Problems with materialism

[SteveA]

(Continued (sort of) ... I put a couple details posts on the previous page for a little background on this)

The clockwork closed box model of the Universe

*1 ... ... ... effect ->- effect (becomes cause) ->- cause ->- effect' ->- effect (becomes cause)' ->- ... ... ... *2

*1 initial cause

All of the cause and effect relationships within our Universe (so we're about to find)
make sense
(are logical) -

- but what of that first seed -
*1 initial cause
we can't make it make sense (so cannot call it logical) -
- however is it illogical ?

- the answer will prove to be
no
- it's {logical, out of our frame of reference}

~that is~ makes sense by inference -
but cannot make sense from direct exposure (experience,empirical evidence)

- neatly permitting us to replace 'science as synonymous with the empirical method'
with
'science as the logical model'

Thank you much for this. You said it well and that sums it up nicely.

Experience -> Empirical
Very real, beyond experience cannot be handled by Empirical
- however if we're to drop Empirical -
- we're going to need to be careful -
scientologists with tea cups and thetan sorcerors arise
otherwise.

Yes, there appears to be a impossibly vast chasm that's only a single unknown wide that logic cannot cross to build a bridge to the other side. Both sides may internally be entirely deterministic and neither appear to possess any internal inconsistancies, yet if there exists a relative (and unspecified or non-deterministic) time between them that's subjectively determined (implying the addition of a third system, but it can really just be a component of one side of this relationship), and spans something potentially larger than eons apart or less than a planck unit of time.

As long as science relies on empiricism, there will never be certainty (even if it uncertainty is potentially avoidable).

- dogged allegiance to the empirical method proving obstructive in ... ... ...
- strict observance of the very real limitations of the empirical method 'gettin' in the way' of the very real human need (optimization of the collective emergent property of mind) ... ... ...

This appears to also be an inevitable component of growth (which tends to imply time) - something that is learned has a component that is inherently not deterministic, or self-controlled. You only know about it after you've experienced or "become" it and encapsulated the knowledge it conveyed, but there was no selection or choice involved - there would appear at most to be a choice in how it's placed in relationship to previous such things in memory, but the specifics of the new experience that allow it to be a growing or learning experience are not predeterminable or deterministic relative to the set of elements in the memory that it's added to.

(I've been looking at some ideas that appear to indicate that if we ignore the specifics of things and look at the general growth on large scales of all possible such growing structures, there is a common core upon which all such forms grow due to the specific properties of the manner of construction and not dependent upon the specific properties of what was used to grow it).

- to understand reality.

~*~

--- More explicitly ---
- to become properly human is to develop the unassailable logical perspective that
'seeing is not believing'.

Yes, if we attempted to not understand anything, then experiences are simply what they are without any additional context needed for them. As soon as a question exists that they represent something beyond them, an unknown is created waiting to be filled (and in many ways one unknown is just as influencial over an infinite time as an infinite number of unknowns presented over finite periods - there really only needs to exist a single unknown over an infinite time, as its influence would appear indistinguishable from any number of other unknowns).

As another sidenote: All deterministic objects, in a similar manner, can be described as a single deterministic object (each previous object becomes encapsulated in the single deterministic object and I'm confident we could take any field of experience and knowledge and represent them all in the same format as the components that describe an entirely deterministic evolution over time with no uncertainty and the single (apparently required, from logic) unknown that creates it).

The logical model scales beyond the scope of coherent human experience (our senses);

I think this is partly because understandings of things are additional to their experiences, so without an understanding, an experience fits perfectly into the memory of information it conveyed - if we add to this an additional understanding or structure of relationships to it connecting to other "things", then this structure extends beyond the space filled by the thing/experience. If we can informationally compress these objects in size, then both the compressed representation as well as the understanding of the compressed representation could potentially fit in the same space and be empirically "proven", but if there is any loss involved in the compressed representation, then the mental object is no longer actual experience and it becomes an intangible virtual space, without deterministic rules that could only make it true for all observers (so it can be subjectively real, but not witnessed as an objective reality, because it need not be true for all observers, though it could appear objective real and tangible between a subset of them, such as something only objectively real and tangible between humans and not all possible things).

using a mechanism which will always preclude (regardless of continued evolutionary improvement in (capacity for resolution increases in)
our senses) -

Yes, there are "objects" that exist in thought, logic and communication that would appear to impose specific restrictions upon the properties of any space with deterministic objective properties - the question of whether or not the physical universes operates by those laws appears to be predetermined if we're to use such tools as experiences, thought, communication and logic etc. to interact with and know of it. (Just like someone could assume the Sun was green if they'd been born wearing green glasses - if they can only see using those glasses, then everything will appear green and they'd never know of a difference - of course it's rather irrelevant to bring up such unknowns if there was truly no possible manner in which things could be different - but it's a little difficult to ignore what possibilities could become reality)

- in our senses

- aspects of reality
to
sense.

~*~

Evolution to increased information upload from external reality via increased complexity of structure of the collective human mind -
- this representing increased complexity in a substrate which (naturally) precludes itself from examining the substrate from which it is folded.

