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“Descartes’ mind-body problem” makes nonsense of materialism

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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.)

Comments
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 successAaronS1978
August 15, 2019
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@OLV #68 https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/news/news-stories/2017/june/brain-decoding-complex-thoughts.htmlPater Kimbridge
August 15, 2019
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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:
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. During all that time you’ve been monitored through the most sophisticated technology fMRI, EEG, you name it. Note that your voluntary and involuntary body movements during that thinking process might have been associated with scratching your itchy ear or going to the restroom or something else, but unrelated to the ideas you’re mulling in your mind. What would the fMRI, EEG, etc. signals reveal that may prove the lack of free will in this case? Have they done any similar experiments?
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
August 15, 2019
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Sorry if I rambled, That actually got me thinking thank youAaronS1978
August 14, 2019
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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 choiceAaronS1978
August 14, 2019
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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
August 14, 2019
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I just noticed your post it on these OLV But hey thank you I really do appreciate thatAaronS1978
August 14, 2019
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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 articleAaronS1978
August 14, 2019
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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
August 14, 2019
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Doubter @57 & @58: Interesting comments. Thanks.OLV
August 14, 2019
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As to fMRI’s and EEGs, etc.. etc.., this tidbit from Dr. Libet may be of interest:
MIND TIME: The Temporal Factor in Consciousness - Benjamin Libet - 2004 Excerpt: At one pole is the determinist materialist position. In this philosophy, observable matter is the only reality and everything, including thought, will, and feeling, can be explained only in terms of matter and the natural laws that govern matter. The eminent scientist Francis Crick (codiscoverer of the genetic molecular code) states this view elegantly (Crick and Koch, 1998): “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons (nerve cells).’” According to this determinist view, your awareness of yourself and the world around you is simply the by-product or epiphenomenon of neuronal activities, with no independent ability to affect or control neuronal activities. Is this position a “proven” scientific theory? I shall state, straight out, that this determinist materialist view is a belief system; it is not a scientific theory that has been verified by direct tests. It is true that scientific discoveries have increasingly produced powerful evidence for the ways in which mental abilities, and even the nature of one’s personality, are dependent on, and can be controlled by, specific structures and functions of the brain. However, the nonphysical nature of subjective awareness, including the feelings of spirituality, creativity, conscious will, and imagination, is not describable or explainable directly by the physical evidence alone. As a neuroscientist investigating these issues for more than thirty years, I can say that these subjective phenomena are not predictable by knowledge of neuronal function. This is in contrast to my earlier views as a young scientist, when I believed in the validity of determinist materialism. That was before I began my research on brain processes in conscious experience, at age 40. There is no guarantee that the phenomenon of awareness and its concomitants will be explainable in terms of presently known physics. In fact, conscious mental phenomena are not reducible to or explicable by knowledge of nerve cell activities. You could look into the brain and see nerve cell interconnections and neural messages popping about in immense profusion. But you would not observe any conscious mental subjective phenomena. Only a report by the individual who is experiencing such phenomena could tell you about them. https://zodml.org/sites/default/files/%5BBenjamin_Libet%2C_Professor_Stephen_M._Kosslyn%5D_Min.pdf
bornagain77
August 14, 2019
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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.OLV
August 14, 2019
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AaronS1978@56
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
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.doubter
August 14, 2019
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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.doubter
August 14, 2019
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@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 trueAaronS1978
August 14, 2019
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"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'. Andrewasauber
August 14, 2019
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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.OLV
August 14, 2019
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@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 willAaronS1978
August 13, 2019
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Doubter @36
“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?”
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
August 13, 2019
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@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?Pater Kimbridge
August 13, 2019
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LoL! @ Brother Brian- What, exactly, do you have to support your position? Something besides trolls would be nice.ET
August 13, 2019
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Pater, So please explain to me how you see or hear someone's else's mind. You see their body. You hear their voice. Andrewasauber
August 13, 2019
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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 Kimbridge
August 13, 2019
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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?Brother Brian
August 13, 2019
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"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? Andrewasauber
August 13, 2019
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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.rhampton7
August 13, 2019
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I infer that you don't know what "perceive" means.Pater Kimbridge
August 13, 2019
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"You don’t? Then how do you know they have one?" Pater, I infer that they have one. What do you do? Andrewasauber
August 13, 2019
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@Asauber #41 said "I don’t perceive anything about another persons mind." You don't? Then how do you know they have one?Pater Kimbridge
August 13, 2019
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"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. Andrewasauber
August 13, 2019
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