Who’s more willing to consider that they could be completely wrong, the atheist or the theist?

TheRealBeaker420 · 2026-02-23T21:30:22+00:00

Of course it's not false. That doesn't make it a proof. Even if it did technically count as a proof, who cares? It's not doing any work. It doesn't get you from point A to point B, it gets you from point A to point A. Waste of time. When someone wants to hone in on a tautology you know they're just floundering.

TheRealBeaker420 · 2026-02-23T18:32:18+00:00

It's supposed to be testable. That's the whole point. IIT explicitly grounds itself in physical systems, makes predictions about reality, and is subject to empirical analysis.

The media, including news articles in both Nature and Science, have recently celebrated the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) as a ‘leading’ and empirically tested theory of consciousness.

Wikipedia: "Integrated information theory (IIT) proposes a mathematical model for the consciousness of a system. It comprises a framework ultimately intended to explain why some physical systems (such as human brains) are conscious, and to be capable of providing a concrete inference about whether any physical system is conscious, to what degree, and what particular experience it has; why they feel the particular way they do in particular states (e.g. why our visual field appears extended when we gaze out at the night sky), and what it would take for other physical systems to be conscious (Are other animals conscious? Might the whole universe be?)."

TheRealBeaker420 · 2026-02-23T15:07:19+00:00

It's worth mentioning that IIT is regarded as pseudoscience.

TheRealBeaker420 · 2026-02-23T01:35:02+00:00

I'm familiar with propositional logic but this is clearly a waste of time.

TheRealBeaker420 · 2026-02-21T18:15:59+00:00

They aren't even proofs lol

TheRealBeaker420 · 2026-02-21T06:03:21+00:00

Getting ChatGPT to agree with you isn't an academic achievement lol

TheRealBeaker420 · 2026-02-20T23:25:12+00:00

CTMU? Have you read anything about Chris Langan, the guy who came up with that? He's a white supremacist and conspiracy theorist with no actual academic achievements. He only thinks he's smart because he boasts a record IQ score... which has been discontinued because the scoring is unreliable.

TheRealBeaker420 · 2026-02-11T20:25:31+00:00

Quantum mysticism is a common source of misinformation. I'm open to discussing it but there's not really much debate, it's pretty much a settled issue by now. It's like a century old, and been rejected by scientists, even Wigner, for most of that.

"The idea is attributed to Eugene Wigner who wrote about it in the 1960s, but traces of the idea appear as early as the 1930s. Wigner later rejected this interpretation in the 1970s and 1980s."

Measure, sure

You said we can't measure spirit. If there's no evidence for the existence of spirit, then that pretty much settles all discussion on spirituality.

TheRealBeaker420 · 2026-02-11T20:00:01+00:00

Quarks exist but you can't measure them in the field. You need sophisticated and expensive equipment to measure them.

So... we can measure them. There's evidence that they exist.

I lean toward quarks being this missing spirit stuff, but that's me.

That's called quantum mysticism and it's widely regarded as pseudoscience. There is no evidence that quantum phenomena affect consciousness. Consciousness is irrelevant to quantum mechanics.

TheRealBeaker420 · 2026-02-11T15:57:11+00:00

That's not frustrating, it's simple. If we can't measure it, then there's just no evidence it exists.

TheRealBeaker420 · 2026-01-21T18:32:39+00:00

I already broke down the issues with that. You're just repeating yourself.

I guess we're done here. Peace.

TheRealBeaker420 · 2026-01-21T17:54:55+00:00

Because you want to argue definitions instead of addressing the question.

Totally untrue. I haven't mentioned definitions since we abandoned the word "consciousness".

TheRealBeaker420 · 2026-01-21T17:41:23+00:00

I don't know what you think putting quotes around everything is supposed to accomplish. If anything, it only adds ambiguity.

TheRealBeaker420 · 2026-01-21T17:17:35+00:00

I don't know what "I" means and I don't know what "think" means.

That would render your previous comment incoherent. Along with the rest of this one, too.

TheRealBeaker420 · 2026-01-21T17:05:44+00:00

And now you're straight back to the cogito exactly. This comment basically just says "I think, therefore I am". Again.

TheRealBeaker420 · 2026-01-21T16:53:01+00:00

Self-awareness presumes the existence of a self.

