Quote:
Originally Posted by John21
What is mass but the tactile perception of it?
Yes, Berkeley. You can't know of an object's 'primary qualities' without knowing of its 'secondary qualities'. His conclusion being immaterialism. He was a theist and bishop so in his view God was the ultimate observer allowing things to exist if no one at all was looking but that isn't a necessary introduction.
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Some thoughts on what has being written in this thread without any more quoting:
A few pages ago, someone proposed the idea of consciousness being fundamental; and whether the moon is there when not looked at.
Consciousness being fundamental doesn't necessarily imply that there isn't an objective reality. No one said there wasn't mind you.
Actually by the definition of fundamental, of course consciousness is just that, to us.
In the scenario where consciousness is the only thing that exists: reality is purely mind-dependent, it still leaves questions like - what is the moon??
The other thing, is that, humans not evolving to see truly is not the consensus among evolutionary biologists. The consensus is that those who saw more truly were more likely to survive and pass on their genes.
Donald Hoffman argues and demonstrates very convincingly that this is not actually the case. And it's catching on.
He thinks our senses are way off the truth, and that we learned to sense well enough so as to survive, while he believes in an objective reality.
Hoffman thinks what's going on, is, that, reality is analogous to a desktop graphical user interface. The purpose of which is to dumb down the truth so we can navigate through it more easily. He uses the example of how we don't need to know about the electronics underneath in order to send an email, or remove a file from a hard rive and so forth.
The reason he wouldn't jump in front of a train, he says, is because you don't need to take a train literally in order to take it seriously. In the sense he doesn't take a word document literally, but if he were to drag it to the trash can he could lose valuable work. The moon is an icon like the files and folders on the desktop, he says.
And so to look at an object at the microscopic level, and say that that's the true reality is analogous to looking at the pixels of the trash can and saying the same thing, regarding a computer.
The problem with this then, if anyway accurate is that it may not be possible to know objective reality for the same reason we can't know of the underlying hardware by examining the desktop icons with a magnifying glass or in terms of reality, any instrument we use, when we can't rely on ours senses. You can never find out about the hardware by examining the desktop pixels. No reason to not try.
Personally, I don't subscribe to either view. I don't know. Does it have to be either or? Well, no, you needn't have to subscribe to hardcore materialism to acknowledge the existence of atoms, for example. Or to know that a blunt object hitting you on the brain is going to alter your consciousness. Or to have your cornea re-shaped by a laser so that light falls on the retina and your eyesight improve.
The problem is that all of those things require consciousness, as Witten said.
The reason understanding consciousness is inconceivable, how being pointed out already: Where do you look to in the electrical schematic we talked about and say 'Aha'. Inconceivable.
What is an aha moment but a conscious one.
And that is the hard problem, not to be confused with the easy problems.
Last edited by MacOneDouble; 07-17-2018 at 06:27 PM.