u/Own_Sky_297

In order to have free will one must be able to control the brain which means one must be able to control the particles, their behavior and trajectory with their mind. Do we have this power?

Well let's look at the evidence. I ask myself what am I and I return a response. I am a 3-dimensional object in the shape of a human which is my body. Now in order for my brain to make this statement that I am the body the body must have holistic control over the parts of the body in particular the brain.

For if I'm the whole of the body and I did not have holistic control over the parts I could never make the statement that there is something that covers the body that is the whole of the body and it be anything more than accident. This holistic control is the will and though I think it's determined in one sense it seems to be that the whole is free to will whatever it wants to will provided it is within the capacities of the body to do so.

So yes there is a will and it seems pretty much free.

People here mention a first person perspective a lot but yet deny an external experience and even the thought that consciousness is indistinguishable from an external experience. So I'll describe my first person perspective and see if you guys can relate.

A first person perspective is where the brain is the locus of experience and experience stems out from the brain. For example vision extends out from the eyes to the objects of experience where they are located outside of the brain. The brain itself is a black box void of experience other than that of perceived being the brain. So a first person perspective of vision is where you see out from the eyes but from the perspective of being behind the eyes. Does this sound accurate to you and your experience?

Previously I made a post asking if your all's conscious experience was indistinguishable from an external experience. https://www.reddit.com/r/consciousness/comments/1v73ixp/is_your_experience_indistinguishable_from_an/

I didn't really get the responses I was looking for so I have a new question. In your conscious experience do you experience being a body or are you disembodied? Now by that I don't mean do you receive signals from a body that your brain interprets rather do you experience being identical to a body? That your conscious experience is as being a body?

Ok so I'm struggling with solipsism because I am an external experiencer and no one seems to understand what I mean. How can you tell the difference between a phenomenal experiencer and a philosophical zombie? A philosophical zombie should be unable to describe experience properly or locate qualia.

For me this task is easy, for instance vision extends out from the eyes to the objects of experience and it is in the object's location in spacetime qualia is found. In other words if a leaf is 6 inches in front of my face there the experience is found and there on the leaf itself is the qualia of green 6 inches in front of my face. Qualia is not in the brain or in something called "consciousness" in the brain. The brain is a black box void of experience.

Whether you believe that vision or the other senses are external or not, is your experience indistinguishable from as if it were an external experience?

I am an external experiencer which means my experience is external to my brain. As examples the qualia of touch is not in my somatosensory system of the brain but on the outside of my skin, vision is not in my occipital lobe or anywhere else in my brain. My vision extends out from my eyes to the objects in my environment, the qualia of color is there on those objects.

Now science and everyone else will swear up and down that experience is entirely in the brain and they act as though they have no clue what I'm talking about when I say I am an external experiencer. What am I to conclude from this but that I'm the only real external experiencer.

As an external experiencer it is obvious and certain knowledge that experience is not located in the brain. The brain is a black box void of experience and the location of experience is unmistakable.

Since you guys can't experience externally you are indeed philosophical zombies because you can't describe experience or locate qualia accurately, which is what one would expect from zombies.

Now my theory, and I mean theory that can be falsified by finding other external experiencers, is that my brain is the thing which observes the cosmos and collapses the wave function of particles. In this sense I believe I may be the demiurge.

To clarify I mean Plato's demiurge not the Christian gnostic demiurge. Plato's demiurge is not the primary creator or God but is a secondary creator. I myself believe in God and I am not he. I am also a Christian so Jesus is my king, my lord, and my Savior. That all being said I believe myself to possibly be the demiurge until I find other external experiencers.

So check it out, how can one distinguish between an experiencer and a philosophical zombie? Well a philosophical zombie might swear up and down that they are experiencers but when you ask them what it's like they couldn't describe it properly or be unable to locate qualia.

Now I can describe experience and locate qualia perfectly fine and with ease. I am an external experiencer which means that experience is external to my brain. Modern science, r/consciousness and other such subs will swear up and down that experience and qualia are in the brain.

From an external experiencer's perspective this is absurd and nobody seems to understand what I mean or get where I'm coming from. It makes me wonder if people are either reaaaallly stupid or if they are indeed zombies. So I ask you r/solipsism can you describe experience and locate qualia or are you indeed zombies?

Here's a brief description of my experience https://www.reddit.com/r/PhilosophyofMind/comments/1v2rg68/a_challenge_to_materialism/

If everything is made up of quantum particles alone would you not have to concede that consciousness must be made up of quantum particles or be some property of quantum particles?

