All matter is a cognitive ‘hallucination,’ even the brain itself

I don’t see how experiences would be “generated” from the brain. The brain is an icon in experience, inside the head that is also part of the iconography of experience.

Why would icons in experience be capable of generating experience itself? The icons on my computer screen are not creating the rest of the display or the rest of the computer.

Of course there is something behind all the iconography, and you can even end my localized embodied experience by messing with the iconography in the same way you can delete your hard drive by using the iconography of a user interface. But I think all we can say from looking at the “physical” is that these correlations between my private experience & the consensus experience exist.

My experience of my brain may be interacting with icons, but the brain itself is capable of generating all sorts of things.

The Recycle Bin icon is not the recycle bin, but there is a recycle bin.

Don't we need to be careful not to iconify everything and end up with nothing?

~~ Paul

I believe @Valmar 's point is that if matter lacks abstractive capabilities by definition, then there cannot be abstractive capabilities in combinations of matter. Adding an infinite number of 0s still gives us 0 after all.

This relates to something Atheist Horsemen, Neuroscience PhD Sam Harris has written:



One of the many issues with the odd idea that something outside of all experience exists, but is only known through consciousness, yet bizarrely generates all experience...

There are no additive capabilities in individual transistors, and yet we can construct all manner of adders from them. I think we have to be careful not to fool ourselves by selecting features we see in the macro world, failing to find them in the micro world, and then concluding that the macro feature cannot arise from combinations of the micro features.

~~ Paul

My experience of my brain may be interacting with icons, but the brain itself is capable of generating all sorts of things.

The Recycle Bin icon is not the recycle bin, but there is a recycle bin.

Don't we need to be careful not to iconify everything and end up with nothing?

~~ Paul

What is the brain capable of generating?

The icons are the phenomenal, there is something noumenal "underneath" but I don't see why we would think the noumenal exists outside of all experience let alone generates experience.

There are no additive capabilities in individual transistors, and yet we can construct all manner of adders from them. I think we have to be careful not to fool ourselves by selecting features we see in the macro world, failing to find them in the micro world, and then concluding that the macro feature cannot arise from combinations of the micro features.

~~ Paul

And there is no additive capabilities in wood or plastic, yet we can make an abacus from either.

Are you saying these tools actually know what math they are doing, or are they merely tools to assist actual conscious entities?

Why does any particular matter need to demonstrate abstractive capabilities in order for certain combinations of matter to do so? I think you're still making a just-so claim.

Because you cannot derive abstractive capabilities from certain combinations if such capabilities are not present in the simplest forms of matter. You cannot get something from nothing.

I agree that we cannot know what exactly the "external world" is. However, it seems quite reasonable, short of evidence to the contrary, to simply assume that it is an external "physical" world.

We don't even have evidence that the external world is truly "physical" ~ we only know what our senses show us, and we call the stuff we perceive "physical", because it has common properties.

There may be no logical reason why our perception should match the external world, but doesn't it seem like that would be the simplest explanation? Is some primitive organism with no brain coming up with a clever interface? How about the next slightly more complex organism?

~~ Paul

It is the most naive explanation ~ there is nothing "simple" about presuming that our perception of the external world is as it is, because you have to ignore whole swaths of data strongly suggesting that we do not perceive reality as it really is ~ everything from quantum mechanics / physics suggests this.

The simpler explanation is that the physical form shapes and modulates how we perceive sensory data ~ we never perceive the sensory data in and of itself, only what the physical form shapes it into.

My experience of my brain may be interacting with icons, but the brain itself is capable of generating all sorts of things.

The Recycle Bin icon is not the recycle bin, but there is a recycle bin.

Don't we need to be careful not to iconify everything and end up with nothing?

~~ Paul

Brains have never been shown to be capable nor responsible for "generating" anything.

That is mere confusion and conflating by Materialists of correlation with causation, because the Materialist just redefines minds as epiphenomena of brains, so it must be the brain doing stuff, not the mind.

There are no additive capabilities in individual transistors, and yet we can construct all manner of adders from them. I think we have to be careful not to fool ourselves by selecting features we see in the macro world, failing to find them in the micro world, and then concluding that the macro feature cannot arise from combinations of the micro features.

~~ Paul

There is nothing more happening at a transistor level ~ it is still purely physical and chemical reactions.

What you don't seem to realize is that we humans create abstractions, and then build physical tools to support those abstractions.

In terms of physics and chemistry ~ there are no macro features. There are just micro features that we conscious entities mentally abstract away as "macro".

There is nothing more happening at a transistor level ~ it is still purely physical and chemical reactions.

What you don't seem to realize is that we humans create abstractions, and then build physical tools to support those abstractions.

In terms of physics and chemistry ~ there are no macro features. There are just micro features that we conscious entities mentally abstract away as "macro".

But doesn’t this micro/macro distinction depend on whether particles themselves are generated by fields?

As per the recent PBS Spacetime videos about what an electron is, if there is no corpuscle but “excitations” of a field…then isn’t the field fundamentally a macro object, possibly as extensive as the universe yet attenuated across distance?

But doesn’t this micro/macro distinction depend on whether particles themselves are generated by fields?

As per the recent PBS Spacetime videos about what an electron is, if there is no corpuscle but “excitations” of a field…then isn’t the field fundamentally a macro object, possibly as extensive as the universe yet attenuated across distance?

Are fields "objects"? Or are objects part of perception? The fields themselves would probably be entirely noumenal.