Everything is made of matter

Your arguments for consciousness being something special beg the question and are only convincing if you assume from the get go that consciousness is indeed something special.

Do you ever get tired of this trolling? Like, you aren't even trying to pretend like you're not, what with posting a pepe image.

What about the problem of qualia?

So what's your argument for why consciousness isn't special? It still hasn't been proven that consciousness is a solely material process. Nor do I think a material explanation could explain the qualia in life.

consciousness is chemical signals being transmitted through an array of neurons, thus as consciousness is made of matter, it is matter.

Ever heard of emergence?

>But if all is matter, meaning all is non-mental and objective (not subjective) then there cannot be the mental or subjectivity.

How so?

Actually I don't know it's true. I could easily imagine intelligence that is not accompanied by sentience, and I have never been able to imagine a mechanism by which brain states would bring about consciousness.
It's very much an open question. The hard problem is real, it's not an attempt at escapism.

>consciousness is chemical signals being transmitted through an array of neurons
Pure speculation.

Consciousness is an abstraction and yes abstract things are exist
But abstract things are originate from material things
Law is an abstract thing and it is back by very material act of you being shot if you don't follow it

>Consciousness is an abstraction
I don't think so

Show me a picture of a 200 kg of consciousness

You seem to be assuming that everything which is not tangible matter is an abstraction and everything which is not an abstraction is tangible matter. I think this is wrong.

"everything is made of matter" applies only to objective world, consciousness is subjective world.

Show me a picture of 100 kg of freedom

Show me 200g of light

Freedom is an abstract concept too
Picrelated. Not a good quality of photo tho

But physicalism holds that consciousness exists, it's eliminative materialism that suggests that consciousness doesn't exist, and yeah, it's doesn't have wide support.

There are findings like the Libet-Experiment that proofed that decision-making is a neurological process without a need of something immaterial: bethinking.org/human-life/the-libet-experiment-and-its-implications-for-conscious-will

Rather nothing immaterial takes part in it: subconscious decision making contradicts idealistic beliefs that require that decision making must conscious process.

Decision-making and consciousness are quite possibly orthogonal. I can imagine an entity that is capable of human-level decision-making but lacks consciousness. I can also imagine a purely passive consciousness that observes but can decide nothing. So knowing about the neuronal correlates of decision-making doesn't really explain consciousness.

Hold on, let me get my big book of verified supernatural phenomena. Here's what I found:
>

It's pretty much implied at this point that if it exists, it's physical. We may not know how it works. In fact, it may not follow the laws of modern physics, but it's pretty much guaranteed to be physical, and likely requires serious advances in both technology and scientific. It's good to have opposition though, because criticism is the whole shtick of science. Foundational theories, principles, even laws need to be viewed critically (by experts, not by laymen. See: anti-vaccination movement).

The hard problem of life (not the origin), is a great example of this. There were a few competing theories on "what is the nature of life?" Vitalism comes to mind, with many prominent proponents such as Pasteur and similar to Cartesian dualism, but eventually, with the discovery of molecular genetics and the application of -delta G to biological systems, it's faded into nothing but fringe at best. We don't even have a set-in-stone definition for life, but we accept that it's bound by physical limitations.

I'm sorry if this sounds pop-sci in nature, but I'm just don't understand why people still hold this "consciousness is immaterial" stance. It parallels with the early hard problem of life so much. We don't know what it is, and it's good to be critical about it as a whole, but it just seems silly to ask, "is it physical?"

I'd like to add that it really doesn't really apply to your baitposting, but I just want to understand why the "it's immaterial" folk believe it's immaterial.

56% of philosophers are physicalists.

This is fuckery.

do all humans have consciousness?

special coma patient probably don't have a consciousness. More important is the question does every human have the potential of consciousness?

>neurons are made out of matter
t.brainlet

Your presupposition that everything is material is where the issue is I think. If all anons started with different presuppositions most would rationally get to different conclusions. I don't presuppose there is only the material, and you can't prove that your presupposition is correct anymore than I can.

According to physicalism everything is physical, right? The physical is not mental, it is not conscious, it is objective. Okay... just think about that for a second... If all is non-mental, if all is objective, then of course there is no mental or subjectivity. There would be no room for consciousness.

Just think of a rock, it's not mental it's just a physical object. Add 2 more, still not mental. Add 5 rocks, still not mental. You can have whole world of rocks and you're still not getting anywhere it's just more rocks. That's what atoms are. That's what the physical is. It's just a bunch of non-mental non-conscious bits of stuff that no matter how much you add up you still just have a bunch of non-mental non-conscious stuff.

