I, for my part, was led to the conclusion that the scientific-materialist perspective was wrong, or at least grossly incomplete. It seems logical as science is essentially the art of useful fiction: we make up the simplest story that predicts the right answers and use it until it breaks (and sometimes beyond that and just avoid the points we know it breaks at).
The distinction between materialist and non-materialist is not that the non-materialist believes science is merely incomplete, as any materialist would agree with that stance; it is that he denies the very ability of science to investigate certain effects, and further, he believes those effects to be important and not mere hypothetical possibilities.
Contrast this to the materialist, who while he accepts that fundamentally there is a limit to what we can know about our universe (we're within the system, after all, and it's provably impossible to know everything about the workings of a closed system from within), still believes that we can figure out most of the important things by observing what we see around us and experimenting.
In particular the materialist doesn't think there's anything so special about humans that their workings are not completely susceptible to scientific investigation. Usually the non-materialist thinks that there's something magical happening in living creatures that makes them fundamentally opaque to observation and description.
Since it is impossible for anyone other than myself to verify that I exist as anything more than a series of chemical reactions (ie. I actually feel), it is a difficult problem to work with.
I'd argue that it's also impossible for you to verify this fact. Who's to say that you don't just think you actually feel things but in reality it's just your brain playing a trick on itself?
Taking that further (and getting into the definition problem others have mentioned), who's to say there's any difference at all between the delusion and the perception of experience?
>it is that he denies the very ability of science to investigate certain effects, and further, he believes those effects to be important and not mere hypothetical possibilities.
I'm not a materialist but I don't deny the ability of science to investigate consciousness. I think it's an open question whether or not science will shed any light on it.
I'm not sure why you think that materialism is a necessary assumption for doing science. Science is generally supposed to start free of any huge metaphysical assumptions about the nature of reality and draw its conclusions via observation and experiment. The balance of evidence might turn out to support materialism or it might not. At most, I think scientists might be entitled to assume what Russell called "neutral monism" -- the notion that there is basically only one kind of "stuff", divorced from the notion that there is anything particularly "physical" about it (whatever that means).
>I'd argue that it's also impossible for you to verify this fact. Who's to say that you don't just think you actually feel things
>but in reality it's just your brain playing a trick on itself?
>Taking that further (and getting into the definition problem others have mentioned), who's to say there's any difference
>at all between the delusion and the perception of experience?
Because to think such a thing way would be qualia in and of itself...
Comments
I, for my part, was led to the conclusion that the scientific-materialist perspective was wrong, or at least grossly incomplete. It seems logical as science is essentially the art of useful fiction: we make up the simplest story that predicts the right answers and use it until it breaks (and sometimes beyond that and just avoid the points we know it breaks at).
The distinction between materialist and non-materialist is not that the non-materialist believes science is merely incomplete, as any materialist would agree with that stance; it is that he denies the very ability of science to investigate certain effects, and further, he believes those effects to be important and not mere hypothetical possibilities.
Contrast this to the materialist, who while he accepts that fundamentally there is a limit to what we can know about our universe (we're within the system, after all, and it's provably impossible to know everything about the workings of a closed system from within), still believes that we can figure out most of the important things by observing what we see around us and experimenting.
In particular the materialist doesn't think there's anything so special about humans that their workings are not completely susceptible to scientific investigation. Usually the non-materialist thinks that there's something magical happening in living creatures that makes them fundamentally opaque to observation and description.
Since it is impossible for anyone other than myself to verify that I exist as anything more than a series of chemical reactions (ie. I actually feel), it is a difficult problem to work with.
I'd argue that it's also impossible for you to verify this fact. Who's to say that you don't just think you actually feel things but in reality it's just your brain playing a trick on itself?
Taking that further (and getting into the definition problem others have mentioned), who's to say there's any difference at all between the delusion and the perception of experience?
>it is that he denies the very ability of science to investigate certain effects, and further, he believes those effects to be important and not mere hypothetical possibilities.
I'm not a materialist but I don't deny the ability of science to investigate consciousness. I think it's an open question whether or not science will shed any light on it.
I'm not sure why you think that materialism is a necessary assumption for doing science. Science is generally supposed to start free of any huge metaphysical assumptions about the nature of reality and draw its conclusions via observation and experiment. The balance of evidence might turn out to support materialism or it might not. At most, I think scientists might be entitled to assume what Russell called "neutral monism" -- the notion that there is basically only one kind of "stuff", divorced from the notion that there is anything particularly "physical" about it (whatever that means).
>I'd argue that it's also impossible for you to verify this fact. Who's to say that you don't just think you actually feel things >but in reality it's just your brain playing a trick on itself?
>Taking that further (and getting into the definition problem others have mentioned), who's to say there's any difference >at all between the delusion and the perception of experience?
Because to think such a thing way would be qualia in and of itself...