In the sense that materialists must talk nonsense to explain it away:
Our mind-body problem is not just a difficulty about how the mind and body are related and how they affect one another. It is also a difficulty about how they can be related and how they can affect one another. Their characteristic properties are very different, like oil and water, which simply won’t mix, given what they are. There is a very common view which states that the French philosopher René Descartes discovered, or invented, this problem in the 17th century…
What is characteristic of a mind, Descartes claims, is that it is conscious, not that it has shape or consists of physical matter. Unlike the brain, which has physical characteristics and occupies space, it does not seem to make sense to attach spatial descriptions to it. In short, our bodies are certainly in space, and our minds are not, in the very straightforward sense that the assignation of linear dimensions and locations to them or to their contents and activities is unintelligible. That this straightforward test of physicality has survived all the philosophical changes of opinion since Descartes, almost unscathed, is remarkable…
What happens, if anything, for example, when we decide to do even such a simple thing as to lift up a cup and take a sip of coffee? The arm moves, but it is difficult to see how the thought or desire could make that happen. It is as though a ghost were to try to lift up a coffee cup. Its ghostly arm would, one supposes, simply pass through the cup without affecting it and without being able to cause it or the physical arm to go up in the air.
Jonathan Westphal, “Descartes and the Discovery of the Mind-Body Problem” at Aeon
We all experience this. But the mind-body “problem” is the nonsense materialists are led into in order to make the obvious meaning of the experience of an immaterial mind disappear in a dense weed jungle of verbiage.
How they have tried to address the dilemma: Why some scientists believe the universe is conscious. They’re not mystics. But materialism is not giving good answers so they are looking around. These prominent thinkers are driven to panpsychism because materialism about the mind doesn’t really work. So if panpsychism ends up seeming absurd, dualism—there really is an immaterial world—is also worth considering.
Why some scientists think science is an illusion. It’s a useful illusion, they say, but our brains are not really wired to know the facts. The great triumph of the theory of evolution was to show that humans are just animals in nature—clever, yes, but clever animals. Or so we are told. But wait!
Panpsychism: You are conscious but so is your coffee mug
and
How can consciousness be a material thing? Well, as the materialist philosopher himself will explain, he must see it that way.)
Reconstruction of Arm Movement Directions from Human Motor Cortex Using fMRI
…Our results suggest that arm movement directions can be distinguished from the multivoxel patterns of fMRI responses in motor cortex. Furthermore, compared to multivoxel pattern analysis, encoding models were able to also reconstruct unknown movement directions from the predicted brain activity. We conclude for our study that non-invasive fMRI signal can be utilized to predict directional motor movements in human motor cortex.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5529394/
First search result, BTW.
Of related note: the question of whether we actually have a soul or not plays right into the main debate between ID advocates and Darwinists.
The main debate between ID advocates and Darwinists is over the inability of material processes to generate information. Darwinists simply have zero scientific evidence that material processes can generate non-trivial levels of information. Whereas, on the other hand, ID advocates have a veritable infinity of examples that they can point to of intelligent minds generating massive amounts of information information.
What is interesting about information, and one of the primary reasons that material processes will never be able explain to origination of information, is the immaterial nature of information. As Dr. Stephen Meyer explains, “information is a mass-less quantity. Now, if information is not a material entity, then how can any materialistic explanation account for its origin? How can any material cause explain it’s origin?
And this is the real and fundamental problem that the presence of information in biology has posed. It creates a fundamental challenge to the materialistic, evolutionary scenarios because information is a different kind of entity that matter and energy cannot produce.”
In further establishing the immaterial nature of information, it is interesting to note that immaterial information can be encoded on a virtual endless variety of material substrates, and yet the meaning of the information never changes from one material substrate to the next. i.e. Immaterial information is simply not reducible to a materialistic explanation!
George Ellis further elucidates the immaterial nature of information and of mind in the following excellent article,,
Moreover, one of the primary presuppositions of Darwinists is that they hold that information to be merely emergent from a material basis. Yet, contrary to that primary presupposition of Darwinists, immaterial information is now shown to be its own distinct physical entity that is separate from matter and energy, A distinct physical entity that has, of all things, a ‘thermodynamic content’.
In fact, researchers have now built “ an information engine—a device that converts information into work—with an efficiency that exceeds the conventional second law of thermodynamics.”
Although the preceding is certainly very strong empirical evidence for the physical reality of immaterial information, the coup de grace for demonstrating that immaterial information is its own distinct physical entity, separate from matter and energy, is Quantum Teleportation:
Moreover, this immaterial quantum information that is now shown to be physically real is also found to be ‘conserved’. That is to say, ‘the conservation of quantum information means that quantum information cannot be created nor destroyed.’
Moreover, it is also important to note at this time that Quantum non-locality, i.e. ‘spooky action at a distance’ as Einstein termed it, is one of the most enigmatic, and yet is also one of the most verified, aspects of Quantum Mechanics.
