^HadouKen24
That doesn't address my main point, which is that determinism isn't really relevant.

Just out of curiosity: Why the femme tag?

>> ^Yogi:
The Videosift seems to love this Dan Savage guy. I've seen him on Real Time with Bill Maher but no where else, what's he do? What's his story?


I dont't know. The Sift seems to love clear, articulate, rational people, regardless of their story. I'm curious too though.

"It takes a lot of physics and chemistry to understand how it works"

But it doesn't take much of either to appreciate its beauty!

Exactly what needs to be said. That is all.

>> ^Lodurr:

That's the point, that today's "non-physical" is tomorrow's "physical." Dualists argue that consciousness results from physical interactions that we can't presently perceive, and that these interactions aren't limited to our perceivable dimensions.
@Almanildo, the problem with classical physics-based consciousness is that physics is deterministic, and our experience of consciousness is non-deterministic. We've recently gone from thinking that we were completely free-willed to a more complex understanding of brain chemistry and motor functions, but the basic experience of awareness and self-guided thought seem fundamentally impossible to pin as deterministic.

Postulating a new kind of physical interaction isn't substance dualism; you have to take the new stuff completely out of physics to call it dualist.


On the subject of determinism, we don't really know whether physics is deterministic. My belief is that it's not. However, it's not a given that determinism is even relevant for the problem of free will. Daniel Dennett argues (quite convincingly in my book) that it's not.

^ReverendTed
I still don't think you've answered my question. You claim that there's no place for awareness in the current physical model, but you fail to give an argument for how a non-physical model would fare any better.

I personally disagree with your pessimism regarding a physical model of awareness. More importantly, I can't see how it would help to bring anything non-physical into this. What specific feature of non-physicality is it that accounts for awareness?

Dark matter wasn't introduced into our view of the universe just because ordinary matter didn't account for the behaviour of galaxies. What made most physicists accept the addition was the fact that it provided a model to explain the behaviour. That's what I'm seeking.

>> ^entr0py:
By the time you posted this it was already confirmed as a failed Russian ICBM test. Pretty awesome looking though. Russia should do that more often.


Here's a video of a simulation illustrating how such a failure would produce this phenomenon.

I'm sorry Ted, I sort of skipped over your long post and went on to argue with raverman, never realizing you had just said exactly the same thing I was typing.

Now that I've read it, I commend you for your clarity. As you say, the only real problem here is awareness. I don't know how to explain that, but it seems to me that any dualist theory will only postpone the problem. How does non-physicality allow something to account for awareness any more than something physical? If you can't answer that question, in my mind there's no reason to worry about that kind of thing at all, despite my curiosity.

^raverman
You're misunderstanding the concept of non-physical. Non-physical means just that: Not in the realm of physics. Such a substance will be impossible to observe by any physical experiment, or to infer from what it causes to happen in natural processes. All of the examples you cited have been proposed because of their effect on the physical world, which makes them physical.

What non-physical substances are supposed to do is to affect the bodies of conscious beings. Since the bodies themselves are considered physical, however, this is a logical paradox.

Thanks, you're the best.

In reply to this comment by gwiz665:
*quality!

^ Yeah, it really was that high in space, from what i've heard. It must have been, since it was seen from all over Norway. It does seem strange that it would spew out that much fuel, but it was an ICBM, after all. Those things are big and burn a lot of fuel.

^ Yup. See also the excellent writeup on Bad Astronomy.

That's what I call dedication.

Is "religi" plural of "religus"?