Progress in consciousness?

On the contrary, the strong evidence indicates that this universe is, in fact, "about 'us'" to a disturbing degree. (which is the point of the Anthropic Principle Link provided above)

Ahem. I disagree

There many parameters which could change and still result in us being here exactly the same.

jnhofzinser

I take you are implying multiple universes from non-anthropocentric perpectives. The interesting question is whether one of these might be "superior in explanatory power" to what we have already....but then usual aspects of "explanation" such as "prediction" and "control" might be very low level concepts.

No doubt; but those parameters are not the issue

Why is it so suprising that a planet comprised of 'X' would producea life form comprised of 'X'?
I think sentiency was accidental but it led to intelligence which led to counsciousness and then awareness.
Thought or 'the watcher', was present throughout.
To expect the complexity of the human body to assemble it's self on random chance would be unreasonable. It has to happen all pretty much simultaneously. Eyes without optic nerves to proceess the reception of light are pretty much useless. Without DNA, how are a million years of trial and error to be recorded?
I am, therefore, my creator is.

Actually, I was hoping to avoid any implication as to "solution" while insisting on the existence of the "problem".
Quite so. But I suppose that raises the question: "what, indeed, do we have, already?"

I don't think that sentiency is accidental. I think that accidents are probably mere illusions. In my train of thought, everything happens because of a preceding cause. Thus, life, consciousness, and awareness, are here because they're supposed to be. The process of evolution seems to be a trial and error process, but it can not happen without natural pressure. Therefore I believe that what will be will be. We are here with our conscious mind, with awareness, and we understand that life should be preserved, and so from these factors we understand "right " and "wrong" and are able to, instead of only identifying with one's "self", identify with the whole identity of life itself and expand our beings into nature (as in bonding). Thus, we are in the process of going against a false, lonely, existence to a more true compassionate connection between beings and nature.

Now I'm not implying "survival of the fittest" distortions, but rather I think that with our understanding and awareness of conscious beings besides ourselves, and of the anti-life/existence reactions of pain, we are responsible for being true to this understanding and sort of have a "duty" of protecting life, which includes ourselves and others (I'm not a Kant fanatic btw). And I believe this is how one can truly be happy and true to oneself, not to imply extreme altruism or anything.


Perhaps there is a sort of "cosmic mind" governing us. If so, then it is probable to say that the laws of physics are the sort of "will" of this "cosmic mind".

I hope I'm making sense (having a headache). What I understand is that complexity is formed from simplicity.

Oh and a late thanx for JL Nobody and Cicerone Imposter for the welcomes.

Sentiency means having consciousness. Intelligence is the capacity of thought and reason, and therefore, consciousness must exist as a precondition to intelligence. Awareness is consciousness.



Yes, very true...this is puzzling, but it has been explained. I cannot remember the explanation right now for how these complex parts evolve...I will get back to you on that!



Whooooooooooo--

oooooooo--

oooo--

aaaaa--

there....

MIGHTY BOLD STATEMENT

Alikimr, I'm sure we will all show up. Thanks for the offering.
BoGoWo, I have no objection to anthropomorphism so long as we know we are doing it, and its limitations. But I don't think we are as interested in a Reality that finds us no more than negligible dust on its shelves. When we think, when we create, when we explore, we do it with reference to our "eigenwelt" (the world as it relates to us). The task, according to my sensibilities, is discover ourselves within the cosmic context, not to discover the Cosmos as a mere expression of our importance. Copernicus put an end to that for Christians--or he should have.
It seems to me that a narrow science, a sterile empiricism of the laboratory has disenchanted us. That was necessary, however, to release us from the great negative and fearsome enchantment of the Middle Ages. Since Newton and his cohorts the universe has been rendered inert and meaningless. Science became a worldview, a Scientism. It was undoubtedly better than the Dark Ages were we were left only with the option of relying on God to give us meaning. With the death of God, and The Enligtenment, psychology became a temporary haven. We assumed that we must learn how to adjust to a meaningless world. Existentialism emerged to affirm the essential meaninglessness of life, but challenged us, with Nietszche, to create our own meaning. Then with the theoretical physics of Einstein and his (broadly--not narrowly--empirical) cohort of thinkers there began a re-enchantment of the World. And with the New Physics we are enchanted to the point of dizziness.
To me, the philosophies and spiritual practices of Buddhism, Taoism, Sufism, perhaps the Caballa (I'm not sure) and Hindu Vedanta complement the findings and promises of the New Physics. Consider the discussions between physicist, Bohm and mystic, Krishnamurti. The New Physics has the potential to merge with the power of "mysticism", or psycho-spiritual experience, to create a naturalistic positive enchantment, one sans Gods, ghosts, souls, absolute values and truths, heavens and hells, etc. Things are looking up.