And while atheistic materialists are at a complete loss to explain how particles can be instantly correlated,,,
,,, And while atheistic materialists are at a complete loss to explain how particles can be instantly correlated, on the other hand Christian Theists readily have a beyond space-time, matter-energy, cause that they can appeal to in order to explain quantum non-locality:
And this ‘spooky action at a distance’ of ‘non-local’ quantum entanglement, which requires a cause which is beyond space-time, matter-energy, in order to explain its existence, is now found to be ubiquitous within molecular biology:
Besides providing direct empirical falsification to neo-Darwinian claims in general, claims that say immaterial information does not exist apart from its representation on a material substrate, the implication of finding ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, and ‘conserved’, quantum information in molecular biology on such a massive scale, in every DNA and protein molecule, is fairly, and pleasantly, obvious.
That pleasant implication, or course, being the fact that we now have very strong physical evidence directly implying that we do indeed have an eternal soul that lives beyond the death of our material bodies.
In the following video Stuart Hameroff states ‘it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body. Perhaps indefinitely as a soul.”
And while Stuart Hameroff’s contention that quantum coherence in micro-tubules is responsible for consciousness has received experimental support,
And while Stuart Hameroff’s contention that quantum coherence in micro-tubules is responsible for consciousness has received experimental support, an additional model, besides Hameroff’s micro-tubule model, is needed to explain the ‘long range’ quantum coherence in the brain. A model that explains the ‘long range’ quantum coherence in the brain that differentiates the sleeping brain from the brain that is awake.
When we sleep the ‘long range’ non-local, beyond space and time, coherence displayed by the waking brain disappears.
And in the following video, an interesting experiment on the sleeping brain is highlighted in which it is demonstrated that there is a fairly profound difference in the way the brain ‘shares information’ between different parts of the brain in its sleeping state compared to how the brain ‘shares information’ in its waking state. i.e. In the sleeping state, the brain shares much less information with different parts of the brain than the brain does during our waking state.
And here is an article on the preceding video
Verse:
Hm, the whole point of that article is that Descartes’ mind-body problem is an issue for dualists. It doesn’t say anything about materialists,. and indeed for them it’s a non-issue because they simply don’t accept Descartes’ separation of Mind and Body.
Of course, we don’t understand enough about consciousness to be sure that the materialist account is correct. But if it is, Descartes’ problem disappears. If it isn’t we should be able to explore the solution, i.e. how the mind communicates with the body.
Good succinct post, Bob.
You tell her Bob. Atheistic Materialists lost their minds (and free will) long ago and have been doing just fine without them! 🙂
In the interactive dualism theory of mind, reality consists of two realms, mind and an objective physical reality. Human consciousness manifests in the physical through the physical brain, where rough analogies would be the filter and the receiver/transmitter theories. Like the TV set receiving and transducing the electromagnetic waves of the TV signal, the brain physically manifests immaterial consciousness which still interacts with matter via the neurons, synapses, etc. of the brain. But the brain is not the producer of human consciousness any more than the TV set really produces the program it is processing and displaying.
Sure, there are philosophical objections to dualism, but I think empirical evidence trumps theory every day. There is a large body of empirical evidence that it seems to me can best be explained by this theory of human consciousness. Veridical NDE accounts and reincarnation evidence such as Ian Stevenson’s research are foremost in this empirical evidence.
Certain features of the experience in many accounts of independently investigated and verified veridical NDEs clearly imply a mobile in physical space center of human consciousness independent of the brain (such as viewing the OR and emergency room doctors from a physical point in space – from the point of view of what is clearly experienced as such a mobile center of consciousness). Sometimes the NDEer views events and people hundreds of feet to many miles from the body, sometime interacting with these people, and experiences a physical space point of view as if the NDEer is physically located at the remote position.
The simplest explanation for these phenomena is along the lines of the Interactive Dualism theory of mind, that the experiences are what they seem to be – a mobile center of consciousness moving from place to place in a separately existing physical space-time realm.
The reincarnation empirical evidence indicates that when the very young child is able to speak he/she may start to talk about another, immediately previous life (usually where the death was violent and sudden). Sometimes the child will exhibit birthmarks or birth defects that correspond to the death wounds of the previous personality. By far the simplest explanation is again along the lines of Interactive Dualism – at one point in time a mobile in physical space center of consciousness moved in to occupy the fetus or baby.
But, the objection is, this evidence you describe can fit under Idealism, or possibly a variety of Panpsychism. For instance, Idealism, defined as “The theory in philosophy that reality essentially consists only of minds, and that the physical world is an illusion, or otherwise the product of minds. Idealism in philosophy of mind is a form of monism, rather than dualism, since it argues that there is only one substance, mind.”