From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (a peer-reviewed academic resource):

"In more detail, the challenge arises because it does not seem that the qualitative and subjective aspects of conscious experience—how consciousness “feels” and the fact that it is directly “for me”—fit into a physicalist ontology, one consisting of just the basic elements of physics plus structural, dynamical, and functional combinations of those basic elements. It appears that even a complete specification of a creature in physical terms leaves unanswered the question of whether or not the creature is conscious. And it seems that we can easily conceive of creatures just like us physically and functionally that nonetheless lack consciousness. This indicates that a physical explanation of consciousness is fundamentally incomplete: it leaves out what it is like to be the subject, for the subject."

Source: iep.utm.edu/hard-con/

If you want to claim all if made of matter, then you're going to leave out consciousness because matter is supposed to be non-mental and objective. If you want to claim there's the mental plus the physical you're just going to encounter the mind-body problem as shown in pic related here:

>it exists, it's physical
the term physical used this way is redundant and circular, all you're doing is equivocating.

P-zombies are a philosophically incoherent concept. Anything that behaved as though it was conscious would simply be conscious. The argument is another example of one that's only convincing if you assume consciousness is somehow special and distinct from neurological processes.

This is yet another example of an argument that begs the question by assuming that consciousness and mental states are something special.

"Materialism is wrong because consciousness is special and immaterial, checkmate materialists." But you ahven't proven the claim that consciousness is special.

I thought modern physics decided that matter as we previously understood it doesn't exist.

(3) doesn't have to be true. I thought this is what Kant tried to show with the self-image and transcendental self? There could be a "soul" or essence which is independent of our perception, which is neither influenced by nor influences matter.

Likewise we may have an emergent consciousness that emerges from the material but is not reducable to. Similar to how light is produced by a lamp.

It doesn't matter

>It appears that even a complete specification of a creature in physical terms leaves unanswered the question of whether or not the creature is conscious.
This is only an assumption since we don't know how to give a complete physical specification of a person.

>And it seems that we can easily conceive of creatures just like us physically and functionally that nonetheless lack consciousness.
Just because you can conceive of something doesn't mean it's possible. It might only be conceivable due to our own ignorance.

Qualia is the true failure. It is circular logic of the highest order. Subjective experience exists and can't be proven because subjective experience exists and can't be proven. The failure is in the fact that subjective experience was never proven in the first place.

I've seen retards on here arguing they can correlate qualia to brain regions. If physicalism is so refuted, why are you relying on physicalist principles to prove a subjectivist argument?

Experience is purely the sensory processing unit's reaction to objective needs and situations. Anything else is arguing in a circle. Why is a p-zombie's experience not unique? If every other creature on Earth is defined by presence of subjective experience, would not the lack thereof be a subjective experience unto itself? And thus, be defined as its own qualia? Because you can't prove qualia's existence or lack of existence in definable characteristics (which would destroy the subjective nature of qualia itself), there's no answer you can give to this question. A p-zombie's antiqualia can be defined as a qualia unto itself and we are arguing in a circle once more.

>And it seems that we can easily conceive of creatures just like us physically and functionally that nonetheless lack consciousness. This indicates that a physical explanation of consciousness is fundamentally incomplete
This notion is so shitty. You can conceive of any number of unreal things, it doesn't add to anything. P-zombies aren't useful concepts, everyone but you could be a p-zombie already and the world would effectively be the same to you, to your "subjectivity", so you won't gain anything by pursuing this line of thinking.

>it's a pretending to be a zombie post

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the hard problem of consciousness. This isn't merely some explanatory gap that you can pray the future will one day bridge for you. It's that there shouldn't be this gap at all given physicalism. If physicalism were true and consciousness is just another physical phenomenon then why can't we just study it? We can look at rocks and measure them and test them and everything. We can look at the activity of wind and all sorts of phenomenon but all of a sudden when it comes to consciousness we just can't describe it with the same language. Consciousness is subjective and 1st person while everything else is supposed to be 3rd person and objective. It's fundamentally different in type and that shouldn't be the case if physicalism were true. Modus tollens and you get physicalism being false.

Is consciousness subjective yes or no? Do we not experience objects from a 1st person perspective? Is there not a sense of what its like to smell a rose or hear music? Rocks certainly are not conscious yet people are. What gives?? If everything is non-mental then how is it possible that there's the mental?

