked". St. Frances of Assisi and stigmata? "Santa Clause is the devil". There is no connecting thread for an atheist to build a proper summation in a closing argument. Their only tool is dissent ad infinitum. Peace
@shizzleman8 Well allow me to dissent som more then. We havn't really talked about life after death. We have talked about the immaterial nature of consciousness, intention and awareness. I won't comment on life after death cos I have no knowledge or idea about what will happen. Whatever happens, I will find out one way or another. My position is consciousness, awareness and intention is part of the our material reality and have played a part in our evolution through natural selection.
@BjornSeverinLarsen Let me change the subject. I had an old man stay with me that I met on the bus. He used to be friends with Timothy O'Leary. He was a meth-amphetimine manufacturer. He told me how when they were cooking up big batches they would slam the sh*t and all the fumes would keep them up for a month at a time. He and his partners would stay up for 750 hours IN A ROW! We don't sleep. Even vampires sleep. Your degrees aren't worth wiping my ass with. Get the picture?
@shizzleman8 No i don't get the picture. I am glad that you would wipe your ass with my degrees - but atleast I am able to stick to a point instead of jumping around in anacdotal stories which I for the life of me can't see what the stories are meant to tell. So they stayed up for a month high on the fumes. What does that tell? That they immaterialised themselves to break natural laws of human endurance or?? We don't sleep - what do you mean? I sleep and vampires don't exist. What is your point?
When Plantinga, or you for that matter, can demonstrate this kind of 'false positive' idea over a complex environment rather than a single threaded example then it might have a chance of winning me over.
As it stands, whilst i can see how a false perspective may lead to the best response on a single occasion I just cannot see how this will not get caught out very very quickly. For example, i could erroneously confuse addition and multiplication for the sum 2+2 and still arrive at the right...
...answer but it wouldn't take very long for this false model of the mathematical world to come crashing down around my ears. It seems to me that Plantinga wants me to imagine that we could evolve an entirely erroneous view of the world that never once comes unstuck. Clealy you are convinced, i am a million miles away.
@noelplum99 The one point I took from Plantinga is if our awareness cannot affect behavior, there is no way for natural selection to select it. I have the same objection to Plantinga's whole argument. It is is not clear that false beliefs can generate an entire network of adaptive responses. Still, for beliefs to generate any responses, the intentional order must be able to affect the physical order. Neither naturalism nor dualism has a mechanism for that. My theory does. Peace, DP
I would agree that if awareness cannot affect behaviour then it sits apart from natural selection, of course. I suppose this presupposes that two otherwise dentical organisms, one aware and one unaware, would be behaviourally identical - yet i cannot think of anything you could do to neuter my awareness that would not impact on my behaviour so your argument surely rests on a hypothetical presupposition that we really could be functionally identical without awareness?
What i would add is that i cannot envisage that awareness, whatever that may be, is free: there must be an anergy cost associated with it, there is with everything. For that reason, even if there were no other, makes me feel highly dubious as to how it could lie apart from natural selection. Simply put: if it doesn't affect behavior and has no evolutionary benefit we would never uave developed it and would be on a sure path to losing it. How can this not be the case?
@noelplum99 If awareness were a kind of motion, or a physical state, it would have kinetic or potential energy. There is no evidence for either. I just argued on another thread that awareness is not a function of content because ANY content might or might not be the object of awareness. So awareness comes from outside content. All the brain does is process and transform content. But, if content is independent of awareness, transforming it can't generate awareness. Peace, Dennis
@noelplum99 As I hold our subjectivity can control behavior, I don't have to deal with it being unadaptive. But since it can't be the result of the brain transforming content, it needs another origin. I think that is as far as philosophy can take us. At least it is as far as I have gotten. Faith offers an answer, but that is not philosophy & I won't pretend it's a reasoned conclusion. It is a reasonable option to think our awareness originates in the intentional order. Peace, Dennis
@noelplum99 No, I hold that as a matter of fact, our subjectivity does affect behavior, & we can prove epiphenomenalism is nonsense. I am not positing the real possibility of zombies. My point is that if you hold epiphenomenalism, you have no case for awareness evolving. The two positions are incompatible. I don't need to hold either position to show their mutual incompatibility. Peace, Dennis
@HarveyJakesMusic No. I do not have a blog. I have a website, xianphil.org, and I moderate a Yahoo Group, xianphil, where I have posts on many topics and answer questions. I have been posting for about 20 years on various sites and groups. Google will find most of them. Peace, DP
@CartesianTheist Thanks. Dennett likes to redefine things into and unrecognizable form, then explain his new form and claim he has solved the original problem. He is smart enough to do better. Peace, DP
Darwin was a naturalist. He argued that man is descended from monkeys. Therefore, monkeys are the progenitors of man. This makes monkey the creator of man.
The creator of life is a single celled organism. The One in his theory is essentially reduced to satirical commentary on intention, but he preserved his connection with unitarian circles by admitting to the existence of variants on the One.
@sbkidde Sorry, but Darwin did not assert man descended from monkeys or apes. He said, quite sensibly, that we have a common ancestor. This is confirmed by DNA. Being an ancestor is not being a creator. David was not the creator of Jesus. Single celled life is ancestral to more complex life, not its creator. Peace, DP
Plantinga's argument shows that epiphenomenalism is unlikely to be true given evolutionary theory. It shows nothing more. A naturalist need not be an epiphenomenalist. Nor does a naturalist need to be a materialist. The argument is a straw man.
@abcdefghix2005 As I said, there is no agreed definition of naturalist, just a consensus. The consensus rules out immaterial causes. If you accept immaterial causes and still want to call yourself a naturalist, that is your right. When you do, it makes me wonder how you define naturalist. Perhaps we may even agree. Peace, DP.
@dfpolis A naturalist is one who denies the existence of beings such as God that allegedly transcend the laws of the universe. There need not be a stipulation that the laws of the universe are solely laws wrt to matter.
I can give two examples of two highly respected naturalists that would not fit your mold: Strawson and Spinoza. The latter would be particularly skeptical of the mind-body distinction upon which Plantinga's argument is based.
@abcdefghix2005 That is not what the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, but if that is what you mean, fine. Again, you are attacking Plantinga, and not my case. I am happy to admit that the brain is integral to the human mind, so I do not make a mind-body distinction. So, are you saying that the laws of nature are invariant and cannot be changed in any way? Also, what kind of epistemology justifies an a priori rejection of God? Peace, DP
"Brains states & ideas signify in different ways (my #25), so they can't be identical."
Are you suggesting that a single thing cannot signify in different ways? Why not? Please elaborate.
You don't know what brain states "are". Therefore you don't know that they "signify" in different ways than consciousness.
Regardless, mind and matter need not be the same thing. They can be different expressions or manifestations of the same thing that operates on its own causal principles.
@abcdefghix2005 I know brain states are the configuration & activation of neurons & astrocytes. I am flatly stating that all ideas do is to signify, i.e. their essence is just to signify. They cannot be defined absent reference to signification. Brains states can be, & may or may not signify something else. When they do, it is via ideas they elicit in an observer. So their power to signify is not self-contained, but dependent on ideas. Yes, persons are 1 thing, not 2. Peace DP
@dfpolis Again, you admittedly don't know what matter is, therefore you don't know all the ways that it signifies, therefore you don't know that it signifies differently than ideas signify. The entities that cause your 3-D spatial perception of neurons and astrocytes could literally *be* the qualia you claim they are associated with. Strawson espouses this view. See his "Real Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Pansychism."
@abcdefghix2005 I admitted no such thing. You claimed that 99% of your beliefs are false, not me. We know how matter signifies, as an instrumental sign, not a formal sign. Ideas signify as formal signs. I said nothing about qualia. They are a side issue, and irrelevant to my case. Strawson says nothing on the distinction of formal & instrumental signs. It would be better to analyze my argument rather than to quote authorities. Peace, DP
Positing a benevolent person that created our minds with "truth" in mind, in addition to being a philosophical cop-out, is incompatible with the data. 99% of what the average human being throughout history has believed about the world is demonstrably false.
