Qualia is a worthless term. If you wish for an explanation of how neuroscientists view consciousness and functionalism, then you can read my essay on the matter. I believe I already presented it. It discusses the topics put forth.

And btw, my post was not irrelevant. You were the one who made the homunculus argument and asked how our minds percieve "redness". You were the one who asked.

Why should I have to repeat what I have already taken the time to write? This topic is complex. It requires a lot of explaining. If you dislike this, then get out. It's no loss.

Fine.

Functionalism is the dominant arm of philosophy of mind, essentially the argument that the conscious mind is a process generated by the brain. This does not mean that consciousness per se is physical. But it does not mean it is immaterial. What it means is that it is emergent. (I already made a post on emergentism). You will note that this is aimed at refuting dualism (which most philosophers do not bother with but all the major religiosn do), so it may contain some parts irrelevant to you, but it does raise important points and ideas about the nature of the mind and the process of consciousness.

We can demonstrate this by proving that the conscious mind cannot be a seperate agent from the reality it inhabits. The relevant parts to this are what I wrote here:

The science of consciousness is all about unity of the lobes of the brain, and can be demonstrated likewise: I am referring to what modern neuroscientists called apraxia, a situation which results in a longitudinal divide along the corpus callosum in epilepsy patients, which causes the dominant hand of the patient to undergo involuntary movement and uncontrollable motor functions. The hand might undo buttons, light cigarettes, even strike objects without the users control. However, combined magnetoencephelogram scanning and neurophenomenology conducted after Penfield died in 1976 have revealed that this very rare form of epillepsy apraxia is caused by the damage caused to the medial lobes by the incision along the major axis of the brain. There are different brain functions associated with voluntary movement, the cerebellum for proprioception, the grid neuron array for mechanoperception, Acetylocholin-based Somatic and visceral motor neurons which run up the body's planar axis through the center of the spinal cord and into the Sensory Somatic Cortex. The incision along the brain's long axis severs the connection between the lobes controlling movement, with the result that different areas of the brain may at different times be able to command the hand in different ways, but since they are not connected, conscious control over it is lost. Actually, apraxia is often used to make the neurophysiological distinction between intention of execution otherwise known as Executive function (Anterior Cingulate Cortex), and actual execution. In other words, we can show that the self loses control of the hand due to apraxia due to a division along the major long axis of the brain, and although the kinesthetic sensation is there, the sensation of conscious control over the hand is not. For this reason, most neurophysiologists consider that at the supramolecular level, there is an electrophysiological event which translates intent into action. The general area which does this has been pinpointed by fMRI as the medial fronal lobe. Recently, neuroimaging has revealed the area of the brain responsible for decisional inhibition to be in the parietaloccipatal system. The damage or destruction of this system results in the loss of executive functional inhibition, with the result that the subject may lose conscious control over many physiological functions. But since the area of the brain responsible for action is located on the other lobe of the brain, the result of an incision along the corpus callosum will be in rare cases the loss of ability for interagency neurological control over such functions, with apraxia, with the result that a conscious self loses control for periods of time over the limb in question unless treated. The very fact that it can be treated in a neurological fashion hence indicates that you are dead wrong. Since the brain is a contralateral control system, which means that damage to the posterior medial lobe results in involuntary movement in the opposite function, the same for the parietal-occipatal system, since the corpus callosum is the link between these two areas and the subcortical synaptogenesis which develops when basic motor skills do, the exertation of control over the movement is partitioned into four areas. In other words, we are seeing exactly what we expect to see with an epillepsy patient experiencing apraxia under IET stimulation.

at most people do not realize is that dualism has been debunked.

There is another, more brutal way to illustrate the physicality of the mind, much more clear than the cutting of the corpus callosum or disassociative identity disorder. It comes in the form of a brutal and most terrible genetic disease called Lesch-Nyhan’s syndrome. It is extremely rare, occurring only in boys and is an in utero mutation on the X chromosome, inherited from the boy’s mother. It has two distinct effects. The first is a stop-codon in the enzyme HPRT making it useless, this enzyme metabolizes uric acid, and the lack of it causes extremely high buildups of uric acid in the bloodstream. But the truly sadistic nature of the disease comes to light in the second distinct effect.

