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Originally written by SkeleTony:

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Originally written by Le Diable d'Ouangs:

See, this is the part that just doesn't make any sense to me. I would rather say that I don't have direct experience of my hands in the way that I have direct experience of my thoughts. When I'm thinking, I just know that I'm thinking -- one step. When I see my hands, I perceive them first and conclude from that that they exist -- two steps.

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See this is where those axioms/first principles come in. YOURS is a solipsist one or at least a "Solipsism might be possible" one. Mine is a materialist one. BOTH are assumptions(what I and most philosophers would call "necessary assumptions" or "useful assumptions"). These initial foundations are not subject to proofs and such the way existential claims which follow from them are.
You arbitrarily determine that your "knowing" that you think is a single step while you (in MY view) struggle to make a case that MY "knowing" that things independently exist is somehow multiplicative.
I am aware of my hands in the same number of "steps" as you are aware of your thoughts but even that is beside the point because it is not the number of determining "steps" that matters but simply the quality of reasoning. I don't care if you can break down my understandings into one THOUSAND steps, so long as none of those steps is irrational.

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I disagree. We disagree on the extraneous assessments of what we experience(i.e. whether something is "beautiful", "ugly" or "meh") but not the events themselves. A terrorist sees the falling of the twin towers as beautiful. I see it as horrendous. We both see the towers falling though.

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Assuming that both of you even exist, which is something you only know by interpreting your own perception.

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You are still not getting the whole "first principles" thing. YOU are choosing the axiom that "We cannot be sure of anything". I am choosing the axiom "We CAN be sure of some things." Neither of our axioms can be proven incorrect. That is why they are called "necessary assumptions". Part of my materilist axiom is that we do exist and are not figments in something else's imagination or some such. The only thing you can really contest is what FOLLOWS from this axiom and to do THAT you have to grant, even if only for the sake of argument, the assumption/axiom that I adopt.
That is why I don't do a lot of "challenging" of solipsists and the like. They operate from a principle I cannot accept and cannot challenge except to point out how observation contradicts their position which means NOTHING to them since observation is unreliable/false anyway(in their worldview).
In the same vein, your "challenge" that I or WE may not exist is like trying to introduce "touchdowns" into the game of baseball.

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You're right that avoiding making assumptions altogether doesn't get us anywhere past solipsism, but the point is that solipsism isn't a viewpoint that can be conclusively ruled out, even if it's a viewpoint that has no practical value.

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It IS ruled out by MY axioms! Logically, there is no way around this. First principles/necessary assumptions cannot be challenged by the methods and processes that emerge from those principles.
To argue otherwise is like trying to use math to prove that math works! If someone does not believe you can actually quantify things sequentially through addition, subtraction and multiplication then using addition, subtraction and multiplication to show them otherwise is nonsense!

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If that were so then we would all be sitting around on our hands in a nightmare bout of solipsism chattering "I cannot say anything is true!". I cannot even say THAT is true." "I cannot say that I cannot say that I cannot say THAT is true!!"

We DO have surefire ways of distinguihsing reality from fantasy. It is a combination of concurrent observation, repeatability, testing/experiement etc.

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None of which are absolutely certain. If they were, we wouldn't make mistakes.

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Sure we would. Just because things are objectively true does not mean that we cannot mispercieve or misunderstand those things! You are trying to argue that since we CAN make mistakes, we can NEVER be certain that we HAVEN'T made mistakes in every single facet of every issue in life. I disagree with this. We CAN be 100% certain that trees exist and that WE exist("I THINK, therefore I AM.") and still make mistakes regarding how much sunlight trees need or how tall humans can grow.

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I am sorry but from my POV that sounds like complete nonsense. It is material objects we cannot get away from and thoughts which are fleeting. A rock will exist regardless of whether you are thinking about it. That is why you are surprised when you accidentally trip over the rug or stub your toe on a rock. The object gets you even though you were unaware of it being there.

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But what does it actually mean to say the rock existed before you were thinking about it?

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It means that before I was thinking about the rock, someone else was observing me walking toward it with my head in a book and subsequently stubbing my toe on said rock. Even without this bit of concurrent observatrion, the rock is existent as evidenced by my toe-stubbing even though I was not thinking about the rock.

I honestly don't think we are going to get past this one as you seem to, for whatever reasons, place the thought of such things on a higher pedestal than the things themselves. Roaches have no abstract thoughts and cannot even concieve of "rocks" and yet they navigate around them as well. Automobiles have no thoughts at all and yet if one hits a rock, damage will occur(even with no humans around at the time).

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It came into your awareness at the precise moment that you stubbed your toe on it.

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So? All the more evidence that physically existent objects are interacting in a physical universe.

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Any assumptions about its prior existence are based on holding a certain model of the universe.

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EXACTLY! The "materialist" model! As opposed to YOUR presuppositional model(the "Anything is possible and we can never know anything!"' model).

