↪fishfry How does assuming everything is conscious help explain how a lump of meat can be? It's no explanation at all.
Plus, the 'problem' is not explaining how meat can be conscious. The problem is that we have rational intuitions that represent all material things to be lacking in mental properties. And it's not a problem, unless you've started out assuming that we're material things. — Bartricks
And I never said that anything in your posts had to do with a flat earth. However lots of people went by rational appearances that it was. I was showing what might be entailed by your argument. Here for example you could show why people believing the earth is flat does not count as a rational appearance.Re your other points - no premise in my argument implies that the world is flat (or that it is flat if enough people believe it to be) — Bartricks
Or is it an illusory byproduct?Did you just decide you have free will? Or does your reason represent you to have it? — Bartricks
Or does your reason represent you to have it? — Bartricks
To me those are quite different ideas. One is that believing in something CAUSES it to become true. The other that a good heuristic for deciding something is true is if many people believe it.But my claim is not about beliefs. No premise of my argument mentioned beliefs. The claim, is NOT that if enough people believe something that will make it true. That's obviously fallacious (and the fallacy in question involves confusing a belief with its object and has nothing to do with numbers - one commits the same basic fallacy if one thinks that believing something will make it true). — Bartricks
I see most people sending out mixed messages about their free will. Sometimes they talk about themselves as free, sometimes as being forced by their emotions, their situation. Yes, when people sum up, they often do sum up in favor of free will, but there is tremendous evidence that the idea of not having free will is unpleasant. IOW that it is not a reasoned conclusion, but a preferred forThe claim is that if the reason of most people represents a proposition - p - to be true, then other things being equal that is good evidence that p is true. — Bartricks
Then there are differences between rational appearances OR we must always agree with the majority and there is no difference between belief that is knowledge and belief that is not. I cannot see in practical terms how your rational appearances differs from popular ideas.All attempts to argue for anything - so all appeals to evidence - are ultimately appeals to rational appearances.
Anyone who rejects my premise on the grounds that rational appearances have no probative force will - by hypothesis - be rejecting it on no rational basis or being inconsistent. — Bartricks
I don't think what you are calling rational is rational, or perhaps better put, some of what you are categorizing as rational intutions is rational some is not. And I see this when people talk about what they believe. For example, they often say they believe X, but act like they do not or even believe the opposite. I also see people saying that X is true for all sorts of reasons, sometimes having nothing to do at all with rational or intuition - for example, cultural habits. They grew up in the assumption, for example. Others can come from language, where paradigmatic ideas are built in, in dead metaphors for example.So are you denying the probative force of rational intuitions? — Bartricks
I am only interested in what reason says, not what some crazy book written by people who know less than we do says. — Bartricks
The first is, the second isn't - and that's something we (most of us) recognise by rational intuition. — Bartricks
↪fishfry My point is that the view has nothing to be said for it - until or unless we can explain in a rationally satisfying way how it is that an extended thing can be conscious, then positing that all extended things are conscious will do nothing whatever to help. — Bartricks
You can see that 2 + 3 = 5, yes? — Bartricks
Also, how do you figure the mind is a soul? And immaterial at that, if it's a part of your brain..? — Swan
the mind is something that your brain is generating — Swan
It's a product of the brain and nervous system, — Swan
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