IF YOU WATCHED the video of Jeffrey Kaplan explaining Russell's paradox I linked to a while back you would have seen that mathematicians and philosophers don't know one of the most basic facts about mathematics, they don't know if numbers have an objective existence or if they are a product of human imagination. I think we know enough about the thinking of articulate birds and apes to know that it would seem they can think about numbers to some extent too, or for anyone who is disposed to believe they can think that they can conceive of them, too. I do happen to think they have demonstrated that they can. But that doesn't tell us if they have some objective existence that doesn't depend on consciousness.
It is not only extremely relevant to this argument that one of the reasons the objective existence of numbers can't be confirmed is that they cannot be observed, they cannot even be known to have any kind of material existence. They cannot be confirmed or disconfirmed to have only a knowably subjective existence for the same reason. Yet I will bet you anyone who claimed to not believe in the existence of numbers would nearly universally be taken as a total nut-job. And they probably should be.
If numbers do have an independent existence then they exist apart from consciousness, so even a materialist who insists that our minds are an epiphenomenon of the matter that comprises our brains would have to explain how they could so be perceived by our materially bound brains and to have such a significant impact on our thinking, our lives, our science which is a consciously invented human attempt to use an imitation of the methods of pure mathematics to come to some conclusions about the physical universe of our perception and observation.
That's not an insignificant problem for ideological materialism, though the vulgar materialism of human greed and pop-kulcha deals with such problems by doing what vulgar pop-kulcha so much does about anything, they choose to not think about it. But when a pop-atheist wants to engage someone on things like "the hard problem" especially if they want to do so under a framing of something pretending to be science or philosophy then an anti-materialist such as I am has every right to use the claims of materialists, atheists, the scy-rangers of scientism against them.
I don't believe animal minds, consciousness, are epiphenomea of mater, I think it is of a rather obvious different nature than apparently unconscious matter. That is what makes the materialists' "hard problem" of consciousness hard, they are using inapt methods, models, etc. for trying to understand something and force it to fit within the narrow confines of the thing they insist is the only real thing there is, the substance of material existence. The current life-boat of materialists, "panpsychism" to attribute "consciousness" to seemingly unconscious matter is not much more than a last gasp effort to rescue what was always an extremely shallow and presumptuous ideological preference. It would certainly be no more successful than the rejected framing of vitalism or plain old materialism to explain human experience of our consciousness which would certainly seem to be different from what electrons or atoms or quarks do. They'd have to relate two apparently disparate "things" which don't seem to be like things to start with.
The old-fashioned debunking of the idea that minds were not physical entities asked how a "spiritual" thing could interact with the physical body. The question makes the mistake of assuming something which is not physical would be bound within the same potentials that physicality encompasses and wouldn't have qualities, potentials and abilities that surpass those of the physical bodies we are familiar with through our senses (of course, they can't even account for how our minds perceive things outside of our minds, to start with). They insist that something proposed to be unlike physical things must have exactly the same quality as physical things which would, for any possibility of conceiving or discussing them, beg the question by insisting on the materialists' conclusion be a premise of the argument. That is what I meant by them "begging the question." You should look up what that or any other "logical fallacy" means before you start throwing the term around because it doesn't mean it forces a question to be asked in the way you believe it does.
Science is certainly a human invention, like most human inventions invented within recorded history, its provenance can be known. It is a series of methods and procedures which are supposedly stuck to by those who get to be called "scientists" and their work which is supposed to gain the reputed reliability of the science which does seem to tell us very reliable things about some simple objects or about some of the simpler aspects of more complex objects treated as if they were simple ones.
Those newly seen galaxies that by the currently reigning models of cosmology shouldn't have developed that long ago can serve as both:
- an example of the ability of science to tell us about even things as complex as entire galaxies while not being able to tell us very much about the, no doubt, enormous complexities contained in such things so very far away;
- and as an example of how seemingly certain and durable knowledge of even things as well studied as atoms and sub-atomic particles and the general movements of planets and stars can be presented with things those so seemingly developed theories can't account for in very big ways.
I don't know how cosmology and physics is going to account for such seemingly very old galaxies, though I'd take that to be a temporary explanation, now that such well-established science seems to not match observation. I do think it's worth coming to the conclusion that while science can give us some very useful and important and reliable information on some things and some useful and important though less knowably reliable information on other things, it also has its limits, even within something as reliably falling within scientific method as physics. None of it is anything like a complete view of reality.
Applied physics, that is, theoretical physics such as is being done today is a mess in regard to following scientific methods, some of them demanding they be allowed to ignore the most basic aspects of scientific method, observation and so have their mathematical imaginings declared to be physical reality by fiat, not only without observation but without any rationally hoped for possibility of observation. It is truly ironic that the culture of high-sciencyness can so easily come to match the worst of academic theology of the kind materialist-atheist-scy-guys love to mock, even when they don't actually bother to read what was said.
There's a remarkable amount of science done by fiat in these secular, materialistic, atheistic, scientistic modern times.
If that last criticism of theoretical physics is to be taken seriously, and I think it's true, then the university-based practice of allowing junk that never followed real scientific methods because what they claim to study can't be observed, can't be measured, can't really be analyzed apart from the ideological and other desires of those who are doing it, is even more a symptom of the decadence that science fell into under the regime of ideological materialism. That is most in evidence in the alleged study of minds. I almost called that the study of "mental phenomena" but, of course, since you can't see them, nothing to do with our minds really are phenomena, we can't see them, we can't really observe them. And that's the problem.
