Are sceptics sometimes irrational?

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Papus79
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Re: Are sceptics sometimes irrational?

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I just mean hierarchically. My organs are collections of cells, I'm a collection of both cells and organs. I don't think it's impossible that there are forms of consciousness that are groups of people, nations even, weather patterns, whole forests, etc., possibly the whole biome on earth, solar systems, etc.. I suggest that partly from thinking of how communication happens from cells to the brain back down to cells and how a lot of the spiritual experiences or contact with deity that people claim, clusters of synchronicity, etc. could simply be call and response with higher nodes of organization or communication with a broader subconscious load spread throughout nature.
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Re: Are sceptics sometimes irrational?

Post by Eduk »

I don't think it's impossible that there are forms of consciousness that are groups of people, nations even, weather patterns, whole forests, etc., possibly the whole biome on earth, solar systems, etc..
Well I'm agnostic on whether something like that is possible in theory. I mean I can imagine a Solaris like thing being possible or not being possible.

But I do have zero evidence for such a thing. So perhaps it is possible and perhaps it is not possible but it has not been demonstrated. The rest of what you say seems to follow on from the assumption it has been demonstrated?
of being are simply emergent channels, whether they're authentically split off of something complete in and of itself
Now I think I understand what you mean by emergent. But I'm not sure what you mean by split off of something complete?
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Re: Are sceptics sometimes irrational?

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Eduk wrote: Well I'm agnostic on whether something like that is possible in theory. I mean I can imagine a Solaris like thing being possible or not being possible.

But I do have zero evidence for such a thing. So perhaps it is possible and perhaps it is not possible but it has not been demonstrated. The rest of what you say seems to follow on from the assumption it has been demonstrated?
I'll start off here by saying it's not part of my arguments or anything I'm trying to debate on behalf of in this thread.

What I've mostly been trying to say is that I don't think consciousness, on the strength and uniqueness of it's effects, can be something that didn't at least assemble from aspects that are fundamental to the universe. It's one thing to say that a vague awareness without thought might met something that it could imprint memory on and - at some level - mind was born at least insofar as we know when enough neurons came together. To say that all of the ingredients of consciousness didn't exist until enough neurons came together and the whole thing sort of just sprang out of nothing. The examples people have given so far of things that can be fully erased are typically things orthogonal to their substrate - like certain types of information. I don't think we can say that consciousness is anything like letters written on beach sand - memory might very well could be but something as raw and by and large self-sustaining as awareness itself doesn't seem like it would quite fit that bill.

As for demonstrations of that effect - sure. I've had experiences that I cannot explain any other way. There's a lot of content out there about the human condition, human experience, or research of human experience and events that people can take or leave. There's a big difference between there being evidence in general and evidence that another person would accept. That's part of why I generally don't beat people over the head with this stuff. OTOH, while I am at least a proponent of weak emergence, IMHO it seems to be the builder of every self-sustaining system we know in one way or another (whether we'd debate they're conscious or not). What I don't think we have much example of is anything in the universe coming out of whole cloth nothing. Even the vacuum background radiation of space I have my doubts on.
Eduk wrote: Now I think I understand what you mean by emergent. But I'm not sure what you mean by split off of something complete?
That would be the exact opposite approach - ie. something like One God manifesting all things through emanation. That's why I brought up Neoplatonism - Plotinus was one of the most developed exponents of that idea. While I think it could be quite difficult to tell the difference between a system emanated from some sort of godhead and a very old animistic system that had come together in nodes at increasingly higher levels I do think the problem of evil tends to favor the second argument.

We're on a planet were living for most people and definitely for most animals means killing to eat. Impressing a mate, especially for men, often requires - if not outright displays of dominance and cruelty - the propensity in reserve to dominate other men. TBH I don't know if we'll ever throw off the worst of our atavistic behaviors or the parts of our own structure that compel us to conflate kindness and weakness. Heck, a lot of the trouble our culture seems to be in comes from our inability to grapple with what we are and our estrangement from understanding it as well as a dreamy-eyed desire to deny it and hope it goes away on its own. To me a world of that description pretty much demands a sort of consciousness that evolved, otherwise we're right up against Epicurus's arguments - ie. if it was all powerful but didn't stop evil, it's malevolent. Even for malevolence, the cold persistence of things just doesn't make sense - ie. the fiery egotism just isn't there - otherwise we couldn't not know what was out there, it would be like having a cosmic Stalin enveloping us in a Big Brother sort of gaze and monuments and edifices to that being would be about all you'd see.