Most people do not realize it, because the situation rarely demands it, but there is no one “Other” that it present in the human brain. Rather, there are two. The human brain is triple-tiered, the bottom contains the primitive brain, then the brain stem and midbrain, and finally, the part where the thinking, conscious being is, the neocortex, the last tier. In situations of dire fight-or-flight, trauma, shock, or anything of the like, the primitive and primal lower tiers take command, controlling adrenaline flow and autonomic functions and instinctual basics, such as sexual urge. This is truly where man’s baser nature is, an ancient evolutionary structure, hopelessly unsophisticated compared with the deep intricacies of the neural networks of the neocortex, whose twisting patters of neural networks and glial cells produces all of man’s genius and creativity and thirst for knowledge.

Anyway, Lesch-Nyhan causes a mutation in the primitive second-tier of the brain, at the brain-stem, where locomotive signals are fired. There are two distinct effects of signal-crossing in the midbrain. The first is that a Lesch-Nyhan child is spastic and assumes an odd “fencer” position, as appearing with one leg diagonally bent and the opposite arm crooked backwards. The second effect is that the midbrain is deranged and the insane signal-firing causes it to “cross” signals with the neocortex. The effects are ghastly. In a fight between the primitive brain and the conscious neocortex, the primitive brain always wins, it has simply been there for a longer course of evolutionary history, it is more ingrained, it overrides the higher functions. Hence, the deranged vertical dividing of the Lesch-Nyhan brain causes the sufferer, during bouts or “attacks” when the signal firing goes berserk, to attack the people around him (always him, girls, having two X chromosomes, cannot get Lesch-Nyhan), and causes intense writhing and seizure-like convulsions. The most brutal effect of this is autocannibalism, the thrashing of the facial muscles causes the boy to eat away their own face, they will often rip out their own palate with their teeth and most of their lip flesh as well. For their own protection, they often have their teeth extracted. It is truly a ghastly disease. For their own safety, they have to be tied down with restraints, otherwise they will viciously attack themselves with their hands. Self-enucleation, removing one’s own eyes, is rare, but it happens. A boy with Lesch-Nyhan’s will not survive much past adolescence. Either from kidney failure or self-injury, most do not see their 20th birthday.

As a genetic disease, Lesch-Nyhan’s is part of my research into vector-based gene therapy. It doesn’t have much money in it, being that it only occurs in one out of every 950,000 births, but I do hope that the research done will alleviate this monstrosity of a disease. However, for the case at hand, it helps, albeit very brutally, to illustrate that the mind can indeed by divided, and that we can point to the neocortex and say, this is where the conscious, thinking “you” resides.

Secondly, whatever the “I” is, I can say with confidence what it is not-magic. This is, after all, in essence what the vitalists are appealing to, the belief that “I” is intangible, and hence cannot be the domain of the material. What is the thing that feels pain when jabbed with a needle? It is most certainly not a obfuscated vital force...you’re acknowledging that every time you have surgery! Furthermore, it may be best to flip vitalist objections on their head to reveal the absurdity of their beliefs. So, the soul is a mysterious, timeless, acausal, non-spatial essence? I would normally say that is a meaningless statement, but that is for another time. For now, I will simply say: How is it even remotely possible that this immaterial is the domain of the “I”? When your eyes are receiving photon packets and converting them into electrical signals to be transmitted across the optic nerve, how is it possible that this data, which is then reassembled into an image by a brain for review by the visual association cortex and sensory somatic cortex (obviously this is an extreme oversimplification, but were I to talk in depth about picture reassembly, you would all be bored to tears, so I shall press on). How is it possible that this distinctly tangible packet of data, physical ,spatial and causal, interact with this mysterious immateriality that is none of these things and that does not even reside in the brain (obviously it doesn’t. Terms like “reside” and “inside” are incoherent when referring to the immaterial). How can this mysterious ether interact with the neuroelectrochemistry. This seems like a reasonable objection, that being: How can this mysterious intangible possibly be a solution to any of the problems of consciousness? It seems like it multiplies the absurdity of the problem by several orders of magnitude. How can it interact with any of the physical functions of the brain at all? If it is atemporal, how does it form temporal and causal thoughts, or process temporal sensory uptakes? If it is non-spatial, how does it analyze spatial data, or interact with spatial chemicals that make up emotional response? What does it do that the material brain cannot handle? And how is it a more cogent solution to these problems than materialism? As I said before, seems it creates a gamut of extra, absurd problems. Human thought does not reside in a magical land that exists outside of space and time. By sitting at the computer screen and reading these perfectly tangible, spatial and coherent words while my prefrontal cortex and visual association cortex are buzzing and ferrying memories to and fro, I am acknowledging this.

