Dennis Mahar wrote:So,
it depends on consciousness.
no consciousness. no access. no values.
Again, you misrepresent my meaning. In fact, I would say that values are not
dependent on being accessed by consciousness; instead, being accessed by consciousness is one of the
possibilities for values.
Dennis Mahar wrote:whether the values hang around waiting to be accessed
or
consciousness chooses reality as it goes along
is something else.
I'd suggest that the two are not mutually exclusive.
John,
Look Laird what your saying is completely contradictory
I don't think you actually meant "contradictory", because you didn't go on to point out any contradiction. I think you simply meant "wrong" or "false".
You say I am the one claiming something which I would need to evidence/support
I'm saying you have an hypothesis for which there are competing hypotheses against which it needs to be evaluated.
My claim is a fact, your experiences/sensations are actually manifestations of your mind
But that's disingenuous: your claim is
more than that, it is
also that these experiences/sensations do not correspond to a reality beyond the mind. And
that is not an established fact.
Nothing has ever been experienced/known/seen/evidenced that doesn't exist as a manifestation of the mind. Agreed?
That's also disingenuous, because the meaning of "manifestation of the mind" is (deliberately on your part I'm sure) ambiguous. I think you want it to mean, "a creation created entirely by the mind in the absence of anything external", whereas, if I were to provisionally answer "Yes", it would be after interpreting that phrase to mean, "a creation created by the mind, in some cases based on the mind's senses as stimulated by external phenomena".
[paraphrasing Laird]1. It seems more plausible that consciousness has to reside somewhere in a "place". With no real reasoning provided besides that apparently it doesn't require any leaps of faith to have it this way and that this model "works".
I notice that you avoided acknowledging that in comparison, your alternative explanation of experiences-in-consciousness relies on "magic" that you have no idea how to describe. In other words, your alternative "explanation" is not even so much an actual explanation as vague hand-waving.
In any case, since that's not enough for you, then let me offer you something more along the same lines. You assert that 'every single idea you may have had of something external to mind was actually residing "within" mind'. Now, unless you make some special exception (which I would expect you to clarify and explain), then
you yourself - you and your consciousness - qualify as one of these "external ideas". Therefore, by your reasoning,
you reside "within" my mind. Yet, the same is true of me with respect to you: I am but an idea "within" your mind. So, we reach the conclusion that you are but an idea in my mind which is but an idea in your mind which is but an idea in my mind which is but an idea in your mind which is... and on and on in an infinite regress. Or, rather than "infinite regress", we might simply call this a contradiction.
I can't see any way to avoid this contradiction other than by positing consciousnesses as "separately located", which brings us back to this first reason that I offered you: if consciousnesses are "located", then they must be located
within something, and so we have reason to believe in an external reality of
some sort.
I would like you to point out how your model is a condition required to navigate or is needed to make life "work" out.
I don't claim that it is, except in the sense that believing in an actual external reality is very probably of significant psychological benefit in living effectively in one: as is evidenced by your own psychology,
not believing in one can lead to very different life choices.
[paraphrasing Laird]2. Computer analogy, which bears no relation to ultimate reality because it is about computers not consciousness. Clearly.
But analogies
by definition involve a contrast between different types of things, in this case computers and consciousness. The fact that this analogy meets the definition of an analogy (which is the worst criticism that can be drawn out of your comment) has no bearing on how useful it is. You seem to want to paint it as useless though, and so, as I challenged you to do in my last post, to support this you will need to point out the specific ways in which you think it is deficient. I'm still waiting for that.
Perhaps you simply don't understand what the analogy points to. I can help you there.
The only understanding you've offered so far is this:
I did have a better grasping of the point you were trying to make once you mentioned the first person shooter idea, there is a platform on which all individual consoles/PC's are "meeting", without this shared platform there would be no possibility for interacting with other players, it is this platform itself that makes such interaction possible, without this central server there is no shared platform.
This is a good start, so I'm not sure why with this basic understanding you go on to say that the analogy is useless, perhaps because of the misunderstanding I'm about to correct, namely that I'm not saying that in the absence of the central server, interaction is impossible: in fact, my analogy relies on the fact that interactive communication still occurs, just on a many-to-many level (multiple individual PCs/consciousnesses communicating with multiple other individual PCs/consciousnesses) rather than on a one-to-many level (one central server/external reality communicating with multiple individual PCs/consciousnesses).
So, yes, the "platform" (more specifically, one part of the platform: the central server) represents "external reality". The point of the analogy is that challenging problems occur when external reality (the central server) is not present that do not occur when it is present, meaning that the absence of external reality is an unnecessarily complicated and thus less likely hypothesis. Somehow, all of the individual consciousnesses (PCs) have to synchronise a consistent experience without the benefit of basing that experience on a shared external reality (the data in the central server). I pointed out some of the many problems with this in my long post; they are very much relevant to consciousness in reality.
I'll take just one of the problems that I pointed out to show you how you can perform a translation from the analogy to reality: the problem of initiation of consistent changes in shared experience. I pointed out that in the absence of a shared external reality (the central server), which could initiate changes itself, it's not clear how or why changes that aren't willed directly by one of the agents in reality (i.e. by a player pressing buttons on his PC, or, in reality, by a person making decisions and doing things) even occur. I'm talking here about changes like the wind starting to blow: this is a shared experience that multiple "players" in reality experience consistently, but if the change isn't initiated by external reality (the central server), more specifically by an application of the rules of physics to the state of that external reality, or something like that, then by what means
is it initiated? Does it initiate from a single mind, from one of the consciousnesses (PCs) in reality (the first-person shoot-em-up), and if so, how is it then communicated to all of the other minds (PCs) in reality (the first-person shoot-em-up)? And what if one of the other minds (PCs) in reality (the first-person shoot-em-up) sought to impose a contradictory change - whose change would take precedence and why? See, these sort of problematic questions and the actual problems they point to simply don't arise when external reality (the central server) really exists, and when all minds (PCs) accept these sort of changes from it as authoritative.
You can apply the same sort of translation to each of the other problems I raised in my long post.
Pye,
there are a very small handful of males here that have never once put those little stones in my path of conversing with them here
To my regret, I'm not one on them. I remember once making a comment that a particular thought you'd had was impressive for a woman, which in context I meant as a sarcastic criticism of the house philosophy rather than of you, but by your response at the time and what you have said now I realise it was inappropriate, and I'm sorry.