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Which was exactly my point - it's possible for a scientific discovery to occur without any initial observation taking place at all.

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?!?!?!?

How so?

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Once you have a hypothesis, it doesn't matter how you got that hypothesis.

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Sure it does! The "Creationist hypothesis"(for example) is NOT science! We are talking about SCIENCE here! Scientific hypotheses require observation!

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That depends on what you mean by "exists".

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Again, I am not much interested in useless semantics. Essential definitions here. If someone claims that hyperspace travel is possible via cold fusion, I don't want to sit around asking inane questions like "What does "cold" mean?", "What does "fusion" mean?", and "What does "space" mean?" etc.

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When is presupposition a trap and when is it the formation of assumptions or axioms necessary for a coherent and meaningful view of the world?

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Presupposition is ALWAYS a trap. Necessary assumptions/first principles are unavoidable, so tieing your brain up in circular knots worrying about them is useless.

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The trouble is, if we weren't capable of thinking rationally, we wouldn't necessarily know that we weren't.

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We would not be talking or thinking at ALL beyond the survival instincts of some quadrepedal mammal's ability so that point is moot. To ask if we would know we were irrational if in fact we were irrational is like asking if we would try to walk if we never had legs and never were aware of such things existing.

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That's right. An interesting consequence of Godel's theorem is that in a formal system such as logic, although you can construct a proof of something, there's no way to construct a proof that your proof is sound.

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Again, I am no mathematician. perhaps if I were, I would have greater appreciation for Godel and his Incompleteness Theorem". As it stands, he is just someone who is invoked WAYYYY too often in existetntial debates by people(Usually the J.Z. Knight/Ramtha crowd but sometimes more reasonable people like yourself). Even so, I was able to deconstruct and demolish "Hilbert's Hotel" in a debate I had with a creationist sometime ago so maybe I need to sit down and make an effort with Godel some time.
It seems silly to me that humans put so much credence on the fact that we can construct nonsense statements and paradoxes!? As if this fact alone refuted logic!

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I maintain that this definition begs the question. The fact that thinking requires a brain is an observation about the world, not part of the definition of thinking.

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And I disagree and we are not going to get any further with that one either. TO me, defining thinking in any way that does not include the brain is meaningless. You might as well define thinking as "The smell of purple".

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Again, the fact that damage to our brains impairs our ability to think is an observation about the world, NOT a necessary fact of logic.

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From YOUR "assumptions"/axioms maybe. Not mine. From MY materialist POV, the fact that you cannot think without your brain proves that you need your brain to think. As soon as you show me a thought that exists sans a brain, we will have something new to discuss on this matter.

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[b]Yes. I'm saying that's a possibility we can never completely rule out. The only reason it should be treated as a belief of last resort is that it would be disastrous to take such a thing as being true -- but that's not the same as saying it can't be true.

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It cannot be true. If it were true then we would know nothing. SInce we know things and the universe operates in a consistent manner, we do not live in the "anything is possible" universe. If we DID live in the "AiP" universe then it would be possible that we know EVERYTHING(with 100% certainty)! Your argument refutes itself!

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Your answer is interesting to me. Surely memories are stored in some form or another in the brain (in fact, neurologists are already starting to find out certain things about how they're stored).

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Sort of but not how one might think they are "stored"(in fact, I am not sure "stored" is correct terminology). We kind of note down, in sloppy short-hand notation, experiences we have. Later, when recalling those experiences, we create complex visuals and fleshed out prose to tell the story of what happened.
Could a machine do that? I don't know. I am not much concerned with the matter either. I suppose it may be one of those "hypothetically possible but practically infeasable" deals.

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Surely, then, if you produce a sufficiently accurate duplicate of a human at a certain point in time, the original and the duplicate will be identical in all ways, including self-awareness, regardless of the fact that one has actually experienced things and the other merely has the neurological remnants of its prototype's experiences. Or are you arguing that self-awareness isn't a state function?

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I think Gould's contingency theory would apply here. There are simply too zoggin' many variables to account for and no matter how hard you try, you can never really duplicate them all to replicate the developement of humanity.[/b]

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I'd argue that "objective experience" is a contradiction in terms. Everything we experience is subjective because everything we experience is processed by our own mind and nobody else's.

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See I don't think that "caused" is right the way you are using it above. There is not really a single "cause" of my perception but rather a few different components: The actual object I am percieving and my sensory organs and brain matter.

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Fine. "Contingent on the presence of that actual object"?

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Furthermore, you are once again implying things with a dependent existence are equivalent of things which independently exist.

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I'm implying we have no surefire way of telling the difference between the two.

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[b]

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In essence saying that since the thought in my head is "caused" by my brain, thoughts are existent in the same way that trees, caused by climatological conditions, "exist".