The dualist assertion, as supported by the religious dogma it complements, is that the soul is the domain of all things mental, that mental states are a seperate reality from the glands and gristle of the brain (but then...what does the brain do? Surely then it would be vestigial, which is absurd). However, neuroscientists have been shooting those off like flies on a windshield. Even the most ardent or ignorant dualist will be forced to admit that there is physical and causal grounding for mental states. We now have convincing neurological explanations for emotion, reason, cognition, pain, perception etc, and those phenomenon which we cannot (as of yet) explain, we can at least to deduce the physical nature of such phenomenon (consciousness, self-awareness and thoughts). The deductions of physicality are obvious, you tweak a physical thing in the brain, and you get a corresponding change in mental state. An electrode at X produces a physiological effect at Y and a corresponding mental state, chemical X in neuron group Y produces mental state Z and so on. We have a slew of cerebrovascular, genetic, neurodevelopmental, congenital neurophysiological, neurotoxic and neurobiological diseases to attest. Depression (serotonin VGIC channel malfunction and limbic-cortic dysregulation), which causes, well, depression. Alzheimers (amyeloid fatty plaque accumulation), which causes dementia, senile dementia, which does the same, Wilson’s disease (accumulation of copper in the brain causing dementia and Kayser-Fleischer rings), OCD (subcortical circuitry malfunction) causing obsessive-compulsive behaivor, Lesch-Nyhan’s (autocannibalism and insanity, caused by a missing copy of the functioning hypoxanthanine-guanine ribulotransferanse), autism (miswiring of mirror neurons) causing, in extreme cases, total antisocial behaivor, inability to speak, general inability to interact with others, eating disorders are caused by frontotemporal synaptogenesis malfunction, hallucination by cytokine storms in the retinogeniculocalcarine tract, the list goes on and on.

So, in the face of 200 crushing years of neurological evidence, many turn to the icky and hopelessly unscientific notion of “free will”. This is appealling because the brain is a physical machine and hence causal, but “free will” as the name denotes, is indeterminate. Many neuroscientists hence reject the notion of “free will”. I am not here to argue for or against such a notion, except to say this:

The question of free will is merely the other side of the coin of consciousness, the existence of a being which is aware of its existence (subject/object) in relation to the world, and has a concept of “I” and hence is able to make decisions about the the world pertaining to the accomplishment of some goal. Neurologists call this executive function. There is a part of the brain responsible, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), although we are not absolutely sure of the precise mechanism involved. Regardless, we can be quite sure of the organic biophysical nature of the decision making process. As I explained before, this is merely the other side of consciousness, which through a series of very easy deductions, we can, as I have shown, prove to have organo-physical grounding. The “free will” and control you excercise over your actions can be altered, controlled, lost, and switched on and off by physical actions in the brain, as evidenced by the poor Lesch-Nyhan sufferer.

But the term “free will” implies your ability to make decisions is...free. It is surely not. There are a host of factors, both acknowledged and programmed, which influence decision making. It is a highly causal and determinate process, depending on the tempermant of the subject in question (which is partially genetic and partially environmental), the electrical signals which knit together to form your cohesive worldview, this is the science of perception, which I shall cover now, memory, the pattern-recognition engines of the brain, the precise neuroelectrochemical concentration at time of the decision being made, and so on. There is no such thing as “free will”, because the processes by which decisions are made are as causal and hence physical as any biological process we care to name. The dichotomy we must entertain is this: Is there a “you” commanding and controlling your thoughts, or are “you” the sum total of your thoughts? Most of neuroscience, as do I, lean towards the latter. There is no mental control room, and it is most certainly not external of the brain. You cannot control your thoughts. Try it. You are your thoughts, and these thoughts are caused by....a guess, anyone? I would suspect, along with the bulk of evolutionary cognitive neuroscientists, that the subject/object self-perception of higher organisms which generates the illusion of “free will” is a by product of the evolutionary expansion of the neocortex along the Pan/Homo genus. After all, humans are not the only animals to possess this capability, although ours is certainly most fine-tuned. At present, great apes, chimps, macques and dolphins are also among this small set of organisms which acknowledge their existence as a defined being from the world they inhabit, and hence they do not behave like mere automata, as Descartes would have us believe.

In preperation for the next section of discussion, we must turn the science of perception. In scientific terms, this is the mechanism by which the electrical signals from the external and internal world are arrayed and read to assemble a picture of reality for the brain to interpret. That’s what the brain does, it runs a first-class simulation of reality.

This simulation is based on thousands and thousands of data hard points inside and outside the body. First, there are the five exoperceptive senses, which we all know, sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing, which depend, respectively, on the eyes and optic, trochlear, abducent and oculomotor nerves, the olfactory and glassopharyngeal nerves, the tongue and hypoglossal nerve, the thousands of recepter neurons across the body and the auditory and vestibulocochlear nerves.