-- Updated October 9th, 2017, 7:49 pm to add the following --
Papus79 wrote:To say that all of the ingredients of consciousness didn't exist until enough neurons came together and the whole thing sort of just sprang out of nothing.
Looks like I lobbed that sentence off - to say that it all sprang from nothing doesn't fit much of anything we've observed in the universe. Data's one thing, something as ubiquitous and primal as our ecosystem OTOH doesn't seem to fit the bill.
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Re: Are sceptics sometimes irrational?

Post by Eduk »

Thank you for elaborating.
There's a big difference between there being evidence in general and evidence that another person would accept.
In an ideal world that sentence wouldn't be true. For example I could say that empirical evidence is objectively true and not open to bias. But this assumes everyone is, or can, play by the same rules. It is perfectly possible to ignore empirical evidence (as we see so often). My only recommendation is that you don't ignore empirical evidence, the scientific method, critical thinking and logic. All those things are your friend even though they contradict you.

For example the argument from personal incredulity is a fallacy. Now I can't force you to care about fallacies, it is merely my recommendation that you do care about fallacies. I'm not in the slightest concerned about winning arguments but I am of the opinion that an unhappy man who is closer to their logical potential is happier than a happy man who is further from their logical potential.
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Re: Are sceptics sometimes irrational?

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Eduk wrote: In an ideal world that sentence wouldn't be true. For example I could say that empirical evidence is objectively true and not open to bias. But this assumes everyone is, or can, play by the same rules. It is perfectly possible to ignore empirical evidence (as we see so often). My only recommendation is that you don't ignore empirical evidence, the scientific method, critical thinking and logic. All those things are your friend even though they contradict you.
There's a particular problem with looking at empiricism that way - it's results from sense data and if there's a particular bulletin stating that empiricism only applies to external sense data then I suppose I missed that memo. It might not even be a particularly strong temptation to explore inwardly if science had clear and coherent things to say about the contents and elements observed, just that at this point it doesn't and aside from point at neural scans that correlate with certain thoughts or memories there's very little cataloging of the specifics of subjective experience. That's a problem for a lot of reasons - mostly that psychology still hasn't made it that far in making heads or tails of a whole lot of it and to see a world sociologically going to pieces means we probably need to check into our own structures a bit more.

I also won't deny that there's a great deal of internal experience that can be written down to rather shallow subconscious automations, dream or hypnogogic activity, and we don't have much reason to believe that there's much more to that than our nervous systems either interacting with internal environments or continuing to process residual external sense data. One clearly has to screen a lot harder with internal territories not to delude themselves and there's usually a fair stretch of agnosticism as to what said internal events mean. I wouldn't claim that I know anything for certain about the universe or even that I'm necessarily right, just that from my own experiences and studies I have to go with my opinion because for all the science I have studied I'm not able to come to the same conclusions.

Overall if someone's going to explore areas of life or historical activity that have been thrown in the discarded knowledge heap they have to do so with humility and be at least somewhat reserved in how many pieces of what they've either come to trust or take as provisional hypothesis that they'd chase people around with. Again, note that these particular points haven't been what I've debated. So far in this thread if anything I've just dogged on the idea that consciousness fully assembles from nothing. That I don't think needs Hermeticism, magic, acceptance of any collective unconscious, or any of that.
Eduk wrote:For example the argument from personal incredulity is a fallacy. Now I can't force you to care about fallacies, it is merely my recommendation that you do care about fallacies. I'm not in the slightest concerned about winning arguments but I am of the opinion that an unhappy man who is closer to their logical potential is happier than a happy man who is further from their logical potential.
Here's the trouble with all of that - human nature is a mess. People claim to be absolute authorities on things they barely know anything about, even to the point of being some of the best brow-beaters out there. If I've noticed anything about the people who, like Dawkins, would say that only a strict naive physicalist has the right to call themselves an atheist and everyone else is roughly in the same woo-woo bucket, he might speaking with a pretty good knowledge of biology but it always seems like these sorts of people really low-ball the clarity, common sense, and even education of anyone who'd disagree with them on these points - to the point that they don't even look at the evidence to the other side of the isle. I'm sure that a person who has barely dreamed and never had a psychedelic let alone mystical experience would assume that all of this is right and I've even met some of them who'd call the existence of a subconscious mind woo-woo crypto-religion, all because that feels right to them - they haven't experienced it themselves.

