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Originally posted by Kashai
reply to post by Bedlam
"Thoughts are processes, not tangible objects."
Given the existence of God, thoughts resulted in the creation of reality can you prove otherwise? If you cannot then how can you define yourself as a realist?
Any thoughts?
Uh... I really hope you have a better argument than that. It's impossible to prove a negative. I can also say that we have no evidence that the spaghetti monster doesn't exist. I hope you realize it's an empty (aka not a sound) argument. Another example.. Just because it's not impossible for me to have a baseball in my hand right now, doesn't mean that I do have it, or that I will ever have it. The possibility remains, but it's just that, until proven, which is impossible for the current scientific methods.
Originally posted by framedragged
Originally posted by vasaga
First we must have evidence that it's actually possible. It'll probably be a philosophical zombie, rather than something that actually experiences. But, we have no way of knowing that, do we? That's the exact issue I'm talking about. How do we know that something is actually intelligent (something that's intelligent must be aware, right?), and not simply responding to inputs?
We have no evidence that it's impossible
You're already assuming it would have my memories due to everything in my brain being identical.
Originally posted by framedragged
and we have plenty of evidence that we can physically model a brain. If I used my handy dandy magical replicator machine and made a perfectly identical copy of you, down to the last neuron and intestinal bacteria, what would be different about you and it that would lead you to believe that the copy is a philosophical zombie? How would you be able to determine you weren't the copy in the first place, since the copy would be created with all of your memories?
Not a soul. In general, I think Bruce Lipton's idea makes sense. Here's a link, it's not too long.
Originally posted by framedragged
What I'm really asking is: is your requirement for awareness/experience some sort of 'soul' residing entirely outside of the physical?
Yeah.. Like I said before, I get it.
Originally posted by framedragged
No, my point was that if we did actually experience color differently then all we're doing is rotating or flipping the additive color wheel. All the relationships between the colors will stay the same; colors will add the same way, have the same complements, etc. If they didn't then RGB pixel displays wouldn't work for everyone. But they do, so the only possible difference between our experiences will be incredibly superficial and shouldn't really be that surprising in that its our own unique experience.
By that definition, computers are aware. By default we therefore know that awareness is more than just processing. Besides, your brain processes a lot of stuff all the time. Most of them, you're not even aware of. For example, every time you breathe, your brain processes the signals that come from your nose, that feel the air flow through your nostrils, but you're never aware of them, except now because you've started paying attention to it since I mentioned it. That's another thing that's unreachable by materialistic science, but should still be taken into account.
Originally posted by framedragged
And who says that awareness isn't the processing itself?
Originally posted by Bedlam
Originally posted by Kashai
reply to post by Bedlam
"Thoughts are processes, not tangible objects."
Given the existence of God, thoughts resulted in the creation of reality can you prove otherwise? If you cannot then how can you define yourself as a realist?
Any thoughts?
Asking for proof of a negative? Can you prove the Flying Spaghetti Monster didn't create us all with a touch of his noodly appendages? No.
Ramen.
Originally posted by Bedlam
Thoughts are processes, not tangible objects.
Originally posted by vasaga
Let me ask this in general again, since people seem to really want to ignore it.
I assume some of you are saying that our minds, memories, thoughts, basically everything, is stored in our brains. Correct? If so.. Explain something simple to me. People have hit their heads, and due to damage to their brain, they lose memories. In this case, the view that memories are in there, makes sense. You could say, the storage device got damaged, and the data was lost. However, there have been a lot of cases, where the memory slowly returns over time. If they are stored in the brain, and the brain got damaged, how exactly are the memories restored? Care to explain how that fits the materialistic paradigm? It's the equivalent of dropping your laptop and that damaged your hard drive so windows has trouble booting properly, and over time it starts working better on its own. I'm really curious what you people can come up with to explain this phenomenon.
Originally posted by vasaga
Let me ask this in general again, since people seem to really want to ignore it.
I assume some of you are saying that our minds, memories, thoughts, basically everything, is stored in our brains. Correct? If so.. Explain something simple to me. People have hit their heads, and due to damage to their brain, they lose memories. In this case, the view that memories are in there, makes sense. You could say, the storage device got damaged, and the data was lost. However, there have been a lot of cases, where the memory slowly returns over time. If they are stored in the brain, and the brain got damaged, how exactly are the memories restored? Care to explain how that fits the materialistic paradigm?
It's the equivalent of dropping your laptop and that damaged your hard drive so windows has trouble booting properly, and over time it starts working better on its own. I'm really curious what you people can come up with to explain this phenomenon.
Originally posted by Kashai
reply to post by Bleeeeep
Gentlemen and Ladies this is a really interesting conversation.edit on 30-3-2013 by Kashai because: added content
Originally posted by Kashai
Can you prove that everything that exist occurred by pure chance? This being just a funny as Flying Spaghetti Monsters. As I have already explained Modern Materialism has been debunked with respect to consciousness.