Poll: Do you believe in the paranormal? If not, have you ever wanted to?

[happyninja42]

snip

We are going to have to agree to disagree 'cos what you're saying to me seems as daft as what I am saying to you. I see nothing wrong in just letting an idea hang, without anything to support it or any reason to even suggest an idea like it.

You seem to need a reason to have an idea or theory, I just don't.

Then you shouldn't discount my invisible purple dragon, if you're so willing to "just let an idea hang"

 

[CeeBod]

Provide for me a solution to the hard problem of consciousness, and then condescend all you like. In the meantime, I'll just be over here with David Chalmers, Saul Kripke, Donald Hoffman, Thomas Nagel, Colin McGinn, Alonzo Church, John Searle, John Eccles, Bertrand Russel, Hilary Putnam, Peter Geach, and a mountain of other major thinkers in philosophy of the mind (many of whom, incidentally, are not religious) who find your position untenable. I mean, it's not like materialism has a scrap of evidence for it either - it is a metaphysical position, not a scientific one, and you cheapen science when you try to palm it off as one.

The problem is that you're presenting mind as being a digital choice between either A) This physical thing or B) This metaphysical thing, when it's really not a thing at all. Like I said in my post, it's a process. I probably didn't explain it well, so here's a pretty good explanation I just found on why the self is just a process http://www.beinghuman.org/article/interview-thomas-metzinger-what-self . I particularly like the line:

I would guess that most cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, and almost all philosophers today would subscribe to the idea that is there no thing or metaphysical substance like the self that can exist independently of the brain. In science and philosophy, the concept of such a metaphysical self is long gone.

That article seems to be nicely in line with what I was struggling to describe, and here's a similar one on life being a process not a thing too, which was a parrallel I was trying and failing to draw (Had a very early start to make an interview earlier today so I'm tired but still hyper, so probly not great on clarity just now!) - http://www.mantlethought.org/international-affairs/life-process-not-thing

 

[Secondhand Revenant]

snip

We are going to have to agree to disagree 'cos what you're saying to me seems as daft as what I am saying to you. I see nothing wrong in just letting an idea hang, without anything to support it or any reason to even suggest an idea like it.

You seem to need a reason to have an idea or theory, I just don't.

Are you afraid of aliens *maybe* abducting you if you step outside at the wrong time? Or entertain the notion that Obama is a shapeshifting lizard person? That maybe a malevolent genie is controlling us all?

When people just let ideas 'hang' I really doubt it's because of some genuine principle. It's because people want to, or are inclined to, believe them and just don't have a good reason over anything else. It's not like they treat the myriad of other potential claims the same.

 

[rgrekejin]

Provide for me a solution to the hard problem of consciousness, and then condescend all you like. In the meantime, I'll just be over here with David Chalmers, Saul Kripke, Donald Hoffman, Thomas Nagel, Colin McGinn, Alonzo Church, John Searle, John Eccles, Bertrand Russel, Hilary Putnam, Peter Geach, and a mountain of other major thinkers in philosophy of the mind (many of whom, incidentally, are not religious) who find your position untenable. I mean, it's not like materialism has a scrap of evidence for it either - it is a metaphysical position, not a scientific one, and you cheapen science when you try to palm it off as one.

The problem is that you're presenting mind as being a digital choice between either A) This physical thing or B) This metaphysical thing, when it's really not a thing at all. Like I said in my post, it's a process. I probably didn't explain it well, so here's a pretty good explanation I just found on why the self is just a process http://www.beinghuman.org/article/interview-thomas-metzinger-what-self . I particularly like the line:

I would guess that most cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, and almost all philosophers today would subscribe to the idea that is there no thing or metaphysical substance like the self that can exist independently of the brain. In science and philosophy, the concept of such a metaphysical self is long gone.

That article seems to be nicely in line with what I was struggling to describe, and here's a similar one on life being a process not a thing too, which was a parrallel I was trying and failing to draw (Had a very early start to make an interview earlier today so I'm tired but still hyper, so probly not great on clarity just now!) - http://www.mantlethought.org/international-affairs/life-process-not-thing

Thinking about the mind as a process rather than a thing is a somewhat interesting thought experiment, but I don't really see anything here to engage with - this isn't a scientific theory, it's a just-so story about the mind. And I should note that this logic can just as easily be run in reverse to yield the somewhat strange idea that the brain doesn't create the mind, rather, the mind creates the brain. See the work of Donald Hoffman (I think he has a decent TED talk about this), David Chalmers, or really, any of the literature dealing with the concept of Idealism for a more in-depth treatment. But still, it doesn't really address the main problems with seeing the mind as a purely physical phenomenon - namely that, given what we know about matter, it would seem to be impossible for any piece of thinking matter to exhibit intentionality or truth-value, things which are very evident in mental phenomenon. These things, at the very least, seem to imply some form of Platonism. Unless you can explain how one unthinking lump of matter can somehow be "about" another unthinking lump of matter without making reference to any sort of an interpreter, the objection still stands.

Edit: Just to be clear, what I'm trying to say here isn't that the mind is or isn't a process, but that describing the mind as a process does nothing to actually solve any of the problems concerning the apparently non-material aspects of thought, like original intentionality and the irreducible first-person ontology. Rather, it just waves systems complexity at them like a talisman to ward off evil. Indeed, the problem has gotten so bad that some prominent naturalist philosophers of the mind have begun advocating a position called "mysterianism" - that the matter of the brain actually causally produces the mind in a simple and straightforward manner, it's just that our minds are not structured in a way to be able to understand it! It is literally unknowable! How's that for a cop-out?

Here are a few good blog posts by a philosopher I like discussing the problems:

Does Matter Think?

Strawson's Vacuous Materialism

 

[emissary666]

When I was younger, I was a huge paranormal enthusiast and conspiracy theorist. Ghosts, aliens, cryptids, all sorts of crazy stuff. Then, I'm not sure when, I stopped believing. Ghosts are just the product of various environmental effects and the human mind, aliens probably exist but not on Earth, Nessy is a catfish, Oswald shot Kennedy, the moon landing was real, and Bigfoot keeps on being faked. That being said, there is still a small part of me that wants to go back to that time; I'm still holding out on Mothman being real (even though it was probably just an owl) and it is hard for me to resist a good paranormal investigation show (even if it is just to laugh). Thinking about it all now makes me kind of sad, the world was so much more interesting back then.