| The subjective apple has objective correlative brain patterns indeed, but what else? You're imagining an apple, using stored memories to create an image in your mind. Nothing else. There is an experiencer that has yet to be explained by any science I know of yet. Neuroscience has pretty well established that consciousness is an illusion created by your mind as a running narrative of what your brain just did. While we don't yet know how the brain does this, experiments do show that your awareness of this actually happens after the fact as your decisions happen in you brain before you are aware you made them. It's a very cool very fancy machine, nothing more as far as we can tell. See we all "fabricate" a worldview within our minds. We take inputs from objective reality and process them according to the picture of reality that we construct there over time. We all contain a subjective reality maintained by our hardware that is dependent upon but quite different than the hardware itself. Correct. The image of an apple "means" something and cannot be completely reduced to electrons or synapse patterns without losing the concept of "apple". Sure it can, it is just patterns after all. Materialism reduces it all to something less. No it doesn't. To that which only can be detectable in the objective world. The objective world is the only world there is. Your subjective reality is an illusion in your mind, the word world does not correctly apply. It loses the apple, for now it is just "brain patterns" or electrons. No it doesn't, materialism doesn't deny subjective mental experiences. No, it is only in part those things, but also a part of a subjective reality that may or may not be shared by others. That's merely a subjective mental experience of reality, something completely accepted by materialists and science. Honestly this whole conversation leads me to believe you have misunderstood materialism, or at least the consequences of it. You keep saying things about what materialists think that are simply wrong. |
You're imagining an apple, using stored memories to create an image in your mind. Nothing else.
What if I imagine an object that i've never seen before? No stored image there. Or just watch the ambient closed-eye-visuals that seem to run constantly in the background like a screen saver? Those and many other examples of different ways that people use their brains will require just as many rebuttles which I'm sure you'd provide but that gets us nowhere.
The image of an apple "means" something and cannot be completely reduced to electrons or synapse patterns without losing the concept of "apple".
Sure it can, it is just patterns after all.
Then why do we look at images on the computer monitor? Why not just watch the electrons flow? Why do we imagine in images at all then? Either way the tiresome point-by-point breakdowns into arguing the logical bits outside of their context very much captures symbolically the essence of what we're going on about here I think.
Reductionism. The following statements both true:
A cell is nothing more than a giant chemical reaction and can be eventually explained (with enough scientific understanding) on the molecular level.
The cell as a whole exhibits characteristics and behaviors totally different than any of its molecular counterparts.
You say the latter above quote that the apple image can be boiled down to its electrons and it is still an apple on that level. But then you say in response to my previous quote:
It loses the apple, for now it is just "brain patterns" or electrons.
No it doesn't, materialism doesn't deny subjective mental experiences.
And then:
Neuroscience has pretty well established that consciousness is an illusion Followed by That's merely a subjective mental experience of reality, something completely accepted by materialists and science.
Then go on accuse me of misunderstanding materialism. But in fact your position changes from reductionist materialism to non-reductionist twice in one post. Which is progress in my opinion!