Re: Materialism is absurd
Posted: June 8th, 2019, 3:51 pm
Consul wrote: ↑June 8th, 2019, 9:25 amAgain you are mixing the easy and hard problems together, and also throw in panpsychism, and then conclude that therefore materialism is the best candidate, so you make about three errors at once.Atla wrote: ↑June 8th, 2019, 4:16 am2. Since there is ZERO scientific evidence that qualia is a restricted to neural networks, the best scientific explanation is that qualia isn't restricted to neural networks.Surely not, since there is zero scientific evidence for the panpsychistic assertion that consciousness is independent of animal brains and organisms and also occurs outside the animal kingdom; and there is sufficient scientific evidence for the brain-dependence of animal consciousness. Of course, panpsychists can reply that it doesn't follow that nonanimal consciousness is brain-dependent. But…
- there is zero scientific evidence that qualia is restricted to neural networks: ruling out the materialist explanations of qualia
- and all scientific evidence shows that animal consciousness (not counting qualia) can be equated or correlated with animal brains: ruling out the kind of panpsychist explanations of consciousness you mentioned
Panpsychism is a lot closer to the correct picture than materialism, but it too is just a crude dualistic view from Western philosophy. Taking the material, and a distorted mental, and having them everywhere.
"Then there is the question of the need for a brain. We normally suppose that one of these is pretty useful when it comes to having a mind, indeed a sine qua non (even if it’s made of silicon); we suppose that, at a minimum, a physical object has to exhibit the right degree of complexity before it can make a mind. But the panpsychist is having none of it: you get to have a mind well before even organic cells come on the market, before molecules indeed. Actually, you get mentality—experience—at the point of the Big Bang, fifteen billion years before brains are minted. So brains are a kind of contingency, a kind of pointless luxury when it comes to possessing mental states. It becomes puzzling why we have them at all, and why they are so big and fragile; atoms don’t need them, so why do we? And this puzzle only becomes more severe when we remind ourselves that the panpsychist has to believe in full-throttle pre-cerebral mentality— genuine experiences of red and pangs of hunger and spasms of lust. As Eddington puts it, the mental world that we are acquainted with in introspection is a window onto the world of the physical universe, and the two are qualitatively alike: introspection tells us what matter is like from the inside, whether it is in our brain or not. But then the brain isn’t necessary for the kind of experiential property it reveals to us; it is only necessary for the revealing to occur. What is revealed by introspection is spread over the entire physical universe. In fact, it would not be stretching a point to say that all bits of matter—from strings, to quarks, to atoms, to molecules, to cells, to organs, to animals—are themselves brains. There can be brains without brains! But if so, why bother with brains?"Again totally mixing together the easy problems (mental states, "contents" of experience) with the hard problem (qualia and experience itself) and arriving at nonsense.
By the way plants almost certainly have rudimentary sensations as well.