Then that would mean there is no interaction between mind and body and you'd wind up with a kind of epiphenomenalism which results in a dualism much more like Descarte's than any physicalist would be willing to admit to being.

Jaegwon Kim explains how this isn't really physicalism at the end of the day:

"If nonreductive physicalists accept the causal closure of the physical domain, therefore, they have no visible way of accounting for the possibility of psychophysical causation. This means that they must either give up their antireductionism or else reject the possibility of psychophysical causal relations.The denial of psychophysical causation can come about in two ways: first, you make such a denial because you don't believe there are mental events; or second, you keep faith with mental events even though you acknowledge that they never enter into causal transactions with physical processes, constituting their own autonomous causal world. So either you have espoused eliminativism, or else you are moving further in the direction of dualism, a dualism that posits a realm of the mental in total causal isolation from the physical realm. This doesn't look to me much like materialism. Is the abandonment of the causal closure of the physical domain an option for the materialist? I think not: to reject the closure principle is to embrace irreducible nonphysical causes of physical phenomena. It would be a retrogression to Cartesian interactionist dualism, something that is definitive of the denial of materialism. Our conclusion, therefore, has to be this: nonreductive materialism is not a stable position. There are pressures of various sorts that push it either in the direction of outright eliminativism or in the direction of an explicit form of dualism."

Source: Kim, Jaegwon (1989). The myth of non-reductive materialism. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 63 (3):31-47.

>If physicalism were true and consciousness is just another physical phenomenon then why can't we just study it? We can look at rocks and measure them and test them and everything. We can look at the activity of wind and all sorts of phenomenon but all of a sudden when it comes to consciousness we just can't describe it with the same language.
Are you saying if we can study rocks and wind we should be able to study absolutely anything that's capable of being studied scientifically?

>everything that exists is not-mental
>the mental exists

how are you not seeing a contradiction here? If everything is not mental then there is no mental by definition. The problem for physicalists is that the mental really does exist, we are conscious. Hence materialism is false.

A phenomenon like consciousness is supposedly localized in space and time is it not? You're saying it's a physical phenomenon of sorts. Okay then measure it. If you can't measure then the worst scientific criticism applies to you: you're not even wrong... meaning you're not even scientific. you're not even on the same playing field. you're essentially talking about some nonsense.

If you're a grounded physicalist about the mind then give me a physical account of the mind. "muh future" can go in literally anyone's favor so don't even try to go there

user...
do you know that there are in fact scientists studying the mind?

Okay then measure it. Show me a unit of consciousness. I'll wait...

btw go ahead and claim behavior is a product of consciousness, that's not measuring consciousness that's jut measuring behavior. Measuring brain activity is also just measuring more behavior of the body so don't even try to equivocate the brain with the mind. I'll patiently await your measurements of consciousness...

Holographic Universe
youtube.com/watch?v=6rgYz_BU2Ew
also this if you have more time:
youtube.com/watch?v=2DIl3Hfh9tY

I guess it just seems like consciousness is just a complicated aspect of matter. Material things just being the kind of stuff that exists regardless of a specific perception.

I guess I got confused by you automatically ascribing thought to an immaterial realm.

How is any of that different from any other scientific phenomenon we couldn't study previously? Explain how without begging the proposition that conciousness is special.

The more you have these threads, the more I become convinced that your just totally ignorant of science.

>Is consciousness subjective yes or no?

Objective, it's a property of objective brain states (inb4 prove it, you haven't proven it to be special).

>Do we not experience objects from a 1st person perspective?

No. Our brain responds to sensory stimuli in a strictly objective fashion, we just perceive it as being a distinct state.

>Is there not a sense of what its like to smell a rose or hear music?

More objective brain responses.

>Rocks certainly are not conscious yet people are.

Rocks don't have a means to respond to stimuli.

>What gives??

Stop proving that you're a troll.

>If everything is non-mental then how is it possible that there's the mental?

Begged premise. Assumes that "mental" is something special.

Stop begging that premise.

>If you're a grounded physicalist about the mind then give me a physical account of the mind. "muh future" can go in literally anyone's favor so don't even try to go there

He doesn't have to. You haven't proven that consciousness is something special.

Yet another begged premise. You're assuming that consciousness is distinct from behavior and brain activity, without basis.

Fucking hell man. Can you do nothing bug beg your premise?

STOP
BEGGING
YOUR
PREMISE

So how long are we gonna play this game huh?

Does it ever annoy you how much grinding you are doing over shitty little word games?
You guys thinking you are gonna level up your philosopher job, when all you are doing it leveling up your schizophrenia factor.

