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Correlation does not mean causation, and I am baffled that this needs be repeated here on this forum over and over again. If you throw a bottle into the televis
by namero999 6y ago
Correlation does not mean causation, and I am baffled that this needs be repeated here on this forum over and over again. If you throw a bottle into the television, are you effectively convinced that you have just disrupted the broadcast signal or do you entertain the possibility that you have simply messed up enough the proxy by which you were registering the signal? This is not woo. This is intellectual honesty. You seem skeptic and rational judging by what you write. Go all the way. We simply don't know that brain causes consciousness. We just don't, and I'm the first not happy about the possibility that it may not be the case, but I must accept rationally that there's all kind of holes in the brain-causes-consciousness narrative. By that account, for instance, every reduction in brain activity should correspond to a reduction of consciousness. Well, this is not the case, see for instance Carhart-Harris et al 2012, 2016 and many others more recently. Moreover, NDEs reports demonstrate enormous level of conscious experience in the absence of any brain activity. There's no space where to fit this empirical evidences in the causal framework.
Moreover, to believe in the fairy tale of physicalism implies accepting that the building blocks of such worldview (fundamental particles) pop up into existence out of thin air, that the universe is made mostly of "dark energy", and that experiential properties "emerge" from unconscious matter... is this the kind of woo you were referring to when you mentioned damaged reasoning ability?
- ncmncm 6y agoReally? "Fairy tale of physicalism"? What have you got against fairies? Can you prove that fairies don't exist? Can you prove that fairies are not the true manifestation of consciousness? Can you prove that you, yourself, are not a fairy who is extremely confused? Woo. Dressing up religion as sense never turns out well for religion or sense.
- namero999 6y agoAgain, it's not religion, it's intellectual honesty. I am not interested in demonstrating that consciousness is or is not woo. It's clearly something we don't understand, and at the same time I am perfectly comfortable in accepting the "placeholder" descriptions we have of the current mysteries of reality (like the above mentioned) since we can't do better right now. What I am interested into is exposing the double standards of materialists/physicalists whose world view is based on even more woo, it's way less parsimonious, leaves out the most in-your-face phenomenon we observe, and when it makes the huge mistake to venture into philosophy/metaphysics like many militant materialists like to do, it's even internally inconsistent. It's a shame, because science is not supposed to be a religion. We should be looking past our own nose tip.
- ncmncm 6y agoBS is BS is BS is BS. But, sure, flat-earth creationist moon-landing denialism is engaging and zero-calorie fun. You can twiddle away your life and not interfere with people actually, you know, doing things.
- namero999 6y agoThis is a confused comment if I have ever seen one. Well, not surprising given the line of reasoning that led to the conclusions made clear by the other comments. Have a good life.