If God has "tricked" us on some of our innate beliefs about the world, why not all of them, including our innate belief in a benevolent God that wants us to know the truth? Plantinga's argument works just as well against itself.
To conclude, the appropriate naturalist response to Plantinga is to acknowledge that mental states, whatever they happen to be, may very well have causal impact. This causation need not occur independent of the physical brain--indeed, physical and mental causation may be the same thing underlying causation. We don't know. Naturalism can be agnostic on that point. Indeed, it *should* be, given the limits of human knowledge.
@abcdefghix2005 Again, you are arguing with Planting. I took one point from him, a point also made by David Chalmers (1996), p. 120f. If you admit intentions have causal effects, I've made my point. I'm happy to mind our includes the brain (#21). Can we move on to the nature of intentions & agree it's a category error to ask what intentions are made of? If so, they're immaterial. You don't know. I know ideas are not brain states (#25). We agree: Naturalism has nothing to say on being a subject.
@dfpolis "If so, they're immaterial." Again, your comment suggest dualism. Material v. Immaterial. How can you embrace this distinction when you admittedly don't know what either is?
If consciousness is immaterial, fine. Naturalism denies the supernatural, not the immaterial.
@abcdefghix2005 I do not call myself a dualist. I hold we are one being with 2 aspects, not a kludge of two interacting substances. I know what both material and immaterial are, but in a human way, not by the absurd standard of divine omniscience. Material objects have measurable extension, energy, and are subject to the laws of nature described by physics. Immaterial reality is not composed of particles and fields and cannot be divided into parts outside of parts. Why don't you know that?
@dfpolis "Material objects have measurable extension" No, your perceptions of them have that. Again, you don't know what matter has independently of your perception fo it. You don't know what it is, therefore you cannot say that it cannot be identical with qualia.
@abcdefghix2005 You're right: we know nature by means of perception. How Aristotelian of you! Now, read Aristotle on quantity. Reality is measurable, not measured. We can interact with reality by measuring it in various ways, and when we do, we produce measure numbers. Those numbers do not exist prior to the measuring process - a lesson was relearned by 20th century physics. Your conclusion is based on the false premise I don't know, but I do know BY MEANS OF perception. Peace, DP
@dfpolis "Naturalism has nothing to say on being a subject." Saying nothing about an unresolved question is the right approach, much better than positing an undefined, conceptually incoherent entity, i.e. "God", that solves the problem by fiat. That's cheating. A cop-out.
@abcdefghix2005 Ignoring relevant data is the mark of a closed mind. Ignoring the data of interior experience allows false claims to endure. But when claims such as identity theory or causal closure are compared with all the data, they are shown inadequate. I do not posit God as a hypothesis, but as a logical necessity imposed by data and principles without which science degenerates into inconsistent irrationality. This is not a god of gaps, but a sound deduction.
@dfpolis There is a law-like order to the universe. If you want, you can posit a mysterious entity called "God" to explain that order. But then you will need to explain God's order. So you will need to posit another entity to do that. And so on. This gets us nowhere, it solves no problems, it predicts nothing, it's untestable, just a silly language game. There is a law-like order to the universe. Feel free to stop there. No need to go further with nonsensical language games.
@abcdefghix2005 I do not posit God as a hypothesis. I deduce God as a conclusion. If you think this is not so, use the method taught in logic 101, not a falsifiability criterion: either show one of my premises is false, or that my reasoning is formally invalid. Making atheist faith claims, however warm they may make you feel, is not a rebuttal. God has no structure to be ordered. What does not exist need not be explained. You have no case. Peace, DP
@dfpolis Ah, but then you will probably say, "We need not posit an entity to explain God's order, for he is a being that explains his own order. I have DEFINED him to be such. Therefore you cannot use my argument against me in a regress."
Put less eloquently, "God" becomes a linguistic construct that contains in its very defintion a fiat solution to all of the philospohical problems that it was created to explain. What is the value of this nonsensical babble?
@BjornSeverinLarsen The name apple is evoked from a social construct. < The same person who wrote that is now telling me what the USA is doing around the world, who my Dad is, and how much better they are than I am. The problem Bjorn is that if your evokations are socially constructed then why isn't it your society that rules the world, the one that rejects God?
I do my friend no honor exchanging compliments for your insults. Lecture some others please.
shizzleman8 5 months ago
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shizzleman8 5 months ago
I was projecting the reality of building a mission model, but not actually building it.
I should have got an A for as long as I thought about builiding it.
shizzleman8 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 As son as you start thinking about the goal and its implementation, you create brain states to represent what you imagine. These are just not as obvious as overt acts. Peace, Dennis
dfpolis 5 months ago
@dfpolis A few minutes after commenting about my "mission project" in an unrelated search I just found out who Father Junipero Serra is. He was "beautified" September 25, 1988 (like I know what that means) just 13 months before my son Jason was born. He'll be 22 this Halloween.
I suppose I'd still believe mostly the same stuff I do today had I never met you, but now I just get to be smarter than all the atheists and agnostics too.
shizzleman8 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 Beatification is a step in the process of a person being declared a saint. After beatification they may be called "the blessed". The next step is canonization.
Peace, Dennis
dfpolis 5 months ago
@dfpolis After I showed everyone in Riverside a picture of Dad putting the cross on Mt. Rubidoux a lot of our country's religious leaders began addressing me. Michael J. Fox and a Bishop did a program on PBS. It seemed like they were talking to me, and then a lot of Hollywood stars, and notably Father Michael Manning. I got the picture after discovering who Frar. Junipero Serra is. The Christian ministers also showed me how Christians feel about people with money. I got that picture b4 too.
shizzleman8 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 hehe
dfpolis 5 months ago
Intentionality is directly causal to our behavior. To say otherwise would be nonsenisicle. If i do something it is with an intent. You cannot do anything without an intent, be it move your foot or choose a major in college. However to say that this cannot happen inside the naturalistic worldview is also makes no sense. To say that intentions needs to be outside our physicality doesn't make sense either - You lack to explain what intentionality is to you, where it comes from.
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen I agree that intentionality is causal. Many, if not most naturalists disagree & hold casual closure, i.e. that physical events have only physical causes. Our intentionality comes from our minds, but not from their physical aspect (our neurophysiology), but from the aspect that is aware of the contents represented by the brain. That aspect is natural, but it is missed in abstracting physics & neuroscience, because abstraction leaves data behind. Peace, Dennis
dfpolis 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen For me it's been my spritiual/supernatural experiences, several dozen. I've seen an inanimate object move around by itself, I've been touched by an Exorcist, Pastoress Barbara Purcell, witnessed an object disappear from my hand, and experienced my "soul" outside of my body. After that I stopped studying the Bible, and started living my life from my heart. The whole of human experience falls directly in line with there being a cause for why we exist in the first place.
shizzleman8 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 Well i respect that - it is your experiences and experiences is allways true, to the person experiencing it. However what would you say to people who hasn't shared these experiences, how can you deny their truth about their experiences only based on your own? This is one of central aspects about the spiritual and naturalistic worldviews - spirituality is always based on own experiences, where naturalistic is almost always based on objective evidence and not subjective experiences
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen Relevance, in the common law of evidence, is the tendency of a given item of evidence to prove or disprove one of the legal elements of the case, or to have probative value to make one of the elements of the case likelier or not. Probative is a term used in law to signify "tending to prove." The whole of human experience is that 1 in 3 people have experienced the supernatural according to Dr. Polis. I tell people to ASK, and you shouldn't have to ask for too long, see?
shizzleman8 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 Well here is the thing about me asking you for your experiences, they make no sense to me. First I have not experienced it, second I don't believe you saw what you saw. It doesn't make it any less true to you,but it has no truth value to me. So unless your experience can be somehow investigated based on principles that fits the scientific method, your claim wont have any truth value to me. It could simply be your brain's dying cells behaving abnormally that gave you your experience.
