Jizz Festival posted:

I've asked a specific question, specifically "So what's the correct order? The self causes brain activity?" and rather than just answering the question you gave me a long boring quote that doesn't answer that question.

FabioClone posted:

Do we really have to seriously consider all possible claims about gods and the supernatural when there is no supporting evidence besides a book?

FabioClone posted:

However, I think his existence, or lack thereof, is pretty important for Christians. Their whole religion relies on him actually existing and there not being a dead Jesus body buried somewhere. Not that that couldn't be rationalized away by some, but the truth about his existence is relevant to the most fundamental claims of Christianity.

FabioClone posted:

I want to hear more about this please. Otherwise, I'm going to assume that this is the point in your post where the drugs really kicked in.
edit: oh, you edited it out

Who What Now posted:

Which part of the self do you believe does not take place in the brain?

Jizz Festival posted:

Who What Now posted:

What we call the "self" is the continuous process of your brain interpreting external stimuli and reacting via chemicals mixing among electrical impulses.

grate deceiver posted:

I think it's pretty obvious that the 'mind' or 'self' is a little dude inside my head, pulling my brain levers, making decisions and watching the movie of my life projected on the inside of my skull. C'mon, it's basic level poo poo. You think a brain could do all this by itself? Lol, silly materialists.

The Belgian posted:

I haven't just been going 'no you', I've given an argument. Owlfancier seems to understand it to to some extend and hasn't refuted it but merely called it impractical. You guys haven't even engaged it at all. But have some of Russell's aruments since some of you love cosmic teapots so much.

Who What Now posted:

"Hey guys I don't actually have the slightest clue what the gently caress I'm talking about, so here's something I found through Google to argue for me."

If you can't explain your own position in your own words then you're too ignorant to be part of an adult discussion about it.

The Belgian posted:

Again, I wholly incorrect reading of both what I said and the wonderful texts I quoted. This would just be falling back on a brain-inside-the-brain ad infinitium, which is absurd.

Dinosaurmageddon posted:

*I* am the self that resides outside your brain.
Which parts of the brain do you believe house the self?

The Belgian posted:

I have repeatedly stated my own position with perfect clarity. I presented useful background material as you guys are clearly unfamiliar with phenomonalism and phenomenology.

Who What Now posted:

The only position you have stated is that you view materialism is "naive". When asked to expound upon this you furiously googled something up that didn't even address the points leveled at you. If you can't explain it yourself, you don't know enough to have a discussion about it.

Dinosaurmageddon posted:

No, naturally, of course not!
But not all of life's lessons can come from books but from personal experience, just as any faith can't be fully contained within the pages of a book without limiting how effectively an otherwise contextually-personal experience can be conveyed to the reader. It's a catch-22.
Anyway I just wanted to quit all the Bible-bunking/thumping derails and point out that this isn't a Christianity vs Atheism debate. If anyone here thinks those are the only philosophical worldviews worth discussing then you've still got a long ways to go.

Dinosaurmageddon posted:

Yeah, I didn't want to derail, honestly.
John Lennon was the second coming of Christ, the Age of Aquarius has officially begun, and Magic is real and gaining in significance. Art, Love, Music, and Present-Mindedness are be Mankind's greatest assets in t(his/her)heir ascendancy to the Sun, Moon, and Stars, to the Greater Cosmos beyond. What do you want from me? More veiled truths?

The Belgian posted:

The Husserl text explicitly discusses naïve materialism. Sorry you're incabable of reading what's presented to you.

Who What Now posted:

I give literally zero fucks about what Husserl has to say right now. I care what you have to say. I'm sorry you don't understand how actual humans have conversations.

Who What Now posted:

I give literally zero fucks about what Husserl has to say right now. I care what you have to say. I'm sorry you don't understand how actual humans have conversations.

Zodium posted:

not a big Husserl fan but if you struggle with this, you should probs stay away from behavioral science explaining behavior scientifically. maybe try a something little easier, you know, something that's already well understood where you can just dig in and read the inferences without having to think too much about the underlying inferential systems, like simple physics or engineering or something.

Zodium posted:

not a big Husserl fan but if you struggle with this, you should probs stay away from behavioral science explaining behavior scientifically. maybe try a something little easier, you know, something that's already well understood where you can just dig in and read the inferences without having to think too much about the underlying inferential systems, like simple physics or engineering or something.

Who What Now posted:

I understood it just fine, actually. But I have no interest in arguing with Husserl, and I have sincere doubts the Belgian actually understands what he posted himself.

The Belgian posted:

Thank you, please tell me I'm not crazy even if you disagree with me. I've been trying to select nicely readable texts,but it seems like people are just glossing over what I say

Zodium posted:

it's self evident from your (hilariously arrogant) not-even-wrong response that you didn't understand it.

Who What Now posted:

So how, exactly, does wanting to have a conversation with the Belgian and not merely have him poo poo out some quotes he found and run without actually engaging anyone somehow evidently prove that I don't understand Husserl? Care to actually back this up, or are you just making a tone argument?

Disinterested posted:

Disinterested posted:

I'm not sure what I think of the seminary but I am sure emphasizing academic credentials to make arguments on a notorious gay hookup site about Jesus is suspect as hell.

rudatron posted:

Husserl's claim that relativity undermines materialism is absolute bullshit - it, at worst, changes what matter is, it doesn't actually help you with dualism at all, which assumes a -wait for it- duality. It's the exact same pseudo-scientific dodge made when it's assumed that quantum 'observations' necessitates a consciousness.

rudatron posted:

Husserl's claim that relativity undermines materialism is absolute bullshit - it, at worst, changes what matter is, it doesn't actually help you with dualism at all, which assumes a -wait for it- duality. It's the exact same pseudo-scientific dodge made when it's assumed that quantum 'observations' necessitates a consciousness.