I appreciate the warnings if someone considers that I'm in dodgy territory per their own understanding of the world but at the end of the day I need to investigate, research, and explore the things that I'm trying to understand about myself, about the world I live in, the people around me, and how culture works. The other part that I think very few reductive materialists understand or appreciate, perhaps with a notable exception for Sam Harris, is that exploring and resolving internal terrain is also a critical endeavor for many people in conquering their own emotions, their own needs, and shoring up their own integrity. I think that's also where I see my explorations as a win-win; I get to play something of an internal extreme sport and if there's a tangible reality to foreign sets of consciousness I find a really nice set of tools to work with. If it turns out that it's nothing more than me playing in my own neural tissue - the same actually applies there as well. Admittedly though, not to give the wrong impression or give a false sense of equanimity, I have to admit that in the scope of my own life - based on a combination of private and public evidence - I have to explore this with a reasonable amount of confidence that there is also something more fundamental and pervasive to consciousness and that all if not most of the universe likely has an intrinsic mental nature. I have to go with that until such a point that it either gets proven false, gets proven correct, some lesser degree of either one of those, or simply gets ground down over time by its own exercise.

So I think people have to have the courage to explore things like this. If they can stay functional, stay objective on most levels, even method act on their own faith at some levels just in experiment to see what happens (like a Liber Null/Psychonaut sort of thing), there's a lot to be gained from that. It's actually a participation with the contents of the world and a real learning and knowing that a person is contributing to rather than reading the Cliff's notes, sitting down on the couch with a bag of chips, and watching TV for the rest of their years well-secured in second hand knowledge. Admittedly such explorations aren't for everyone, those who'd take it up again have to be skeptical of themselves to some degree, but ultimately IMHO they should do what they need to do.
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Re: Are sceptics sometimes irrational?

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There's a particular problem with looking at empiricism that way - it's results from sense data and if there's a particular bulletin stating that empiricism only applies to external sense data then I suppose I missed that memo
Ah, well absolute objectivity can't be demonstrated to exist. So I don't require absolute objectivity, I only require things to be objective enough. And I need to account for this loss of absolute objectivity in my methodology. For example this is why there is blinded experiments. This is why independent groups should be able to make the same test on their own equipment and reach the same result. Of course even after all that, it is still not absolutely objective, it's merely as objective as humanly possible.
Fortunately it is possible to go one step further. For example build a computer using an incorrect theory of quantum mechanics (or no theory at all) and see how well it works. The scientific method has been very effective and the results speak for themselves. But yes, anyone is free to ignore all that and to believe as they wish, reality can only be forced on people in extreme circumstances (such as a belief that you can fly). Although I tend to feel reality is forced on people as a whole over time (but that is much less straightforward).
human nature is a mess. People claim to be absolute authorities on things they barely know anything about, even to the point of being some of the best brow-beaters out there.
Absolutely that is true. It is only my recommendation that you don't think fallaciously. I can't prove it is 'wrong' to be fallacious. I mean I can say it will get in the way of goals or effect your quality of life, but now I have to define quality of life (which can't be done objectively). I have to define 'good' and 'bad', which again can't be done objectively. I mean the best I can say is give it a go for a while and see if it works out for you personally. I am of the opinion that it would work out well for almost all humans (but not necessarily all).

I don't think Harris is unique in valuing what you might call spirituality or meditation or even non rational thinking. Einstein has some good descriptions of his process for creative thinking and it requires a meditation and a breaking down of rationality. How else would he think that time and space were the same thing (something I can't comprehend). But what they do argue against is stating things as being true without empirical evidence.
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Re: Are sceptics sometimes irrational?