JLN, by "one sans" do you mean "one without" ?

I finally looked up "non-dualism" since it's getting annoying that the term keeps coming up...I read that it is the belief that the world cannot be divided into two explicable fundamental entities such as mind and matter. This seems like a very scientific viewpoint, yet you say it as if its mystical...am I not understanding the way you use this term?

sentiency

n : the faculty through which the external world is apprehended [syn: sense, sensation, sentience, sensory faculty]

A presence is sensed, but not explained.
Intelligence/intellect.... the ability to reason ie: something is there ..... so....something must be here.
Consciousness .... self awareness
Awareness .... knowledge of enviornments existence.


I am, therefore, my creator is.
should be
I am, therefore, my creator is?

sorry

Stuh, yes sans=without.
The logic of non-dualism is at the heart of mysticism. If this seems to you to be contrary to the nature of mysticism, it definitively indicates that your understanding in that regard is not yet mature. But I'm sure you know that. Non-dualism is becoming an important principle in the New Physics as far as I understand. Fresco has made some interesting contributions in that regard. As an aside you might remember that non-dualism applies not only to the dichotomy mind-brain, but to all analytical oppositions: subject-object, truth-falsehood, good-bad, up-down, ugly-beautiful, cause and effect, and even life and death. That does not mean that there is no "beauty" in our experience or that we can't look "up", or become "dead". But that has all been discussed in other threads.

Been reading some Descarte, have we Gelisgeti?

Here's your argument:




(this is the entire definition exerpt)

In order for a single premise to lead to a conclusion, the statements must be synonymous, which they are not. There is no logical progression, and the argument cannot be written in a mathematical form. Therefore the argument is not valid.

-edited for politeness-

Arguments for dualism

One argument for dualism, especially dualistic interactionism, is that it is a very common sense view. Some developmental psychologists claim to have shown that dualism is commonsensical for very young children as well. This is obviously not "proof", but it suggests we should at least have a reason for not abandoning dualism.

A second argument is that the mind is (or resides in) the immortal soul. Traditional Christianity, like many other religions, teaches that you have a soul which is as different from your body as water is from rock. Your body will die and then your soul will go to heaven, or hell, or who knows where. If you believe this then you practically must believe in dualism. The only way that you can avoid believing in dualism is if you accept phenomenalism, which holds that everything is, ultimately, mental. But in any event you absolutely cannot hold that the soul is reducible to anything physical. If events in your soul were reducible to events in your brain, then when your brain stopped functioning, your soul would cease to exist. This is incorrect. The laws of physics might change. See The Physics of Immortality (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0385467990/102-4109531-5268163?v=glance) .

Note that although this religious account may motivate or reinforce a religious person's belief in dualism, it may well seem altogether unconvincing to dualism's skeptics. To use this argument to convert, say, a card-carrying materialist to dualism, it seems necessary to first establish that people do, in fact, have immortal souls. And yet the card-carrying materialist is one of the last kinds of people who are going to admit to this.

A third argument for dualism goes like this: if dualism is false, we should be able to reduce mind to matter, or vice versa, or to reduce both to a neutral third substance. Since smart people thinking hard about these issues have not been able to do this satisfactorily, so, at least for now, it seems safer to assume that dualism is true. Note that this argument is likely only to convince the convinced, and may be subject to the standard criticisms about lack of imagination.

A final argument, to be explored in depth, is that the mental and the physical seem to have quite different and perhaps irreconcilable properties.

First, mental events are not publicly observable. When I touch the hot stove, you may see me whip back my hand and say "Ouch!" but you are not feeling my pain. Unless you're Mr. Spock, or God, you can't as it were get inside my mind and take a look at what's going on in there. And of course it's not just because my mind is hidden beneath my skull. If you knew just where to look in my brain, you wouldn't be able to see thoughts and feelings jiggling around in there. That's just not how it works. So unlike physical events, like fireworks displays, mental events are private, not publicly observable.

Second, mental events are often said not to be spatially located. Where is my pain supposed to be? Maybe you could say in my fingertips, because they hurt. But is that where the feeling is? Does it really make sense to say that the feeling is in my aching fingertips? That sounds a little funny, anyway. A better example would be an emotion like happiness. When I say I'm happy, can I locate my happiness in my head, or does it exist all my body, or something? Doesn't that sound odd? It would seem better to say that my happiness isn't the sort of thing that can be located in a particular place.

Third, more generally, mental events do not seem to have various physical properties which physical events have. For one thing, mental events do not involve anything having mass, or physical motion. We can't weigh a thought. We can't say that a feeling has a velocity of 10 miles an hour. To say such things is to talk nonsense. Now you might say: that's only because mental events are events. You can't say that physical events have mass or velocity either. Point well enough taken; that's true, no event, per se, has mass or velocity. But physical events do involve objects which have mass and velocity. Mental events do not have any components which have mass and velocity. For example, when I think, "I like ice cream," I have a concept of ice cream; and my concept of ice cream has no mass and velocity. Nothing involved in my appreciation for ice cream would appear to have any such physical properties. This is a point to which we will have to return. But on the face of it, this seems pretty obvious.