Technically, yes, but the fit is uncomfortable – there have to be a lot of accessory hypotheses. Explaining some of these features of NDEs and reincarnation evidence along the lines of Idealism or Panpsychism is much more complicated, more contrived. To begin with, you now have to postulate another Mind or Minds producing the strong illusion of separate mental and physical realms, for some reason(s). What Mind(s), and why? Interactive dualism follows as a direct inference from the empirical evidence.
The clear implication of and the direct inference that can be made from the accounts of the actual veridical NDE experiences and the empirical evidence of reincarnation research, is that the reality the NDEer and the child with verified past life memories experiences is most probably what it appears to be: dual realms of mind and matter/space that interact. This is the case because of Occam’s Razor: the interactive dualism hypothesis is a considerably simpler and more direct explanation for the data.
I’ve said this before, but I can point to 7.6 billion examples of minds that are associated with physical brains.
Can anyone show me a mind that is NOT associated with a physical brain?
If you can’t separate them, maybe they are not separate things.
ETA: question mark on second sentence
Pater Kimbridge@8
This simply ignores without any justification a large body of empirical evidence, some of which I pointed out in 7. I guess that is the tactic employed by a lot of materialists – to pretend that all the empirical evidence to the contrary simply must be false since it violates certain deeply set ideological assumptions.
With NDEs I am not referring to often anonymous and uninvestigatable self-reported accounts posted on the Internet. A good number of these are probably valid, but I suggest perusal of sources like The Self Does Not Die by Rivas, Dirven and Smit, which contains over 100 reliable often firsthand accounts that were later verified by independent investigators. This book presents what is probably the largest number of confirmed and researched cases of veridical NDEs ever compiled. The authors went back to the original sources, the people involved, whenever possible, rather than second-hand sources.
@Doubter
How exactly does one verify the subjective experience of a person whose brain was likely deprived of oxygen?
Doubter, there is a blatant hypocrisy in Darwinian materialists not accepting the ample and robust evidence from NDEs. They demand evidence that consciousness can exist apart from the brain, and then when we point to the vast body of evidence supporting the validity of NDEs they resolutely refuse to accept it. Yet, on the other hand, they wholeheartedly believe Darwinian evolution to be true even though they have ZERO substantiating evidence that unguided processes can create gene/proteins, molecular machines, functional information etc.. etc.. (and much evidence indicating that material processes cannot generate functional information as such)
i.e. And as was touched upon in post 2, we have far more observational evidence for the reality of souls than we do for the Darwinian claim that unguided material processes can generate functional information. Moreover, the transcendent nature of ‘immaterial’ information, which is the one thing that, (as every ID advocate intimately knows), unguided material processes cannot possibly explain the origin of, directly supports the transcendent nature as well as the physical reality of the soul.
Further notes:
In the following study, materialistic researchers who had a bias against Near Death Experiences being real, set out to prove that they were merely ‘false memories’ by setting up a clever questionnaire that could differentiate which memories a person had were real and which memories a person had were merely imaginary.
Simply put, they did not expect the results they got: to quote the headline ‘Afterlife’ feels ‘even more real than real”
A few ‘more real than real’ quotes:
LoL! @ Bob O’H- Of course dualism a non-issue for materialists. The big issue for materialists is the existence of life, brains and minds. We know enough about those three to discount any materialistic explanation- minds from the mindless via blind, mindless and purposeless processes is about as absurd of a claim as there can be. You have to be desperate to consider such a thing. Very desperate.
Pater Kimbridge:
It has been done. And you can easily validate the findings. You just have to travel to some of the top rated haunted places and see for yourself.
There billions of TV sets through out the entire world too, this is NOT evidence that the TV generates the shows on it.
@AaronS1978
The fact that you can play the shows separate from any particular TV set is the evidence that they are separate things.
Assuming ET was actually serious, vague sounds and apparitions in a haunted house are not evidence of a mind. The only minds present belong to walking, talking humans who are letting their pareidolia get out of control.
Pater Kimbridge@10
To avoid what is undoubtedly just wasting more time, I’ll just borrow BA77’s quote from Michael Egnor at 11:
I would add that this extraordinary “realer than real” clarity of consciousness occurs while the brain is only weakly functioning, or entirely nonfunctional, as in cardiac arrest cases.
@Doubter
None of that shows that the mind is separate from, or departed from, the brain at any time.
Pater Kimbridge:
Yes, I am very serious. And there is more than vague sounds and apparitions. You can choose to ignore the evidence. I understand why people do. But that isn’t going to make it all go away.