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen Of course they make no sense to you, YOU'RE A NATURALIST/MATERIALIST. Naturalism is a belief that only natural explanations exist for all the phenomenon in the universe. If you had studied Theology for the last 30 years like I have and gone to 1000 church and miracle meetings you'd have a different set of experiences. I know people who can control the spirit realm. They can send spirits to you and cause your soul to leave your body. You think we're jokers in the USA?
shizzleman8 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 Well yes you are correct, I am a naturalist. Which is also at the core of my disagreement with this video. Basically the video uses a metaphysical claim to say something about a naturalistic oriented theory. It would be the same as saying the theory evolution disproof the biblical genesis account therefore christians are not correct. I find both these approaches to be dishonest because a naturalistic theory can say nothing about a metaphysical theory and vice versa
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen The term I would use is misleading or irrelevant. Naturalism is an untestable theory. Naturalists reject the supernatural as where most "supernaturalists" don't deny or reject nature just that it doesn't have all the answers. Try to incorporate some law into your study of sociology, the mind and Doc Dennis' videos. This is easy to follow: The Four Types of Evidence Yahoo associated content. Heather Zarkah
Doc Polis may not check in again for up to a week.
shizzleman8 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 Well if I where to incorporate some metaphysics into my sociology, it wouldn't be sociology any more - at least not a science. It would become pseudo - science. This is the thing about science ( science is naturalistic philosophy at its core) it is testable. It is part of why science is succesful. It makes hypothesises, and then they are tested by naturalistic methods. It works - the interpretation as to why it works, isn't neccesary true - but that doesn't matter
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen It would still be sociology it would just be right. Please forgive me for being a one note Johnny but the law is sociology at it's very core. A foundaiton of objective morality. "this is the first precept of the law, that good is to be done and promoted, and evil is to be avoided. All other precepts of the natural law are based on this" - St. Thomas of Aquinas
My Dad had a great saying, "If you're so f*cking smart why aren't you rich?. < Law of parsimony.
shizzleman8 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 Okay, then since you know what sociology is better than me. Then explain to me - what is the question that sociology tries to answer and what are the thing that we look at to answer that question?
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen Sociology is both topically and methodologically a very broad discipline. Its traditional focuses have included social stratification, social class, social mobility, religion, secularisation, law, deviance. - wiki
My family owned the number 1 dealership of mobile homes in California for SEVENTEEN YEARS! I made thousands of collection calls in association with my Dad's 27 finance companies. I've been practicing the law and ministry for THIRTY YEARS! We owned hospitals 8)
shizzleman8 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 The question sociology tries to answer is: How is society possible? The thing that we look at is interactions. As easy as that - the categories you cited are all forms of interactions, both from a structural functional perspective and a symbolic interactive and pure interactive perspective. So since you still now more about how sociology works than me, what does the interactional chains in your family buisness ventures tell you about your families view on human nature?
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 now = know
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen Now I know that you can't feel good about yourself unless you put me down. What's that say about you? The Americans have become the saviors of the world and like I said before, "the vikings, the ones where you live, have become taint." < You don't know what that word means? Basically it means that when you can't DO anything worthwhile in society you try and teach others how great you are.
shizzleman8 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 Look you keep telling me that I'm an idiot through the mouth of your daddy so stop taking the highroad. So I guess you are taint - the saviors of the world - lol. Perhaps after the second world war but things has surdently changed. USA meddles in everything, they have inserted dictators, overthrown democraticly elected goverments and they still call themselves protecter of freedom etc. Hypocritical. Your politics is like a awesome batch of stupid - tsk the savior.....
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 What does being smart have to do with riches? Not all want to be rich, some of us is quite happy having enough to live a good life. Besides what does your dad think they pay scientists? He sounds like a the perfect specimen of my assumption about what republicans must be like...
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen Subjectively your life is GREAT I imagine but objectively you'll never be well known as where my Dad's family of 750 years of Jewish Bankers has provided a life of fame and fortune.
You have no "good". You rejected that up front with the acceptance of naturalism. How is what you believe one wit different than LaVeyan Satanism? "Oh, I have happiness, and that's a true measure of 'real' wealth" < F*ck that! That's LOSER talk.
shizzleman8 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 Lol - i guess you are your dad's boy. And that is really all I have to say about that
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
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BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
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BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@dfpolis Well the reason they ignore intentionality in their explanations isn't that they can't measure it yet? If we get to a point where intentionality, consciousness and awareness can be measured, I'm sure that they would be called phisical aspects. The thing is that they don't know - but just cos they use them as causal atm doesn't mean that they are not physical causal - meanning the mind is part of a physical causal explaination of a phenomenon, if or when the knowledge is gained
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen What makes you think intentionality is measurABLE? It is not extended in space. It is a relation between a subject and an object. When we do physics, we abstract away the knowing subject. We do not care about the subjective experience of the physicist, but only about the objects experienced. Thus, there is NO DATA in physics dealing with subjectivity, and so no data about intentionality. Thus, physics lacks the resources to explain intentionality. Peace, Dennis
dfpolis 5 months ago
@dfpolis If I understand your comment correctly then you just rationalized all social science as redundant. The social sciences does research intention and subjectivity. The empirical evidence in these cases are either direct experiences by the subjects, which then can either be generalized from data or theory or it is indirect evidence based on theory. However when dealing with these subjective experiences the theorectic framework allways point back to a physical causation.
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen Did I? I did not notice. Social sciences generally study behavior as an object. Psychology on the older model used introspection and so studied subjectivity per se. In the absence of introspective methods (1st person reports) there is no direct data on subjectivity. I am not denying the role of physical processes in informing the mind or expressing intent. I am saying that physical observations alone will never reveal that we are more than zombies. Peace, Dennis
dfpolis 5 months ago
@dfpolis The study of the social reality is by definition the study of something allready interpreted. therefore the social scientist will be interpreting something allready interpreted. Basically when investigating something subjective like values and reasons for behavior (intention) a social scientist is investigating it's subjects introspections. However a subjects introspection is allways based on a construction of a phenomenon therefore it is not directly used as evidence TBC
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen I am unsure what "already interpreted" means to you, but it seems irrelevant to your point. Stated purposes are subjective data. Since they are subjective, it is not directly available to physical observations & so not measurable -- my point. Still, committed intentionality is a disposition to act, & so has physical effects. Having physical effects does not make it material in se or directly measurable. Your claim that introspection is always a construction is dubious.
dfpolis 5 months ago
@dfpolis When I was in school and had to make a model of a California Mission I had a committed intention to do the project periodically and THEN it was a disposition to act and had physical effects even though I didn't act there was content in my brain, the image of the Mission would have showed up on an MRI for instance? My intention had extension in reality even though I was procrastinating?
shizzleman8 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 The intention would not be visible, but the encoding of it would be. Fro example, if you have an image of what you intended to build in mind, the encoding of that image would be a brain state. the details might not show up in an fMRI as it is too low resolution, but the activation of your visual cortex might. Peace, Dennis
dfpolis 5 months ago
@dfpolis "Already interpreted" means that the subject of social sciences is humans and we our existence in this world is based on our ability to interpret our experiences and from this interpretation make sense of it. It is what Giddens calls double hermenuetics (or something close to that). My comment about the construction of introspection is minded towards how we create memory and recall them - see any pschological texts about the subject later than the 1990s.
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen To interpret we must be operational interpreters. So our existence is logically prior to interpretation. Making sense of ourselves is knowing our prior existence, & requires existence as potential objects of thought as well as thinkers. It is not our existence, but the articulation of our self-experiences that requires interpretation. We have experiences, & project them into a conceptual space of largely social origin. We can't have memories w/o prior experience. Peace, DP
dfpolis 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen Why does Dr. Dennis get to talk about zombies, but vampires aren't real? Zombies don't sleep vampires do. Do the vampires get more sh*t done? I don't think so.
shizzleman8 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 Zombies was used as a metafore, maybee you used vampires the same way. I just didn't get your point. What does sleeping has to do with anything, in the context of our disagreement?