This is a total cop-out though. If the gospels are unreliable, and must be 'read critically', on what basis are you claiming that the jesus figure must be accepted as existing, uncritically? Like, if in a dig, you find some graffiti 'biggus dickus was here', you may not know if that's their actual name, but you can trust it somewhat. You understand why it was written there, and that is was probably written by the person it refers to. You can't say that about the Gospels, there are in fact a tonne of reasons they could have been written, and not every one of them involves a Jesus figure existing! You cannot treat a religious text as evidence for the events it contains, because that's not what the text does.

Like, here's another problem with this whole conversation: if you say, to the average person, 'serious historians all agree Jesus existed', their immediate assumption is that there's actual, historical evidence for his existence. 'Wow, they must clearly have something, other than this book full of other made up poo poo in it, which is also pretty unreliable'. Yet that's not the case, you track down the sources and, lo and behold, the only source is the Bible.

The gospel is true guys, jesus existed! [1]

[1]Source: the gospel

The Belgian posted:

I have repeatedly stated my own position with perfect clarity. I presented useful background material as you guys are clearly unfamiliar with phenomonalism and phenomenology.

You are like a layman attending a quantum field theory class and getting angry when people won't explain everything from the very basics for you and instead refer you to some background text.

Richard Feynman posted:

I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.

The Belgian's 'Husserl', part one posted:

As was the case previously with the psychic, everything that has newly flowed in is now concretely localised in the world through the living body, which is essentially always constituted along with it. I - the-man, together with the transcendental dimension now ascribed to me, am somewhere in space at some time in the world's time. Thus every new transcendental discovery, by going back into the natural attitude, enriches my psychic life and (apperceptively as a matter of course ) that of every other.

The Belgian's 'Husserl' part two posted:

But does this mean that it is in the world in the way that the physical body is and that, when men with living bodies and souls are experienced in the world as real, their reality, as well as that of their living bodies and souls, could have the same or even a similar sense to that of the mere physical bodies? Even though the human living body is counted among the physical bodies, it is still "living" - "my physical body," which I "move," in and through which I "hold sway," which I "animate." If one fails to consider these matters - which soon become quite extensive - thoroughly, and actually without prejudice, one has not grasped at all what is of a soul's own essence as such (the word "soul" being understood here not at all metaphysically but rather in the sense of the original givenness of the psychic in the life-world); and thus one has also failed to grasp the genuine ultimate substrate for a science of "souls." Rather than beginning with the latter, psychology began with a concept of soul which was not at all formulated in an original way but which stemmed from Cartesian dualism, a concept furnished by a prior constructive idea of a corporeal nature and of a mathematical natural science.

Zodium posted:

rudatron posted:

Husserl's claim that relativity undermines materialism is absolute bullshit - it, at worst, changes what matter is, it doesn't actually help you with dualism at all, which assumes a -wait for it- duality. It's the exact same pseudo-scientific dodge made when it's assumed that quantum 'observations' necessitates a consciousness.

rudatron posted:

Jesus isn't real because I don't like the source.

The Belgian posted:

rudatron posted:

Well all new discoveries pose interesting questions, but as a threat, not really. You're only changing the rules of the game, the game itself plays on.

rudatron posted:

I'm not adverse to reinterpreting the word salad you get from continentals in purely psychological terms, I think that's also the proper way to get useful stuff from Hegel. But using it in a light-brigade-charge against 'naive materialism' will absolutely compel me to shoving into a box, called a 'grave'. It's a kind of nervous tick I have.

The Belgian posted:

The claim that relativity undermines materialism was in the Russell quote, not the Husserl quote.

More to the point, relativity does present problems for materialism if you want to see relativity as describing real reality. Not that relativity itself is enough to wholly anihilate materialism but it poses interesting questions. For instance, the conformal invariance of the causal structure of spacetime poses interesting question on what distance and time are and to what extend they're really real and unique. Holography in relativity (unknown in Russell's time) poses even greater questions and makes it seem like the 4D universe that we know and love isn't the real deal but some emergent thing.

J.A.B.C. posted:

Husserl sees himself as two distinct entities: The physical self and the transcendental dimensional self. The argument we are having now is whether there is evidence for this secondary self, or if the brain and it's reactions are the source of what we know as 'self'. Which isn't answered by what you posted. Philosophically it wraps up nicely; observably, not so much.

The Belgian posted:

The self is immediately given to you. You shouldn't need any convincing that your own self exists because, well, 'you're livng it'. Is this acceptable to you?

OwlFancier posted:

However the ease with which self delusion is possible suggests that other modes of learning are not credible, as a rule.

Just because you personally see something as being real does not mean it is, at all.

Zodium posted:

anyway, here's a a cool article about differential topology and exotic manifolds. i've got a few digits riding in friendly bets on exotic 4-d spheres being the key to capturing behavior mathematically.

The Belgian posted:

So why is scientific observation (alone?) credible? This seems to be what you're claiming. The scientific knowledge must be mediated and if you cast doubt on the immediate mode, then all else is tainted too.

Zodium posted:

you're even crazier than the dino guy.

OwlFancier posted:

The consensus part is what makes it credible, you observe the same thing over and over with different instruments (people) and if and when they correlate, and when you can devise a theory which can be used to predict future observations accurately, you've got something credible.

Tei posted:

I recomend you to read this book:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_for_a_Hat

And no. If I remember correctly the book (I could be wrong), is possible to be alive, and not have sense of self.

Theres seems to be (based on the book) people that accidentally lose the sense of self of one leg or a arm, the result is hilarious / creepy, they feel like theres somebody leg or arm in his bed.