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Eduk wrote:How else would he think that time and space were the same thing (something I can't comprehend). But what they do argue against is stating things as being true without empirical evidence.
Ah, I think we might finally be getting somewhere.

There are the things that, at least provisionally - right now - I'd consider to be strong enough hypotheses to pursue but not argue or debate with people, like almost everything I've been telling you about my outlook that functionalism in it's radical sense describes the behavior and existence of consciousness quite well.

If you're suggesting that it's a foregone conclusion that all of the elements of consciousness sort of just zap in from nothing without any root fundamentals and to believe otherwise is tantamount to a serious adult belief in Santa Clause or the Tooth Fairy, that's where you lose me.
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Re: Are sceptics sometimes irrational?

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If you're suggesting that it's a foregone conclusion that all of the elements of consciousness sort of just zap in from nothing without any root fundamentals and to believe otherwise is tantamount to a serious adult belief in Santa Clause or the Tooth Fairy, that's where you lose me.
Well that's slightly straw manning the argument. Water suddenly popped into existence when the correct molecules were suddenly placed together. Up to that point there had never been water. But I wouldn't describe that event in the way you describe above. I think I don't know what consciousness is or what causes consciousness. So I can draw no conclusions. Saying there has to be root fundamentals just means you are saying there must be a reason. I agree with that. I just don't know what the reason is. Any positive claim is almost certainly wrong and requires proof.

Now pantheism as you describe at it's root could be something I am broadly agnostic towards. As in it is possibly possible. So it is certainly an entertaining thought and on that level well worth the time and effort (if you so desire). However the issue I have is the conclusions drawn and the addition of further properties, which for me become less and less reasonable with each property added.

For example I mistook you for a Christian because of some of the properties you appear to endow your god/s with. Namely this property of good and evil, and evil being a potential problem. So you start by assuming consciousness isn't explainable (which is already a very strong claim) and you then further add good/evil which for me have nothing to do with the first claim. I don't get the leap of logic.
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Re: Are sceptics sometimes irrational?

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Eduk wrote:Saying there has to be root fundamentals just means you are saying there must be a reason. I agree with that. I just don't know what the reason is. Any positive claim is almost certainly wrong and requires proof.
I think most of the problem tends to be a categorical one. For example we can talk about a lot of different properties of things, like gold, like water, luminescent materials, etc.. that have somewhat unique qualities but insofar as we can tell those are attributable to a proton count or a particular combination of atoms. Similarly evolution has cause things ranging from apes, elephants, and peacocks to things as unusual as cuttlefish, Portuguese man of war colonies, and sea cucumbers. Between both of those categories is a pretty impressive array of differences, however they still seem to fall into different kinds of permutation and express possibilities of what kinds of different structures can be created by the permutation of genes and succeed in survival or, in the case of metals and compounds, we see both the stability and instability of such things as well as the many odd characteristics they have.

Along side that though I try to think of anything we see in nature that springs out blunt-force as either it's own cause or purely a secondary cause. I could be suffering from a shortage of creativity on this front but I can't think of many.
Eduk wrote:Now pantheism as you describe at it's root could be something I am broadly agnostic towards. As in it is possibly possible. So it is certainly an entertaining thought and on that level well worth the time and effort (if you so desire). However the issue I have is the conclusions drawn and the addition of further properties, which for me become less and less reasonable with each property added.
I'm not even sure I'd consider myself a pantheist as that still has a twist of Platonic/Neoplatonic tautology. At least sticking to what seems observable or within the realm of what can be sought and experienced reliably I tend to find a fair amount of agreement with Gordon White that there doesn't seem to be much evidence, if any, of any sort of supreme deity and that life - much like evolution - is left to fend for itself. What did strike me though, over the last four years of plowing through, at least at first, the new age reading gauntlet and then into the more heavyweight Masonic, Martinist, Rosicrucian, Golden Dawn, Thelemic, etc. is that they seemed to be describing the movements of what's in the universe rather than the things, and if you try to pin anyone down as to what on earth they're talking about by still taking Aristotle's wheel of the elements seriously at any level it seems like they're making behaviorist categories and playing with them.