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen December 7th 1941 shortly after the sun rose but before the sailors at Pearl Harbor had awaken Japan launched 180 aircraft strike fighters in a first wave assault. We had no fighters.
That's the difference between sleeping and being awake. Please don't lecture me anymore. I hope you do well with your schooling and all I just can't help you.
shizzleman8 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 Okay I won't. I don't really have anything add to your statement anyway and thank you
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@dfpolis 2nd part - The social construction of social reality is here put under light. I am not saying that reality is socially constructed, I am saying that the reality we as humans percieve, IS socially constructed. This also means that how we see intentionality, awareness and consciousness is also constructed - the definition of these traits are our own (not individual but collective). So the investigation of the subjective interpretation is the investigation of that construction TBC
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen I disagree. The immediate origin of the conceptual space we use to classify & analyze reality is mostly social. Ultimately, however, it is the product of individual insight. Reality must be able to evoke our concepts for us to apply them. If apples could not evoke the idea apple, I could never call them "apples." So the power to evoke ideas is in reality prior to their being evoked. What has an objective basis in reality is not a construct, but a projection of reality.
dfpolis 5 months ago
@dfpolis 3rd In this way it is not intentionality, awareness or consciousness that are researched but their representations to us humans. Though how can the representations of these traits be removed from the traits themself? IMO rather easily by simply accepting that we don't really know what these traits are and accept that the only way to investigate them is by looking at their representation as constructed by us. We don't know what these traits are objectivly in reality, only subjectively
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen Ideas come from human interactions with reality. Reality is intelligible, but to actualize that potency, we need awareness. The mind can be aware, but to know it needs to be informed by intelligibility. It is as much an error to leave reality out of ideogenesis as to leave out the human mind. We do not exhaust reality in our knowledge, but we do know a projection resulting from a specific power to act in the object. Every act of knowing has a knowing subject & a known object.
dfpolis 5 months ago
@dfpolis 4th - So as explained about the social science there is a problem when stating that the traits discussed (though not with you, so sorry to drag you into this) is either material or immaterial when we don't really know what they are outside human perception. We only know our own construction of the traits. Before any comment about the nature of these traits and natural selection can be made, we need to understand the constrution. So I still contend that the premise of the video is flawed
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen As I discussed in my #36, every act of knowledge gives us a projection of an object's essence because every act of knowing is the result of an action the object is specifically capable of & its essence is the specification of all the acts it can do. If it acts so with me, then it can act so. Of course, this is never exhaustive, so all human knowledge is a projection (a dimensionally diminished mapping) of reality. We do not need to know the social origin of ideas. Peace, DP
dfpolis 5 months ago
@dfpolis This will be a comment towards all your above answers/ comments: "I could never call them apple" - The name apple is evoked from a social construct/ definition, it is but a name - it has no ingrained meaning other than what it has been given. It is like a table. Does a table has any ingrained meaning other than the meaning we give it? I guess it is about what gives objects and subject meaning. Is it naturally given or given by us? tbc
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen The idea apple is latent in the fruit's objective intelligibility. Apples' repeatable ability to evoke the idea in normal subjects shows objectivity. Still, intelligibility is usually actualized by a culturally trained subject. Once an idea is first actualized, it may be passed on culturally. Your hypothesis can't explain new concepts. Mine allows a culturally received conceptual space as well as novelty and objectivity. Ideas are not words & signify differently. See my #25.
dfpolis 5 months ago
@dfpolis 2nd part - Does the name of a thing define it in reality? The example with the apple - will its properties be different if I call it an orange? This can be related to intention - the difference is that intentionality is a name or definition that humans has given. If I understand you correctly you would say that intentionality has meaning in itself, not the meaning we give it, right? Here is my position: intentionality is something humans has define and given meaning tbc
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen Names aren't ideas. They enter a ternary sign relation, ideas a binary one (see my #25). There is no language of thought. To posit one leads to an infinite regress. We do think in words, but some though is wordless: We occasional can't find the words to express our thought. Names are not the reality. They express thoughts which may in turn intend real objects. (A 3 term relation.) Intentionality is prior to naming & articulation. The idea apple intends real apples (2 terms).
dfpolis 5 months ago
@dfpolis 3rd part - Our definition of it might not reflect what it really is. It appears to us as one single trait in our minds, however that might not be what it really is. What it really is might be many things working together in our brain seeming to be only one trait. So the origin of intentionality IMO properbly is materialistic, we just don't know what it is. I agree btw with your last statement: that we do not need to know origin of idea, but we better know the consequenses of them. tbc
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen 4th part - The idea of what things are, controlls our definition of them. There by it has real consequenses on our lives. The objects essence, which you mention, is that what I mean when I say meaning? If that is so, then I guess you mean that we by thinking about something, can find it's purpose and from there it's essence? Basically by thinking finding reality? If that is how, then I must say I disagree. I'm gonna stop here and let you answer :)
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen Essences are WHAT objects are: the specification of everything an object can do. They might act on us. If so, we can know them. Still, we can only know what objects do to us, & so we have only a partial knowledge (a projection) of essences. If we refer to essences, we are referring to something partly known & partly a mystery. Purpose is reflected in essences, but is different. Essence is what an object can do. Purpose is a role in context. Reality inter-acts with us.
dfpolis 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen Physics has no concept of reference, i.e. indicating the signified isn't a physical property. Materialism, as articulated by physics, has no concept from which one can derive meaning & intentionality. All signs require a human mind to actually signify. What does "cat" mean? Physics can define the shape & constituents of a material text object, but not its reference. Only a mind can. Minds are irreducible to physics. As signs change material form, meaning is invariant.
dfpolis 5 months ago
@dfpolis 5th part - Oh I just to say that I am not a proponent of reductionism, but I am saying that something appearing immaterial does not neccesary need to be. It can be a combination of other attritubutes which by themselves can't be reduced to merely electric activity in the brain and also my argumentation is clearly speculative. But unless I'm missing something I find that the same can be said about your argumentation.
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen Yes, appearances can deceive. But, we know what physical facts are. If there are other kinds of facts, not expressible in terms of matter and motion, then they are immaterial. The laws of nature are an example. It is foolish to ask what they are made of. Since they explain matter and motion, they are not explained by matter & motion -- that would e circular. As I said above, reference is another example. So is being a knowing subject. Physical things are objects, not subjects
dfpolis 5 months ago
@dfpolis So emotions are also immaterial? How do you know that natural selection isn't immaterial aswell? If natural selection is what you then call immaterial, then other immaterial traits would play a role in the natural selection (as long as it helped an individual to survive compared to other individuals). What makes you think that matter is not immaterial? To clarify - the Higgs Boson, that theoretically gives matter weight has not been found yet. Is that then immaterial or not? cont.
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen 2nd part - Your critism of how evolution sees natural selection as to intention and other immaterial traits I find based on a misconception of natural selection. You call natural selection some kind of mechanical natural something... meaning that it is firmly based on matter and nature i guess. However this is your interpretation of natural selection - natural selection is just: if an individual genetically gains a better chance of surviving compared - cont.
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen 3rd part - compared to the population around the individual. Then the genetical difference gives this individual a larger chance to reproduce and spread his genes in the population, thus in time, the trait that gives the advantage is spread in the population. A "better" intentionality in an individual which is based on genetics would give the individual a better survivability, then it is part of a natural selection process. Immaterial or not - doesn't matter
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen I do not think of NS as "some kind of mechanical natural something" as can be seen from my response to part 1: it as a law-driven physical process. Yes, individuals with certain unpredictable (not ontologically random) mutations have a higher chance reproducing than others. Why? Because the intentional laws of nature (see my #14) make it so. Behavior, not awareness, is tested by NS. So, if awareness can't cause behavior (epiphenomenalism), NS can't select it. Peace, Dennis
dfpolis 4 months ago
@dfpolis How can NS select something? It is not a conscious mechanism. It is but the fact that those best suited to survive, has the highest chance to do so and to pass on their genes. How is that behavior testing? How does intentionality or awareness not influence behavior. What is behavior but an extension of our intentions and reactions to our perceptions (awareness (simple form, need to be aware to percieve consciously))?