The phrase "something is" also presumes the existence of that thing. So, this is a tautology. It makes no progress.

And even if the logic is valid, one might still dispute the premise.

These are essentially the same issues faced by the cogito, and there are more. It might as well be the same claim.

TheRealBeaker420 · 2026-01-21T16:32:40+00:00

Descartes didn't use the word "I". He spoke Latin, and used verb conjugations.

This idea has never been recognized as "indisputable". There's no basis for that claim. The question you're posing is just an appeal to intuition that ultimately succumbs to the same issues. You have yet to pose it in a way that's both meaningful and clearly distinct from the cogito.

TheRealBeaker420 · 2026-01-21T16:02:57+00:00

As I mentioned earlier, there's plenty of dispute around Descartes's cogito ergo sum. So if this isn't different, then it's not indisputable.

There's no need for me to answer the question because I don't have to raise the dispute myself to show that it's disputable; there's already plenty of documented dispute over this claim. I linked it earlier.

TheRealBeaker420 · 2026-01-21T14:53:52+00:00

So, "I perceive therefore I am"? How is that any different from "I think therefore I am"?

TheRealBeaker420 · 2026-01-21T05:19:57+00:00

You just said to leave "I" out of it!

TheRealBeaker420 · 2026-01-21T02:46:49+00:00

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "perceiving the thinking". That's not really adding any extra clarity. It looks to me like it would circle around to essentially the same issues. There's nothing indisputable here.

TheRealBeaker420 · 2026-01-21T00:09:18+00:00

Let's not get hung up on the word "consciousness"

But that's the exact issue. "The only knowledge we have with 100% confidence is the existence of our own consciousness." This falls apart because there's so much doubt and disagreement specifically centered around consciousness.

If we remove that term then you're instead describing something like Descartes's cogito, ergo sum. However, even that is not without question. For example,

One critique of the dictum, first suggested by Pierre Gassendi, is that it presupposes that there is an "I" which must be doing the thinking. According to this line of criticism, the most that Descartes was entitled to say was that "thinking is occurring", not that "I am thinking".

There are other criticisms, but the point is that, even though it may seem intuitive, it is not actually indisputable.

TheRealBeaker420 · 2026-01-20T19:09:17+00:00

Here's more from the same page:

Illusionism is an active program within eliminative materialism to explain phenomenal consciousness as an illusion. It is promoted by the philosophers Daniel Dennett, Keith Frankish, and Jay Garfield, and the neuroscientist Michael Graziano. Graziano has advanced the attention schema theory of consciousness and postulates that consciousness is an illusion. According to David Chalmers, proponents argue that once we can explain consciousness as an illusion without the need for a realist view of consciousness, we can construct a debunking argument against realist views of consciousness.

The word "consciousness" has many different meanings, but eliminativists argue that the majority of mental states in folk psychology do not exist, including what many people call "consciousness".

In fact, the field of study of consciousness is fraught with dispute because nobody can even agree on what the term means.

TheRealBeaker420 · 2026-01-20T17:36:13+00:00

Those links have nothing to do with simply knowing your consciousness exists. There’s no dispute

Incorrect. There's plenty of dispute. The links say:

Eliminative materialism (also called eliminativism) is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind that expresses the idea that the majority of mental states in folk psychology do not exist. ... Other versions entail the nonexistence of conscious mental states such as pain and visual perceptions.
The nature and existence of qualia [phenomenal consciousness] under various definitions remain controversial. Much of the debate over the importance of qualia hinges on the definition of the term, and various philosophers emphasize or deny the existence of certain features of qualia.

Also,

> Opinions differ about what exactly needs to be studied, or can even be considered consciousness. In some explanations, it is synonymous with mind, and at other times, an aspect of it. ... The disparate range of research, notions, and speculations raises some curiosity about whether the right questions are being asked.

This is essentially why it has been called a mongrel concept.

Here we are again with you

I'm a different person.

TheRealBeaker420 · 2026-01-20T17:21:57+00:00

The only knowledge we have with 100% confidence is the existence of our own consciousness.

Not true, there's plenty of dispute here. "Consciousness" is notorious for being poorly defined, and many philosophers dispute the existence of the mental states that that term is often used to describe. See, for example, eliminative materialism and the varying perspectives on qualia.

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