OK, I may have to retract my earlier statements - I tried watching a few videos - he’s just an annoying kook for the most part. He takes forever to get to the point, and it’s a disappointing arrival when he does.
Dude.
Come on. Yeah, I’m aware of the idea that the brain is really some sort of antenna for the soul. It’s a ridiculous theory, because where is this soul you’re talking about? What’s it made of? How does this incorporeal insubstantial thing that can’t be detected by physical means interact with the physical brain? Do animals have souls? What about animals that don’t have brains, or plants, or bacteria?
The only parsimonious explanation is that the human brain works like an animal brain, the neurons work just like animal neurons, and the only difference between a rat and a chimpanzee and a human brain is the size and complexity and organization of the brain. Our minds are generated by our brains and bodies, and our brains and bodies are composed of the same ordinary matter that makes up rocks and dirt.
If you want to postulate some pixie dust mixed in there feel free, but what does your pixie dust theory add? What does it predict? We’ve been looking for that pixie dust for hundreds of years and we still haven’t found it, so good luck on your continued search.
I think the rules of argument state that one cannot rule someone out until you have at least heard their argument. Or that just because you don’t agree doesn’t mean you can dismiss them.
What part of “dig in deeper” implies that the argument has not been heard?
As far as I could make out, the guy in the video isn’t really arguing that the brain is an antenna for the soul, but rather, that the material world is an illusion, or maybe that it exists, but we are incapable of perceiving its true nature.
His argument, as far as I could tell, goes:
Look, people were wrong about Phlogiston and Luminiferous Aether, Miasma, and Caloric - see how easy it is to be wrong? Therefore everyone is wrong when they say that the brain is where the mind lives.
Classic fallacy of false equivalence. He very carefully does not say what he thinks about the discovery of Oxygen, Relativity, the Germ Theory of disease and Thermodynamics; neither does he acknowledge the mechanism by which humans actually determined the wrongness of Phlogiston et al.
The reasons we know Phlogiston was a false notion are the same reasons we believe the brain hosts the mind - the scientific method and empiricism.
Wrong. Not enough hours in the day to listen to every kook expound at length on their crackpot theory while looking for some grain of truth they unwittingly managed not to drown in their inanity.
Wrong again. See what I did there?
As has already been said, of course you can. You came in here using a guy who deified Charlie Freakin’ Manson to lay out your argument. Sorry, there’s no need to consider that guy’s argument. He ruled himself out.
We’re not dismissing people because we disagree with them; we dismiss their arguments because they and their arguments are batshit insane. There are plenty of people out there who aren’t batshit insane that put together points I disagree with. I’m willing to read and listen to them. Even if I dismiss their argument I can understand where they are coming from. Why not look for those people to start a discussion?
I recently tried to debate someone in regards to criticism and it somehow got into a debate about the basis for knowledge.
The point is taken, the beast is molting, the fluff gets up your nose. The illusion is complete, it is reality, the reality is illusion and the ambiguity is the only truth. But is the truth, as Hitchcock observes, in the box? No, there isn’t room, the ambiguity has put on weight. The point is taken, the elk is dead, the beast stops at Swindon, Chabrol stops at nothing, I’m having treatment and La Fontaine can get knotted.
…Now, how about that long walk in the fresh air?
But by what metrics do you judge insanity then? How do you so easily dismiss someone yet be so certain you are right? Aren’t all positions ultimately based on something unprovable?
What about the video where he argues that the mind is the deceiver? That it would be so easily for it to lie to you since it controls almost everything?
Is that your position?
I mean it’s not. I don’t think that. But I don’t know how to counter those that say it.
This is the video I mean. You can skip to the 55 min mark.
See, I kind of figured that the go-to response — when someone relays the position that all positions are based on something unprovable — is to nod thoughtfully and ask whether his position is based on something unprovable.
If it is, then apparently there’s nothing wrong with having such a position; after all, a guy who seems fairly sure of himself is breezily holding a position and relaying it, in the same way he’d presumably seem untroubled while walking and chewing bubblegum. And if it’s not, then, uh, I guess he was wrong about that.
We’re not having any problem with the concept. You can learn from that.
That actually doesn’t help much, since just dismissing someone as crazy without addressing the argument is ad homeniem.
Then again, the proof he offers for self deceptions (in the link staring at 55 min) doesn’t seem like evidence but more like personal judgments .
Just because something is a logical fallacy does not mean it is wrong.
Those are the remarks I was addressing when I said “We’re not having any problem with the concept.” Your follow-up does not lead logically from this.
Again, we are supplying quite adequate refutations of the concept - actually the feeble notion - that since absolute proof is unattainable outside of formal math and logic all propositions are of equal value. They are not. Value depends on the weight, type, and credibility of the evidence supplied. It is possible that a nugget or brilliance resides in a ton of dross but hardly likely. And even in the exceptional case, a nugget won’t get you very far.
As we have said repeatedly in all your threads, we are not responsible for sorting through hours of lectures or hundreds of pages of assertions just to evaluate their worth. A small amount of dross is normally sufficient, as in the aphorism “You don’t have to eat an entire egg to know that it’s rotten.” A large part of the worth of a college education is the building of the critical faculty so that dross can be quickly identified. You seem particularly resistant to that concept. Our collective response can be put into shorthand: you need to build those mental muscles.
But it’s the fear of wrong and thinking about how some things might be right and so are everything else.
Like on point he made about ownership and how it’s a myth. Like how can one person possibly own another piece of reality, like how a piece of paper possibly means it belongs to you. The fear that everything that one knows could be the result of the deception of the mind.
Ownership of property isn’t a “myth”, it’s a social convention. If nobody else agrees that you own the Moon, and don’t act as if you own the Moon, then it doesn’t do you any good to own the Moon.
Ownership is a human concept that was invented so we don’t have to keep squabbling over the same old shit every single day. Now we only squabble over who owns what every other day, and our lives are twice as peaceful as before. That’s all it is. God doesn’t write down which humans own which property and mark that ownership into the fabric of the cosmos, it’s just humans deciding and un-deciding stuff.
You can’t. Once someone gets to the point where they can dismiss as an illusion anything you might possibly say or present in evidence, their position is unassailable.
That doesn’t make them right - it just makes any discussion of right or wrong utterly pointless.