On Sep 12, 1:58 am, "pico" <pico.pico.pico> wrote:
Curt Welch wrote:
If you want to kill the myth of a non-physical mind,
just figure out how to develop a noninvasive high
resolution real time brain scanner which any Joe
from the street can experiment with and see the
physical activity of his brain


Brain scanners show only gross electrical activity.
Watching your brain to learn your mind is like
watching your feet to learn how you walk.

I think the suggestion was to "kill the myth of a
non-physical mind". People suffering physical damage
to their brains or the effects of chemicals on the
brain I believe make the link between the contents
of our experiences and brain activity very clear.
Those who need a soul will never be convinced for
psychological reasons.

--

rs...@nycap.rr.com wrote:
On Sep 13, 1:53 pm, D H <wings...@budweiser.com> wrote:

"Let the reader be warned, accordingly, that whenever he hears a
philosopher proclaim any metaphysical opinion with great confidence,
or hears him assert that something in metaphysics is obvious, or that
some metaphysical problem turns only on confusions of concepts or upon
the meanings of words, then he can be quiet sure that this man is
still infinitely far from philosophical understanding. His views
appear to him devoid of difficulties only because he stoutly refuses
to see difficulties."

--Richard Taylor--

Well, I didn't post that quote, but I take it that the "D H wrote" is
just floating up there alone to indicate which message you replied
from. If I had submitted one along that vein it probably would have
been Hume's founding quote for the later anti-metaphysical stance of
logical positivism or "strong empiricisms" in general:

"When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc
must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school
metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract
reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any
experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No.
Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry
and illusion."

I don't quite agree with Deutsch below when he seems to say that
science must correspond to an absolute, ontological truth (such
dogmatism would seem to stifle progress, too). But he's probably not
the first to construe (wrongly or rightly) that the phenomenalism
which was sported by some philosophers of science and scientists as
amounting to solipsism.

David Deutsch: "Logical positivism is a form of solipsism. . . . But
solipsism is a dead-end philosophy and when it comes to science it's a
poison. It doesn't allow further progress from existing theories . . .
You could say people didn't really think the theory was true because
they had rejected the idea of truth in science. Truth in science must
mean correspondence to reality, or it means nothing."

Now this will do for the great mass of men, but what are we to do with
those troublesome few that find imaginary difficulties in the plain
truths we have enunciated. They are the really pig-headed ones.

The soul/body problem has a long and distinguished history. It has
lately been renamed.

"In more recent metaphysics less has been heard of the soul and more
of the mind; the old problem of the relationship of soul and body is
now that of the relationship of mind and body"
--The Britannica--

Many are of the opinion that the soul had best be called something
else...Soul: spirit, essence, psyche, mind, consciousness, awareness,
intelligence, intellect, mentality, self, individuality, persona,
personality, conscious mental field, self awareness, sentience,
executive function. There should be something here for everyone. I
like "executive function", or perhaps "conscious mental field".
However, in deference to historical usage, I will stick with "soul".

Now many feel that the soul (spirit, mind, whatever) is intimately
involved with any discussion of the nervous system. What are we to do?
McGinn has given it as his considered opinion that man lacks the
intellectual muscle to understand the relationship between the soul
and the body. I say we must put the soul (spirit, mind, whatever)
completely to one side, and discuss the nervous system wholly as if
there were no soul (spirit, mind, whatever) involved.

Let us talk of neurons, and the neural structures constructed by the
genome. How do they work and think. Is that not enough for a simple
soul?

If you are interested in the nervous system, you might look at:
http://home.nycap.rr.com/rscanlon/brain/brain.htm
For a conjecture on how the nervous system might work.

Ray- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

JGCASEY <jgkjca...@yahoo.com.au> wrote:
On Sep 12, 8:21 am, c...@kcwc.com (Curt Welch) wrote:
JC:
And I have never denied there is nothing but "motion
of the brain". However the explanation as to what kind
of brain activity involves a "conscious experience" is
not revealed in the statement: "there is nothing but
motion in the brain" anymore than the difference between
graphite and diamond are explained as "there is nothing
but carbon atoms". Functionally there is a difference
and it needs to be explained. The difference between
having and not having a "conscious experience" needs
to be explained.

Ok, I wrote a few thousand words to your other comments, but I just deleted
them all, because this one paragraph of yours is where I have all the
problem with your thought process and your logic.

Let me try this. Lets pretend that an alien from outer space showed up,
and programmed one of our computers with their AI software, and our
computer started to act like a human. This computer also happens to have a
robot body which arms and legs and eyes and he's talking to us just like
humans talk to us.

And the computer says to us, I wonder why I'm conscious? And we ask, what
do you mean by conscious? He says, you know, I'm conscious. I'm aware
that I'm speaking to you, and I'm aware that I exist, and I'm aware of what
I did yesterday. When you turn me off, I'm not conscious, and I have no
awareness. But what I don't understand is why I'm conscious? So we tell
him that he is aware because he's a computer which is processing and
responding to sensory data. He's aware because the computer has power and
it's running the software which makes him respond to his environment. When
we turn him off, he can no longer respond to sensory data, and the computer
can no longer store information about past sensory data in it's memory.

Then he says, ok, I know all that. But that doesn't explain this feeling
of conscious experience I'm having. Why am I conscious, but the computer
over there running Windows is not conscious? I mean, just look at it, it's
sitting there and it doesn't care at all if I smash it with a hammer, it's
got no awareness of the fact that you and I are talking about. He doesn't
love anything or feel anything. I love watching R2D2 in Starwars. The
Windows machine doesn't love anything (except maybe to blue-screen on us
after we have spent three hours typing a Usenet message). So why am I
conscious but the windows machine is not, because we are made of the same
hardware? There must be something really special about my hardware that we
don't understand.

