Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5

What's More Difficult to Believe?

#11
Zinjanthropos Offline
(Sep 23, 2017 10:35 PM)OSyne Wrote:
(Sep 23, 2017 07:10 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote:
Quote:How is an eternal god different from an eternal universe some argue to avoid a beginning altogether? Just the veneer of science? 
Personally, I have no trouble seeing god's origin, like creation itself, as ex nihilo. 

I have no problem with that since many people tend to think everything (that would include us) came from nothing. I have trouble with coming from nothing fully equipped and omni everything. What wonderful and fantastic process could have occurred for that to happen?
The exact same process Guth (the father of inflationary cosmology) describes as the "ultimate free lunch". If you can get a whole universe from nothing, why not something similarly as grand? Granted, a more nuanced description of god may be more conducive.

If my imagination counts as nothing (hold the jokes please) then I know I can do this. What kind of God do you want? I'm taking orders. Wink
Reply
#12
Magical Realist Offline
Quote:Of course it is, but the point is that you are just as unconcerned about its origin as Christians are the origin of god.

Why should reality have an origin? What lies outside of reality such that it could be an origin? Reality just is. And unlike a God, it is immediately evident. There is nothing else and certainly no need to posit anything else.
Reply
#13
Syne Offline
(Sep 23, 2017 10:54 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: Reality  just is. And unlike a God, it is immediately evident. There is nothing else and certainly no need to posit anything else.

Really? Subjective experience of anyone but you is "immediately evident"? Science doesn't even have a tentative hypothesis to explain qualia. Considering we experience all reality through our subjective perception, that's a very large something else that definitely does beg a posited explanation.

But hey, if you're happy regurgitating what the materialist priests tell you...and desperately trying to ignore all else...good luck with that. Wink
Reply
#14
Magical Realist Offline
Quote:Really? Subjective experience of anyone but you is "immediately evident"? Science doesn't even have a tentative hypothesis to explain qualia. Considering we experience all reality through our subjective perception, that's a very large something else that definitely does beg a posited explanation.

I said reality is immediately evident. Do you know what reality is? It is self-evident as well and our very act of consciousness assumes it. EOS.
Reply
#15
Syne Offline
(Sep 24, 2017 12:36 AM)Magical Realist Wrote:
Quote:Really? Subjective experience of anyone but you is "immediately evident"? Science doesn't even have a tentative hypothesis to explain qualia. Considering we experience all reality through our subjective perception, that's a very large something else that definitely does beg a posited explanation.

I said reality is immediately evident. Do you know what reality is? It is self-evident as well and our very act of consciousness assumes it. EOS.

So...qualia isn't real? Dodgy
Or are you claiming qualia is "immediately evident"? Huh
Reply
#16
confused2 Online
I get the distinct impression qualia were invented for the express purpose of generating argument about whether or not they exist. Unfertile ground IMHO.
Reply
#17
Syne Offline
Really? You have no subjective experience? You're just a stimulus-response automaton?
Reply
#18
C C Offline
(Sep 24, 2017 02:01 PM)confused2 Wrote: I get the distinct impression qualia were invented for the express purpose of generating argument about whether or not they exist. Unfertile ground IMHO.


I'm never exactly sure whether philosophers and the scientists who venture into such intend "qualia" to also concern the capacity of manifestation itself or it is purely quibbling over the content of experience (the specific qualitative characteristics and whether or not they are being "properly" conceived). If it is the latter, then from the late 20th century onward qualia probably have become a distraction from the broader issue of the former. When backed into a corner, the average physicalist or materialist will readily admit that after a brain returns to being non-alive or is non-functioning slash poorly organized matter once again, then the "stuff" composing it natively and universally lacks any empirical and intellectual evidence of itself even existing. Just absence of everything -- not even the presence and cognition of nothing, or even random nonsensical "noise" flaring up intermittently. (Exceptions are Galen Strawson's version of materialism.)

There are at least three "explanations" of experience (the visual, aural, tactile, etc manifestations we're confronted in consciousness with, whether in extrospective or introspective context):

1. Incremental development. Which equates to pan-proto-experientialism (a milder subcategory of panpsychism). Since it entails by meaning a primitive precursor for experience which is gradually manipulated by evolution into a greater or higher degree of complexity.  

2. Denialism. Denial that we even have experiences (i.e., we're all philosophical zombies suffering from a verbal, conceptual, or language based hallucination; a re-defining of what hallucination means or what it would otherwise be dependent upon in the first place).  

3. Brute emergence. Where a process or pattern of activity simply conjures experience as a brute add-on to the physical sciences. IOW, it does not incrementally fall out of accepted and recognized properties of matter, but magically yet predictably appears according to an as yet undiscovered natural principle. The vulnerability of this "conjuring" view is obvious, since it leaves the door open to dualism via lack of explaining experience to a deeper substrate. Experience is "summoned" rather than incrementally produced from fundamental / simpler characteristics of the universe already in play.(Compare with everything else about the biological level not floating on it own, but arising from and dependent upon the chemist's and physicist's levels of interest).    

All three choices are crazy from some rival group's perspective or specific restrictive dogma about materialism / physicalism. Thus the reason why curious people otherwise eager to solve anything suddenly become dullards when it comes to the "hard problem of consciousness". Just dodge around it, make excuses, whistle and distract attention elsewhere, bait and switch, etc.

- - -
Reply
#19
confused2 Online
CC Wrote:Just dodge around it, make excuses, whistle and distract attention elsewhere, bait and switch, etc.
You got me. I just can't get into the qualia zone.
Reply
#20
Syne Offline
Wow, a true philosophical zombie. O.O
Reply


Possibly Related Threads…
Thread Author Replies Views Last Post
  British people more likely to believe in ghosts than a Creator, YouGov survey finds C C 2 762 Mar 29, 2016 07:31 PM
Last Post: Magical Realist



Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)