What seems suggestive to me is that there's one thing all of the mystic/occult religions tend to agree on - my first major encounter with it was reading John of the Cross and hearing him diagram Mt. Carmel, that followed with Theresa of Avila's Seven Castles, talk of at least two particular dark nights of the soul along with contacting something very intensely luminous within themselves. One thing lead to another as I realized that actually mapped quite well to another diagram, ie. the Tree of Life. That's a very neoplatonist system but whether it's the Hermetic Golden Dawn, whether it's Crowley and his OTO or A.'.A.'. it seems like the aim is identical to what was before that - ie. what they call Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, which also maps on quite well to what Carl Jung seemed to be referring to when he talked about 'individuation'.

I still don't know what all of that means or even how much of it I'd stake much faith in. When I do try to bring the universe together, along with animal and human existence, and try to look at it in a way that's congruent along with the stuff I mentioned above - it seems like nature is filled with various emergent layers and these layers take on a particular sort of governance of their own. Systems that gain a certain degree of integrity tend to gain complexity and in some ways by that have a way of acclimating the environment around them to themselves, you see that with not just the life in particular natural biomes but also the ways in which it also seems to effect rainfall and the like. While I have doubts that there's such a well-built and robust planetary logos or Gaia hierarchically forming from all the life on earth (if it were that strong we'd have clear evidence of it) it seems tough to discount the possibility that recursive systems might have at least something of our own nature - particularly considering that our nervous systems themselves are in that same sort of constant recursion, ie. drawing up stimulus from our peripherals and sense apparatus, bundling those impulses, processing that data, and sending it back down as reactions and responses both to internal and external environments. Daniel Siegel had a short on Big Think, seems like he got lambasted a bit for it getting called something as pretensions as 'A Scientific Explanation of the Human Mind'. It seems like there's a lot out there to suggest that we're not special when considering the nature of our own internal cycles (which to think of it would be odd to expect much else) and I might take that a step further and consider the possibility that consciousness, or at least the bare roots of it in say primitive forms of awareness, might not be nearly as special either as we might have thought.

Eduk wrote:For example I mistook you for a Christian because of some of the properties you appear to endow your god/s with. Namely this property of good and evil, and evil being a potential problem. So you start by assuming consciousness isn't explainable (which is already a very strong claim) and you then further add good/evil which for me have nothing to do with the first claim. I don't get the leap of logic.
Actually I wasn't going there so much as walking out my own analytic process on how I have a very difficult time accepting theism, either in it's benevolent or malevolent sense, that is I don't see evidence that there is something of superior mind and power watching over us in a self-aware manner. My examples were that if there were something malevolent up there it would far more than likely want everything to do with us, mainly for gratifying its own ego and we'd be living in something like a global DPRK. If there were something both supremely aware on a conscious level and benevolent - evolution of the sort we have here is about as bloody, savage, cruel, and even anti-moral systems that such a being could have brought life about with.

If one comes to the conclusion after that, especially if they've been an atheist or materialist for any amount of time and then start running into things that simply aren't suppose to happen or exist per their worldview, they're stuck trying to figure out how such things could come to pass in a naturalistic context. That's where I think functionalism stands out as one of the strongest candidates in that it proposes consciousness, at least with a big C, being endemic to self-organizing dynamic systems and in a rather holographic manner - such that much like I could think of my own body as cells, organs, or a self I can think of ants as individual ants or a colony, a flock of birds as individuals or sort of a complex amoeba flying through the sky, or I could think of people as individuals, communities, and nations. Also when I look at the really weird stuff people run into, especially what people like to call the whole UFO, cryptoid, and by a broader expanse of the account the 'fairy phenomena' it seems like the consistency and oddity of that behavior seems like it's more akin to a natural force, like lightning or something of that nature, but rather it's a strange form of discharge that seems to hit the earth in different places, different times, and always seems to slightly lead whatever people already believe in that given culture or at that time in history. A lot of these things pile up for me where while I'm a ways away from taking something like astrology seriously I do feel like any sense I'd have for squaring parsimony with pitting everything on human delusion takes more of a stretch than I'm comfortable with.