Pater Kimbridge@17
Like I said, just wasting time. This large body of evidence shows that the mind is not one and the same as the data processing of brain neurons and synapses, or an illusory epiphenomenon of that, or any of the other materialist neuroscience “explanations” of human consciousness.
further to Dr. Egnor’s quote,, “The patients knew of things that they could not have known except by extraordinary perception — such as describing details of surgery that they watched while their heart was stopped, etc”
The following NDEer witnessed her mother smoke for the first time while in the emergency waiting room which was down the hall from the emergency room
In the following video, Dr. Lloyd Rudy, a pioneer of cardiac surgery, recounts two patients who came back to life after being declared dead, and told him things that they could not have possibly known if they were ‘attached’ to their brain.
Dr. Sam Parnia, perhaps the most skeptical NDE researcher, now considers NDEs to be authentic after a “man described everything that had happened in the room, ”
Then there was the famous ‘blue tennis shoe’, seen by the NDEer as she ‘floated’ above the hospital, which was found on the ledge of a 3rd floor hospital window by a nurse after the NDEer told the nurse about the blue shoe on the ledge.:
These are not just a few isolated cases either
Another piece of evidence that argues very strongly against any type of materialistic explanation for Near death Experiences is what is termed ‘Shared Death Experience’. A ‘Shared Death Experience’ is an experience in which a loved one, though not terminally ill, is caught up into part of the Near Death Experience as the loved one passes on:
The only problem I see is that some people do not stick to definitions. Science is defined as anything that can be measured, and spirit is defined as anything that can not be measured. Some people ignore those definitions and make pronouncements about spirit based on their training in science. That is a silly thing to do.
Pater Kimbridge
August 12, 2019 at 11:59 am
@AaronS1978
The fact that you can play the shows separate from any particular TV set is the evidence that they are separate things.
Obviously somebody didn’t get what I was saying
Saying that there is a lot of the same thing that’s Correlated with it I’d not proof of concept that they are one in the same.
The being a quantum receiver for the consciousness would also explain much of what we see
Hazel
As all posts worth reading are. With the exception of ET’s.
Right. Brother Brain cannot be concerned with posts that expose him as an ignorant troll. Those posts best be ignored.
But short posts full of nonsense are OK as long as its Brian’s type of nonsense.
Thumbs high
August 12, 2019 at 2:03 pm
Pater Kimbridge
August 12, 2019 at 11:59 am
@AaronS1978
The fact that you can play the shows separate from any particular TV set is the evidence that they are separate things.
Obviously somebody didn’t get what I was saying
Saying that there is a lot of the same thing that’s correlated with it, is not proof of concept that they are one in the same.
The brain being a quantum receiver for the consciousness would also explain much of what we see
I apologize for the last post, I was using talk to text while driving, which I shouldn’t do anyways, and I honestly deserve how stupid my last post sounded
I have re-posted this with the corrections, and this is why AI stinks
@AaronS1978
If you know Clark Kent and Superman are good friends, but you never see them both in the same room, don’t you get suspicious?
I would, but I also don’t see how the piano, the pianist and the music being played or all one of the same, They are all required to make music exist
I think my correlation better suits consciousness and the brain then Clark Kent and Superman
Clark Kent is just a dude with superpowers dressed up as another dude with the same superpowers I don’t see your correlation actually paralleling with the mind brain problem, Your correlation is more you trying to create a narrative that better suits your personal persuasion then it is that of proof that the mind and the brain or one in the same. This was my problem with your original statement saying a truthful statement which is there are 7.2 billion brains in this world and then you jumping straight to the conclusion the mind and the brain are the same.
That’s why I brought up the TV sets and TV shows there is a lot of TV sets out in this world, still doesn’t mean the TV shows that are televised on them are one in the same
There are a lot of brains out in this world, more than 7.2 billion, Including animals, But that does not mean that the mind and the brain are one in the same, they do show attributes that seem different
I could argue that Iron Man and Tony Stark are one in the same but they aren’t it is the combination of the suit and Tony Stark that makes Iron Man.
I can kill Tony Stark And the Iron Man suit will not work (well that depends the original wouldnt) I can get rid of the Iron Man suit and Tony Stark won’t have any of his superpowers
This almost sounds like it’s a matter of opinion between you and I, and I honestly don’t agree with your opinion. You obviously don’t agree with mine but I do know I am right that you cannot parallel the mind to the brain because everybody with a brain has a mind and therefore the mind has to be physical
There is so much we do not know about the mind to make that assumption, and much like my analogy of the pianist, the piano, and the music all three are not one in the same but the two of them combined make something beautiful, they are together but they are separate
And this is simply an example stating that just because you have a bunch of pianos or a bunch of brains, that doesn’t mean that you’re going to produce a mind without the consciousness much like you’re not going to produce music without the pianist
Dynamics of directional tuning and reference frames in humans: A high-density EEG study
Electrophysiological Brain Connectivity: Theory and Implementation
BB & PK et al:
Again, this is one core point from Reppert that you have never cogently answered:
Minds and computational substrates are categorically different.