BjornSeverinLarsen 4 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen Your question is like asking how an election can select a candidate. Neither elections nor NS are voluntary agents. They are the processes by which such agents express their will. NS does not select genotypes directly, but the resulting phenotypes in virtue of superior performance (i.e. behavior). I have no problem with my freely willed intent being expressed in my behavior, but then I'm not a physicalist. Only some behavior is intentional, i.e. that which I will. Peace, DP
dfpolis 4 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen Emotions have 2 components: (1) a physical state, (2) awareness of that state. The 1st is hardly immaterial, while the 2nd can in no way be reduced to matter and motion. Natural selection is a process, not a thing. It is driven by immaterial laws acting on material states. Unless consciousness can change physical states, NS can't affect it. Your question on the Higgs Boson assumes an argument I have not made. I've not said ignorance implies immateriality.
dfpolis 4 months ago
@dfpolis I don't really understand your argument about immateriality - which is also why I'm trying to stear around it. Actually emotions has 3 aspects. They are physical, cognitive and social. On the physical and cognitive you can see changes in the body - I would argue that awareness is part of the cognitive. The problem with this in understanding emotions is that the social aspect of emotions can't be measured other than from it's cause and effect.
BjornSeverinLarsen 4 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen We can project reality into many conceptual spaces, just as we can project events into many frames of reference. Some conceptual spaces facilitate the solution of a given problem better than others. Awareness, as I use it, is not our state of readiness to accept perceptual data, but standing as a subject to objects. I have no problem with a social aspect of emotional life, but as you point out, it is relational rather than intrinsic. I can emote in isolation. Peace, Dennis
dfpolis 4 months ago
@dfpolis So awareness is the fact that we are aware that we are apart from other things? That our body is that barrier which defines a person as a person? If we project reality into conceptual spaces (I understand this as: we percieve, interpret and give reality subjective meaning) then how is our understanding of reality not relational? I find it hard to see how we are to find the intrinsic value of anything, when we allways relates reality to ourselves.
BjornSeverinLarsen 4 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen I did not give a circular definition of awareness, but defined it by its relational role. I don't know what you mean by the body a barrier. It is one aspect of an integral human person. Projecting into a conceptual space is actualizing some objective notes of intelligibility by attending to them, while ignoring others, leaving them potential & unactualized. Our understanding of reality is thus relational. We find value to us as human. Peace, Dennis
dfpolis 4 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen Did I? I did not notice. Social sciences generally study behavior as an object. Psychology on the older model used introspection and so studied subjectivity per se. In the absence of introspective methods (1st person reports) there is no direct data on subjectivity. I am not denying the role of physical processes in informing the mind or expressing intent. I am saying that physical observations alone will never reveal that we are more than zombies. Peace, Dennis
dfpolis 5 months ago
Natural selection is organically mechanistic. It effects physical characteristics with genetics. Intentionality is about purpose or design. Cognition plays a role in the organic design.
There is an element of choice in the selection of a mate for a relationship. Natural selection for the species indirectly entertains that element of choice, but the survival of life has subliminal and transcendent concerns for thoughts, feelings and beliefs about personal selection.
sbkidde 6 months ago
@sbkidde What? Intention is about purpose and design. That makes no sense. So my intention to eat a banana, caused by my hunger is about design? How did you put design and purpose together? Where is the link? If humans had no intentions we would do nothing. All animals have intentions, they usually revolves around eating, fighting or mating ( atleast that is my understanding) - if intentions didn't exist we would be dead long ago and so would all other life (unless food comes to it automaticly)
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen There are different levels of meaning associated with intent. There is intention according to design and there is intension according to desire as an aspect of design. Intention is not all about your intension. Purpose is not all about your opposition to the free exercise of religion. Design is not all about an individual's absolute freedom.
sbkidde 5 months ago
@sbkidde I must admit, I don't follow your reasoning. Please break down what intention is then, what design is and what purpose is. How do they related to a persons agency and how do they related to anything really. Is desire only an aspect of design? What does aspect of design mean? If intention is not about my intention - what are they then?
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
intentions can't do anything natural selection can test and select for. It is impossible to believe intentionality, consciousness to evolve and intentionality is powerless to effect our behaviour. If it is powerless to effect our behavior then there is no traction for natural selection to select conscioussness or improve it and make it more veretical. < is that last word right, varetical (variable)? How does emergence offer oppostion, an atheist used this word to explain the mind?
shizzleman8 8 months ago
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BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 Well that is the assumption made by the author in this video - but he is wrong. He totally misrepresented Jaegwon Kim. His assumption is that intentionality can't evolve in the physical world. To say that natural selection wouldn't be affected by intentionality is ignorant at best. If the intention to eat or to mate desapeared it would be a deathblow to a species. I don't even understand what he means by intentionality - all animal life has it - or it would be dead.
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen BLASPHEMY!!
Physical facts are not mental facts. 1. content (physical) 2. Awareness of content (immaterial) Dr. Dennis explains exactly how natural selection can't select, test, or improve intentions on my featured video (my channel) #34 Mind and evolution part 2. The main point Bjorn is that we don't inhereit intentions. Eating and our sex drive are instinctual not intentional. He covers that point as well with the "zombie" argument. Look with new eyes. Abandon bias.
shizzleman8 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 So when you get hungry and take the bread out and put something on it, it is not intentional? Who says awarness of content is immaterial? When you meet a woman you fancy, it is not intention that makes you go over and talk to her? When you cook a romantic dinner for your wife it is not wirth intent? The way intentionality is used in this video is fuzzy and selfexplanatory - then it is a shame when intentionality is not selfexplanatory especially when you talk about origin of it. TBC
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen Awareness creates intention. My dogs are whinning now to go for their walk, it's their intention that I take them. I'm intending to take them but as the saying goes, the best intentions pave the road to hell.
Think consciousness. I'm aware that I need to eat, but that's different from a lizard needing to eat. Carl Sagan explains how our brain evolved from the inside out, that our old reptile brain was the center for controlling our body's functions. UR not a lizard
shizzleman8 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 Why is that different from a lizard eating than you eating. The functions is still located in the lazardpart of our brain. So basically you are saying. When humans eat, we do immateriacally because we are aware that we eat, or soemthing to that affrect? The best intention comment made no sense - you made no connection to anything atleast, what is intentions since they apparently have to be immaterial?
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 2nd part - We don't inherit intentions??? What does that mean? Why shouldn't a higher awarness of your soroundings be a trait that natural selection would favor? If it improves survivablilty and reproduction it is favored by natural selection. Why shouldn't awarness or intentionality be apart of that? This assumption that the mind is not just part of the brains function, is at best an unfounded assumption. TBC
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen You're trying to build an entire case based on a single assumption about a single piece of evidence that will never become a part of the record. Telekinesis has been proved. The video you need to watch is #22 at least the last 1/2 of it. My soul "popped" out of my body back in 1999, there's no denying that it happened to me. It's direct evidence. Over a half a BILLION people have experienced the same thing. You have to use ALL THE INFORMATION/SCIENCE => form conclusions
shizzleman8 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 Again - why should telekinesis be something immaterial. Why can't it be a function of our brain, which is very physical? This is not an argument against your dualistic assumption of our existence!
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen I'm not a dualist, that would be David Chalmers ph.d I'm an Admiral's favorite Son.