As for how I feel comfortable with my own sort of mental map of at least psychological entities and relationships, I feel particularly strong with a four-pole: Christ Logos and Isis/Sophia as the masculine and feminine of Mercy, the Beast and Babalon as the masculine and feminine of Severity. Even though I'm really still not sure how literally I'd take the Tree of Life I do think there's at least one really wholesome idea in it - that it's not about strictly running toward good and away from evil, rather were both and we have to metabolize all of it to keep ourselves moving toward productive ends in life. Doing otherwise causes lots of neurosis, imbalance, and I really like how Jordan Peterson in a lot of his lectures constantly relates to the issues of the Jungian shadow - ie. that people need to have it not only processed but mobilized and at the ready. He also suggests that people who don't digest that part of themselves are dangerous and have a way of being swept up in mobs or doing almost anything to placate others, whether for good or for ill. I look at our culture and I see where we're apply a lot of our old management strategies particularly badly and without even much to call a road map.
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Re: Are sceptics sometimes irrational?

Post by Eduk »

I've never run into anything that contradicts atheism.
Consciousness and atheism have nothing to do with each other. One doesn't preclude the other.
For example Sam Harris is an atheist. He believes consciousness is an illusion. But that neither contradicts or supports atheism. Actually I think he's making the same mistake you are. It's unknown how materialism can lead to consciousness therefore it can't is the same claim as you make. He just draws a different conclusion. In my mind just as likely to be true as your own, well to be fair I think consciousness is an illusion is more likely than your ideas, but I'm still mostly agnostic to both ideas.
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Re: Are sceptics sometimes irrational?

Post by Chili »

"Consciousness is an illusion". To me this is obviously a contradiction in terms.

An illusion we understand to be something which is perceived (exists in consciousness) but is not objectively real. We presuppose that consciousness in some sense exists in order to refer to something as an illusion. Therefore consciousness cannot be an illusion, by definition.

Arthur C. Clarke has this now-famous quote: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." This also applies to religion. If you were walking through the woods and something seemingly religious occurs - a heavenly voice, a burning bush - you don't know what kind of beings with what type of technology might have caused this.
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Re: Are sceptics sometimes irrational?

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Eduk wrote: Consciousness and atheism have nothing to do with each other. One doesn't preclude the other.
That I'd completely agree with.
Eduk wrote: It's unknown how materialism can lead to consciousness therefore it can't is the same claim as you make.
Technically you're right - without a considerable change in the depth of what science has the techniques and tools to prove or disprove when it comes to things like panpsychism, weak emergence, strong emergence, or until it has any capacity to edify or break down something like functionalism, neutral monism, idealism, or whatever else - they're all just theories that more or less fit our observations to better or worse degrees. I suppose my willingness to argue on the primacy of its components is just based on my degree of confidence in the assertion, which is much higher than my confidence in mystical realities being more than just the human brain.

Eduk wrote:He just draws a different conclusion. In my mind just as likely to be true as your own, well to be fair I think consciousness is an illusion is more likely than your ideas, but I'm still mostly agnostic to both ideas.
I'm not even sure he thinks its an illusion. As far as I can tell what he does consider to be an illusion is the unified 'I' experience. I'd actually agree that the self is a bit like soft sandstone and that it can be broken into fragments under certain conditions with little more than memory to hold it together enough to observe such an effect. I just think that those individual grains, while they might be reducible even further, would never quite reach absolute zero. It's not that they couldn't, just that otherwise we really would be dealing with an absurdity that's about as far out there as the mathematics of black holes if not farther.
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Re: Are sceptics sometimes irrational?

Post by Eduk »

Oh I am perhaps misrepresenting Sam's idea. He believes free will is an illusion. I just tie up consciousness and free will in my own mind so that I'm unsure of the difference.
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Re: Are sceptics sometimes irrational?

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Free will's an area where I typically send people to his conversations with Joe Rogan if they have a hard time understanding my POV on it. My best analogy for why I don't believe in free will - time sequences our order of processing and, on top of being our genes and history, we also never have cognition of options we aren't already aware. Even if we consider some of the strange possibilities that we might be able to pull from the future somewhat as well as the past - whatever happens in the moment either does or doesn't based that combination of readily available info and our state of energy/capacity. It leads me to the sense that time itself is quite a bit like the DVD that our lives are burnt onto.