Then, there are the lesser known, but equally important introperceptive senses, which regulate balance and spatiotemporal relative position and geometric orientation in the world (inner ear and cochlear tubes) called proprioception, the tracking of movement and muscle memory called mechanoperception (this one is quite remarkable, it is controlled by grid neurons which array a lattice-like projection of external reality, dividing it into grid squares, such that grid neurons corresponding to said squares fire when movement is detected in said squares. Obviously, your brain does not project this onto your vision, as that would be extremely annoying. As a matter of fact, your brain, while efficiently organizing reality, tweaks a lot of things so as not to appear unsettling. For example, the eyes never stop moving, they, even when fixed on a point, are making a jerky motion called sacchares. However, this is extremely unsettling in appearance so the brain eliminates it from the visual projection. It can be detected only by watching someone else’s eyes in the mirror.

There are many introperceptive senses, but they keep inventing new ones as they are discovered, so I shall not mention them all here. The point is that the simulation which the brain runs based on this data is the fundamental requisite of existence for a conscious mind. The mind cannot exist without it. For some hitherto unexplained reason, perhaps psuedo-therepautical, the wealthy sometimes pay to be placed for short periods of time in a total sensory deprivation tank. This is dangerous. Overexposure to total sensory deprivation will cause insanity then death. The sensory processing units of the brain will begin to unravel, as experiments have shown. Imagine a person born more unfortunate than Helen Keller. Not only are they congenitally blind and deaf, but they have CIPA (Congenital insensity to pain with anhidrosis) and ageusia. If I presented this case to a neuroscientist, they would say the baby would die soon after exiting the womb, assuming it has not been born stillborn. The mind cannot exist without the senses.

In addition to the senses and the genetic factors of temperament and chemical concentration across the VGIC arrays, the mind cannot exist without the brain’s pattern recognition engines, without which we would be somewhat like Dory the fish in Finding Nemo, except that in addition to constantly forgetting our own name, we would be unable to walk, talk, or think at all.

Born without a brain

Of the most ludicrous attempts to prove the existence of the “soul”, surely, the so-called “born without a brain” is one of them.

Of course, it is possible to be born without a brain. The precursor to the neural clusters of the brain are called neural tubes, which open and develop around 25 weeks into embryonic development, and partition along the brain’s major longitudinal axis into the four major partitions (prosencephalon, mesencephalon, rhombencephalon and the cerebrospinal fluid duct. The first three then split again into the brain’s sub-partitioning, the prosencephalon develops along the optic ducts and into the precursor of the cerebrum, which contains all of the higer-level functions and partitions (temporal lobe, occipatal lobe, prefrontal cortex and parietal lobe), and the rest develops into the sub-structures of the primary and secondary tiers of the brain, the midbrain, the fluid ducts that run between the lobes, the pons medullas and hypothalamus, the cerebellum and the brain stem.

To be born without a brain is a classed neural tube defect, which occurs around 26 weeks of human embryonic development, with the failed closure of the neural tubes. The most serious of these is called anencephaly. An anencephalactic baby has no isocortex or cerebral hemisphere, in short, they are missing 85% of their brain, the part necessary for higher-level brain function.

Very few anencephelactic babies are born, since it can be detected in utero, and nearly all mothers who learn of the baby’s condition choose to abort it, many of those who are born are stillborn. A very tiny portion remain alive. It is possible to be alive in an anencephelactic state since the brain stem is present, and hence the cardioregulatory center, so the heart will beat. Eventually, however, with no brain, the body will die very quickly (Morpheus, in the Matrix, my favorite film, was correct when he said “the body cannot live without the mind”) the record, I believe, for an anencephelatic baby is one week outside of the womb.

Unsurprisingly, an anencephaltic baby is in a permanent vegetative state, unable to feel pain, unconscious, blind, deaf and dumb. In short, there is no higher level function to speak of. No consciousness develops, no mind etc. They just...exist, although there is no “I” to speak of in an anencephelactic baby.

Anencephaly is not to be confused with a much, much rarer condition called Acephaly, which is the absence of the entire head of a parasitic twin fetus, which appallingly, can survive for a few hours by leeching blood from the heart of its twin.

So, having read the two sections above regarding free will and NTDs, we reach an incredibly obvious conclusion. The conscious mind is not a separate agent from the reality it inhabits (recall especially the section on sensory deprivation and its resulting effect). The ancient Egyptians actually believed the brain to be vestigial. Such ignorance!

