Sorite’s Paradox Reconsidered: Materialism Defeated

@dalniente, I seriously don’t know what you’re getting at. I was quite drunk last night (finished my first semester of PhD! WOO!) and am still a bit hazy this morning…

When I said “The real weird thing is consciousness is aware of itself” it had nothing to do with any prior discussion, I was simply blurting out what I wanted to say.

Which is still weird, and has occupied my mind for the past 3 days now. (Oh and yes I agree things are qualitative, the color red, although grounded to a physical, quantitative wave-length, is a subjective, qualitative experience – if I were to deny this … I don’t know)

But anyway, am I missing something here? Am I getting lost in circular logic, because this seems incredibly odd to me:
In the standard, emerging model, we believe that the brain can account for everything, right? There is no soul, nothing unexplainable about the mind – all our feelings, thoughts, qualitative and quantitative that can be experienced, are processes of the mind.

Somehow, consciousness emerges from this brain, this mind, what some seem to believe is due to the entirety of the brain working = voila consciousness. As someone once said: “I don’t think anyone will solve the problem of consciousness in my life time. Its a hard problem.” Some famous Neuroscientist, idk who.

Anyway;
So consciousness is a product of the brain, and obviously the brain is aware that it is conscious, otherwise I wouldn’t be having this discussion. Yet consciousness itself usually lags behind actual neural network decisions, but we have this illusion that consciousness is doing everything. God damnit I’m losing myself again. I will come back to this. Maybe in a new thread cause kind of getting off topic here, now.

@dkman,

the pile argument seems a little silly, its semantics, of course what one decides is a pile another might feel differently, its a descriptive term, not meant to relay a specific amount, but a general amount,

everyone views reality differently, everyone uses terms differently, and because everyone is unique in regards to their accumulation of knowledge and experience, everybody puts different meaning to different words in terms of relevance, and even in definition (slang),

@dkman,

It’s a heap and not a heap at the same time. It’s all perception. I personally follow the philosophy of the duality (opposing qualities and “truths” are both true and not true).

My Duality Explanation: http://www.highexistence.com/topic/understanding-the-duality/

@dkman, Sure, modern computers may be incapable of producing qualatative statements. However, human brains are the end result of billions of years of evolution. Computers are are the end result of, at most, a few hundred years. Is it a surprise that our brains can do things that computers cannot? Of course not.

@ijesuschrist,

This is mainly in regards to idea of “consciousness being a byproduct of the brain”. I feel that there is something very important missing from the core of this statement; it detaches existence from the natural world. Essentially what I am trying to say is that we/everything is a manifestation of that natural world, humanity from the earth, earth from the sun, the sun from a massive cloud of dust and gas, that dust and gas from the death of one or probably many super novas or maybe just remnants of the big bang. I find it hard to believe that there was a point in existence where consciousness was not a part of thee equation. In my mind consciousness is a keystone of existence, it just manifests into different forms or rather Life/Being/to Be is experienced at different levels of consciousness. To bring it back to the heap of sand paradox… at what point in development of the human embryo does consciousness start, is there some key cell that forms and then, poof, consciousness? I believe that the brain in its many varying states is simply a means for consciousness to perceive reality/existence in a particular way. The complexity of the human brain merely results in our ability to perceive the world/reality in the way that we do, it seems that it is the complexity of the brain that is so important. This might sound bizarre but I believe consciousness is the underlying force/attraction between everything, the entity that resides between the space of the nucleus and electron cloud if you will.

I mean honestly, what is existence without consciousness? I think that we have a tendency to project human qualities onto everything around us and when those things don’t have similar human characteristics we cast them aside as being primitive or unaware, however these too are from the same origin that led to the creation of our complex molecular makeup.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this… these ideas race through my mind constantly these days. Maybe I’m thinking in some paradox I can’t see outside of?

@ijesuschrist, it has much more to do with how efficient connections in an individual’s brain are.

@ijesuschrist, human brains have gotten smaller over the last 20,000 (or so) years. To put it simply, we use what we have pretty well. I’ll give you another example: the number of genes humans in general have is much lower than what many people previously thought. Humans have evolved to use them quite effectively (without being greatly detrimental to performance).

I was totally going to make a penis joke.

@dkman, @ijesuschrist, A little insight from Mr.Watts. “We’ve got the idea that ‘No, I’m something IN this body.’ The ego. That’s a joke. The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention. It’s like the radar on a ship. The radar on a ship is a troubleshooter. Is there anything in the way? And conscious attention is a designed function of the brain to scan the environment, like a radar does, and note for any troublemaking changes. But if you identify yourself with your troubleshooter, then naturally you define yourself as being in a perpetual state of anxiety”