Discussion Topic |
|
This thread has been locked |
jogill
climber
Colorado
|
|
|
Apr 11, 2019 - 01:51pm PT
|
"Argumentum ad lapidem (English: "appeal to the stone") is a logical fallacy that consists in dismissing a statement as absurd without giving proof of its absurdity.
Ad lapidem statements are fallacious because they fail to address the merits of the claim in dispute. The same applies to proof by assertion, where an unproved or disproved claim is asserted as true on no ground other than that of its truth having been asserted.
The name of this fallacy is derived from a famous incident in which Dr. Samuel Johnson claimed to disprove Bishop Berkeley's immaterialist philosophy (that there are no material objects, only minds and ideas in those minds) by kicking a large stone and asserting, "I refute it thus." This action, which is said to fail to prove the existence of the stone outside the ideas formed by perception, is said to fail to contradict Berkeley's argument, and has been seen as merely dismissing it."
Hmmm . . .
|
|
eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
|
|
|
Apr 11, 2019 - 05:29pm PT
|
So what do you think of those Black Hole images Largo and MikeL? Do they exist out side of our perceptions? If not, can you give us some idea on how our perceptions can collectively converge and agree on a phenomenon like this?
|
|
MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
|
|
|
Apr 11, 2019 - 05:38pm PT
|
Werner: There's NO escape.
Sorry. From what?
It seems to me recently that having or knowing an explanation for anything matters not a wit. It affects nothing unless, I guess, action is taken. But implementation is hardly ever a small issue (even if one believes that manifestations can be affected at all).
I've been hearing really good explanations for this and that recently, but I see nothing beyond that. Yet, people seem really proud of their explanations, as if they were valuable.
In truth, more and more I find I have nothing to say about anything. I should just be quiet. (I'm sure my wife would just love it.)
I feel playful, mischievous.
|
|
WBraun
climber
|
|
|
Apr 11, 2019 - 05:43pm PT
|
Sorry. From what?
From revealing your consciousness.
Can't be hidden, even if you say nothing at all.
That's why there's NO escape ......
|
|
MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
|
|
|
Apr 11, 2019 - 05:45pm PT
|
eeyonkee,
What I see I find interesting from an artistic point of view. I see more and more aesthetically these days. It's the image that matters, not what people think the image represents. Expression, not declaration.
As for collective convergence, I think I could talk you into seeing social construction about many outrageous things, but I think you really want to talk about multiple consciousness, because as I posted earlier, you have no way to know if others exist and are what you think they are. The could all be actors in your play. You could be comatose in a way that you can't conceive because it's not in your consciousness.
But, other minds? Who knows? And why would it matter? Now that you have some strong belief in hand, what are you going to do? It's a non-event, a triviality that someone made up to amuse themself. (Er, that could describe something else. Oops.)
|
|
MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
|
|
|
Apr 11, 2019 - 05:48pm PT
|
Werner: From revealing your consciousness.
Please review what I wrote to eeyonkee. If there is a you, it's all you know. It's all you have to know. There's nothing else that you have access to.
Now, what about that "you" ???
Be well.
Gotta run to eat. I got a body back, and I'm using it by golly.
|
|
WBraun
climber
|
|
|
Apr 11, 2019 - 05:50pm PT
|
You just revealed impersonalism and mayavadi consciousness again ....
|
|
eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
|
|
|
Apr 11, 2019 - 05:52pm PT
|
But, other minds? Who knows? And why would it matter?
Say what? Sheesh! We are a social species! To think that the existence of others of your kind is in doubt is the ultimate wrong-headed thinking IMO. And you still haven't answered my question.
|
|
MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
|
|
|
Apr 11, 2019 - 07:25pm PT
|
you have no way to know if others exist
We have too many ways to know.
What you probably mean is that we have no way to know for certain. Yes, this could all be cooked up by the Mikel consciousness. Do you really require certainty? If so, even your own consciousness is not certain. Why can't you predict your future if you are all that exists? What is preventing you from knowing all of your past and all of your future? Does time not exist, also?
Seems to me that you are just throwing up your hands. Not a bad choice but of no general interest.
|
|
Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
|
|
|
Topic Author's Reply - Apr 12, 2019 - 07:21am PT
|
eyonnkee is trying to get at consciousness by way of qualia, or the STUFF we are apparently conscious OF. In this case, a black hole.