Also, conscious awareness, creativity, intelligence, etc. These are functions which develop via the interactive existence of the brain and the world. It is absurd to say that they are somehow separate or come “pre-packaged” in this nonsensical and ridiculous “ether” which is somehow “injected” into the zygote or foetus (whichever, apparently, depends on whether you are Catholic or Protestant. I am trying very hard not to laugh as I write this). They depend on and build from the subject/object nature of human existence, which is why, as I have previously explained, they cannot exist in a baby born with no sensory functions (which would die soon after assuming it survived in utero). It makes no sense to pin these functions on the existence of this magical nonsense being that they are no more separate functions from the physical brain than the liver is separate from the rest of the body, as 200 years of neuroscience confirms.

No, you did not. You merely asserted that people used immaterial language. They do use the language and think they are making coherent references, but they must actually steal from material. You never show HOW they use this language to imploy immateriality.

This is why you  have NO argument.

And this is why you just run from this point every time I raise it. 

Look what you did in response to my last post: you just ignore it, because it asks you to tell us how 'evil' can be rendered coherent without referencing materiality. 

I already did, above.

Hey: why not CUT AND PASTE what I say, so that you have my actual words?

What you posted does not represent my argument. My argument is here, in my post. Cut and paste what you wish to reply to, and present a counter argument.

How simple can it be? 

I gave you my actual argument. You didn't even copy and paste it, acknowledge it, or, of course, reply to it.

Yes, you did.

Please, again, don't lie. You demonstrated that you DIDN'T EVEN KNOW MY POSITION, A POINT YOU KEEP REFUSING TO ACKNOWLEDGE: 

then according to this retarded use of the word existence there would be no such thing as immaterial.

You've not shown anything here to be 'retarded' other than yourself, particuarly your inability to even work out my position before you try to argue 'against it'!

You can't even be bothered to read the first paragraph of the first post here and figure out my postion.

You can't even demonstrate an understanding of my arguments.

I'm a material monist. My arguments are intended to demonstrate that immateriality is an incoherent concept.

The fact that this is all news to you says quite a bit, doesn't it?

Did you even bother to read the first paragraph in the first post in this thread?

Why don't you go read it, for the first time, champ?

Did you catch that?

Yes. And I have no problem with the implication, seeing as I'm a material monist who argues that immateriality is incoherent.

Did you catch that? 

But you might try to actually present my argument as I stated it.

If I was to follow the rules of your language game, no matter how ridiculous they are,

You've only demonstrated how ridiculous you are. You've not actually cut and pasted one of my arguments and shown a flaw.

In fact, you can't even WORK OUT MY POSITION!

then I would also come to the conclusion that all that exists is necessarily material.

Can you work out yet that I'm a material monist?

Um... excuse me... but you don't even know what my position is.... and you think you're arguing against what I actually have said?

Calling you retarded was kind.

You've not demonstrated anything.

The point you keep dodging is that you can't show HOW language coherently employs immateriality.

How many times does this simple point have to be repeated to you?

One more thing I wish to add.

We often talk as though our scientific knowledge of a concept and our everyday use of the same concept are referring to different things because they seem so different.

But this again is falsehood. In reality all that is occuring is that we are referring to two different aspects of the same concept.  In science, we are merely describing the technical aspect of the same concept. For example: time.

Our everyday usage of the word time merely refers to events occuring in sequentiality.

Our scientific usage of the same concept explains precisely why this works, and that time is physical entity part of a physical entity called spacetime.

These two appear different, which is why Strafio thinks that our everyday usage of time is different from Relativistic Kinematics. This is false. The reason for this is because our everyday usage of the word time lends itself to our intuition, and our intuition would seem to tell us that time is an intangible Newtonian thing. It is not. We can demonstrate our own intuition false. 

So we need to distinguish the overlapping nature of intuition, everyday usage and scientific usage. Our scientific usage is a technical description of a phenomenon that we eperience everyday. However, our everyday usage leans heavily on or intuition, which scientific empiricism tends often to flip on its head.

The notion that "consciousness" and "the mind" are seperate agents from the material brain, otherwise known as dualism, is very intuitively easy to grasp (even if it is technically impossible to understand because it refers to something absurd). However, this view has been utterly raped by neuroscience.

