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tonyrey
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Please present statements that can be discussed…
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inocente
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Oh dear, how mind-bogglingly pedantic.
OK, may it please your lordship, the videos linked in the first post below are physical evidence of animal behavior which clearly and irrefutably disproves for all time points 6, 7 and 8 in the second post below.
forums.catholic-questions.org/showpost.php?p=10135140&postcount=18
forums.catholic-questions.org/showpost.php?p=10135181&postcount=55
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tonyrey
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Please make precise statements that can be refuted. If the evidence cannot be presented as philosophical reasoning it is irrelevant on this forum.
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tonyrey
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…to control and change ourselves.
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inocente
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Heh, that’s not in the forum rules as well you know. I made a very precise statement. All who have eyes to see can look at the evidence for that statement, two pieces of which were made by that nice Sir David Attenborough and the other by a leading primatologist.
:compcoff:
The fact that animals engage in cheating, cooperation and fair play proves that your claims in post #55 are false. Your argument is proven wrong by direct evidence of real animal behavior. What’s the big deal, you can’t avoid that by mystic logic tricks, can we please move on now?
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tonyrey
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NB All remarks irrelevant to the discussion are deleted.
Precisely** how **do cheating, co-operation and “fair play” prove my claims are false?
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Sair
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So our bodies are not part of our selves now?
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Sair
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But an appeal to ignorance is exactly what you are using as the basis of your argument. It goes pretty much like this - “We cannot possibly imagine how rational thought and decision-making etc etc could arise from biological processes, so we might as well call a halt to investigation, assume they don’t and just call rationality some kind of magical extra that rides along with our physical bodies.”
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tonyrey
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- Animal intelligence does not prove animals have insight or are rational beings.
- They simply remember previous situations and react accordingly.
- They would be lost if they were in a completely novel situation whereas we would apply general rules and principles to solve the problem.
- They do not have the power of abstract thought.
- Their language is not syntactical.
- Even with human instruction animal behaviour has not developed to any significant extent.
- They are not morally or legally responsible for their actions because they lack the power of self-control.
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tonyrey
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The self is intangible whereas the body is not. “**My **body” is quite different from “myself”.
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tonyrey
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Robert_Sock
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Being unreasonable creates cognitive dissonance which is aversive for most people. The aversion is behavioral in psychology and involves operant conditioning. The there is the Freudian view that being unreasonable goes against one’s conscience (super ego).Is there a reason or not? Please feel free to answer the question in any way you like (reasonably of course). My own view is:
- Every reasonable person accepts conclusions based on probability.
- Probability is not a human invention.
- Probability describes physical events.
- The description consists of human symbols.
- The description is accurate whatever symbols are used.
- The description is based on understanding events.
- It is not an accident we can understand events.
- It is not an accident events can be understood.
- There is a reason why events are understandable and understood.
- It is because reality is reasonable - and not absurd!
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Sair
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You can’t support your own hypothesis except through your own faith that humans must be somehow ‘more’ than our physical existence (despite swathes of evidence to the contrary) and by damning as useless the ongoing attempts by scientists to reach an explanation of how consciousness and its various functions work. And so you fall back on accusing your opponents of the very same kinds of errors you make in your own attempts at argument; all the while dodging the real point at issue - you have no evidence whatsoever that the mind is something other than the manifestation of a functional, living brain. There’s no deification here - except of your magical ‘something more’ that you claim exists, but cannot define or demonstrate or explain. You will never admit that you are essentially employing a ‘god of the gaps’ argument, but it is what it is.
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Sair
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Why the abovementioned argument simply doesn’t work - that is, the argument that ‘blind, purposeless particles’ can’t give rise to consciousness - is that scientists have already demonstrated the manifold phenomena to which these ‘blind, purposeless particles’ do, indeed, give rise. There’s no reason, except the dogged belief that humans have to be a bit more special than everything else on earth, to suppose that consciousness should be something different that - while the jury is still well and truly out, I might add - just can’t be explained in natural, physical terms.
The other important point to remember is that, yes, science deals with natural phenomena - phenomena that can be detected, if not in themselves, then through their effects upon other phenomena. If the actions of a conscious human mind can be detected - which even supernaturalists will acknowledge - then they are in principle susceptible to scientific investigation.
Oh, but this just won’t do, say the supernaturalists - science can’t tell us anything about minds and consciousness, because even though we can see and feel and measure the effects of these things, there’s something more at work that science can’t touch.
