Okay. Let's see if I can articulate this properly at the moment or not; my brain doesn't always do what I will it to do, after all (hah-hah, aren't I funny).Quote from: jpinkman on March 29, 2013, 02:45 pmQuote from: SelfSovereignty on March 28, 2013, 11:14 pmSo in essence, your position is that the attributes we assign to objects based on our internal comprehension of the objects, is more real than the physical matter that composes them. Yes, if that is your belief, then life after death appears to be a possibility.I believe the opposite -- that the only thing of importance is physical matter. It comes down to this -- I do not believe that anything unreal exists. It's all matter. We may not have detected it all yet or understand it all yet, but it's all physical matter (or the equivalent energy), and things that would break laws we've never seen broken before seem extremely unlikely to me.Life after death breaks thermodynamics and conservation of energy, unless the soul has some measurable amount of mass to it that leaves the body after death -- seems extremely unlikely. But again, by your beliefs, you're perfectly justified in your opinion.All I'm really saying is that to me, your position looks naive and uneducated. To you, my position looks pretentious and closed-minded. It's all just a matter of perspective, really.I've been meaning to revisit this topic for awhile and you've given me a perfect segue here. It's been ages since college metaphysics, but the heart of what's being posed here is mind-body problem, a question philosophers have grappled with for ages. You and almost everyone in this thread has adopted a materialist approach, in which you believe the brain and mind are one and the same; a perspective that's most common these days among the scientific community although that might be changing ... I'll get more to that in a sec. Going off the top of my head, the initial dichotomy breaks down like this:How do thoughts come to be?1. Thoughts must arise from physical bodily processes. Mind and Brain are one and the same.Aristotle, Democritus, Monist Viewor2. Thoughts in the Mind are separate from physical body; Dualist view; Plato refined to Descartes (brain in a vat)Ok SS, I'm assuming with how well you articulated the Materialist Monist perspective that you have at least some familiarity in the problems with it. ;)Actually, I'm woefully uneducated with respect to that. Everything I've said is from my pondering this problem every day for... well, basically my entire life. I'm afraid I don't even know what "Materialist Monist" refers to (beyond being able to guess what the words materialist and monist mean, anyway -- I don't know the reference is my point).QuoteSo how do you resolve the inherent issues that arise with unitary materialism? Like the hard problem of consciousness?As I touched on earlier, there's this inexplicable issue of "qualia" that can't be explained from the materialist pov. The raw sensations, or "quality" of experience. Like seeing colors, hearing music, smelling, tasting are sensations that move you to feel a certain way. These must be experienced to truly understand them. Someone colorblind could come to understand everything about colors, the wavelengths that create them, which neurons fire in response, and behaviors and emotions engendered by them but that person will still never know what it's like to really experience them in spite of knowing everything about colors. The essence of the subjective experience that lacks physical, objective analysis. Science has done a great job showing how our brain reacts to our environments in the physical world. Scientists do a good job correlating brain states with conscious states. Neuroscience is a field in its infancy, but say a hundred years, it's pretty conceivable that by then every single thought will be successfully matched and cataloged to a correlating physical brain state. Well the answer to that is exceedingly simple, my good man: I don't have a mother fucking clue how you resolve that. By my position, we should have all the consciousness of a pebble and not be aware that we're having this "conversation." I don't know. I really don't know, and it haunts me in a very deep, troubling way. Obviously there's some fundamental assumption we intuitively make that's incorrect, because as you point out -- it doesn't quite add up. Even if you take it on faith that awareness is some sort of magical emergent property, that still leaves the matter of sensation unexplained. I find it odd that intuitively it's somehow less believable that sensation arises as an emergent property... less believable than awareness or consciousness in general, that is. There's no reason it should be, I don't know why it seems that way... I'll have to think on it. I can't tell off hand what my intuition is basing that on.So to get back to the matter at hand, this "qualia" thing: I don't think that there is the stark separation that you assume there is between the experience and the comprehension of it (you along with most everybody else in the world). I believe that they are fundamentally the same: that you cannot have one without the other. That experiencing the "qualia" of seeing a color is an intrinsic part of understanding what a color is. I've slowly come to the conclusion over the past several years that comprehension and understanding are not the things that people think they are -- that to understand a thing, we really only need to have a mental representation that we can somehow relate to other mental representations. That these representations and neuronal structures are formed as we age and develop, and as we acquire more of them and the structures and connections between them (abstractly speaking, not physical connections) become more complex and richer, our awareness and our understanding of each grows. There is no understanding of a color without the experience of a color -- I don't think that's a meaningful concept at all, and there's nothing that really needs to be resolved about it.I do not know what sort of abstract structure or system of mapping similarities and differences our brain uses. If I had all the answers, I'd be the richest man alive because I held the patent to every artificial brain in the millions of droids walking about the world; but regrettably, I am quite broke :PQuoteBut science appears ill equipped in explaining why each of us has our own unique interpretation