Neuroscience is about describing instrisic phenomenon to our existence. How do we remember things? How do we process light and sound? What is the mind? How do we reason? We can answer these using neuroscience. However, due to the fact that it is utterly intuitive that these things appear to be seperate from the material, many balk at this. In my neuroscience essay, I smashed aside the bulk of the objections, but the point is that the phenomenon neuroscientists are describing are merely technical descriptions of our everyday experience, we just balk at this due to its counterintuitivity. We can tell you the electrophysiological events which cause decision making, we can tell you about the necessary interagency lobal control necesessary for consciousness, but many balk at this because it a) counterintuivity and b) it appears to contradict free will. I hate the term free will. It is useless. It appears that we have free will, so what of it? Even if our actions are determined by our brains, this gives us nothing to ponder save philosophical ratiocintations. 

Anyway, the point I am trying to make is that our everday use of language is riddled with inaccuracies due to our intuitive bias. These remain uncorrected even when we subconsciously acknowledge their falsehood. For example, nobody believes the sun rotates around the earth, yet the phrase "the sun rises" is still common.

It may be the same when we describe consciousness and the mind in everyday language. Although our intuitive bias would seem to indicate that these are not the processes of physicality, that we can demonstrate their necessary physicality merely reflects an inaccuracy in our everyday language. You may protest that perhaps we are making reference to something other than consciousness as neuroscientists describe it, but this is merely a denying the correlative fallacy. We both mean the same thing: The subjective experience of being the mind. That our everyday language does not reflect the empirically demonstratable physicality of the mind says nothing except that our everyday language is rooted in sometimes inaccurate intuition. It says nothing at all about the reality which it is attempting to describe.

DeludedGod, the reason why I was picking at your premises is because you were trying to use them to counter my argument. You made this claim that scientific explanations prove things about philosophy of mind and I asked you to justify the relevence of your scientific explanations.
You invariably tried to do this with scientific explanations...
Don't get me wrong, you're good at science, but you're like this guy who finds a hammer so useful at knocking nails into a wall that you try and use it to wash the dishes with as well.

It seems that both of you want to see my positive argument from language. You both passed straight through it last time it was posted so try to pay attention this time:

1) The meaning/point of a word/phrase is determined by how we would use it.
This ought to go without saying really.
"Hello" is a word we use to greet people.
"That dog is green" refers to a dog and makes a claim about the colour of said dog. etc.

2) The word 'existence' is a word we use in the context of describing things.
It's when we are describing the world that the question of whether something exists or not. The ontology is how the thing would exist (e.g. as a piece of matter or as combination of physical events etc) and the existence is whether it exists.
A concept with ontology can potentially refer to an actual material thing while an existing object actually does refer to an actual existing thing.

3) We aren't necessarily using nouns to refer to things.
This simply states that just because something is a noun, it doesn't mean that it has to refer to something. There are potentially other uses for nouns other than referring to (or potentially referring to) material things. There are two consequences to this:
a) These nouns will be grammatically similar to referencial concepts but not actually refer to material things. This means that they will share the grammatical properties of the material concept but they don't share the material properties. e.g. coords in spacetime, causal relations with other material things, existence, etc.
b) Because their purpose isn't to refer to things, they don't require an ontology to be meaningful.
(Todangst, if you disagree with this then I expect a full account of what ontology is and why it is necessary even for 'non-referencial' uses of language where 'existence' is irrelevent)

4) From here, I'll re-introduce that definition of immaterial:
Immaterial:
In language, nouns are usually used to refer to something material.
However, there are exceptions to the rule.
Some nouns share the grammar of referencing nouns but don't actually refer to anything material. So they have the grammatical properties of referencing but lack the semantics.
Because of this, we call them 'not material' as although they grammatically remind of material concepts they do not actually refer.

And by the previous premises, immaterial concepts do not need to refer to existing things or even have an ontology to be meaningful, as the requirement of ontology is one for concepts that wish to refer to the material world.

5) Numbers are nouns that do not refer to material things.
That numbers can be nouns should be obvious to anyone who has a basic grasp of our language. They are certainly treated as nouns in the logical language that mathematicians use.
That they don't refer to material things should also be obvious from the way we are taught them. When we are taught a word, we are taught the rules of it's use. To use the word 'chair' we are taught to associate the word with the object chair.
To use numbers we are taught to use the words properly by learning the rules of counting. '5' isn't taught to refer to a material thing, it is the word we say after '4' when we are counting. When you use a number, would you ever use it to refer to something? You might sometimes call the representation of the number the number. e.g. the '4' on the blackboard is the number '4', but mathematicians frown on this definition of a number and have specifically made the distintion between 'number' and 'numeral' to counter it.
Numerals are representations of numbers.
E.g. 'II' and '2' are both different numerals but both the same number.