KF
AS78, looks like 7.7 billion SOULS aboard spaceship earth (hint, hint) right now. KF
There is more evidence for ghosts then there is for a materialistic origin of life and organisms with brains.
@AaronS1978
It’s not an opinion, that when two things cannot be separated, that they are likely to be just one thing.
It’s logic.
It’s more likely that one of those things is just a property of the other.
And that the people who think they see two things are just confused.
The confusion is with those who think that minds arose from the mindless via blind and mindless processes.
“It’s not an opinion, that when two things cannot be separated, that they are likely to be just one thing.”
Pater Kimbridge,
How likely are two chain links “one thing”? They could be totally different in shape, size, material. The thing that holds them together is their design. Methinks you are misusing ‘likely’.
Andrew
Pater Kimbridge
August 13, 2019 at 9:01 am
@AaronS1978
It’s not an opinion, that when two things cannot be separated, that they are likely to be just one thing.
It’s logic.
It’s more likely that one of those things is just a property of the other.
And that the people who think they see two things are just confused.
And here’s why what you just said it’s an opinion I’m simply going to take what you just said reverse that and aim it at you and your perspective, People that don’t see the difference well they’re just confused
OLV@28
I’m curious. How are the various brain studies such as the two you cite supposed to prove that the mind is generated by the brain like bile is generated by the liver?
From the abstract and introduction of the first paper you linked:
There is a lot of experimental data like this. How is this supposed to show that human consciousness, the human mind, is generated by the physical brain? This sort of data is merely of correlations experimentally found between voluntary movements and EEGs of certain brain areas – correlations, not evidence of causation. In the receiver/transmitter theory of mind rough analogy of the TV set, this is like saying that the fact that in order to physically display the picture and produce the audio sounds of the program the EM waves carrying the TV program data have to be processed by complicated detection, demodulation, filtering and digital processing modules in the TV set, proves that the displayed TV show was produced by the TV set.
And remember the Wilder Penfield brain stimulation studies cited by Dr. Egnor that showed that no electrical stimulations of the brain could control the psyche – but they could do things like cause movements. All in accordance with the interactive dualism theory of mind. And simply consider (if you are willing) the NDE and reincarnation empirical data. If you deny the validity of this data please furnish detailed justification of this position.
Further notes on the physical reality of the soul:
As was previously mentioned in posts 2 and 3, we now have empirical evidence that Quantum coherence/entanglement is ubiquitous throughout molecular biology. As the paper on quantum criticality mentioned, “Quantum criticality (now found) in a wide range of important biomolecules
As was also mentioned in posts 2 and 3, quantum coherence/entanglement requires a non-local, beyond space and time, cause in order to explain its existence. As well, the fact that quantum information is physically conserved, i.e. quantum information cannot be created nor destroyed, was also mentioned in posts 2 and 3. And as was also pointed out towards the end of post 3, the ‘pleasant implication’ of these facts is that we now have very strong physical evidence directly implying that we do indeed have an eternal soul that is capable of living beyond the death of our material bodies.
What was not touched upon in post 3 was that we now also have empirical evidence for quantum effects playing out on the macro level of our material bodies.
Before we touch upon that, it is first important to note that Darwinian materialists have no clue why our material bodies, conservatively estimated to contain at least a billion trillion molecules, should remain unified as single entity for precisely a lifetime. As Stephen Talbott succinctly puts it, “the question, rather, is why things don’t fall completely apart — as they do, in fact, at the moment of death. What power holds off that moment — precisely for a lifetime, and not a moment longer?”
The Christian Theist, of course, has a ready answer for the question of “What power holds off that moment — precisely for a lifetime, and not a moment longer? “. The answer, of course, being that it is the soul that holds that power off “precisely for a lifetime, and not a moment longer”.
And, as was already mention, besides having empirical evidence that quantum coherence/entanglement is ubiquitous in all the important biomolecules of life, we now also have empirical evidence for quantum effects playing out on the macro level of our material bodies as well.
One line of evidence that quantum effects are at play of the macro level of our material bodies is that the brain exhibits ‘instantaneous synchronization’ between remote cerebral cortical areas.
Another line of evidence that quantum effects are at play of the macro level of our material bodies is that the human eye can detect a single photon. As the following researcher commented, “Any man-made detector would need to be cooled and isolated from noise to behave the same way.”,,,
In fact, because of the ability of the human eye to detect a single photon, researchers in quantum mechanics are now devising experiments to test the theoretical foundations of quantum mechanics, by using human subjects, instead of using mechanical detectors, to make ‘observations’:
As well, evidence that quantum mechanisms are at play on the macro level of the human body itself is also revealed in the following article where it is found that a subject perceives a sensory stimulus on the skin at the moment the skin is touched, before the stimulus reaches the brain and before full deliberative consciousness occurs.
As Libet himself remarked, “In spite of the delay for a sensory experience, subjectively there appears to be no delay.”
