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trane_project 2 hours ago

I can't read minds. I know I have one and you know you have one. That's enough for both of us to know that mind is a real phenomenon.

As for why any materialist explanations are unsatisfactory is that even if you managed to map every physical interaction in a sentient being, you are only mapping physical phenomena. Maybe that is enough to account for how that maps into the contents of the experience.

I am not arguing about how the contents are generated though. I am arguing about the "field" of subjective experiencing, which I called a mind. How is that generated from a set of aggregates that has no subjective experience of any kind? The simplest answer is that it is not, even if those material aggregates are deeply involved in how the contents presented to this field are generated.

Maybe you want to argue that salt "tastes" something when it is dissolved in water, but materialism assumes that simple matter does not have any experience of mental events.

thepasch an hour ago | parent [-]

> I can't read minds. I know I have one and you know you have one. That's enough for both of us to know that mind is a real phenomenon.

So that's a religious argument, then. It's real because enough people believe that it is.

> How is that generated from a set of aggregates that has no subjective experience of any kind?

How can a pile of sand and rocks smushed together real close play back video? How can it produce a process that understands natural language?

> The simplest answer is that it is not

You keep saying "simple" when what I think you're actually saying is "easy." They are not equivalent things. In the same sense that I think the "hard" problem of consciousness should really be called the "complex" problem.

> Maybe you want to argue that salt "tastes" something when it is dissolved in water

At no point did I ever intend to argue any such thing. I suggest you put away the strawman and actually engage with what I'm saying.

trane_project an hour ago | parent [-]

The only religious argument is materialism. It's real because enough people have convinced themselves that it's "scientific". Even though there is no proof whatsoever, no solid hypothesis, no experiments to prove how matter acquires subjective experience, it's incoherent to the very foundations of its position (that matter is dead), and has not made any progress in answering the "hard problem" (which is just someone pointing out the incoherence). It also makes people argue that they don't have a mind, that asserting they have a mind is a religious statement, or that they have some trouble understanding what a mind is.

> How can a pile of sand and rocks smushed together real close play back video? How can it produce a process that understands natural language?

The laws of physics are enough to explain this because no one is arguing that computers are experiencing anything when they play a video or generate a set of numbers that are displayed as natural language.

> At no point did I ever intend to argue any such thing. I suggest you put away the strawman and actually engage with what I'm saying.

Sorry, I phrased that badly by using "you" when I did not mean that. I meant to say that if someone (not you) wanted to argue that simple matter has some sort of experience, then at least the position would make some sense. But materialism assumes that simple matter does not have any subjective experience of any kind.

Anyway, I won't be able to convince you that you have a mind, so I'll peace out.