A good way of saying what's actually there is that we have agency which feels like authorship but we're simply not in control of our inputs thus our inputs really puppet us all the way along.
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Re: Are sceptics sometimes irrational?

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Roel wrote:A good example is the 4chan murderer of which people first thought he was acting with his girlfriend, until the police discovered her body in his house.
Well you can't deny that she was involved in that murder.
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Predictably Irrational

Predictably Irrational
by Dan Ariely
September 2023

Artwords

Artwords
by Beatriz M. Robles
November 2023

Fireproof Happiness: Extinguishing Anxiety & Igniting Hope

Fireproof Happiness: Extinguishing Anxiety & Igniting Hope
by Dr. Randy Ross
December 2023

Beyond the Golden Door: Seeing the American Dream Through an Immigrant's Eyes

Beyond the Golden Door: Seeing the American Dream Through an Immigrant's Eyes
by Ali Master
February 2024

2022 Philosophy Books of the Month

Emotional Intelligence At Work

Emotional Intelligence At Work
by Richard M Contino & Penelope J Holt
January 2022

Free Will, Do You Have It?

Free Will, Do You Have It?
by Albertus Kral
February 2022

My Enemy in Vietnam

My Enemy in Vietnam
by Billy Springer
March 2022

2X2 on the Ark

2X2 on the Ark
by Mary J Giuffra, PhD
April 2022

The Maestro Monologue

The Maestro Monologue
by Rob White
May 2022

What Makes America Great

What Makes America Great
by Bob Dowell
June 2022

The Truth Is Beyond Belief!

The Truth Is Beyond Belief!
by Jerry Durr
July 2022

Living in Color

Living in Color
by Mike Murphy
August 2022 (tentative)

The Not So Great American Novel

The Not So Great American Novel
by James E Doucette
September 2022

Mary Jane Whiteley Coggeshall, Hicksite Quaker, Iowa/National Suffragette And Her Speeches

Mary Jane Whiteley Coggeshall, Hicksite Quaker, Iowa/National Suffragette And Her Speeches
by John N. (Jake) Ferris
October 2022

In It Together: The Beautiful Struggle Uniting Us All

In It Together: The Beautiful Struggle Uniting Us All
by Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
November 2022

The Smartest Person in the Room: The Root Cause and New Solution for Cybersecurity

The Smartest Person in the Room
by Christian Espinosa
December 2022

2021 Philosophy Books of the Month

The Biblical Clock: The Untold Secrets Linking the Universe and Humanity with God's Plan

The Biblical Clock
by Daniel Friedmann
March 2021

Wilderness Cry: A Scientific and Philosophical Approach to Understanding God and the Universe

Wilderness Cry
by Dr. Hilary L Hunt M.D.
April 2021

Fear Not, Dream Big, & Execute: Tools To Spark Your Dream And Ignite Your Follow-Through

Fear Not, Dream Big, & Execute
by Jeff Meyer
May 2021

Surviving the Business of Healthcare: Knowledge is Power

Surviving the Business of Healthcare
by Barbara Galutia Regis M.S. PA-C
June 2021

Winning the War on Cancer: The Epic Journey Towards a Natural Cure

Winning the War on Cancer
by Sylvie Beljanski
July 2021

Defining Moments of a Free Man from a Black Stream

Defining Moments of a Free Man from a Black Stream
by Dr Frank L Douglas
August 2021

If Life Stinks, Get Your Head Outta Your Buts

If Life Stinks, Get Your Head Outta Your Buts
by Mark L. Wdowiak
September 2021

The Preppers Medical Handbook

The Preppers Medical Handbook
by Dr. William W Forgey M.D.
October 2021

Natural Relief for Anxiety and Stress: A Practical Guide

Natural Relief for Anxiety and Stress
by Dr. Gustavo Kinrys, MD
November 2021

Dream For Peace: An Ambassador Memoir

Dream For Peace
by Dr. Ghoulem Berrah
December 2021