Saint Augustine on Dualism

[OsO]

I think that's the point of this discussion. The only thing that CAN be real is your knowledge of your own existence/mind. Everything else can NEVER be determined to be real or fake.

Only mathematical concepts and the fact that you are a thinking sentient being are objective and rooted in reality, the rest is impossible to determine.

At least, that's what this philosophical concepts of dualism present.

so when you made love to the last woman you made love to, that wasn't real? what about that experience could justify categorizing it as "not real?"

 

[daze23]

our experiences are the only things we KNOW are real.

hardly

 

[Type Username Here]

so when you made love to the last woman you made love to, that wasn't real? what about that experience could justify categorizing it as "not real?"

It could have been a computer simulation, extended dream (that I am currently still in), hallucination, etc.

It could feel very real to me, but at the end of the day, the only thing I can know for certain is that I am a thinking being who can experience, not if that the experience was actually real.

 

[Type Username Here]

 

[Type Username Here]

 

[daze23]

so when you made love to the last woman you made love to, that wasn't real? what about that experience could justify categorizing it as "not real?"

for one thing memory is very fallible. but it's been my experience that people here don't like to talk about that (or maybe I'm not remembering correctly ). it's not an easy thing to accept

How Friends Ruin Memory: The Social Conformity Effect | Wired Science | Wired.com

Humans are storytelling machines. We don’t passively perceive the world – we tell stories about it, translating the helter-skelter of events into tidy narratives. This is often a helpful habit, helping us make sense of mistakes, consider counterfactuals and extract a sense of meaning from the randomness of life.

But our love of stories comes with a serious side-effect: like all good narrators, we tend to forsake the facts when they interfere with the plot. We’re so addicted to the anecdote that we let the truth slip away until, eventually, those stories we tell again and again become exercises in pure fiction. Just the other day I learned that one of my cherished childhood tales – the time my older brother put hot peppers in my Chinese food while I was in the bathroom, thus scorching my young tongue – actually happened to my little sister. I’d stolen her trauma.

The reason we’re such consummate bullshytters is simple: we bullshyt for each other. We tweak our stories so that they become better stories. We bend the facts so that the facts appeal to the group. Because we are social animals, our memory of the past is constantly being revised to fit social pressures.

The power of this phenomenon was demonstrated in a new Science paper by Micah Edelson, Tali Sharot, Raymond Dolan and Yadin Dudai. The neuroscientists were interested in how the opinion of other people can alter our personal memories, even over a relatively short period of time. The experiment itself was straightforward. A few dozen people watched an eyewitness style documentary about a police arrest in groups of five. Three days later, the subjects returned to the lab and completed a memory test about the documentary. Four days after that, they were brought back once again and asked a variety of questions about the short movie while inside a brain scanner.

This time, though, the subjects were given a “lifeline”: they were shown the answers given by other people in their film-viewing group. Unbeknownst to the subjects, the lifeline was actually composed of false answers to the very questions that the subjects had previously answered correctly and confidently. Remarkably, this false feedback altered the responses of the participants, leading nearly 70 percent to conform to the group and give an incorrect answer. They had revised their stories in light of the social pressure.

The question, of course, is whether their memory of the film had actually undergone a change. (Previous studies have demonstrated that people will knowingly give a false answer just to conform to the group. We’re such wimps.) To find out, the researchers invited the subjects back to the lab one last time to take the memory test, telling them that the answers they had previously been given were not those of their fellow film watchers, but randomly generated by a computer. Some of the responses reverted back to the original, but more than 40 percent remained erroneous, implying that the subjects were relying on false memories implanted by the earlier session. They had come to believe their own bullshyt.

Here’s where the fMRI data proved useful. By comparing the differences in brain activity between the persistent false memories and the temporary errors of “social compliance” the scientists were able to detect the neural causes of the misremembering. The main trigger seemed to be a strong co-activation between two brain areas: the hippocampus and the amygdala. The hippocampus is known to play a role in long-term memory formation, while the amygdala is an emotional center in the brain. According to the scientists, the co-activation of these areas can sometimes result in the replacement of an accurate memory with a false one, provided the false memory has a social component. This suggests that feedback of others has the ability to strongly shape our remembered experience. We are all performers, twisting our stories for strangers.

The scientists briefly speculate on why this effect might exist, given that it leads to such warped recollections of the past:

Altering memory in response to group influence may produce untoward effects. For example, social influence such as false propaganda can deleteriously affect individuals’ memory in political campaigns and commercial advertising and impede justice by influencing eyewitness testimony. However, memory conformity may also serve an adaptive purpose, because social learning is often more efficient and accurate than individual learning. For this reason, humans may be predisposed to trust the judgment of the group, even when it stands in opposition to their own original beliefs.