There are linguistic concepts called "extension" and "intension".
Intension is comparable to the rules of use of the word and extension is the object the word refers to.
E.g. your example of H20 and Water being different intensions with the same extension, and one person with two names.

Unfortunately, this is not the case of time.
There are two ways of seeing time.
Either time is 'out there', that is the temporal structure of the universe, or time is 'in here', that is the temporal structure of our perceptual experience.
When I talk about the timeline of England, I am referring to time as in the structure of the universe. If I was describing an experience and I said "time slowed down", unless an amazing quirk had occured in the fabric of spacetime, it seems that my perception of reality saw a 'slowdown' of experience.
You are right that when we apply our intuitive notion of time to 'out there' things we are in a sense trying to refer to the 'out there' time, which turns out (through scientific experiment) to be spacetime.
However, when we are talking about the temporal structure of experience, it clearly begins and ends with our perception of time on our experience.

So the temporal structure of our experience is clearly a separate concept to the one of 'time' the structure of the universe.
The claim that mental events are 'temporal' clearly comes from how our experiences are temporal.
DeludedGod's attempt to identify that with the temporal structure of external reality was certainly a novel idea, but it relies on a conflation.

You're right that language is a mish-mash of alternative uses and stuff - that's why so many problems arise. The power of linguistic philosophy is to recognise this so we can take precautions to minimise error. E.g. if you see an opponent using a word in a way that you wouldn't expect then ask for an explanation for it so you can see where they are coming from.

Anyway, even DeludedGod admitted that 'belief' and 'desire' being as we use them in everyday language was a premise his argument. How do we compare our everyday use? Why, we use our ability to use them everyday (our intuitive grasp of the language) to see how we would use the words in given situations, and then we can see where certain definitions have perversed a word. Ofcourse, it can be that we propose a reforming definition, where we justify a re-defining of the word.

I'm sure you'd like to do this to mental concepts.
However, your for doing this comes from physical/meta-physical premises, so you need to show that physics and meta-physics are important to these concepts, and to do that you need to show that our original use of them involved the contexts of physics and metaphysics.

If you disagree with any of this then give your alternative account of language. What really gets me about this conversation is that all three of you have admitted to not really caring for the philosophy of language yet still make assertions on it as if you were bloody authorities on the subject.

The weight of green is 0, just like every other wave on the EM spectrum. 

You don't seem to like that I pick holes and show that your linguistic assumptions are unjustified, but I wouldn't have to if you didn't keep restating these assumptions so categorically. If you were to even say "Alright, I might be wrong about the application of language - what's your positive theory on it?" then this conversation you can go forward. The thing is, whenever I put forward such a positive explanation you dismiss is based on these pre-conceptions of yours, then I am reduced to having to challenge these pre-conceptions...

On the one hand, it's admirable that you're willing to tackle problems outside your area of expertise. The problem comes in when you fail to realise that all the assumptions that you could take for granted in science don't apply here. So rather than tackle philosophy, you simply misread philosophical questions a scientific ones. If that was the case, wouldn't philosophers have been given similar training to scientists in order to tackle such questions?

This in itself wouldn't be so bad if you had the humility to admit it, but after so blatantly misunderstanding the entire subject, you then start talking with an authoritative tone. And when I question your assertions in the correct way, fair enough you don't understand as this is not your area of expertise and not a discourse you have been trained to deal with, but maybe that means that if you come across an argument you misunderstand from someone who has studied then maybe you should recognise that it might just be you who isn't understanding the points that's being made.

Instead you try to blame all the misunderstandings on me, despite the fact that we're discussing an area that is clearly out of your expertise. Now I don't claim to be an expert on linguistic philosophy - I've barely started to scratch the surface of the subject. The thing is, even I can see that you've grasped the most basic issues to the subject. This might sound like an argument from authority but it's not. I'm not asking you to take my word on anything here, just pointing out that if you want a leg to stand on these discussions then you need to study the issues at hand.

Yes, your knowledge of scientific fact is very impressive.
But you clearly don't understand the nature of these facts or how they ought to be used in an argument. You were taught skills to separate scientific fact from scientific fiction. If you want to apply these facts in a scientific debate then you need to learn something new.

It seems that we're both fed up with the conversation as it has been going. You've been making the assertions and I've been trying to counter them. Perhaps you would like to turn the tables. Higher up on this page is my positive argument for the use of the word 'immaterial'. While you might not agree with it, you'll atleast get a taste for what a linguistic argument should look like and maybe get a feel for the issues involved.