Yes, though as I suggested above, it may not be impossible to have a lossless compression in information and somehow allow an additional understanding of it to exist within the same space - I'm not truly certain of this and an obvious problem of self reference occurs here where something is expected to know about itself, but this additional knowledge, if expected to fit within its previous "informational space" could not have referenced itself without already having had the knowledge (sort of like being unable to gain knowledge regarding something that has always been true - you'd have to have already known it to be true all along if the object is suppose to also contain a knowledge regarding it - you can't build a bridge to that location, you have to either have it or implode a bridge across an inaccesible space to get it to fit - or maybe instantaineous teleportation of all the components into the final unchanging state, then again if it could be done, then it's likely undoable, so it would appear to require something unconditional and eternal be present).

Coherence from structures formed within a 2 dimensional plane -
- a 2 dimensional plane defining our entire frame of reference -
where -
- although everything make sense
(internally consistent) -

- we define a space which is impervious to human scrutiny.

That space though alluded to from time to time -
'spooky action at a distance'.

This appears to match some of my thoughts that the second dimension would appear most likely described in terms of a free will or indeterminism.

If we listed all possible things as an evolution from a single deterministic process, then all those possible things exist in a single "timeline" relative to that process.

If we have any control over this sequence, then it would be as a reordering or preferential bias to the representations of these and that could be seen similar to a second infinite quantity in a second dimension. I don't think logic can handle how two infinities evolve over time unless we place one as a construction of the other, then though both may grow "infinitely" one is a subset of the energy/information of the other and determined by it, but that's logical/deterministic (excluding the infinity) and there may (currently, for me) irrationalities beyond that.

Another note: If human perceptions are only capable of making a limited and finite number of distinctions between states of experience, then the quantities of those states should also be limited to being finite (time appears to be required to be infinite, IMO, and so there's a discrepancy there that conscious qualities appear to potentially surpass).

[austintorn@aol.com]

I’m on vacation at a secret hideaway right on the ocean, doing a study of materialism. Everything seems real here, but for some obvious cases of silicone fraud. My room is so unassuming that its entrance is via an unmarked door in the stairwell. No bad guys can find me here. The town is filled with transients—visitors from all over the world; same with all the workers—they come here from afar to work during their summers off from college or whatever. My room even has a little hump and a downslope just inside the door, so even if any bad guys did get in they would imediately fall down. I’m off to the depths of the sea now.

[dleviwing]

Steve;
Science is a discipline that requires empirical data to form judgments about our reality. Until one can provide such testing to confirm any conscious influence on our physical reality then such a paradigm can only be a theory or belief system and cannot be claimed as science or scientific theory. It is quite obvious that when an individual performs any testing that can be manipulated by the tester, there will always be that subjective influence due to the conscious or subconscious beliefs of that individual.

Science does not claim that consciousness does not influence physical reality, it only states that no one has applied the scientific methodology to confirm or falsify such; thus it is simply an unknown factor. String theory falls into this same unknown category even though many scientist have great belief of its validity; without the empirical data, it’s just another religion or religious belief.

The root problem of science is the paradigm we use to define reality; as you’ve noticed, it’s flawed but we should not alter the requirements of science to allow religions to claim they are being scientific.

[SteveA]

Steve;
Science is a discipline that requires empirical data to form judgments about our reality. Until one can provide such testing to confirm any conscious influence on our physical reality then such a paradigm can only be a theory or belief system and cannot be claimed as science or scientific theory. It is quite obvious that when an individual performs any testing that can be manipulated by the tester, there will always be that subjective influence due to the conscious or subconscious beliefs of that individual.

Science does not claim that consciousness does not influence physical reality, it only states that no one has applied the scientific methodology to confirm or falsify such; thus it is simply an unknown factor. String theory falls into this same unknown category even though many scientist have great belief of its validity; without the empirical data, it’s just another religion or religious belief.

The root problem of science is the paradigm we use to define reality; as you’ve noticed, it’s flawed but we should not alter the requirements of science to allow religions to claim they are being scientific.

I agree with most everything you said, though I'd disagree with "Until one can provide such testing to confirm any conscious influence on our physical reality then such a paradigm can only be a theory or belief system and cannot be claimed as science or scientific theory." because there's already evidence that conscious intentions do have physical effects - I attempt to lift my arm and lo and behold, it lifts and I've repeated that experiment enough times to feel an empirical confidence in it. So the question is over the possible forms of this interaction.

I also believe it's a bit too common to see people who've claimed to prove that people have no free will or overlook the fact that in theory, neuroscience would be studying ones own nervous system and not someone elses.

I'd begun the thread simply to point out some of the problems with the perspective that there don't exist problems with a description that ignores consciousness and simply states that it's an irrelevant bystander in physics and, in fact, more fundamentally the physical universe in human sciences is gathered via. information conveyed via. conscious perceptions and so there's a conscious filter over the entire picture.

I'm not going to try to claim that wishful thinking does much of anything useful, nor do I think that conscious intentions over physical systems are without limits, simply because, if there are multiple conscious desires that conflict, some rules regarding their interactions over common spaces must be in place otherwise it would be rather chaotic and there would no be much of anything recognizable as a shared objective reality.