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> The first big leap is considering experience to be a continuum from humans down to inorganic matter. This is stretching the meaning of 'experience'. If I walk

> The first big leap is considering experience to be a continuum from humans down to inorganic matter. This is stretching the meaning of 'experience'. If I walk on snow, does it experience deformation, or does it just deform? This is the part where materialism has the burden of proof to explain a mechanism for how, suddenly, snow doesn't experience de-formation. You get it. You've made the logical link of connections from human down to snow, and you see no mechanism for a sudden loss of the ability to experience. The rational answer is to say that provided what we know about the universe right now, it seems that there is nothing that does not have the property of experience. The only other rational answer is solipsism because there's no real evidence that anything other than your self has any experience, but that's no fun and doesn't have any interesting conclusions.

jhedwards 7y ago
I don't get this. I have an experience because I have specialized organs for delivering _information_ to a central information processing unit which can evaluate the experience in a way that is _temporally decoupled_ from the event itself. There is no such mechanism in snow, it doesn't convert "deformation" into data separately from the physical fact of its deformation.
- Lambdanaut 7y ago
  What you have are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and a few other pieces of earth, water, and air that are dancing around each other in a very complex way in order to dance up a very complex experience that has interesting properties that the snow does not exhibit in its experience of simple deformation. Your very special organs are nothing but melted snow(water) deforming against broken up rock(carbon), repeatedly, in beautiful fractal patterns that have emerged through evolutionary processes over billions of years. These evolutionary processes that turned Snow into You. The _information_ is higher order deformation.
  - karmakaze 7y ago
    So redefine experience = process? That's all I can parse out of it.
    - Lambdanaut 7y ago
      Cool, that's a start. Another implication is that you're a lot older and you've experienced a lot more than you identify with at the moment in the span of time identifying as this human system. I won't give you more than you can chew. Accepting that process=experience is already a huge paradigm shift. If you're interested in deeper implications, it's better if you come to them without anyone handing them over.
mech1234 7y ago
Most people's interpretation of Occam's Razor would probably disagree with you. But more importantly- the distinction you are making does not explain anything. Regardless of whether inorganic matter has experiences, there aren't any observable phenomena that have outcomes that are effected. You can make a claim one way or the other, and the world behaves the same regardless. I tend to fall toward the stance of logical positivism on this one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism

jhedwards 7y ago

I don't get this. I have an experience because I have specialized organs for delivering _information_ to a central information processing unit which can evaluate the experience in a way that is _temporally decoupled_ from the event itself. There is no such mechanism in snow, it doesn't convert "deformation" into data separately from the physical fact of its deformation.

Lambdanaut 7y ago
What you have are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and a few other pieces of earth, water, and air that are dancing around each other in a very complex way in order to dance up a very complex experience that has interesting properties that the snow does not exhibit in its experience of simple deformation. Your very special organs are nothing but melted snow(water) deforming against broken up rock(carbon), repeatedly, in beautiful fractal patterns that have emerged through evolutionary processes over billions of years. These evolutionary processes that turned Snow into You. The _information_ is higher order deformation.
- karmakaze 7y ago
  So redefine experience = process? That's all I can parse out of it.
  - Lambdanaut 7y ago
    Cool, that's a start. Another implication is that you're a lot older and you've experienced a lot more than you identify with at the moment in the span of time identifying as this human system. I won't give you more than you can chew. Accepting that process=experience is already a huge paradigm shift. If you're interested in deeper implications, it's better if you come to them without anyone handing them over.

mech1234 7y ago

Most people's interpretation of Occam's Razor would probably disagree with you. But more importantly- the distinction you are making does not explain anything. Regardless of whether inorganic matter has experiences, there aren't any observable phenomena that have outcomes that are effected. You can make a claim one way or the other, and the world behaves the same regardless. I tend to fall toward the stance of logical positivism on this one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism