writtles
Motley Fool Investment Guide is where I started. I've subscribe to their Stock Advisor newsletter for nearly a decade and have picked from their recommendations in that newsletter. Basically i've invested money in one of their picks once per month with the expectation to hold that investment for 10+ years. That portfolio has gained an average of 25% PER year and I've never researched a stock.
1) if a disruptive tech has plenty of personal intrigue and 2) plenty of brilliant people herald it
then buy the crash.
You're imagining an apple, using stored memories to create an image in your mind. Nothing else.
What if I imagine an object that i've never seen before? No stored image there. Or just watch the ambient closed-eye-visuals that seem to run constantly in the background like a screen saver? Those and many other examples of different ways that people use their brains will require just as many rebuttles which I'm sure you'd provide but that gets us nowhere.
The image of an apple "means" something and cannot be completely reduced to electrons or synapse patterns without losing the concept of "apple".
Sure it can, it is just patterns after all.
Then why do we look at images on the computer monitor? Why not just watch the electrons flow? Why do we imagine in images at all then? Either way the tiresome point-by-point breakdowns into arguing the logical bits outside of their context very much captures symbolically the essence of what we're going on about here I think.
Reductionism. The following statements both true:
A cell is nothing more than a giant chemical reaction and can be eventually explained (with enough scientific understanding) on the molecular level.
The cell as a whole exhibits characteristics and behaviors totally different than any of its molecular counterparts.
You say the latter above quote that the apple image can be boiled down to its electrons and it is still an apple on that level. But then you say in response to my previous quote:
It loses the apple, for now it is just "brain patterns" or electrons.
No it doesn't, materialism doesn't deny subjective mental experiences.
And then:
Neuroscience has pretty well established that consciousness is an illusion Followed by That's merely a subjective mental experience of reality, something completely accepted by materialists and science.
Then go on accuse me of misunderstanding materialism. But in fact your position changes from reductionist materialism to non-reductionist twice in one post. Which is progress in my opinion!
Say I'm being monitored by a machine that can detect my brain patterns in real time. I am asked to imagine an arbitrary object, say an apple. I close my eyes and think of the apple and all of its sensual properties etc. My neurons fire and the machine picks up all of the brain patterns that correlate with my idea of "apple". And yet nowhere will the machine detect anything remotely resembling an apple. Only I "see" the apple in my "minds eye". The subjective apple has objective correlative brain patterns indeed, but what else?
Now to follow that, you could counter with the fact that a computer's graphics processor will have all kinds of electrons flowing in certain patterns to produce an image of an apple on screen. And I don't deny that the brain is indeed a high-order computer. But the difference here is that the actual computer (of today's technology) requires an end user whereas the brain (we can only assume) has one built in more or less. There is an experiencer that has yet to be explained by any science I know of yet. Maybe you do, and I'm not going to claim that it resides independent of the brain, but I will claim that it is this very end user that creates it's own interior subjective reality.
See we all "fabricate" a worldview within our minds. We take inputs from objective reality and process them according to the picture of reality that we construct there over time. We all contain a subjective reality maintained by our hardware that is dependent upon but quite different than the hardware itself. The image of an apple "means" something and cannot be completely reduced to electrons or synapse patterns without losing the concept of "apple". It fits into this scheme that we create. This is how we "learn about our world." Some people use different means than others. Some people value The Secret. Some people value science. And so on. Materialism reduces it all to something less. To that which only can be detectable in the objective world. It loses the apple, for now it is just "brain patterns" or electrons. No, it is only in part those things, but also a part of a subjective reality that may or may not be shared by others.
So how's that different than my "subjective reality" -- that isn't really a thing either.
And to hammer the confusion further you say:
* Your subjective experience, in the real world, is just patterns of electrical signals in your brain, that's what actually exist*
So my subjective experience IS an objective phenomenon and nothing more? If its something more than what we can measure "in the real world" then what is the part that is "more"? It doesn't exist right?
I can only logically conclude that pure Subjective Experience doesn't exist! As scientific materialism has always claimed.
In the future is a cloning device. You step in and your body and brain are cloned down to the last electron. All of your memories, scars and epigenetics are cloned here as well. Now this is key here: In all Objective sense, your clone is you. There are no distinction between you and your clone and nobody can tell who is who. You both know yourself to be you and no one would be the wiser if you went and lived in a foreign country under a different name and your clone stays back and lives your life for you. Well nobody except YOU would know. You see, to you that clone is another person that you can talk to and shake hands with. Even though a brain scan will reveal the same thought patterns between you two, you will never literally see through the clone's eyes. If the clone dies, you go on just fine, but if you die... It's over even though your perfect clone goes on. So therein lies the one distinct difference between you and your clone and that is YOUR subjective experience makes you YOU.
So the problem is is that this subjective experience has no real evidence of its existence, so it doesn't exist right? Just like fairies don't exist, right? And THAT is the absolutistic mindset of the scientific materialist.
Because, you see, if we can only objectively measure things scientifically with instruments then there can be no subjectivity because we can't see it on any instrument! Therefore anybody who continues to insist that it does exist falls into the category of "woo woo," "magical thinking", or "superstitious". And those anti-scientific stances can only lead down the slippery slope into any of those pitfalls--or worse yet--fundamentalism (because there is just as much evidence for a mythical god as there is subjectivity... or unicorns for that matter... or spaghetti monsters...etc)! So its easy to lump all that is non-objective into the same category as unicorns since we cannot measure any of it.
/caricature
This is a fallacy of absolutistic thinking and it is rampant.
You might be surprised...
I'm glad you cleared that up. Here I was thinking evolution and its "goal" is still a mystery to science.
Wow, OP really feels his friends chose Google over the friendship?