So we tell him that the only thing special about him is that he has
software that makes him act like a human, and the windows box has software
that makes him act like a windows box and the Linux box has software that
makes him act like a Linux box.

The computer still doesn't buy our argument that the difference is just
software, because he knows this awareness he has is something other than
just his behavior.

So the computer starts to talk about qualia. He says, but I have qualia.
That chair over there is red. It looks red to me. Where does this
sensation of red come from? It's not in the chair because the chair is
just reflecting a given frequency of light. So the redness is not in the
chair any more than the blueness is in that blue book. Why does one look
red to me, and the other look blue? I've seen inside my computer box, and
there's nothing red in there. All the transistors are the same color, and
there's no redness anywhere in there. So where does redness come from? It
just seems to magically emerge from the behavior of the box.

We explain to the computer that it can see red because it's got a camera
which is able to detect the frequency of light and it produces different
signals for different light frequencies. And we explain to the the
computer that the software is then written so that it triggers different
behaviors based on the sensory signals that come into it. Different
sequences of sensory signals in, creates different strings of behavior out.
We explain that red looks different from blue because they are represented
by different internal signals in the computer. We explain that that is all
there is. When he "sees blue" all that is happening, is that the computer
is reacting to the blue sensory signal.

But the computer fails to accept this. He says, but I see blue, and there
is now blue in my circuits. What you say makes no sense to me.

So we give the computer a demo. We wire a button to it's blue sensory
input so that when he pushes the button it activates his input, and we tell
him he will see blue. He tries it out, and he sees a flash a blue even
though there is no blue in the room. He says, yeah, it works, I see it.
But why do I see it as blue instead of red? Red is the same signal as the
blue signal but I only see blue when I hit the button. We explain that red
is the other wire and we switch the button to activate the red wire. He
hits it, he tells us he sees red. But still, he wants us to explain how we
do this trick because the wire is not red. We tell him, that's all there
is. There is that signal, and that signal triggers all your behavior of
you talking to us about seeing red. There's nothing else to explain.

He tells us that we are just ignoring the interesting question. He says we
haven't explained where the red comes from. He says the red somehow
emerges from behavior of the computer, but that elections moving in the
wire are not the redness - the redness must be something else - and we
haven't explained how the electrons moving in the wire create his conscious
experience of redness.

We explain to him, AGAIN, that his conscious experience of redness IS the
movement of the electrons in the wire, and nothing else. What he calls
"seeing red" IS the movement of electrons in the wire. It's not something
CREATED BY, the movement of the electrons.

He doesn't buy it. He knows there is something else here to explain and
thinks we are just ignoring the interesting question of where the redness
comes from by pretending there is no redness (but the computer is sure as
he is a live that he sees redness and that he is having a conscious
experience of everything he is aware of). The best he can come up with to
explain it, is that it must be an emergent property of his computer brain.

So the computer switches subjects again.

He says, ok, you still haven't explained why I'm having a conscious
experience and the MS Windows machine over there is not.

So we point out to the computer that the Windows box has the same camera he
has, and that the Windows box can "see red" for the same reason the
computer is able to see red - simply because he's got a camera which is
sensitive to red light and sends signals to the computer which are
different from red light than for blue light. And the windows computer
responds in different ways depending on what it "sees". But our friendly
computer responds...

But, the Windows box is not conscious. It doesn't see red like I do. It's
just a computer with no conscious awareness of what's going on around it.
It can't talk or do anything I do.

We point out that the only difference is that the Windows computer is
programmed to produce different reactions to "red" than he does, but other
than that, there's no real difference. We pint out that how the Windows
box reacts to the environment defines what we understand it to be, and how
our talking computer reacts to its environment, defines what it is to us.
The windows computer do all the things we expect a windows computer to do,
when we press it's keys and wiggle it's mouse.

And the talking computer, likewise, does all the things it's been doing
when we press its keys, and wiggle its mouse. It's been producing a long
string of words about its conscious experience and it's awareness of it's
environment and of how its conscious and the windows box is not producing a
similar list of words.

We try to explain to the computer that he is nothing but a CPU box, and
wires, and transistors, and that the only thing going on in there is the
movement of elections in the wires and that there is nothing else there for
us to explain to him. But again, he doesn't buy it.

So we ask the talking computer, what exactly do you think you are talking
about when you use the words "conscious experience"? You are nothing but
wires and transistors which produce a constant stream of nonsense about
"your conscious experience".

The computer says, but I'm not just a computer saying these things. I'm
"aware" that I'm live, and that I'm saying these things, that's what makes
me conscious and the Windows box not conscious?

So we ask, so you mean since you can spit out English words, and the
windows box doesn't, that's what is special about you? No, he says, we can
program the dumb computer to spit out these words - but that won't make him
aware of what he is saying.

So we suggest we need to make the computer parse and respond to English
words as well. And the computer says, no that's not it. If you do that, he
will just respond to way you programmed it to respond. It won't have any
free will. It won't be aware of anything, it will just be an unconscious
machine spitting out English words.

So we explain to the computer that it's "awareness" of what it has said, is
nothing more than changes to it's internal state in response to past
sensory inputs (such as our words and it's words), and that those changes
are what is making it say the next thing it says.

Again, the computer doesn't buy it. He goes back to his old mantra, "but
you still haven't explained where my conscious awareness comes from".

We go off and talk to other people about the fun we have been having
playing with this talking computer who thinks that he's got something in
him (conscious awareness, and this red qualia) which is something other
than his ...

read more »

Hi been lurking here for a while,

What about the dualist 'concept' that perhaps the
brain is simply a receiver for the messages that
the mind produces and that damage to the brain is
simply damaging the physical ability for the brain
to receive those messages.


How does that fit in to the mind body argument