What is life? Is death real?

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Re-read this please.
"From the above two paragraphs, i suppose we can conclude that i measure significance on how much influence that thing has. In our little species of organism box, those organisms are very influential, but outside it, they do not matter. The same can be applied to us humans, outside our solar system box, we don't matter."

If something has no important effect outside of it's "box", how can you say that it's significant outside of that box? The "box" that humans have is ridiculously small compared to the universe. So when taking the whole universe into account, how can you say that humans are significant? If you only take our "box" into account, or at least not a significantly larger region, then obviously humans are significant.

"The only known minds we know of in the universe are the ones originating on this Earth. Until someone from somewhere else comes into the picture and explains what matters to them, we are the only measure we have of what matters..."

Completely irrelevant.

And what rational basis do you have for this metric?
How do you know what "influence" is? Are you measuring in terms of basic forces? Mass? Quantities of spacetime?
What rational basis do you have for applying such measures?

I don't think this is as straightforward or obvious as you think.



So you keep asserting. Still waiting for some rational basis for this, though, rather than some arbitrary "because I said so" standard.


According to you. Apparently, solely on the basis of whimsy or some irrational emphasis on size.

Edited to ad: the verb "to matter" implies that things are regarded by conscious beings as important. Nothing is inherently important. There is no quanta of importance associated with elements on the periodic table. We can't say there is some intrinsically greater importance about galactic superclusters than hadrons either. The notion of "importance" is entirely a construct in minds.

On this basis of this, I think it is rational to acknowledge, that when it comes to importance, as far as our knowledge currently allows, man is the measure of all things.

It seems likely that we will want to extend the understanding of what matters to the other minds in our biosphere and such others as we may discover in the cosmos, but at the moment, extraterrestrial consciousnesses are purely hypothetical and we have to work with what we have. This is far more relevant to the question of what matters than how big things are or how tiny we are compared to the vastness of the universe.

It is exactly as straightforward and obvious as i think it is. Influence - "the capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behaviour of someone or something, or the effect itself." Obviously i'm not going to measure influence in terms of mass alone lol; that would be ridiculous. Something can have an effect on something else via the electromagnetic force, strong force, weak force and gravitational force; fundamentally.


"So you keep asserting. Still waiting for some rational basis for this, though, rather than some arbitrary "because I said so" standard."

Sigh... That box is "completely isolated from the rest of the universe". Therefore those organisms don't matter outside the box. Is that not easy to understand?

Now obviously, our box is larger than the solar system, as photons that have been influenced by humans have been emitted into space since the first human(s). But those photons will have pretty much no effect on anything. I suppose that the first noticably influential signals we have sent into space are radio signals. They've travelled 110 light years, now. Now, these waves are so attenuated by that 110 light year bounday, that they'll be undetectable by an alien race, unless they have some "magical" technology. So they haven't really had much of an effect, even if there is other intelligent life within 110 light years. I'll let you decide wether or not we shall count them or not. Either way, we still have a box. Outside that box, we don't matter, as we haven't had a detectable effect on anything outside that box. I think now would be a good time to add that i don't think our graviational influence should be counted as us influencing things. That will happen wether or not our mass is in human form and is ridiculously small.

"Edited to ad: the verb "to matter" implies that things are regarded by conscious beings as important. Nothing is inherently important. There is no quanta of importance associated with elements on the periodic table. We can't say there is some intrinsically greater importance about galactic superclusters than hadrons either. The notion of "importance" is entirely a construct in minds.

On this basis of this, I think it is rational to acknowledge, that when it comes to importance, as far as our knowledge currently allows, man is the measure of all things. "

I have already stated that i agree with this.

I'm just going to address this, because the idea qualia is just an illusion is patently absurd claim, and if you can't realize it's inherent absurdity there is no hope for you. It's absurd because illusions can't exist without qualia. Anyway, you're idea that I'm implying that qualia is something magical further betrays your materialist brainwashing, as I was making no such argument. I also opened up the option for qualia being material with panpsychism, but you didn't even allow for that, as so a situation would imply that the existence of material implies an observer, as the material itself is an observer.

PS: Berkely isn't a book, he's an influential philosopher, one of the great British empiricists. You don't need to read a whole book, you just need to read about his theories.

Oh, and once major point I need to address (there are several other minor points I could adress, but I'm not for time reasons):

Nope. Burden of proof is on you to proof that the brain is capable of producing consciousness, which you've failed to do. By beating around the qualia bush you have just continued to fail to bring up evidence. If the brain is insufficient to explain consciousness, then by default something besides the brain is needed for the explanation. The problem is your entire argument is based on a dogmatic adherence to materialism, and you fail to realize you even have a dogmatic adherence to materialism. Like, all your critiques of immaterialism aren't actually critiques of immaterialism at all, they're critiques of materialism plus magic junk, which isn't what I'm talking about at all. Occam's razor actually favors immaterialism over materialism, as material is an extension of our perceptions: we can be certain we see, but we can only assume what we see are things.

Last edited by Ganondox on 11 Dec 2016, 12:05 am, edited 1 time in total.

Did you really read through everything I wrote and seriously think I'd give your postulate any credence?

I don't know much about quantum mechanics (I figured out how to do wave functions once but have since forgot) so I don't have position on a particular quantum effect, but I would say no, as it seems counterintuitive to the way things are organized. As schopenhauer said, it seems to actually just be the result of it being impossible to observe something without first altering it. However, for quantum mechanics to even exist there must be a conscious observer somewhere in the universe, as processes only exists as far they *ultimately* have an effect on some observation. When I say something doesn't exist without an observer, I'm not saying there are no processes that go on that aren't directly directly observed, I'm saying it's the observation which makes it the process equivalent to something other than nothing. I can only really explain it using computer science analogies, but it's like you can use two conceptually different algorithms to produce the same results, but if they produce the same results, they are equivalent.