Libet, since he had no idea at the time he was conducting his experiments that quantum effects are ubiquitous within molecular biology, erroneously thought that ‘backwards in time’ causation must be the answer for instantaneous sensory experience. And he even admitted that “no neural mechanism that could be viewed as directly mediating or accounting for the subjective sensory referrals backward in time”.
Yet, quantum effects that instantaneously traverse the entire material body to the immaterial mind of a person, (if it is even possible to localize the immaterial mind of a subject strictly to the brain), provides a ready explanation for why there is no delay in a subjects sensory experience.
Apparently Libet, although he was a dualist himself, was, never-the-less, led astray by his materialistic presuppositions that held that it always took time for a signal to traverse a distance across the material body.
In summation, Quantum coherence/entanglement across the entire material body answers the question that was asked at the beginning of this post, i.e. “”the question, rather, is why things don’t fall completely apart — as they do, in fact, at the moment of death. What power holds off that moment — precisely for a lifetime, and not a moment longer?”
The answer to that question is that quantum coherence/entanglement across the entirety of the human body is the reason “why things don’t fall completely apart — as they do, in fact, at the moment of death.”
As Christians have been saying for thousands of years, a ‘soul’ is what holds the body together for precisely a lifetime.
Advances in Quantum Mechanics, that demonstrate ‘instantaneous’ quantum effects on the macro level of the human body, now validates that ancient ‘common sense’ observation from the Christian.
Verse:
@Asauber
You can already see that chain links are separate. Just because they are topologically intertwined does not mean they are a single object.
We know how chains are made, and they start off as separate links.
At no point in a person’s life do you perceive their mind in a different location from their brain.
Quantum Receiver?
Give me a break !
“We know how chains are made, and they start off as separate links.”
Pater,
And we don’t know how either minds or brains are made, so I think you are jumping to conclusions you shouldn’t be jumping to. They may have started as separate things and have been linked together. You can’t demonstrate otherwise.
“At no point in a person’s life do you perceive their mind in a different location from their brain.”
I don’t perceive anything about another persons mind. It could just as well be they are two different things linked together.
Andrew
@Asauber #41 said “I don’t perceive anything about another persons mind.”
You don’t? Then how do you know they have one?
“You don’t? Then how do you know they have one?”
Pater,
I infer that they have one. What do you do?
Andrew
I infer that you don’t know what “perceive” means.
If the brain is a receiver, then what of those with Anencephaly? They lack the forebrain and cerebrum, the parts the differentiate us from animals.
“I infer that you don’t know what “perceive” means.”
perceive
“become aware of (something) by the use of one of the senses”
You smell brains, Pater?
Andrew
How can anyone seriously doubt that the mind is separate from the brain when we have near death experience and the existence of ghosts supporting our view?
You don’t have eyes and ears, Andrew?
You don’t talk and listen to others?
You don’t watch their actions?
How are you perceiving me right now, Andrew?
I am starting to think you are just a troll.
Pater,
So please explain to me how you see or hear someone’s else’s mind.
You see their body. You hear their voice.
Andrew
LoL! @ Brother Brian- What, exactly, do you have to support your position? Something besides trolls would be nice.
@Asauber:
I see a person. I hear them talking. I speak to them and they respond rationally. I see them go about their daily life, much in the way that I myself do. I infer that they have a mind, much as I consider myself to have a mind.
If you got the impression that I claimed to directly perceive peoples’ minds, then you inferred something that I was not trying to imply.
Clear?
Doubter @36
Good question. Glad you asked it. Thanks.
I believe, that mind is immaterial and primary, and matter/energy derivatives.
Each individual consciousness communicates with its assigned brain through an unknown interface. When the material brain is chemically or physically damaged, the implementation of that interface deteriorates.
I’m far from ever becoming an authority on the topic, but my opinion is that they don’t prove much, except their discovered observations. They barely describe -sometimes with much speculation- the processes they observe. Many times they don’t understand them well, or at all. I’m interested in seeing more discoveries shedding light on what remains unknown or poorly understood, because most of what they find and describe seems to reveal more functional complexity and complex functionality than they expected.
With every discovery they describe, the Darwinian RV+NS trick looses more explanatory power, if it had any left. Their reductionist approach to research looks like desperate reverse engineering. But still it often reveals designed systems. Most serious papers we read lead to the same conclusion. Ironically many authors don’t see it. Perhaps they’re busy working on their specific tasks and don’t have time to think about the implications of their discoveries beyond the limited context they’re investigating. We outsiders may see beyond those limits, because we expect complex functionality and functional complexity, though sometimes presented in elegant simplicity.