By way of the apparent uniformity of the black hole as described by various people, the black hole is thereby ONE THING or one phenomenon we can name and know, and that thing exist separate from us, whereby some of reality is here or absent and the other parts are over yonder. And that's just the start of the challenges of the bit-torrent way of looking at reality in ONLY linear-causal terms.
|
|
WBraun
climber
|
|
|
Apr 12, 2019 - 08:52am PT
|
Gross materialists fall into black because they are clueless to life itself .....
|
|
MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
|
|
|
Apr 12, 2019 - 09:21am PT
|
eeyonkee: Say what? Sheesh! We are a social species! To think that the existence of others of your kind is in doubt is the ultimate wrong-headed thinking IMO. And you still haven't answered my question.
You say we are a social species; you might consider the implications of that. You appear to be saying that BECAUSE we are social, we can be sure of what "we think" exists. I might say that BECAUSE we are social, our views are suspect to social construction. If you care to do the research, why don't you find journal articles saying that groups of perceptions lead to certainty and truth. Then compare it to the number of journal articles that say that group perceptions are biased, wrong, or do not reflect what later becomes understood as accurate or final or complete.
Ever hear of groupthink? Ever notice that old theories are continually being replaced by newer ones? What do you make of that?
As for answering your question about the image of a black hole (and its certainty of perception), kindly look at the recent articles of how the image was captured and developed. It's a construction, an artifact of technology (which is itself particularized and not complete).
Although simpler, consider images created by MRI technology, and then read scholars' criticisms of the truthfulness of CAT scans, MRI, or other imaging practices. For example, CAT scans and MRIs require diagnostic experts (doctors) to interpret images. If images were truly representative of manifestations, then they would not need experts to tell us what is being portrayed or what they mean. Pictures may be worth a thousand words, but they are not the "things" themselves. The map is never the territory. Maps are always abstractions, models, stickmen expressions.
Sometimes I wonder how much you people know about how science gets done.
|
|
jogill
climber
Colorado
|
|
|
Apr 12, 2019 - 09:24am PT
|
"and that thing exist separate from us" . . . . . .
"And that's just the start of the challenges of the bit-torrent way of looking at reality in ONLY linear-causal terms."
Why is it a challenge that things exist separate from us? Should we be one with the black hole? Is it that in an altered mental state you feel oneness, therefore that is the way things really are?
|
|
MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
|
|
|
Apr 12, 2019 - 09:26am PT
|
Werner: You just revealed impersonalism and mayavadi consciousness again ....
To you. Not to everyone. This again exposes the difficulty of seeing.
|
|
healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
|
|
|
Apr 12, 2019 - 10:13am PT
|
Great. Unpack it for us.
Gladly. An anonymous sniper shoots you in the back of the head from 1700 meters away. At no point are you ever aware of the sniper, the shot, or the 50 cal. bullet. You have no subjective experience of the event at all and, in fact, never had a remote clue it even occurred before your head exploded. That's objective reality and your subjective experience and perceptions played no role whatsoever in the event occurring or how it transpired - you did not create nor shape the objective reality of the event in any way.
And that's the bottom line - objective reality exists and your internal notions and subjective experience of it are just that: internal. You do not create reality except for yourself in your own mind - i.e., the tree in the woods doesn't give a sh#t whether you know it's there or whether it's keeling over or not. Ditto for a tree on planet Wzacabee. And the universe was here long before there were conscious biological entities to do any observing so biocentric universe creation is out as well.
|
|
jogill
climber
Colorado
|
|
|
Apr 12, 2019 - 11:02am PT
|
Some day JL will unpack Peter Lynds.
|
|
Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
|
|
|
Topic Author's Reply - Apr 12, 2019 - 11:57am PT
|
Eyonkee, you have to get much more basic than this (sniper analogy) you'll never get clear on this and will instead spin on what your simple perceptions and sense data are telling you is "true."
Go back to your black hole. Note that virtually all of your qualifiers per "what" a black hole "is" are derived from qualities not of phenomenon "out there," but of mind itself. There is no "black" or any color in the world we imagine is "out there." Same goes for shape, size, and so forth.
Per "when" (linear) the black hole is doing it's thing, physics is quite undecided on how to consider this, save that "clock time" is relative to an observers's perspective, and "location" in this regards is also anything but a point fixed in an objective world in which snipers and black holes "exist."
Your black hole example is another take on Johnson's old TE where if you doubt the opbjective reality of a rock, kick it and break your toe.
Upon closer investigation (beyond sense data) we find that the ratio of empty space to "matter" in the rock is millions to one, and that "matter" is not at all what our sense data tells us it is (little globs of solid stuff). We break our toes kicking the rock NOT because of the
solidity of the equivocal stuff in the rock, but rather because of forces. The "laws of physics" do not impart a force on the rock or anything else, rather they describe what is happening.