of objective reality that we come to define as individual identity. Going by the Materialist Monist view, brain cells produce proteins and electricity. When you connect multiple brain cells with electricity, how does it generate thought? This is where I see the limitations of materialism coming from. You provided an excellent exposition of this earlier when trying to make sense of how consciousness might arise from one tiny bit of added complexity. But purely from a materialist standpoint it just appears profoundly baffling how that could happen. Even though we already know that it does happen all the time at some point during human conception. There's got to be more to it than that to explain it, the added complexity from which consciousness emerges must be part of a far larger paradigm that our limitations in knowledge prevents us from seeing right now. ??? We know thoughts are accompanied by brain activity, meaning more electrical connections from synapses firing from certain emotions and different types of thoughts, but where do the thoughts themselves come from?Again, I regret that the only response I have for you is: I don't know. I understand that this sort of thing is incredibly boring or even impossible to grasp for the majority of people, but this is the sort of thing that an overwhelmingly large proportion of my existence is devoted to. This lack of even a theoretical explanation deeply troubles me. I just don't understand. Yet.QuoteI don't mean to veer too much into phenomenology here, but it's a valid question that MM's should feel the need to answer to ... what is it that makes the mind? How do thoughts arise from chemical processes and then how do the hard physical data of objective empirical processes become subjective experiences? Because according to you they are all one and the same. If the mental IS the physical, then why is there a distinction at all between objective and subjective reality? Where do you draw the line? How do millions of separate inputs to brain sensations and memories organize into one sense of self that is "identity" and how does free will arise from that? It's an excellent point you make, and one I'm not sure I've really considered before in this context. I have no hard answers for this, but consider if you will: removing a portion of your brain removes a portion of your consciousness, but you can't really tell that it's been removed. If you want proof that this would be the case (as you should, of course), think about the fact that your neurons are not perfect and are not firing perfectly all day every day. Certain neurons undoubtedly fail, or you have a lack of potassium or calcium and can't change the surface charge of a cell and generate an action potential (i.e. make the neuron "fire") when you were "supposed to." Or stay up for 3 days tweaking and note how you don't ever really notice it, but your brain sort of ... leaves you. Yet you're still conscious. You're still there to answer and ask questions. You're just... not "as there," as you were the first day of the run.How can that be? How can we not notice losing pieces of ourself? Well, maybe it happens so slowly that we just don't take note, like slow cooking a lobster? I don't think that's the case though -- I think the only reason that we can notice at all is by looking in on our own brain functions and thoughts, and comparing the current ones to our memory of what the sensation of thinking was that first day. I believe it's only through comparison to experiences of times that we felt our brain was "working well," that we even notice at all that our brain functions are all fucked up and exhausted.That's the best answer I think I'm able to give you just now. I hope it illustrates my current thinking on the matter enough for you to fill in the parts I can't quite verbalize properly.QuoteIf everything comes down to brain activity in the physical world, it should be a deterministic one where free will does not exist. We are not accountable for our actions, it's our brain cells. But I don't think you're espousing straight determinism are you?Actually, I generally refrain from stating it because I find it's an almost impossibly unacceptable position for most people -- and there are much more important things to convince people of, and you must always choose your battles carefully and at the right time -- but yes. That is actually what I'm saying. That we don't deserve credit for our successes nor punishment for our evils. That we're slaves to our biology, and that we ultimately have no more free will than a rain drop falling from the sky. We simply twist and morph endlessly as we fall through the molecules in the air on our way to death, unable to do anything at all to change what course we take.Please note that despite what most people immediately jump to -- that we shouldn't try and discourage evil and encourage good -- is not what I am saying, not *at all*. Obviously no one is going to argue with the fact that if you stop someone from killing another person, you've done a good thing if you don't think people should be getting slaughtered randomly. Just because your biology deterministically (and randomly at the quantum level) forced you to stop them doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. If we don't, people suffer. Suffering is bad, mm'kay.I don't have the answers as to why it's so unbelievably, astoundingly obvious to every one of us that we do have free will. I haven't quite reconciled that gap yet, and it's definitely a big one, to be sure.QuoteSo after re-looking into this recently it seems like there finally is some movement on the mind-body problem beyond the dead field of philosophy into the scientific world. There is a science of "emergence" that you hit on in an earlier description, let me guess you're big on Chalmers :) , how exactly does consciousness arise from complexity?The name is vaguely familiar, but I have no knowledge of him nor his work. The source for everything I said earlier is just the years I've spent pondering this gibberish when I probably should have been doing something more profitable. Arguably should have been, anyway -- who knows, maybe it'll pay off someday and it'll turn out super profitable (oh God, please make it so, hah...)QuoteOTOH there's a lot of resistance in the scientific community to exploring particular topics. I can understand this to some extent. Parapsychology and related