Heres your solution.
Everything is made of matter
matter is made of symbols
consciousness is symbolic.

Or to put it blunty
"Matter" is fucking vague and undefined
Consciousness is a word and that pretty much it.

>I'm sorry if this sounds pop-sci in nature

It is, very. You barely even seem to understand the issue. What do you even think 'life' is?

There is objectivity, and the human mind is capable of grasping it when applying the correct method to studying it. However, perception is flawed and many processes are complicated beyond accurate observation, let alone are observable more than once. Subjectivity bridges the gap between objective reality and human capability of understanding it.

>A p-zombie's antiqualia can be defined as a qualia

What the fuck am I even reading?

He brought up vitalism. At one point life was considered a similar hard problem, in contrast to Descarte's assumption that living organisms were effectively machines, and it was assumed that there was some sort of unanswerable philosophical quandry at the root of life; an immaterial animating force that had to be there to account for gaps in scientific knowledge. This proved to be wrong.

>According to physicalism everything is physical, right?
Reducibility makes existence ambiguous.
A rock has the same problem: it has a form. Is the form physical?

>It appears that even a complete specification of a creature in physical terms leaves unanswered the question of whether or not the creature is conscious.
Programs have subjective experience and it's visible from their description.

>If physicalism were true and consciousness is just another physical phenomenon then why can't we just study it?
WE already do: some team decodes thoughts from MRT.

>Objective

LOL so there's no difference between us and rocks. Rocks are just as "conscious" as us then. It's all objective. There is no 1st person subjective perspective. You're a retarded eliminativist just like Dan Dennett:

"To put it as clearly as I can: in his book, Consciousness Explained, Dennett denies the existence of consciousness. He continues to use the word, but he means something different by it. For him, it refers only to third-person phenomena, not to the first-person conscious feelings and experiences we all have. For Dennett there is no difference between us humans and complex zombies who lack any inner feelings, because we are all just complex zombies. ...I regard his view as self-refuting because it denies the existence of the data which a theory of consciousness is supposed to explain...Here is the paradox of this exchange: I am a conscious reviewer consciously answering the objections of an author who gives every indication of being consciously and puzzlingly angry. I do this for a readership that I assume is conscious. How then can I take seriously his claim that consciousness does not really exist?" - John Searle, Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Language, University of California, Berkeley.

Nobody is begging the premise. Unless you're a philosophical zombie then you know damn well that you're conscious. You're just denying the obvious because you want to stay faithful to physicalism which is just retarded.

>consciousness is objective
>we perceive

pick one. If there is no 1st person subjective experience then we perceive absolutely nothing. There is no we, there is no I, there are no thoughts or experiences or qualia or anything.

>Rocks don't have a means to respond to stimuli.

They're just another physical object just like another. They're not in control of anything, they merely have forces being responded on to them just like ourselves, right...?

>Semantics solved Philosophy

/thread

Dunno if trolling. If not, please elaborate.

Read:

We can alter your consciousness through matter, be it via drugs, or physical trauma. We can similarly, completely suspend it, and do so regularly, in hospitals, in such a way that even no sensation of passage of time is experienced.

We have machines that can, to a limited degree, read your mind. They can tell if you've seen an object or visited a place before. They can tell which of a narrow set of objects you are thinking of. They can even tell if you intend to press a button, before you press a button, so far before you are conscious of the decision that they can prevent you from doing so.

Emergence, motherfuckers! An individual ant is a stupid, helpless, thing - but a bunch of ants make a colony, and colonies get shit done. Similarly, an individual neuron is useless, but enough of them can give rise to consciousness.

And conversely, take enough away, or configure enough of them in a certain way, and you will lose that same consciousness, either temporarily or permanently.

You can talk about souls all you want, but all evidence suggests that consciousness has a material basis, as there's no function left for the soul that cannot be altered or eradicated in the material. It's not dualism, so much as the mind and body are one, they are a system that supports consciousness, until they break down. Folks are just rebelling against basic reality in an attempt to make things seem more fantastic than they are, while simultaneously removing much of the fundamental wonder of reality.

>rare picture of Searle arguing with Dennett

>implying matter isn't conscious

What would a scientific explanation of consciousness even look like??