When they were founding university departments and then schools of "psychology" they insisted that minds were to be taken as being vulnerable to discovery through scientific methods by ideological fiat, by declaration, when there was absolutely no evidence that they then could be studied successfully that way and there has only been disconfirming evidence since then as one school and framing of psychology has been erected, has rather quickly fallen into decay, fell apart and was replaced by another cathedral of "science" built on the same sands of dishonesty the first generation of university based psychology built on.
The same can be said of other alleged sciences dealing with minds, singly and collectively, sociology, anthropology, cog-sci, neurosci, etc. The scandal of the inability of scientists to replicate studies that were published in reviewed journals, accepted professionally and, in many cases built on, relying on the claims of those non-repeatable studies, the numerous cases in which papers published turned out to be based on wishful thinking by university based researchers and, in some notorious cases, outright fraud (which was also built on by later "researchers") shows that some of the biggest scandals of science are a product of the original materialist ideological programs and the decadence of alleged educational institutions in allowing them to cut more than just some corners in order to keep up with "science."
I don't think minds are material, they certainly can't be observed even indirectly. At best they can be reported on by individuals reporting on their experiences of consciousness and the reliability of those reports can't be tested. I don't think science can tell us much about them. I do think, especially, within psychology that it is a scandal that the research which has been the most rigorously conducted and measured and analyzed, the controlled research into parapsychology is exactly the research which is most vigorously rejected BECAUSE MATERIALISTS SUSPECT IT VIOLATES THE IDEOLOGICAL PREDILECTIONS OF THOSE IN CONTROL OF "SCIENCE".
If that research isn't valid to show us something real about human experience, some peoples' abilities to do things like guess cards or pictures hidden to them and shielded from any reasonable possibility of sensory information informing their guesses, succeeding at rates exceeding chance by anything from thousands to millions to one is a real thing that physics can't explain and so is rationally believed to not be physical and some extra-physical cause of it must or at least may be held to be demonstrably real.
The ability is proven to exceed any scientific explanation, if anything to do with human minds has passed the test of scientific experimentation, it is those "things." To declare it nonexistent by fiat in a baldly ideological use of "science" is to use science for something it can't legitimately be used for, which doesn't stop the Harvard based phony Stephen Pinker from citing the atheist-ideological cosmologist Sean Carroll to do that. Among the reasons that that ideological use of science as ideology is so telling about the decadence of current science is that from the time of Bacon and Descartes and Gallileo one of the reasons for coming up with scientific method was to shield the study of objects from ideological input. Now it rules so much of what is supposed to be science. I guess that's what happens when you relieve science of having to follow the rules of science. I could say a lot more about the current violations of the rules of science, such as it not being shielded from economic or professional interests, though it never really was shielded from those sources of pollution from the star.
And something like rigorously controlled correct card-guessing is one of the more banal of unexplainable experiences people have and, as they are the ones having the experience, they have a right to believe. I go much farther and hold that others have a right to find them credible though, as is generally the case with "rights" you can exercise them wisely or foolishly based on little to no checking of evidence or the character of those reporting their own experience.
Some of the most extraordinary experiences people have, singly and in groups, are some of the most impressive examples of what we assume are "things" related to Rhine's style of card guessing or the impressive Ganzfield series of experiments or those into what Dean Radin calls "presentiment" some of the most impressive of those rigorously conducted experiments.
As those spontaneous experiences don't happen regularly or predictably or to order, they couldn't be studied by science. You don't have to believe anyone who tells you about it but if someone I know to be reliable tells me they've had such experiences, who am I to disbelieve them? I know them, I don't know the scientists whose studies I read. I do know that anything that is published as psychology or sociology or, these days, theoretical physics without rigorous scientific verification has a far higher than average chance of being anything from methodologically illegitimate to just plain wrong to fraudulent. I do know that that one area of controlled, peer-reviewed and reviewed by those hostile to it, parapsychology, is held to the highest standards of rigor of any experimental science including of experimental physics or chemistry, these days. I have to trust someone, I'll trust those who regularly face their critics and retest using those criticisms to tighten their methods AND STILL COME UP WITH STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT RESULTS, generally of very high statistical significance. I don't, though, agree with those who work in the field who believe minds are material in nature. Not all of them do.
I've never been much afraid of being declared to have cooties, the first time someone tried that with me in about the second grade I thought it was pretty stupid. I'm sure I rolled my eyes, I don't know if I bothered to respond. It's hilarious how many people do that into their adulthood and on to old age and how many university based, college-credentialed people still rely on it to deny when what they hear is what they don't like. And it's amazing how effective that kind of coercion is with the smart set. It's like they never grew up. I don't care what they merely believe they think.
I don't think there are many entities widely mistaken as scientific that are less genuinely scientific than the materialist-atheist-scyrangers of CSICOP, CFI, the whole alphabet soup of Paul Kurtz-Corliss Lamont shell-corporations, clubs and cults. When a person deputed to be a scientist tries to turn science into their ideological tool, they should be held to be unreliable because they are so prone to lying to do it. They have to lie about something to do it and liars are rightly taken to be unreliable.
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