« first day (2 days earlier)   

NotThatGuy
NotThatGuy
12:01 AM
@Sismetic I don't think this discussion is going anywhere. All of this just seems to come down to fundamental assumptions you're making, which I don't accept, and which seems to directly be disproven by demonstrable reality and basic logic (you probably disagree, but that's still where I'm at). It's all wrapped up in the abstract and in ontology and in the conceptual, and you're not talking about reality, but also you ARE talking about reality...
Most of my comments are just trying to break down all your big words into some underlying meaning, but I don't find anything there when I do that, and doing that is exhausting and doesn't seem to get us any closer to either of us better understanding the other person. This doesn't feel much like a discussion, given how much work I'm doing to try to relate what you're saying back to anything I can know to be true, and I'm not convinced you have any such grounding for what you're saying.
Ultimately you've basically just assumed your conclusion by presupposing that only minds can model minds. You've wrapped that up into 16 points and subpoints, and lots of talk of ontology and whatnot, but your argument seems to boil down to just 3 points: B1. only minds can model minds, B2. under materialism, minds model non-minds, B3. therefore materialism is false (or "absurd"). I'm obviously not accepting B1 at this point in time.
It seems like you want to discuss everything AROUND B1, and you've restated B1 in 50 different ways, but I haven't moved even a fraction of an inch closer to accepting that premise, or even seeing why YOU accept that premise, beyond just assuming it to be true. Every comment is just 10 steps back into the abstract, and I'm just too tired to keep trying to drag things back to reality.
 
2 hours later…
Sismetic
Sismetic
2:16 AM
I agree we've reached an impasse.

You claim I'm making assumptions, but the ones in my syllogism which you've highlighted I've clarified and changed, and after that no direct response has been given. There are a lot of things I've said to which there have been no direct response. One of which being that the "assumptions" I'm making, are not just assumptions but core definitions and tenets of any physicalism/materialism, and core elements that are the very condition of intelligibility(conceptualization).
 
2 hours later…
NotThatGuy
NotThatGuy
3:47 AM
"I can't even begin to conceive of [materialism] coherently" - and I can't conceive of idealism coherently. I don't know how anyone can experience reality as anything OTHER than materialistic - whatever you're experiencing, which you say "we necessarily experience" certainly isn't what I seem to be experiencing.

Idealism seems woefully underdefined, with consciousness existing in some unknown way, in some unknown place, caused by some unknown thing, and it generates our imagining of this specific reality for some unknown reason, and it raises a whole bunch of questions about why there's su…
 
10 hours later…
NotThatGuy
NotThatGuy
1:58 PM
Also, I don't have a fundamental aversion to any abstract or conceptual way of looking at reality. My point is that your argument is TOO abstract. My purpose with philosophical discussion (outside of moral philosophy) is to figure out what's true about reality. What you seem to be doing is abstracting away the nuance that exists in reality and making further claims about the abstract that seems to have no correspondence whatsoever in reality, hence: too abstract.
Regarding being on a philosophy forum: I think there's a lot of word-saladry going on in philosophy, and I generally just leave people who engage in that to their own devices. But I posted an answer here to defend materialism, because I think it's the most reasonable position, by far. And while I pointed out that ungrounded ontology is entirely uncompelling to me, I also engaged with your argument itself by pointing out the specific premises I have an issue with, and I explained why.
 
3 hours later…
NotThatGuy
NotThatGuy
4:55 PM
* Also, we see material reality through our material eyes, we hear through our material ears, we smell through our material noses, and those (followed by reasoning) are pretty much the only tools we have for gaining knowledge about anything that might exist outside of ourselves, and for how and where we might exist, while idealism dismisses those as mere illusion. It's also questionable whether consciousness can even exist or even makes sense without some sensory experience of things material.
We seem to learn language through our ears, which shapes our ability to think on a very fundamental level. The emergence of new consciousnesses seem to correspond exactly to the material process of childbirth (at least if you hold that other consciousnesses exist; solipsism would be a whole other can of worms with way too much ego attached). All of this makes perfect sense under materialism, but idealism has to make all sorts of leaps to make sense of that.
I don't know that anyone has even tried to explain that, not that I'm familiar enough with the literature on the subject. But any attempt to do so would probably also just be a whole lot of unjustified assertions, because that's what idealism is at its core. Meanwhile, materialism provisionally holds what we experience to be real, which leads to a coherent model with a whole lot fewer leaps to explain why things are the way they are (although I acknowledge that you disagree about the coherence).

« first day (2 days earlier)