@OLV and Doubter
I’m actually really happy that Doubter looked at your
Post. I was looking at it too I really didn’t get a chance to respond to it I was hoping somebody would respond to it so when I saw that Doubter did I was honestly really happy
My two cents and this is also involving a post that was made at the very beginning of this Op
Is that even despite looking at fMRI’s and EEGs, We see the brain patterns, but we only have a limited level of success at predicting these brain patterns
Edward Feser goes into a locked about the limited access we have to reading brain patterns furthermore I’ve been watching a lot of things on how we are trying to decode the brain but decoding their brain completely depends on the person subjective experience and translating that subjective experience to something a computer can read
The thing I find fascinating is it requires the conscious mind to do this to do the translating from brain patterns to discernible information in fact it takes to conscious minds to do this
I find it entirely fascinating I also find it concerning to because this is the realm that particular anti-Theists could to make their most direct attack on free will
AaronS1978 @53,
Interesting comment. Thanks.
You wrote:
“it requires the conscious mind to do this to do the translating from brain patterns to discernible information in fact it takes to conscious minds to do this“
What did you mean by “it takes to conscious minds”?
Can you elaborate on that? Thanks.
You also wrote:
“I find it entirely fascinating I also find it concerning to because this is the realm that particular anti-Theists could to make their most direct attack on free will”
Can you explain how they could do it? Thanks.
“If you got the impression that I claimed to directly perceive peoples’ minds, then you inferred something that I was not trying to imply.
Clear?”
Pater, sure. But you should be more careful with ‘perceive’.
Andrew
@OLV
It’s something that Raymond Talus talked about in one of his books about the human consciousness
When we’re trying to translate the brain and the neural activity of the brain, it first requires a conscious human being (The one that we are doing the neural imaging on) To help translate what the patterns mean in the brain
In other words we need someone with that all important subjective experience has to help translate the patterns in their head. They pretty much have to tell us what they’re experiencing
Secondly, we need another conscious mind to read and input the data which is still based off of their conscious experience
So it requires two conscious minds to try to read and translate what the brain is doing in the first place.
Now when it comes to free will, this is something that’s always bothered me. There are people like John Dylan Haynes, and Patrick Haggard, that make an active ever to try to disprove free will and they do so by using fMRIs and neural imaging
One, is the intent to read the patterning of neural imaging in the brain to predict what our actions are going to be before we know what our action is going to be
They claim if they do that, you have absolutely no free will because everything is pre-determined before that all important subject of self knows about it and it is generated in the brain where they can read it
They’ve had some success with this, anywhere from 60% accuracy on the AI, 72% accuracy on certain test subjects, to a little over 80% accuracy with neural electrodes implanted in the brain (Freid, this is result of 80% is debated because it was accomplished with in 700 Milliseconds of point of will, which is a problem, because of the subject being able to report it accurately)
A recent experiment in Australia replicated these results with about 54- 65% accuracy
But the idea is if they could complete a 100% neural prediction of everything that you do you absolutely have no free will because it can be read on a computer before you know it’s happening
And that’s why I think it is the strongest attack on free will, It’s the most direct and it is the hardest to argue against that doesn’t mean you can’t argue against it in fact I’m trying to find ways to argue against it if this ever were to come true
OLV@52
Thanks for the response. It looks like we are on the same page, so to speak, though you appear to adhere to Idealism in philosophy of mind as opposed to my preference for Interactive Dualism. It turns out that Neutral Monism may be another and rather attractive variant of Idealism, that appears to neatly solve the problem Interactive Dualism has in accounting for how the interactions between Mind and Matter necessary for consciousness to manifest in the physical can take place when the two realms are existentially, fundamentally separate. Neutral Monism posits that the basic ultimate substance is neither mind nor matter, but something in between,
something “neutral, with the capacity to interact with both.
I agree with your thoughts re. evolution and the total inadequacy of Darwinist RM + NS. The usual materialistic assumption is that large complex energy-hungry brains (necessary for advanced consciousness to manifest in the physical) evolved by Darwinian RM + NS to generate consciousness. Both parts of that assumption are invalid – it didn’t happen by Darwinian RM + NS, and the brain doesn’t generate consciousness: it filters it and receives/transmits it. The much more likely view is that these brains evolved in some process heavily involving introduction of design from outside the natural order to manifest pre-existing consciousness in the physical, where as Dr. Behe has concluded, design introduced from outside rules in the origination of the orders, classes and families in evolution, with RM + NS making the necessary adjustments and fine tuning changes at the genus and species levels of classification.
AaronS1978@56
The experiments you describe do on the surface seem to pose a dilemma for believers in free will. It seems to me that this may be resolved and explained by the simple observation that in the interactive dualism filter and receiver/transmitter theories of consciousness, human conscious awareness manifests in the physical through the neuronal structures of the brain. While in the body all experience of self awareness is filtered through the neuronal brain processing. This interface, and all filtering and transduction processes, inherently involve time delays. So there would be expected to be a time delay between immaterial consciousness having a thought, making a decision, and it being experienced by the physically embodied human personality limited to experiencing what the physical brain interface allows it to.