fields are filled with loons, but I think the academic establishment overcompensates by refusing research grants to anything that smells like it could be likewise tarred in spite of being a perfectly legitimate question of scientific inquiry.Like clinical death. This is defined as 1) no heartbeat 2) no breathing 3) brain stops functioning as determined by pupils no longer being reflexive. That would indicate no brain stem control. Lack of blood flow to the brain leads to cell death. So what happens to human consciousness? Because within 10 seconds of these 3 criteria happening you can no longer measure any electrical activity from the brain. So in the 10-20% of cases of those who have gone through clinical death and brought back through attempts at resuscitation, electricity doesn't return to the brain for up to an hour or two afterwards. If the brain is the mind, how could you have conscious thought processes in the form of NDEs if there is no electrical activity?So this then begs the question, when does human consciousness end?I'm not entirely sure what your question is? I think I may not be seeing what you intended to state, but the answer to what seems to be your question is: it ends slowly, and in an infinite series of small losses. Just as is the case with Zeno's paradoxes. Just as it begins. Slowly, surely, inevitably -- idea by idea, piece by piece, as we develop a larger and larger basis for analysis of our internal representations of "qualia." In other words, as our semantic net grows -- or in your question's case, as it slowly goes dark and we simply no longer compare and contrast concepts. When there isn't a single neuron left giving rise to some small spark of consciousness -- that's when we're really dead. And we don't come back because the cells almost immediately suffer permanent, irreversible damage and never function again. If they didn't, I think we could die and come back just as easily as we sleep and wake up (though it would be very different, of course).QuoteBecause since this is the topic of this thread discussion, what I think most materialists miss is that there really shouldn't be any question as to whether consciousness survives death. It happens all the time when people are revived. Yes, the neurons and structures and links can stop firing and get jumpstarted again as long as it's done within a certain time frame. I don't see what needs to be resolved there -- are you sure you're not tacitly making assumptions that my theory doesn't purport? We are our biology. Why would we not come back after death if our biology does? We have to, there's no alternative. There's no soul or anything else that needs to be returned or attached or anything else. It's just the cells. When they function again, we're "here" again.QuoteSo I was intrigued to learn duelism being reconsidered (even if not quite accepted) by a small, albeit growing, number of scientists; the school of thought considering the mind as a non-material force that through focused attention can change the brain. Because again, how would you come to define whatever it is that directs the thoughts and correlating physical brain states of your mind that forms your identity? Because there appears to be much more to it than adding one more bit of complexity and BOOM consciousness. Your neurochemistry in fact seems to take direction from whatever force that essence is. As an extreme illustration, consider that method actors can actually change how neurochemistry in their brain works while immersed in character, demonstrating how radically focused attention can change the brain. Is it something in the brain that creates consciousness or something in consciousness that changes the brain?And so this is where classical physics from the materialist pov comes up woefully short. Why would billions of interacting neurons, no matter how complex, give rise to subjective experience? Even beyond classical physics, even considering quantum mechanics into a larger theory of consciousness as some are now doing; say you incorporate randomness into it like Wave Function Collapse, and how it applies. Before there can be increase in knowledge a decision needs to be made what question needs to be asked, each collapse is preceded by a human action that is supposed to design a new increment in knowledge. That still comes up woefully short in explaining how that decision is made, even if there is quantum uncertainty involved.I'd be shocked if there isn't a major shift by the scientific community away from strict material monism in the next 10-20 years. Not necessarily a complete paradigm change from materialism to an embrace of duelism even though this might be where things are headed, but at the minimum a shift to a different subset of monism from material monism to something like neutral or "mystical" monism. You can already see a gradual shift happening already among hearts and minds. Just 10-20 years ago the idea that mental states could affect one's biological physical states was widely scoffed at within the scientific community. Now it's almost accepted as a given.I don't believe we do change our brain's state. I think we're passive observers who think we do. But why wouldn't we think that? We arise from the biology. Assuming consciousness is a property inherent to the physiological basis of the human brain, it seems quite natural that we'd feel we're in control. A little strange and requiring some loosening of the concept of what the experience of "thinking we're exercising free will," truly is -- but still not entirely unexpected. Mistaken, but quite naturally so.Again, I have absolutely no clue how our brains cause consciousness. But the alternative is that consciousness is somehow tied to our brain. Because if our brain goes away, people sure seem to go away along with it -- which means even if our brain *isn't* just our biology, then it's something that the physical matter of the world has absolute power over. Which makes it, in turn, nothing more than matter that's very real and very influenced by other matter. Unless of course you're saying it's only influenced one-way, and our bodies simply die when our brains do.Again, that violates the conservation of energy. Which could be possible and which I'm willing to allow for the possibility of, but you need some pretty serious evidence to back up a claim of the only phenomenon in the known universe that creates or destroys energy.