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I think thoughts exist in an even more real and certain sense. A material object is an abstraction which we assume from our perceptions; the boundaries we set to any given "object" as distinct from other objects are arbitrary and defined by our mind (the fact that people don't take this fact into account is why they think the Ship of Theseus is a paradox.) A thought is something we can't get away from; we'd be thinking all the time even in the absence of external input.

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[qb]

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What is unscientific is assuming that what he reported anecdotally(re: that he had a dream in which the structure of benzene came to him) happened just as he reported but that is another issue. YES it is unscientific to rely on dreams in such a way but so what? If I am inspired to invent a better sugar-free beverage than Diet Soda because of a daydream or hallucination I had then how I go about inventing said beverage will be where the scientific process occurs. The "inspiration" part is rather inconsequential(or maybe "incidental" would be a better word) to the whole matter of how science works.

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So you'd support dropping the "observation" criterion from your previous method altogether?[/b]

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THat's not what I was arguing. Let's say that I came here boldly proclaiming, in all of my closed-minded furor, that girls who wanted to be working 'models' had to be of a certain height and weight range in addition to having appealing facial features/bone structure by the general consensus of the modeling community and society in general.
Now along comes someone who says "Hey! My friend does hand modeling for those Palmoloive dish soap commercials and she is overweight and short!"

See what I mean? Hand models and runway models are both models but clearly the guy in the above analogy is fishing for a non-applicable example to rationalize a dissenting view.

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So now you're only claiming that the "natural" sciences require an assumption of materialism, and that the "social" sciences don't?

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I wasn't under the impression that that was the argument you were making, since you just used the blanket term "science".

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Even then, I'd argue that the natural sciences only require a weak form of materialism (assuming that matter exists), rather than a strong form (assuming that only matter exists.)

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See "model" example above. Calling economics "science" in this discussion is like invoking someone with an honorary doctorate(re:Doctor Martin Luther King Jr.) in a discussion about medical malpractice or something.

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I don't think it's beside the point at all. I don't think either of us disagree that in a non-material world, the social sciences would be the only sciences worth studying.

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What I'm saying is that that still counts as science, so science doesn't require materialism.

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Unless you're going to argue that the sciences that do require materialism are somehow more intellectually sound in principle than the ones that don't, I think it's unfair to draw a distinction between sciences which require materialism and sciences which don't.

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I know I am going to catch all Hell for saying this but anyway...

THAT is where skepticism/critical thought come in. Any scientist worth his salt will be a skeptic/criticial thinker. Skepticism is a means of keeping an eye out for what Shermer calls "errors in thinking". Fallacies that spring forth from personal bias adn such. We cannot be completely objective/unbiased this is true but we CAN avoid the problems of being so. We do NOT necessrily have to fall into the traps of presupposition and the like.

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To say that you've proved something via reasoning requires, at the very least, a conviction that your own reasoning is correct. Brains, as we've already agreed, aren't purely logical things. It's always possible you've made some error in logic even if nobody notices it, so how can you be completely certain of any conclusion arrived at through a line of reasoning?

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Here's the thing though. BRains are capable of both rational adn irrational thought, we both agree. However it is the very fact that we DO have teh ability to think logically and rationally and therefore to spot those "errors" of thinking. The scientific method is largely built upon this truth. I am convinved that this universe has limitations or boundries. I am further convicned that humans are capable of recognizing some/many of these limitations. I am also convinced that I have correctly identified a few myself(I am not the first mind you but that is unimportant) such as the fact that something cannot be 'A' and 'not A' by ANY rational system of thought. Therefore, round squares, transcendent gods and things that grow while shrinking do not exist.

We may disagree on much but I think this should be the very LEAST of which we should agree on.

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Prove it. And prove it without using empirical evidence, because there's always the possibility that any empirical evidence you use is a hallucination.

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Not true. What I think you mean to say is that it is always possible for someone to deny what they know to be true and against such a person, nothing can be proven.

We do not need to prove this because by definition it is true. Like it or not "walking" is defined as an ambulatory activity/movement of legged creatures. "Thinking" is the act of mentally concieving of ideas using the brain. We do not think using our elbows adn if WE are thinking(and I think you will agree that we are) then we must be doing so with SOMETHING that WE have. It makes no sense to speculate that I am thinking with a piece of magic in some other world that somehow becomes non-functional when my brain is thoroughly damaged. Followed to it's logical conclusion, your line of reasoning suggests that we live in an "anything is possible" universe where we cannot say we know anything.

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Okay, here's a simple question that will tell me what I originally wanted to know one way or the other; if I made a completely accurate molecule-by-molecule duplicate of a self-aware human being, would the duplicate be self-aware? The duplicate hasn't "experienced" anything, because it was only just created, but from a materialist perspective there isn't any difference between the two now.

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Possibly but it would be self-aware in the same way a bewborn baby is self aware. Experiences define who we are.[/b]

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