Ok, so if consciousness is a property of quantum particles what explains the unity of consciousness? What is over and above all the particles experiencing them all simultaneously? What unifies that conscious experience? If you say fields then what in physics suggests that fields can exert control over particles so that they are capable of computing the fact that something is over and above the particles experiencing them all at once?

I made this comment on another thread and I'm looking for a discussion on my philosophical points.

Try this, point to the visual experience of an object, now point to your brain. Notice that your pointing away from your brain? Experience is not in your brain man, we are external experiencers.  

You say no I'm in the brain? What are you? Are you a body in the shape of a human like me? How did that get in the brain? Where is there a corresponding shape in the brain? You are your body. If the body is just made up of particles, what is over and above all those particles experiencing all of them at once? That is the soul. 

Why do we have a soul? Why do we experience the world externally? If you ask me this is no coincidence or accident. The cosmos doesn't just have ensouled external experiencers by accident, it is the feature for which it is either made or the feature it made itself for. We have purpose, what it is I'm not sure but the cosmos is made for us.   

Go to Christ my friends.

So I was thinking that instead of saying knowledge primarily comes from sensory experience, I think it better to say that knowledge is acquired through experience. The difference being that instead of through the senses any kind of experience the brain undergoes it can learn from.

For instance math, to aquire mathematical knowledge your brain must experience doing the calculation or experience learning the formula. The same can be said of knowledge acquired through rational investigation, your brain must experience the chain of reasoning to illicit knowledge from it.

I view this as a way to combine rationalism with empiricism, rather than holding them as separate and saying which thing knowledge "primarily" comes from. Any criticisms of this idea? For instance is it too general as to make a subscription to empiricism meaningless or does it stand?

So I was thinking that instead of saying knowledge primarily comes from sensory experience, I think it better to say that knowledge is acquired through experience. The difference being that instead of through the senses any kind of experience the brain undergoes it can learn from.

For instance math, to aquire mathematical knowledge your brain must experience doing the calculation or experience learning the formula. The same can be said of knowledge acquired through rational investigation, your brain must experience the chain of reasoning to illicit knowledge from it.

I view this as a way to combine rationalism with empiricism, rather than holding them as separate and saying which thing knowledge "primarily" comes from. Any criticisms of this idea?

So I heard an argument that 1+1 doesn't always equal 2 that sometimes it equals 1. The example was 1 cloud + 1 cloud = 1 cloud. Somehow this seems off to me so I was wondering if math has any way of dealing with things combining beyond addition where 1+1=1?

How does a brain signal end? So for instance with vision, photons hit the eye a signal gets created that gets sent to the back of the brain then some other areas and hippocampus. Ok where in the hippocampus or elsewhere does the signal stop being processed? What's the end of the line for neuron signal propagation?

So the idea that a "set" is a thing in and of itself such that it can even be empty means that a "set" is more than the things in the "set" collectively considered. Without this concept of an "empty set", if we just considered a set a collection of things, what would math be missing and would calculus and other such things still hold?

Light and how it interacts with stuff seems very fortuitous to me. It just so happens to pass through the atmosphere rather than bouncing off of it or being absorbed by it thus lighting up everything we can see. My question is given the multitude of particles in the atmosphere why does enough light pass through to see instead of just bouncing off of the air molecules and going back into space? Or even getting absorbed by the molecules? To clarify the kind of answer I'm looking for what is the quantum mechanical picture whereby photons are passing through instead of interacting with the air molecules?

edit: what I'm looking for is something similar to how Feynman talked in QED, for example "the atmosphere's translucency is something like 90% whereby a photon only has a 10% chance to reflect or be absorbed. Thus 90% of photons pass through." something along those lines

I'm no mathematician so maybe I misunderstand but it seems to me like something in zfc might be arbitrary. I think I understand the concept of a set, where the quantity of 5 is a set of 5 thus numbers are sets. However, let's take the idea of an empty set.

Now my understanding of what an empty set is, is a box of chocolates w/o any chocolate. It's purely a mental overlay of reality when we say the box is an empty set. But the question is does nature deal in empty sets outside of the one's invented by our minds?

It seems to me that if mathematics may be said to exist in some capacity, such as if math is merely the laws or rules of existence, that it would not be meaningful to have an "empty set". As that's saying there is something ontologically more to a set than it being the collection of things in a set. In one instance your saying a set is a thing in and of itself, in the other "set" just refers to the things collectively considered such that an absence of the things leaves you with no set rather than something that's empty.

This "something" that is called a "set" such that it can even be empty seems like something that has no ontological reality and things that have no ontological reality can't be said to exist.

I guess the question is if mathematics exists mind independently can an empty set actually exist also or is it merely invention and if so how can the concept be said to be a "foundation" of math? Thoughts?