Fourth, mental events have a certain subjective quality to them, which physical events obviously do not. I mean, for example, what a burned finger feels like, what sky blue looks like, what nice music sounds like, and so on. I'm going to expand on this fourth point at some length. Recently, philosophers have been calling the subjective aspects of mental events qualia, and they also call them raw feels. There is something that it's like to feel pain, to see a familiar shade of blue, and so on; there are qualia involved in these mental events. And the claim is that qualia seem particularly difficult to reduce to anything physical. Just think of what that would involve. You'd be saying: feeling the top of my hand right now, this "raw feel" I'm experiencing right now, is itself nothing more than a physical event.

In fact, there is an article by an American, Thomas Nagel, that came out in the late 1970s called "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" In this article Nagel argued roughly as follows. You are familiar with the fact that bats use a certain kind of sonar, right? They emit high-pitched shrieks which allow them to fly around in dark caves; they can tell how far away the walls are based on how their shrieks echo around in the cave. Bat sonar allows bats to perceive distance, shape, size, and so on, in a way similar to, but obviously different from the way vision works for us. Now Nagel invited us to ask, "So what is it like to be a bat, flying around in the dark using bat sonar?" Surely bats do have experiences; we just don't know what they are. Suppose we were to take apart a bat brain and figure out how the neural apparatus for bat sonar works. No doubt biologists have actually done so, dissected bat brains and so forth. But in understanding how the bat brain works, do those biologists learn what it is like to be a bat? Well of course not. They're mucking around in the grey matter of bats. In order to know what it's like to be a bat, and to have bat sonar, why, you'd have to be a bat. So argued Nagel.

So what's the point of all this? The point is that if indeed there are "bat qualia," then there are peculiar mental events of a sort that only bats have, and we cannot learn what they are like even if we have a detailed understanding of physical events going on in the bat brain. Or to put it even more simply: there is a strange "bat sonar experience" we'll never have. We won't have it even if we learn what physical events in bat brains are associated with bat sonar. So that's excellent evidence that mental events cannot be reduced to physical events; mental events must be regarded as quite a different sort of thing from physical events. Really, you can make the same point without even bringing up weird cases like bat sonar. Just think of your own unique feelings. Do you think that a psychologist could, simply by digging around in your brain and doing tests on your grey matter, ever learn what that feeling was like?

So there are at least four major differences between the mental and the physical, which make it difficult, to say the least, to understand how one might reduce the mental to the physical. Mental events are not publicly observable; they are not spatially located; they do not involve physical properties such as mass and velocity; and there seems to be an irreducibly subjective aspect to them. That seems to give us considerable reason to think that the mind and the body are two totally different categories of being. So there you have one basic, powerful argument for dualism.
------------------------------------------------------

Arguments against dualism

Varieties of dualism in which mind can causually affect matter have come under strenuous attack from different quarters, especially starting in the 20th century. How can something totally immaterial, people ask, affect something totally material? That's the basic problem. We can analyze the problem here into three parts.

First, it is not clear where the interaction would take place. Burning my fingers causes pain, right? Well, apparently there is some chain of events, leading from the burning of skin, to the stimulation of nerve endings, to something happening in the nerves of my body that lead to my brain, to something happening in a particular part of my brain; and then, I feel pain. But the pain is not supposed to be spatially located. So what I want to know is, where does the interaction take place? If you say, "It takes place in the brain," then I will say, "But I thought pains weren't located anywhere." And you, as a dualist, might stick to your guns and say, "That's right, pains aren't located anywhere; but the brain event that immediately leads to the pain is located in the brain." But then we have a very strange causal relation on our hands. The cause is located in a particular place but the effect is not located anywhere. Well, you might say, that might be puzzling but it's not a devastating criticism.

(Problems with the above paragraph: 1) some dualisms maintain that the mind resides in a particular place, say, in the pineal(?) gland. In this case the arguments about the mental being "nowhere" look less strange. 2) it seems a little blurred -- is the problem locating the mind or the mental events or both? 3) it should at least be emphasized that things don't necessarily have to be in the same place to interact, as we see with the "attraction at a distance" in gravity.)