Yes. His continued lying on this matter is trolling at this point. If I see more of it, I'll step in as a mod.  

Cliff notes to this entire thread:

b) Because their purpose isn't to refer to things, they don't require an ontology to be meaningful.

Ontology speaks to matters of existence, identity and meaning. Without any identity, there can be no identification, ergo, there can be no meaning.

So your claim is demonstratably false.

QED

End of thread.  

Look, try thinking this through: To express 'evil' you must point to behavior, which is physical. Whatever level of abstraction you grant a term, you can't imagine 'evil' unless you instantiate it in some manner... the abstraction must be represented in some way. --Todangst

If someone bashes a baby's head in with a wooden bat, that's a token of the type evil. It's a behavior to which we attach the idea evil. There are many, many different tokens of the type evil, or many instances and behaviors to which we can attach the idea of evil, just like their are many different green pieces of paper that we attach the concept of "One US Dollar" to. I agree that the tokens here are physical, they are material. What I'm saying is immaterial is the concept that is applied to all of them, in so far as their is no physical thing that we can point to and call "the idea of evilness". There are physical things that we can point to and say "That is evil", but those are just behaviors to which we attach an idea, a word. To say that the instance and the idea are one in the same is incorrect. 

The thing is Todangst, you've defined your position in such a way that an argument against it is impossible. I'm sure you're thinking "no shit", and I realize that's what you've been saying the whole time here.

What I'm saying is, you've given no argument for why immateriality must by definition be impossible.

You define existence as physical existence. So when you're asking someone to give an example of nonphysical existence using your definition of existence, obviously it's going to be impossible. 

When you equate concievability with physical existence, obviously asking someone how they can concieve of an immaterial idea becomes an impossible request.

Now, I said before that according to the way you define these and other key concepts, nothing material can exist. I agree, from what I can see, your position seems to be internally consistent. You've defined it to be true by definition.

What you don't understand is, in philosophy, that's usually known as pseudophilosophy. If the only reason your position is true is because you've redefined it to automatically be correct, you haven't really done anything extraordinary. 

I say that most people have no problem saying that ideas and numbers exist. You would say, that's because they just haven't thought it through... correct? However, you're assumption that someone who thinks it through will conclude that immaterial is incoherent is based on another assumption, which is that everyone shares your definition of words like existence, and material, and abstraction, etc.

That's the assumption I'm questioning. I think your terms are loaded, I think that most people would reject them not because most people are stupid, but because nobody else uses them like that.

You repeat this phrase over and over in one of your latest posts:

You must explain how you can conceive of an idea that has no identity!

What you really seem to be saying, though, is that we must explain how you can conceive of an idea that has no physical identity. Since you've defined existence as physical existence, and identity as strictly physical identity, obviously this is an "impossible request".

You keep acting as though you are the last word when it comes to ontology, as though competing view points are nonexistant.

Ontology speaks to matters of existence, identity and meaning. --You

That's quite true, but the presupposition behind this statement of your seems to be that ontology only speaks to matters of physical existence, physical identity, and physical meaning.

The reason ontology is an issue in the first place is because for thousands of years people have pondered what kind of existence things that aren't matter/energy have, if they can even have any.

For you to simply define ontology physically rather arrogantly brushes away one of the most interesting and complicated branches of philosophy.

Any philosopher would agree that a red apple is physical, and a red rose is physical, and a red stop sign is physical. What philosophers don't agree on, and what you keep ignoring and dismissing with your assumptions, is what type of existence, if any, the redness that they all have in common has.

Your arguments are defined in a way that doesn't even allow for this possibility. That's ridiculous and narrow-minded. Like I said, you and a small handful of people share these very narrow definitions.

Everyone else has no problem saying the number 3 exists as an immaterial universal, because not everyone else has defined existence as strictly physical existence.

And popular view was that no one could come up with a more draconian restrictions on language than the logical positivists!
I've yet to come across an opinion that would make ontology and identity more fundamental than meaning. My understanding was that rules based on ontology and identity were justified by the purpose of language, not vice versa!!

But hey, I'm not here to argue from authority.
Maybe all the philosophers in history up to the present day have gotten it wrong and you're about to revolutionise the subject.
Nevertheless, you must justify this view on the philosophy of language.
You must first explain to me what ontology is, as I'm not sure I understand what you mean by it anymore.
You must secondly explain why it is necessary for a word to have an ontology in order to have meaning.

What might help us along here is if you give me some more examples. Could you please explain the ontology of the following sentences?
"Oi!"
"Please do it."
"I don't want to."
"What is your name?"
"Happy days!!"