A lot of them are non-reductive physicalists aka crypto-dualists

>c-c-circular reasoning!
This would be a lot more reasonable if you actually backed up your points, but you're not doing so

>You're assuming that consciousness is distinct from behavior and brain activity
No one thinks this. Not even Descartes thought this. The question is, is it reducible to unconscious, lower-level brain states? The obvious answer is no, but I'll let you keep memeing

Matter is the only reason we know consciousness exists. In other words, the subject cannot construct a constitutive definition of itself without an object of perception, i.e. a phenomenon.

Back to your solipsistic dungeon, Berkeley

>it's a "I've never actually read Wittgenstein but I'm gonna pull his name out to claim everything is semantics [even though this isn't what he argued and more like the exact opposite of what he argued]" episode

Thanks for the putdown, Jacobi

I'd like to think that most people here understand that the Twin Philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, represent the height of our metaphysical knowledge.

I can't imagine there's a literal materialist here on Veeky Forums.

Do you HONESTLY think that someone like Descartes, who was very knowledgeable in medicine and basically created the modern scientific worldview, thought that the brain was nothing but packing foam?

Nigga don't try to argue against a position you don't understand

>all evidence suggests that consciousness has a material basis
Can you show me?

Also correlations of mental events with brain states does not mean that mental events can be reduced to, or are equivalent with, brain states. In fact, a LOT of evidence has been found against a 1-1 correspondence (e.g. pain without c-fibers firing, c-fibers firing without pain)

materialism is straight-up false

they're moved the goalposts to "physicalism"

>le libet experiment meme

The "causal closure" argument is as circular as arguments get. Fuck off with this semantic shit Jaegwon

>what is samadhi

western philosophy lmao

>>all evidence suggests that consciousness has a material basis
>Can you show me?
Already did - or are you asking for links to all those examples, some of which you should have experienced for yourself by now.

>Also correlations of mental events with brain states does not mean that mental events can be reduced to, or are equivalent with, brain states. In fact, a LOT of evidence has been found against a 1-1 correspondence (e.g. pain without c-fibers firing, c-fibers firing without pain)
Without a corresponding pattern of pain in the brain? For that I'd need a link, though it'd also have to rule out psychosomatic effects and hypochondria, which generally, but not always, include those. It's not as if you can't report pain without feeling it, or can't feel pain without having injury.

But no, you aren't just foam, you are the most complex system known to exist in the universe, giving rise to the most complex experience in the known universe. Break that system, however, and you break with it. Alter that system, and you are altered along with it. Never seen any solid reason to discount that.

>are you asking for links to all those examples
where?? show me where you even gave the example? God help me if you're the guy who brought up the Libet experiment

>But no, you aren't just foam, you are the most complex system known to exist in the universe, giving rise to the most complex experience in the known universe. Break that system, however, and you break with it. Alter that system, and you are altered along with it. Never seen any solid reason to discount that.
no fucking shit
t. epiphenomenalist or panpsychist (it changes day to day)

the fact that mental states are very closely intertwined with brain states is beyond question. the idea that consciousness can be simply reduced to some combination of brain states is very questionable

You would not be able to act meditatively on your consciousness if your consciousness did not exist in a body.

*hits your knee with a hammer and your calf moves*

guiz this LITERALLY PROVES that ALL MENTAL STATES are ENTIRELY PHYSJCAL and GOD DOESNT EXIST and free will is and ILLUSION and morality is like all relative and shit

now that ive solved the mind body problem, i will go watch rick and morty now

>where??
In the same post you replied to >he idea that consciousness can be simply reduced to some combination of brain states is very questionable
If brain states alter experience and experience alters brain states... Where does that leave you? Why would one assume anything else?

If you started pulling pieces of an engine block out of a car until it breaks, would you assume it could run without an engine? Seems we do not make this leap of logic with any other emergent system. Such systems maybe more than the sum of their parts, but they do not function without them.

>In the same post you replied to

"guys science proves me right just trust me on this one"

>If brain states alter experience and experience alters brain states... Where does that leave you? Why would one assume anything else?
There's no way you could possibly infer the existence of phenomena or their character from any brain scan. If phenomena can't be physically described then they are - GASP - not physical. Unless you're gonna pull some weak trivial "consciousness is physical because I define the physical as everything that exists" memery

>If you started pulling pieces of an engine block out of a car until it breaks, would you assume it could run without an engine? Seems we do not make this leap of logic with any other emergent system. Such systems maybe more than the sum of their parts, but they do not function without them.
NO ONE ARGUES THIS. NO ONE. Why are you attacking a strawman? How much philosophy of mind have you read?

>hurr if I throw my phone in the toilet it breaks therefore there is no such thing as a "cellular network" checkmate theists