This of course posits that the immaterial consciousness self does possess free will. This involves the old philosophical debates about the universality of determinism, and whether we really understand the essence of cause and effect. I think it suffices to say that all of the evidence for and the understandings of spiritual existence of the soul or spirit absolutely require the existence of human free will.
AaronS1978 @56:
Thank you for responding to my message.
you wrote an interesting explanation.
I think I see your point.
Regarding the first part, I agree that it requires at least two conscious minds to run the mentioned experiments:
1. The mind being investigated
2. The mind doing the investigation
Regarding the second part, will try to comment on it later.
As to fMRI’s and EEGs, etc.. etc.., this tidbit from Dr. Libet may be of interest:
Doubter @57 & @58:
Interesting comments. Thanks.
AaronS1978 @56:
Please, note that those experiments seem focused in on body movements, not on thoughts associated with decisions made to change our attitude or behavior in a given context. I’ll try to write more when I find more time and get some needed rest.
Olv I look forward to your response
BB 77 and Doubter I actually really do appreciate your posts they were very informative and very helpful actually I didn’t know that Benjamin Libet Wrote that in 2004 I’m actually quite shocked it’s amazing all the articles that I have combed through and I’ve never found that almost irritating to me
Because this is something that I’ve been digging through for quite some time and that would’ve been really helpful to of had that article
I just noticed your post it on these OLV
But hey thank you I really do appreciate that
AaronS1978,
Let’s say you’re writing a PowerPoint presentation and later you lay down on a recliner chair taking a break and suddenly you get an idea about something interesting you could add in your PP but after you consider it, you decide not to do it.
What would the fMRI and EEG signals reveal the lack of free will in this case?
OLV
By the way my last message, I just reread that and it sounded terrible and I didn’t mean that to sound that way I was actually thanking you for your response
Now in response to your question, I would think that they would say that they were able to predict with some level of accuracy that you were going to decide not to use that paper how they would do that would be very difficult because they would have to know every pattern in your brain to be able to determine that
But that’s too simple to say that now that I think about it, they would have to be able to read every single impulse in your mind and actually Know The exact subjective experience that you were having at that time for every notion they would not be able to tell whether you wanted to add, add part of it, not add it all, mention it during the power point etc etc
I guess the only reason why they’re even capable of making predictions is because of the fact that they set the experiment up to negate free well entirely.
In every single experiment, The participant has asked to wait for an urge to make a choice to flick the wrist, Choose to add or subtract, press the right or the left button, choose between a group of pictures, move your hands. None of them really allow you to have a choice in the first place the choice they give you is an illusion you were to wait for your bodily urge to do something
So I suppose they could never really predict whether or not you were going to add something to your PowerPoint or take it out because the only reason they know how to predict the further experiments is because they ask you to wait for an urge to move or make a choice which is never your choice to begin with you’re waiting for an urge
And to be frank with you when I act or make a choice I really don’t wait for an urge I don’t even notice a feeling in the first place even when I think about it meaning when I think about making a choice between two options
Anytime I feel a particular urge it’s linked to an emotional choice
Sorry if I rambled, That actually got me thinking thank you
AaronS1978,
Thank you for commenting on this. Please note that this topic really intrigued me and I don’t know much (or anything) about it.
I wanted to modify my initial message but ran out of time. Here’s the revised version:
After seeing your comment on this, does the revised version make you add or change anything you said already?
One of the many questions I may ask is if every thought in the simple example above is associated with physical signals in the material brain?
I believe my thoughts are in my inmaterial mind. Do all get somehow reflected in the brain ?
Can the experiments detect them?
Has this kind of experiment been done and published?
What did they find? What did they conclude?
We’re discussing a difficult-at least to me- topic that may be conducive to what you call “rambling” (which I may do often, at least according to my wife and children*). Hence, join the “rambling” club. There’s room for another member. 🙂
(*) my grandchildren haven’t accused me of rambling yet. 🙂
@OLV #68
https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/news/news-stories/2017/june/brain-decoding-complex-thoughts.html
https://mindmatters.ai/2018/08/ai-that-can-read-minds/
We’ve spoken on this before. I don’t know if your new or not I think you picked that because of the fact that they said it predicts in the other direction as well
It used a neural network with semantics to do guesswork pretty much the exact same thing talk text uses to guess what you’re saying
That Ai was trained on several peoples brains and it wouldn’t work on your brain and it wouldn’t work on my brain
It only be partially accurate and yes there are brain regions that are used When you think of those things still a mind is required to translate them to train the AI and then you can start doing those guess
I believe it’s 1/3 of the brain can be used that way across all humans the other 2/3 of the system has to be trained for because it’s unique to the individual
There’s a cute ted talk on exactly this, And the paper you cited kind of over states their success