The term psychokinesis (from the Greek ψυχή, "psyche", meaning mind, soul, heart, or breath; and κίνησις, "kinesis", meaning motion, movement; literally "mind-movement"),[1][2] also referred to as telekinesis[3] < It's not a function of the brain because it's effecting phyically something outside of our bodies. You're fighting an uphill battle. Lesson 1 Deal from strength.
shizzleman8 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 Ofcourse you have a dualistic assumption about your existence. You are arguing that part of you are immaterial. You are mind and body - your mind is not part of your body, they are seperated by something you call immaterial. I am arguing that the mind is part of body as much as my toe are. They have different functions but are still part of the same structure
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen Maybe I was a dualist for the second that my soul was outside of my body but for the other 55 years it's just me, and I subscribe to a collective consciousness, a from of Christian mysticism where all people and animals are One. We all, everything in existence, came from a singularity and the laws of nature Self Sustaining that sustains. "I am like God and God like me. I am as large as God. He is as small as I. He cannot above me nor I beneath him be." - Angelus Silesius
shizzleman8 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 Just a comment about your direct evidence. It is direct subjective evidence. The experience is real to you however it doesn't have to be real objectively. Therefore it is not direct evidence to anyone other than you and others to who this kind of experience makes sense. There are some other natural explanation of what happend to you ex. the starvation of oxygen in your brain = a long tunnel with a light in the end of it. Just saw something about out of body experience too.
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 3rd part If you look into the more resent research into emotion and intentionality, you will see that this idea of a human being a dualistic creature stands on shaky grounds. IMO the mind is as much part of our physicality as is our toes and there is no evidence against this - so it is as informed an oppinion as any. BTW i like you comment about abandoning bias and calloing me a blashpiemer (or whatever the term is). It made me laugh
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen Thank you! All of our media this last weekend has been to commemorate 9/11. I just watched one about our religious views in the aftermath of the tragedy. One guy was talking about collective consciousness. That we're one with the extremists who flew the planes into the twin towers. Evil is not a separate entity, nor good, but that whatever one of us is all of us are. Check out nderf doht org for the people like myself who've encountered the afterlife, there's God.
shizzleman8 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 Perhaps God exists, That is not what I am arguing. What I am arguing - Why can't intention, awareness and consciousness be physical things? Why can't it effect evolution, if the traits makes a species more likely to survive? Why does the existence of God have anything to do with intention, awareness and consciousness being physical??? Please stop walking sideways and answer these questions directly or admit that you can't
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen Awareness, intentionality, consciousness and free will choice can't be physical because they have NO EXTENSION IN REALITY. < This is what I was "connecting" with intentions paving the way to hell. Without action, without our intention conveying will that our brain moves our body to donate time to the eldely at the senior citizen center then our intention never meets the criteria to act saintly.
What can be reduced to physical facts and what can't be?
shizzleman8 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 No extension in reality - what do you mean? The world around you doesn't create your awareness or? Basically action is intent, or there is always intent in action and action is very much physical. I am however in doubt about our free will. This is again based on our emotions, they predisposes us for action but our emotions are part of the social world around us, so the field you are part of limits your possible actions. It is very elequatly explained in the book I referenced earlier
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen @dfpolis I'm convinced animals have souls the same as we do, maybe everything has a soul. Omni presence or collective consciousness. I know I came from a primate, everytime I look in the mirror I see a big hairy ape. I know they have souls. I just don't know when God inserted them or if everything his them. I loved the movie Avatar where he mercy kills the Orynx and then says "I see you". Maybe the Native Americans had the best religion. The departed raised above ground
shizzleman8 5 months ago
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@shizzleman8 I don't think that was for me :)
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen Dr. Polis has made a bunch of new videos recently I'm sorry I wish I could remember the one where he talks about the difference of awareness and content in relation to the MRI research. The machine picks up on WHAT we're thinking but not on our consciousness, our awareness, or our intentions. The content of what we think has extension in reality it can be see on an MRI, the rest is who we really are. Are you your thoughts? Of course not. We can choose. ( ;8~D)
shizzleman8 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 Well what are our emotions then? You can't seperate intentions from emotions, since it is our emotions that predisposes actions. The emotional response to action done by other or yourself will then reveal your intentions towards any given situation ( I have a source to this: Poul Poder (2004): "The power of feelings or the feelings of power"). Besides a MRI scanner doesn't pick up what we are thinking - only that there are electric activity in different part of the brain. TBC
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen I have an amazing boss, she went 24 years as Judge Advocate General as a prosecuter 12 years and a defense attorney for 12 years ALL WITHOUT A LOSS! She ran the whole thing for our entire military she had 37 attorneys working under her! I'm working for her now because when she was our condiminum assoc. President I watched as person after person would yell at her for various selfish reasons and she wouldn't respond. She's just like Dr. Polis. Emotions don't have to rule us.
shizzleman8 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 I didn't say rule. I said predisposes us for action
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 2nd part - to make the connection between an MRI can't see my intentions therefore intention, consciousness and awareness is spiritual is valid. Just because a machine measuring activity in the brain can't see the intentions doesn't mean they are not part of our physical world. We just don't know where they are located and how they physical comes from. Just because something is unknown doesn't mean that magic exists. It might - but the logic is still off TBC
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 3rd part - I wont get into identity, cos that will take alot of comment parts. So short: We are complicated. We are part will, part genetics and part society. All this mixed up creates a socially reliant and compliant person who can change his own curcumstances to a degree but is always bound by how the world views him. Part self identity and part social identity - if you wish to know more about this read some Giddens, Schutz and Mead
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen Twins. I've dated girls, Vicki and Shawnie, who were each a twin. Vicky & Nicky, and Shawnie and Tawnie. The twins have the same DNA, family and environment but couldn't be any more dissimilar. If we can change our own circumstances to a degree we can change them! Imagine you're in charge of the space mission to the moon. You can't make any mistakes. Here's one. The universe didn't create itself. Whatever existed before and now maintains and sustains us is immaterial.
shizzleman8 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 How do you know this and why does it need to be immatariel? Comment towards the twins: One twin was properbly the dominant one, therefore having other reactions to her action. this might have shaped her social reality in a different way than the other twin. To say what makes some twins be similar and some be dissimilar is nothing immatrial either - it has to do with their experiences and their temper. Space mission to the moon... huh? No social conditioning there or?
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen I know the soul is immaterial a part of the incorporeal universe by the perturbation research and meta-analysis of random number genteration studies per #22 video. Currently 90+ random number gen. labs are running all around the world. It's been proven. I come from a background of law, and what you're attempting to do can't be done. You can't start off with a position and then deny material facts and expect for your presentation of "evidence" to carry the day. Can't be done
shizzleman8 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 Perhaps we have a soul and perhaps it is immaterial. That however doesn't make awareness, intentions and conscious part of the soul. Why does it need to be? It can be explained within our physical reality. The field of emotional sociology is rather new but it can be the connection between our thoughts and action - thereby connecting these three seemingly immaterial things to the physical reality. We also control reality on a subatomic lvl, this doesn't mean we do it spiritually.
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen What we are, what created everything in the first place is everything we don't inherit from our parents. People say we are a partial product of our environment. I don't think so. The Reverend Arthur Blessitt the man who carried the Cross around the world said that people would tell him what he was doing was great, and he's say "O.K.", and that people would tell him that he was all wrong, he'd say "O.K."
We didn't "cook" ourselves up. End of story.
shizzleman8 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 Who said we cooked ourselves up? And what does your story have to do with that? To be partially socially shaped, part genetically shaped and part will shaped - how is that equal cooking oneself up? To say it in only a few words: The society we live in creates strutures which we have to live within but within these structures we have room for creativity, there might even be more than one plausible structure system to choose from. So not cooked up by ourselves but very complicated
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen I'm referring to the laws of nature in relation to ourselves NOT cooking ourselves up. The laws of nature didn't cook themselves up. C below: Spontaneous creation. < That's the laws of nature/natural selection? wtf? I've been listening to Dr. Polis for awhile and spontaneity isn't a word he uses to describe physics.