You can go on and on about this and never arrive at a universethat squares with what our rational minds (time bound) and sense data tells us is "out there," separate and independent of us. But that's just scratching the surface of unpacking the matrix. In fact the forms and the emptiness from which they arise are exactly the son ame, but we can't see as much owing to two basic constructs: The "I" who seems to have an independent POV of reality "out there," and our notion of time, which doesn't exist as an stand-alone thing or force, but is derived from the apparent linear flux we experience, with us anchoring "clock time" on the uniform linear duration of the seeming objects "out there," originally with the night and day, cycles of sun and moon, and later, the measured velocity of atoms giving us atomic time.
Again, this is just the start of it, but the questions being asked are cucial as the motivation to keep digging into the whole shebang.
Josh Schoolcraft at JPL put it this way:
Mind as used here has been described as a kind of cognitive Hilbert Space, a concept that is largely misunderstood (having in this case nothing whatsoever to do with Euclidian geometry etc). Using a Hilbert Space analogy is not an attempt to square outrageous “mystical” claims with “hard science,” rather to acknowledge that Hilbert Space, as used in science, is a cognitive tool allowing us to model “reality” in certain ways, and more importantly for science, to enable measurements.
A Hilbert space is: “an abstract vector space possessing the structure of an inner product that allows length and angle to be measured.”
First is to note that mind “structures” the reality we experience (read Kant). “Abstract” in this regards means “existing in thought or as an idea but not having a physical or concrete existence.” Hilbert Spaces do not exist out there in an “objective world.”
Last, an “inner product naturally induces an associated norm.” Norm, here, means “something that is usual, typical, or standard.”
The generative and creative aspect of mind fashion the Hilbert Spaces (tools existing as thoughts/ideas) of linear time, space, physical “reality” and so on that allow us to experience a seemingly dualistic reality of individuals existing in a time-bound objective world comprised of objects, forces and phenomenon sharing a usual, typical, or standard form across the species.
|
|
healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
|
|
|
Apr 12, 2019 - 01:06pm PT
|
No, actually the bullet [basically] sums it all up quite nicely. And yeah, yeah, that's all terribly interesting from the inside your skull perspective, but the point is objective reality is just that regardless of your 'sense data', yourself, or even your existence. Your sense data doesn't make objective reality, it only feeds the simulation of it in your head. Confusing the two is either academic/philosophical mindlessness or incredibly arrogant, or both.
P.S. Add Hilbert Spaces to the now fairly long list of things you should probably just drop.
|
|
Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
|
|
|
Apr 12, 2019 - 01:14pm PT
|
all well and good, but the "model" that there exists an external "objective" world works well, it provides predictions about how that objective world will respond when "kicked" and in the case of the recently observed black-hole, it provided the information required to build the telescope with the capability of seeing it, if it did in fact exist.
if you think that the the "reality" at the atomic level is just a shrinking of the reality you see around you, you have not understood the description. But you would be in good company if that were the case (which it is, go back and listen to Feynman).
Now I know that Largo has said time and again that science works for things, and we reap the benefits of that, but that mind is not a thing, and so science cannot work for it.
Largo neglects to provide us with what is "no thing" and he neglects to demonstrate that science would be incapable of describing "no thing" in the same way it describes "thing."
Yet the predictions of science obviously provide ample evidence that things that were not before can be discovered, and that the properties and behaviors of "no thing" are well described (if quantum mechanics' domain is the atomic, and Largo's assertion that there isn't anything there, then the physics seems to be quite good at telling us what that "no thing" realm is doing).
But really in the end it is a choice of what you are going to commit to. Science does not seem to be restricted by any philosophical argument regarding the domain over which it can work. Any observable phenomenon can and will be subject to scientific study, mind included.
There are certainly other commitments, Werner exhibits his, Largo started the thread on it, and many others have contributed their thoughts. The scientific answer to "What is 'Mind?'" is a possibility, it's complicated no doubt, and it hasn't been achieved yet, though there is a sense that as we get better at looking we converge on our "black-hole" moment even there.
Why is "Mind?" would be unanswerable from the science point of view, ultimately. Y'all can provide your opinions, I have none on that question.
|
|
Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
|
|
|
Topic Author's Reply - Apr 12, 2019 - 01:23pm PT
|
You'd be wrong that we are arguing from a philosopohical argument, Ed, though it is in keeping with your belief system that you would root for list the physical world and "reality" as being the same "thing."
The other angle presented here happens when the cognitive modeling of an "I" drops away (amongs other stuff), and this does not result in one "only believing" this or that is true.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0okQCx9108
One person in a dozen might find this interesting (the above link).
|
|
|
SuperTopo on the Web
|
Let us know!