This research helps explain why a shared narrative can often lead to totally unreliable individual memories. We are so eager to conform to the collective, to fit our little lives into the arc of history, that we end up misleading ourselves. Consider an investigation of flashbulb memories from September 11, 2001. A few days after the tragic attacks, a team of psychologists led by William Hirst and Elizabeth Phelps began interviewing people about their personal experiences. In the years since, the researchers have tracked the steady decay of these personal stories. They’ve shown, for instance, that subjects have dramatically changed their recollection of how they first learned about the attacks. After one year, 37 percent of the details in their original story had changed. By 2004, that number was approaching 50 percent. The scientists have just begun analyzing their ten year follow-up data, but it will almost certainly show that the majority of details from that day are now inventions. Our 9/11 tales are almost certainly better – more entertaining, more dramatic, more reflective of that awful day – but those improvements have come at the expense of the truth. Stories make sense. Life usually doesn’t.

 

[Type Username Here]

 

[Type Username Here]

Sorry to drop the 3 Matrix clips, but it explains it well.

 

[NkrumahWasRight Is Wrong]

Descartes argument is blood boiling. It pisses me off so badly. Luckily I was shown the analogy that defeats him:

Descartes's argument, where M=I have a physical body and B=I exist, goes:

1. I can doubt that M
2. I cannot doubt that B
3. Therefore the "I" who is doubting cannot be a physical body.
or
3. Therefore M is not B.

Now check this argument:

1. Lois Lane cannot doubt that Superman is Superman.
2. Lois Lane can doubt that Clark Kent is Superman.
3. Therefore, Clark Kent is not Superman.

Descartes

Why does that analogy work?

Your analogy is saying x equals x cannot be doubted
But x equals y can be doubted
Therefore x equals y is false.

Descartes is saying

X can be doubted
Y cannot be doubted
Therefore x equals y is false.

However in your logic proof x and y are both bodies and in descartes one is and one isnt.

 

[NkrumahWasRight Is Wrong]

If you can doubt that x equals y then you must say that x equals y is false at that time, under those definitions, until those definitions are changed.

To lois lane clark kent equals something that is not superman, with both definitions not contingent on the hypothetical. X doesnt equal y to lois lane. Therefore the statement that x equals y is false to lois lane is true even though x equals y to you. Because you cannot be lois lane.

 

[The Real]

hmm

I don't find this Superman response convincing as a parallel, because Descartes' mind has a special relationship with whether he's thinking whereas both Superman and Clark Kent are outside of Lois Lane's frame of reference as far as her own mind is concerned

that is to say, Descartes' whole body could be an illusion to his mind, but his thinking mind can't be an illusion to his own mind; but both superman and clark kent can be illusions to lois lane. So "Lois cannot doubt that superman is superman" is not equivalent to "descartes' mind can't doubt that he has a mind"

will think about this and post later

Good point. One thing that Descartes stresses is that he cannot be deceived to believe that he is thinking when he isn't. Even in his famous "evil demon" argument, where he suggests that some malevolent demon could deceive him with all manner of illusions, including even the experience of having a body and bodily sensations, the one thing he can't ever be deceived about is the bare fact of thinking, because there must be something there that witnesses or experiences that illusion in thought. Therefore, if he thinks he exists, there must indeed be something that exists, even if he does not or even cannot know that thing fully.

This is part of the basis of the actual dualism, which is a substance dualism. Descartes believes that physical matter, on one hand, and the mind, on the other, are literally made of two different substances and are different in kind. Actually Leyet is relatively Cartesian, going by most of his posts here.

 

[NkrumahWasRight Is Wrong]

The superman argument doesnt distinguish between tuples and sets in applying multi dimensional modal logic either

 

[NkrumahWasRight Is Wrong]

Basically you are saying (1, 2, 3)= {1, 2, 3} even though () equals {} is false

 

[The Real]

so when you made love to the last woman you made love to, that wasn't real? what about that experience could justify categorizing it as "not real?"

Descartes' argument is that your senses have deceived you before, since you can sleep and dream whole scenarios that seem entirely real, complete with sensory experience, without experiencing the outside world, and since there are things like mirages and optical illusions which demonstrate the incoherence of perception even when you are supposedly awake. According to him, "it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once."

He's not stating that your experiences are unreal, only that you can't legitimately establish that they are ever real.

 

[zerozero]

If you can doubt that x equals y then you must say that x equals y is false at that time, under those definitions, until those definitions are changed.

To lois lane clark kent equals something that is not superman, with both definitions not contingent on the hypothetical. X doesnt equal y to lois lane. Therefore the statement that x equals y is false to lois lane is true even though x equals y to you. Because you cannot be lois lane.

Right, in a way going by a certain reading of Descartes' argument, and reading the superman hypothetical the same way, you can be justified in saying that Clark Kent is actually not Superman.