So pony up, if you know what this ‘something more’ is. What is it, exactly, and how do you know? By what means can you tell that the observable effects of consciousness are produced by the ‘something more’ you believe exists, and not by completely natural processess that we have not yet fully investigated or explained? How do you have the confidence to substitute one unknown quantity for another?
The other important point to remember is that, yes, science deals with natural phenomena - phenomena that can be detected, if not in themselves, then through their effects upon other phenomena. If the actions of a conscious human mind can be detected - which even supernaturalists will acknowledge - then they are in principle susceptible to scientific investigation.
Oh, but this just won’t do, say the supernaturalists - science can’t tell us anything about minds and consciousness, because even though we can see and feel and measure the effects of these things, there’s something more at work that science can’t touch.
So pony up, if you know what this ‘something more’ is. What is it, exactly, and how do you know? By what means can you tell that the observable effects of consciousness are produced by the ‘something more’ you believe exists, and not by completely natural processess that we have not yet fully investigated or explained? How do you have the confidence to substitute one unknown quantity for another?
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tonyrey
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Bpth views are correct but neither explains the existence of persons as opposed to animals without a conscience or cognitive assonance.
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tonyrey
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My view is based not on faith but on the fact that when we are reasonable we rely on reason rather than blind events to reach our conclusions and make our decisions.
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The “damning” only exists in your imagination! The only scientists who attempt to explain how consciousness work are those who have **faith **in the power of neuroscience to explain all human behaviour, i.e. materialists. They are entitled to their faith as much as anyone else but that does not imply they are right or will succeed.
Ad hominem! You really must learn how to discuss a topic objectively without making personal comments…
The sole primary evidence we have is our mental activity **on which all our subsequent reasoning is based **- including the inference that physical objects like the brain exist… It is worth consulting the on-line article Two Dogmas of Empiricism by Willard Van Orman Quine, an eminent atheist philosopher.
I have not made any claim that “'something more” exists but simply pointed out the inadequacy of the “Matter has created everything” hypothesis.
Another ad hominem! Please indicate where I have employed any other argument apart from the “Matter has created everything” hypothesis.
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Sair
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False dichotomy. See my above post and explain exactly why you ‘know’ that reason is not the product of ‘blind, purposeless particles’.
False. You’ve made it perfectly clear whenever the subject has come up that you believe scientific investigation of consciousness to be futile.
If you really mean this, you are sadly misinformed. Neuroscientists investigate psychological phenomena because they seek to understand it. If there is evidence of some kind of magical woo or a soul at work in consciousness, the first people to confirm it will be neuroscientists. Supernaturalists just sit on their haunches and say, “It’s the mysterious ‘something more’, so just accept it and down tools on the study.” That gets us nowhere.
As I’ve said before, commenting upon the tactics you use in discussion does not amount to an attack upon your person. It’s an observation based upon the evidence you provide in your posts.
Quine was arguing for a more comprehensive and all-embracing empiricism, not solipsism. If you assume that neuroscience is solely concerned with ‘reducing’ mental activity to the actions of particles and energy, then you are actually succumbing to one of the ‘dogmas’ that Quine rejected.
Oh, okay - so you’re saying you have no idea of your own on this subject, but you still know that my ideas are wrong?
Observations upon your arguments are not ad hominems. If I said your arguments were invalid because you’re stupid or because you’re ignorant or because you look funny, that would be an ad hominem, and I have said none of these things. Saying that your arguments are invalid because they are, indeed, invalid is not an ad hominem. As I’ve now pointed out again, above, you are saying - more or less directly - that in your opinion (and in the absence of the evidence that is continually asked for but never provided), the materialist approach is invalid therefore there’s ‘something more’ at work that has to explain consciousness - hence ‘god of the gaps’: as long as you maintain that physical phenomena can’t explain consciousness, there’s room to invest faith in some kind of supernaturalist explanation. That is the foundation of your argument, is it not? If not, then what exactly are you arguing in the first place? Why not just wait and see whether the materialist, scientific approach actually yields the kind of results that help explain what’s really going on? Why assume that any endeavour is doomed before it’s completed?
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Robert_Sock
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Are you saying there are people with cognitive dissonance or without a conscience who are reasonable? I’m not sure they exists.Bpth views are correct but neither explains the existence of persons as opposed to animals without a conscience or cognitive assonance.
But do keep in mind that with behaviorism we can take any 2 groups of people and condition them to be either reasonable or unreasonable simply by using rewards and punishments.Moreover, with classical conditioning (Pavlov) we can probably use evoked emotion to control how ‘reasonable’ a person is.
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tonyrey
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