Is the Filter Theory committing the ad hoc fallacy and is it unfalsifiable?

I have moved on. Thanks for the opportunity to be here. I have learned a lot. Hopefully people have also learned from me.

I summarize my experience at Adventures in Psienceland.

@Merle, I hope you might visit us again from time to time.

I visited your own site and may I say I found a very moving and interesting account there, entitled

How My Mind Was Set Free

That is a description of a journey. Something I think all of us are on, each in our own way. I appreciated reading this, thank you for sharing it.

Our backgrounds are very different, the starting point different yet the journey itself may have a great deal in common. For example in my case from the age of about 11 my education was primarily focussed on science and technology, it was how everything was described, explained and understood. At home we did not discuss religion, but sometimes topics such as the nature of electricity, the inside of an atom, and astronomy, the working of the Solar System, stars and galaxies as well as at that time various manned and unmanned spacecraft sent out for the first time in human history beyond the Earth's atmosphere and reaching out to satellites and planets out there.

The journey of liberation which I undertook was therefore a different one, but liberating oneself from the constraints of the educational background was every bit as necessary, as difficult and as painful.

As for the current thread on 'Filter Theory', it is not one of my main interests, it is a somewhat obscure side-branch from my perspective. But as I said, our journeys are different, even though they have much in common.

edit: I forgot to emphasise that I'm from the U.K. living in England and the role of religion in society is very different from that in some parts of the U.S. Here we have a mostly secular background to society. Religion certainly during my formative years was mostly part of a cultural background in much the same way as literature of Shakespeare or Wordsworth is part of the background. As in most European countries, the perspective on these things is completely different to that across the Atlantic.

In this respect, the place where a person lives, in which country, which political system, what background society, probably plays a much larger and more significant role than is generally appreciated. Describing things in terms of religion or of science neglects the major contribution of cultural background which is perhaps the 'elephant in the room' in many debates.

Just read Merle’s “Adventures in Psienceland” post and to me it shows a lot how materialist “science” has such as a grip on our culture. Very interesting reflecting back on this thread as a new member.

I think we’d all do better with a little more Bernardo Kastrup and less info from Keith Augustine (who’s been refuted too many times to count)

Just read Merle’s “Adventures in Psienceland” post and to me it shows a lot how materialist “science” has such as a grip on our culture. Very interesting reflecting back on this thread as a new member.

I think we’d all do better with a little more Bernardo Kastrup and less info from Keith Augustine (who’s been refuted too many times to count)

As much as I've enjoyed my interactions with him, Kastrup's Idealism seems indistinguishable from Materialism some days....

As much as I've enjoyed my interactions with him, Kastrup's Idealism seems indistinguishable from Materialism some days....

Will you elaborate on this? Indistinguishable how?

“ The brain constructs this model of a conscious self out of patterns of neurons firing that are based on a series of other patterns of neurons firing, that are ultimately derived from present and past base level neuron firings due to the body’s senses.”

Found this from a neuroscientist:
“No, neurons can continue to fire even when someone is unconscious.
From the Deepest Coma, New Brain Activity Found
There are also neurons firing in our intestines :



The idea also that all of our sensations, thoughts and feelings are "just" neurons firing is ultimately incoherent. Are these words just pixels on a screen, or letters of the alphabet? To dismiss levels of description of reality as 'emergent' properties is really just a sneaky way to get around the explanatory gap between physics and consciousness. It doesn't explain anything since consciousness is the only place in which levels of description can emerge in the first place. Physics doesn't have emergent properties because:
1) It doesn't make sense for physics to describe itself to itself.
2) It doesn't make sense for physics to describe itself in magical non-physical terms.
To allow non-physical terms to be conjured up in physics without explanation is bad enough, but to then imagine that they can arbitrarily be categorized as a part of physics is an insult to scientific thought. It is really more anthropocentric to dismiss consciousness in this way, and assume that it is a meaningless epiphenomenon of biochemistry than to look at the phenomenon we call consciousness objectively as a study-able part of nature.
Besides emergentism being a post hoc fallacy, we can also see the same kind of logical oversight in the original question. In that question: "Is consciousness just neurons firing in recognition of some kind of stimulus that it encountered before?", the "it" presumably refers to unconscious neurons, making it unclear in what sense they can tell they 'encounter' anything at all.


https://neurosciencenews.com/physics-con...ess-21222/

As a result, we can’t reduce the conscious experience of what we sense, feel and think to any brain activity. We can just find correlations to these experiences.

After more than 100 years of neuroscience we have very good evidence that the brain is responsible for the creation of our conscious abilities.  So how could it be that these conscious experiences can’t be found anywhere in the brain (or in the body) and can’t be reduced to any neural complex activity?

This mystery is known as the hard problem of consciousness. It is such a difficult problem that until a couple of decades ago only philosophers discussed it and even today, although we have made huge progress in our understanding of the neuroscientific basis of consciousness, still there is no adequate theory that explains what consciousness is and how to solve this hard problem.

But I guess internet bloggers solved it, when even atheist neuroscientists/physicists are beginning to change their mind about physicalism

I think we’d all do better with a little more Bernardo Kastrup and less info from Keith Augustine (who’s been refuted too many times to count)

And I think we would all do better if we would deliberately ignore Kastrup.

Will you elaborate on this? Indistinguishable how?

It's deterministic and the individual self is illusory, plus no Survival of the individual self following from the latter.

Really not sure what such an Idealism offers...

And I think we would all do better if we would deliberately ignore Kastrup.

Heh, I wouldn't go that far. I think Why Materialism is Baloney and Rational Spirituality are pretty good works, and even some of the stuff in Science Ideated, More than Allegory, and The Idea of the World.

I will say sometimes I wonder if Kastrup is trying to accommodate the atheistic picture as much as possible in his later writings, in hopes future generations expand further away from Materialist assumptions if he lays the first brick in the foundation stone now.

It's deterministic and the individual self is illusory, plus no Survival of the individual self following from the latter.

Really not sure what such an Idealism offers...

I'm a bit surprised if this is his position. A random googling gave this fairly recent post about Kastrup and survival Bernardo Kastrup (the Well-Known Cosmic Idealist) and His Afterlife | by Paul Austin Murphy | Paul Austin Murphy’s Essays on Philosophy | Medium