Bjorn, I used to explain to Christians who believe God gives them a license to sin that is not what Jesus sacrifice does. I have a working theology/science.
shizzleman8 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 Why are we talking about spontaneous creation now? The natural laws in relation to ourselves - what do you mean? Well I do not have a theology degree but a BA in psychology and working on a masters in sociology. So to return to the subject of our disagreement - why do consciousness, awareness and intention have to be immaterial and part of the soul? Why can't these play any role in natural selection because as I contend they ARE material?
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen efficacy /ef·fi·ca·cy/ 1. the ability of an intervention to produce the desired beneficial effect in expert hands and under ideal circumstances. 2. the ability of a drug to produce the desired therapeutic effect. Pay atttention friend, you're going to know more than all of the people around you if you just keep watching Dr. Dennis' videos. If there were an emergent mechanism then billions of peoople's experiences would be falsified. It would have been found BY NOW also!
shizzleman8 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 First: why would it be found by now? We can't even explain matter or gravity - how on earth should we be able to explain something we can't see or measure? So efficacy explains why the awareness, consciousness and intention are immaterial? I still don't feel I have gotten an answer to that one. An experience cannot be falsified - it is always true to the one experiencing it. The experience however does not necessarily mirror reality - but that doesn't falsifies it
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 2nd - i meant: more than one plausible system of structures to choose from.
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
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@BjornSeverinLarsen I know the soul is immaterial a part of the incorporeal universe by the perturbation research and meta-analysis of random number genteration studies per 22 video. Currently 90+ random number gen. labs are running all around the world. It's been proven. I come from a background of law, and what you're attempting to do can't be done. You can't start off with a position and then deny material facts and expect for your presentation of "evidence" to carry the day. Can't be done
shizzleman8 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 I know of this experiment in passing. It is true that the random number generators is influenced by different mood in the populace. However in the same program i also saw evidence of foresight and telepathy (or mentally shared stimulation) and these things can still be explained with physics. There are no direct evidence yet - but it doesn't mean that I have to assume they are immateriel. My position is this - everything can be explained inside our reality of existence.
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen I'm interested in people's theories. What I see is that if I bring up a subject like life after death atheists immediately answer with a play from their book, DMT. Genesis? Spontaneous creation from the law of gravity. Angelic intervention? "That's been debunked". St. Frances of Assisi and stigmata? "Santa Clause is the devil". There is no connecting thread for an atheist to build a proper summation in a closing argument. Their only tool is dissent ad infinitum. Peace
shizzleman8 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 Well allow me to dissent som more then. We havn't really talked about life after death. We have talked about the immaterial nature of consciousness, intention and awareness. I won't comment on life after death cos I have no knowledge or idea about what will happen. Whatever happens, I will find out one way or another. My position is consciousness, awareness and intention is part of the our material reality and have played a part in our evolution through natural selection.
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
@BjornSeverinLarsen Let me change the subject. I had an old man stay with me that I met on the bus. He used to be friends with Timothy O'Leary. He was a meth-amphetimine manufacturer. He told me how when they were cooking up big batches they would slam the sh*t and all the fumes would keep them up for a month at a time. He and his partners would stay up for 750 hours IN A ROW! We don't sleep. Even vampires sleep. Your degrees aren't worth wiping my ass with. Get the picture?
shizzleman8 5 months ago
@shizzleman8 No i don't get the picture. I am glad that you would wipe your ass with my degrees - but atleast I am able to stick to a point instead of jumping around in anacdotal stories which I for the life of me can't see what the stories are meant to tell. So they stayed up for a month high on the fumes. What does that tell? That they immaterialised themselves to break natural laws of human endurance or?? We don't sleep - what do you mean? I sleep and vampires don't exist. What is your point?
BjornSeverinLarsen 5 months ago
When Plantinga, or you for that matter, can demonstrate this kind of 'false positive' idea over a complex environment rather than a single threaded example then it might have a chance of winning me over.
As it stands, whilst i can see how a false perspective may lead to the best response on a single occasion I just cannot see how this will not get caught out very very quickly. For example, i could erroneously confuse addition and multiplication for the sum 2+2 and still arrive at the right...
noelplum99 9 months ago
@noelplum99
...answer but it wouldn't take very long for this false model of the mathematical world to come crashing down around my ears. It seems to me that Plantinga wants me to imagine that we could evolve an entirely erroneous view of the world that never once comes unstuck. Clealy you are convinced, i am a million miles away.
noelplum99 9 months ago
@noelplum99 No, as I said, I am only taking the one point from him. The same point is made by Chalmers, a naturalist. Peace, DP.
dfpolis 9 months ago
@noelplum99 The one point I took from Plantinga is if our awareness cannot affect behavior, there is no way for natural selection to select it. I have the same objection to Plantinga's whole argument. It is is not clear that false beliefs can generate an entire network of adaptive responses. Still, for beliefs to generate any responses, the intentional order must be able to affect the physical order. Neither naturalism nor dualism has a mechanism for that. My theory does. Peace, DP
dfpolis 9 months ago
I would agree that if awareness cannot affect behaviour then it sits apart from natural selection, of course. I suppose this presupposes that two otherwise dentical organisms, one aware and one unaware, would be behaviourally identical - yet i cannot think of anything you could do to neuter my awareness that would not impact on my behaviour so your argument surely rests on a hypothetical presupposition that we really could be functionally identical without awareness?
noelplum99 9 months ago
@noelplum99
What i would add is that i cannot envisage that awareness, whatever that may be, is free: there must be an anergy cost associated with it, there is with everything. For that reason, even if there were no other, makes me feel highly dubious as to how it could lie apart from natural selection. Simply put: if it doesn't affect behavior and has no evolutionary benefit we would never uave developed it and would be on a sure path to losing it. How can this not be the case?
noelplum99 9 months ago
@noelplum99 If awareness were a kind of motion, or a physical state, it would have kinetic or potential energy. There is no evidence for either. I just argued on another thread that awareness is not a function of content because ANY content might or might not be the object of awareness. So awareness comes from outside content. All the brain does is process and transform content. But, if content is independent of awareness, transforming it can't generate awareness. Peace, Dennis
dfpolis 9 months ago
@noelplum99 As I hold our subjectivity can control behavior, I don't have to deal with it being unadaptive. But since it can't be the result of the brain transforming content, it needs another origin. I think that is as far as philosophy can take us. At least it is as far as I have gotten. Faith offers an answer, but that is not philosophy & I won't pretend it's a reasoned conclusion. It is a reasonable option to think our awareness originates in the intentional order. Peace, Dennis
dfpolis 9 months ago
@noelplum99 No, I hold that as a matter of fact, our subjectivity does affect behavior, & we can prove epiphenomenalism is nonsense. I am not positing the real possibility of zombies. My point is that if you hold epiphenomenalism, you have no case for awareness evolving. The two positions are incompatible. I don't need to hold either position to show their mutual incompatibility. Peace, Dennis
dfpolis 9 months ago
@HarveyJakesMusic No. I do not have a blog. I have a website, xianphil.org, and I moderate a Yahoo Group, xianphil, where I have posts on many topics and answer questions. I have been posting for about 20 years on various sites and groups. Google will find most of them. Peace, DP
dfpolis 9 months ago
@CartesianTheist Thanks. Dennett likes to redefine things into and unrecognizable form, then explain his new form and claim he has solved the original problem. He is smart enough to do better. Peace, DP
dfpolis 9 months ago
Naturalism asserts that nothing is supernatural.
Darwin was a naturalist. He argued that man is descended from monkeys. Therefore, monkeys are the progenitors of man. This makes monkey the creator of man.