So look at a second problem about the interaction. Namely, how does the interaction take place? Maybe you think, "Well, that's a matter for science -- scientists will eventually discover the connection between mental and physical events." But philosophers have something to say about the matter, because the very idea of a mechanism, which explains the connection between the mental and the physical, would be very strange, at best. Why do I say it would be strange? Compare it to a mechanism that we do understand. Take a very simple causal relation, such as when the cue ball strikes the eight ball and causes it to go into the pocket. Here we can say that the cue ball has a certain amount of momentum as its mass moves across the pool table with some velocity, and then that momentum is transferred to the eight ball, which then heads toward the pocket. Now compare that to the situation in the brain, where we want to say a decision causes some neurons to fire and thus cause my body to move across the room. The decision, "I will cross the room now," is a mental event; and as such it does not have physical properties such as force. If it has no force, then how on earth could it cause any neuron to fire? Is it magic? Honestly, how could something without any physical properties have any physical effects at all?

Here you might reply, as some philosophers have indeed replied, as follows. You might say: "Well sure, there is a mystery about how the interaction between mental and physical events can occur; but the fact that there is a mystery doesn't mean that there is no interaction. Because plainly there is an interaction and plainly the interaction is between two totally different sorts of events." Now I expect that some of you may want to say this. But the problem with it is that it does not seem to answer the full power of the objection.

So let me explain the objection more precisely. Let's take as our example my decision to walk across the room. We say: my decision, a mental event, immediately causes a group of neurons in my brain to fire, a physical event, which ultimately results in my walking across the room. The problem is that if we have something totally nonphysical causing a bunch of neurons to fire, then there is no physical event which causes the firing. That means that some physical energy seems to have appeared out of thin air. Do you see? Even if we say that my decision has some sort of mental energy, and that the decision causes the firing, we still haven't explained where the physical energy, for the firing, came from. It just seems to have popped into existence from nowhere.

As our reading says, there is a physical principle, called the "Principle of the Conservation of Energy." According to this principle, "In all physical processes, the total amount of energy in the universe remains constant." Or in a form you may have heard before: in any change anything undergoes, energy is neither created nor destroyed. This is a basic principle you probably learned about in high school physics. So the point is that nerve firings, which are allegedly caused by a totally nonphysical decision, would appear to violate the Principle of the Conservation of Energy.

Now, dualistic interactionists have tried to answer these objections, and other such objections, but most philosophers these days are not impressed by their answers. It has come to the point where, in fact, there aren't very many interactionists around, and there haven't been many for decades. When I say this, I don't mean to imply that dualistic interactionism is false. All I mean to imply is that many philosophers today think it is false, and perhaps also that, if you want to hold onto interactionism yourself, you should try to come up with some effective replies to these objections.

(Another very interesting route to take for the aspiring substance dualist might be to question the causal closure of the physical domain. Briefly: there seem to be events on the quantum level which lack a physical cause; if they lack a physical cause, then either they have a nonphysical cause or they are uncaused; in either of these cases, the physical domain is not causally closed. But it remains true that there are very serious objections to substance dualism which must be met.)


Source: Wickipedia

This is the most concise definition I could find of nondualism:

It means that light and shade, long and short, black and white, can only be experienced in relation to each other; light is not independent of shade, nor black of white. There are no opposites, only relationships.

And here is a defintion of Mysticism from the american heritage dictionary:
1. immediate awareness of the transcendent or ultimate reality or God
2. A belief in alternate realities beyond perception

I so no relationship, so I ask you again what definition are you using for nondualism

I have never read Descartes.

Will you ever learn not to be so abrasive? How can I take anything you say seriously when presented in such a manner?

If I am ..... who/what is my creator? misreading or misquoting is counter productive. Simply state your belief, it is that simple.

play nice!

stuh

You ask for "definititions" but do you not see that such an activity is in itself "dualistic" ?

The nondualist "mystic" believes he has "glimpsed the truth" which comes from disolution of all boundaries including "self" and "world". This "truth" is transcendent of "logical status" in as much that "logic" is seen as the mere handmaiden of ephemeral dualistic striving.

it is quite obvious that you borrow you form of your argument from "i think, therefore I am" credits of Descartes...

I have difficulty restraining myself from a torrent of insults...I edited out nearly a page of it before I realized what I was doing. The thing is, your comment is just SO incredibly bold and unsupported. Many people do not believe in god, yet you think you can just prove his existence with logical certainty based on the evidence that you merely exist? this is just absolutely ridiculous and nobody deserves to be taken seriously who brings up ideas like that.

FYI, Gelisgesti does not believe in God either. He is using "Creator" in a more philosophical sense.
Thanks for the restraint, btw.

Well generally in physics events are not necessarily exactly spatially located : there's the uncertainty which renders some events' spatial coordinates practically undetermined (for example, a highly coherent beam of electrons with frequency 345.100000 nanometers (e=hv)).




The same arguments would hold for the post I'm typing right now; but this is algorithms and information that resides in configuration of material 'objects' if you like. You are correct when you say that events are immaterial - they are. Hence this as a whole is a paradoxical argument - it does not prove anything.


Relative