The creator of life is a single celled organism. The One in his theory is essentially reduced to satirical commentary on intention, but he preserved his connection with unitarian circles by admitting to the existence of variants on the One.
sbkidde 9 months ago
@sbkidde Sorry, but Darwin did not assert man descended from monkeys or apes. He said, quite sensibly, that we have a common ancestor. This is confirmed by DNA. Being an ancestor is not being a creator. David was not the creator of Jesus. Single celled life is ancestral to more complex life, not its creator. Peace, DP
dfpolis 9 months ago
Plantinga's argument shows that epiphenomenalism is unlikely to be true given evolutionary theory. It shows nothing more. A naturalist need not be an epiphenomenalist. Nor does a naturalist need to be a materialist. The argument is a straw man.
abcdefghix2005 9 months ago
@abcdefghix2005 As I said, there is no agreed definition of naturalist, just a consensus. The consensus rules out immaterial causes. If you accept immaterial causes and still want to call yourself a naturalist, that is your right. When you do, it makes me wonder how you define naturalist. Perhaps we may even agree. Peace, DP.
dfpolis 9 months ago
@dfpolis A naturalist is one who denies the existence of beings such as God that allegedly transcend the laws of the universe. There need not be a stipulation that the laws of the universe are solely laws wrt to matter.
I can give two examples of two highly respected naturalists that would not fit your mold: Strawson and Spinoza. The latter would be particularly skeptical of the mind-body distinction upon which Plantinga's argument is based.
abcdefghix2005 9 months ago
@abcdefghix2005 That is not what the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, but if that is what you mean, fine. Again, you are attacking Plantinga, and not my case. I am happy to admit that the brain is integral to the human mind, so I do not make a mind-body distinction. So, are you saying that the laws of nature are invariant and cannot be changed in any way? Also, what kind of epistemology justifies an a priori rejection of God? Peace, DP
dfpolis 9 months ago
"Brains states & ideas signify in different ways (my #25), so they can't be identical."
Are you suggesting that a single thing cannot signify in different ways? Why not? Please elaborate.
You don't know what brain states "are". Therefore you don't know that they "signify" in different ways than consciousness.
Regardless, mind and matter need not be the same thing. They can be different expressions or manifestations of the same thing that operates on its own causal principles.
abcdefghix2005 9 months ago
@abcdefghix2005 I know brain states are the configuration & activation of neurons & astrocytes. I am flatly stating that all ideas do is to signify, i.e. their essence is just to signify. They cannot be defined absent reference to signification. Brains states can be, & may or may not signify something else. When they do, it is via ideas they elicit in an observer. So their power to signify is not self-contained, but dependent on ideas. Yes, persons are 1 thing, not 2. Peace DP
dfpolis 9 months ago
@dfpolis Again, you admittedly don't know what matter is, therefore you don't know all the ways that it signifies, therefore you don't know that it signifies differently than ideas signify. The entities that cause your 3-D spatial perception of neurons and astrocytes could literally *be* the qualia you claim they are associated with. Strawson espouses this view. See his "Real Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Pansychism."
abcdefghix2005 9 months ago
@abcdefghix2005 I admitted no such thing. You claimed that 99% of your beliefs are false, not me. We know how matter signifies, as an instrumental sign, not a formal sign. Ideas signify as formal signs. I said nothing about qualia. They are a side issue, and irrelevant to my case. Strawson says nothing on the distinction of formal & instrumental signs. It would be better to analyze my argument rather than to quote authorities. Peace, DP
dfpolis 9 months ago
@dfpolis If you can't get the Strawson article, see see cognet.mit.edu/posters/TUCSON3/Strawson.html
abcdefghix2005 9 months ago
@abcdefghix2005 Thank you for the citation.
dfpolis 9 months ago
Positing a benevolent person that created our minds with "truth" in mind, in addition to being a philosophical cop-out, is incompatible with the data. 99% of what the average human being throughout history has believed about the world is demonstrably false.
If God has "tricked" us on some of our innate beliefs about the world, why not all of them, including our innate belief in a benevolent God that wants us to know the truth? Plantinga's argument works just as well against itself.
abcdefghix2005 9 months ago
To conclude, the appropriate naturalist response to Plantinga is to acknowledge that mental states, whatever they happen to be, may very well have causal impact. This causation need not occur independent of the physical brain--indeed, physical and mental causation may be the same thing underlying causation. We don't know. Naturalism can be agnostic on that point. Indeed, it *should* be, given the limits of human knowledge.
abcdefghix2005 9 months ago
@abcdefghix2005 Again, you are arguing with Planting. I took one point from him, a point also made by David Chalmers (1996), p. 120f. If you admit intentions have causal effects, I've made my point. I'm happy to mind our includes the brain (#21). Can we move on to the nature of intentions & agree it's a category error to ask what intentions are made of? If so, they're immaterial. You don't know. I know ideas are not brain states (#25). We agree: Naturalism has nothing to say on being a subject.
dfpolis 9 months ago
@dfpolis "If so, they're immaterial." Again, your comment suggest dualism. Material v. Immaterial. How can you embrace this distinction when you admittedly don't know what either is?
If consciousness is immaterial, fine. Naturalism denies the supernatural, not the immaterial.
abcdefghix2005 9 months ago
@abcdefghix2005 I do not call myself a dualist. I hold we are one being with 2 aspects, not a kludge of two interacting substances. I know what both material and immaterial are, but in a human way, not by the absurd standard of divine omniscience. Material objects have measurable extension, energy, and are subject to the laws of nature described by physics. Immaterial reality is not composed of particles and fields and cannot be divided into parts outside of parts. Why don't you know that?
dfpolis 9 months ago
@dfpolis "Material objects have measurable extension" No, your perceptions of them have that. Again, you don't know what matter has independently of your perception fo it. You don't know what it is, therefore you cannot say that it cannot be identical with qualia.
abcdefghix2005 9 months ago
@abcdefghix2005 You're right: we know nature by means of perception. How Aristotelian of you! Now, read Aristotle on quantity. Reality is measurable, not measured. We can interact with reality by measuring it in various ways, and when we do, we produce measure numbers. Those numbers do not exist prior to the measuring process - a lesson was relearned by 20th century physics. Your conclusion is based on the false premise I don't know, but I do know BY MEANS OF perception. Peace, DP
dfpolis 9 months ago
@dfpolis "Naturalism has nothing to say on being a subject." Saying nothing about an unresolved question is the right approach, much better than positing an undefined, conceptually incoherent entity, i.e. "God", that solves the problem by fiat. That's cheating. A cop-out.
abcdefghix2005 9 months ago
@abcdefghix2005 Ignoring relevant data is the mark of a closed mind. Ignoring the data of interior experience allows false claims to endure. But when claims such as identity theory or causal closure are compared with all the data, they are shown inadequate. I do not posit God as a hypothesis, but as a logical necessity imposed by data and principles without which science degenerates into inconsistent irrationality. This is not a god of gaps, but a sound deduction.
dfpolis 9 months ago
@dfpolis There is a law-like order to the universe. If you want, you can posit a mysterious entity called "God" to explain that order. But then you will need to explain God's order. So you will need to posit another entity to do that. And so on. This gets us nowhere, it solves no problems, it predicts nothing, it's untestable, just a silly language game. There is a law-like order to the universe. Feel free to stop there. No need to go further with nonsensical language games.
abcdefghix2005 9 months ago
@abcdefghix2005 I do not posit God as a hypothesis. I deduce God as a conclusion. If you think this is not so, use the method taught in logic 101, not a falsifiability criterion: either show one of my premises is false, or that my reasoning is formally invalid. Making atheist faith claims, however warm they may make you feel, is not a rebuttal. God has no structure to be ordered. What does not exist need not be explained. You have no case. Peace, DP
dfpolis 9 months ago
@dfpolis Ah, but then you will probably say, "We need not posit an entity to explain God's order, for he is a being that explains his own order. I have DEFINED him to be such. Therefore you cannot use my argument against me in a regress."
Put less eloquently, "God" becomes a linguistic construct that contains in its very defintion a fiat solution to all of the philospohical problems that it was created to explain. What is the value of this nonsensical babble?
abcdefghix2005 9 months ago