You’ve said something like this a couple of times and it strikes me as a weird thing to say. Why would anyone think the mind was something tangible that could be dissected out and held in the hand. You can’t dissect out and hold the process of digestion, or the process of respiration, why do you seem to be saying it’s significant that the process of cognition is no different?
You are right, the mind is not tangible, but the processes you described are tangible. One can watch digestion taking place, respiration also. You can watch it from the cell level up to the organ level. There are cells and organs for them. But the mind can not be seen, or any level of it. No memory cells, no thoughts being formed, etc. Scientists believe mind is physically created, if so, there should be some physical evidence of this somewhere, but there is not.
To go back to a level of technology you’re familiar with, if you looked at an old core memory you wouldn’t see anything either. You could read the contents by applying a stimulus, but as DerTrihs mentioned you can do that for our memories also. Our memories are connections of neurons and the levels at which they fire. What do you expect to see? Little pictures or video clips?
BTW, you’re posts are the very model of unscience. When someone brings up the problem of personality changes caused by physical changes in the brain, you literally multiply entities, bringing in evil spirits, which I thought went away several centuries ago. You don’t explain why a single spirt would have aspects of its personality split to be received by different parts of the brain, as if it used frquency division multiplexing or something.
Did Robert Monroe, while he was jumping outside of his body, ever do a controlled experiment? Anyone can found an institute. If there was even one person who could do this reliably, we wouldn’t even be debating its existence, but rather how it worked.
The fact that you had an OBE means nothing. A section of the brain has been found which controls our perception of where we are in space. If something happens to that, you will indeed have an OBE, but that doesn’t mean anything actually moved. If you get drunk or dizzy and the world spins around, do you think it is actually spinning, or do you acknowledge that it’s all in your head. Maybe I can create a Voyager-centric universe theory, which states that the world is really spinning and my perceptions are correct. Funny? No different from your hypothesis.
I read your link, it was interesting.
I think we have covered this point many times. Yes, it is true that one can probe the brain and “read the contents.” But this is not proof that consciousness is local anymore than probing the tuner of a television set proves that what you get is located solely within the television set. I have read about the neurons and their firing many times, but have never seen any evidence that the firing is consciousness. If you have something more than theory, I would love to read about it. It has not been determined whether the electrical activity that causes brain waves is coming from the brain or going to the brain.
On the other side there is verified evidence that consciousness is non-local and continues to exist after the death of the brain and body.
The rest of your post doesn’t apply to anything I posted.
There you go again. You said we have never seen a memory. In fact we have seen exactly what we expect to see based on the standard theory of the brain and memories. No we can’t prove it, but science is not about proof, and we can’t prove that some software demon is really running our programs, not the hardware. And, as I demonstrated, you can’t prove that consciousness is non-local, and that OBEs don’t come from remote viewing.
The physical model predicts that all strange phenomena can be explained by parts of the brain, and these can be stimulated to invoke the phenomena (like OBEs.) It also predicts that, like the rest of our bodies, parts of our brain will be specialized for different functions. All these things can be tested, and have been, and have been confirmed. This doesn’t prove the theory of the physical brain, but it supports it.
What predictions does your hypothesis make, how can they be tested, and how can they be distinguished from the physical hypothesis.
For instance, if we had spirits, why would we evolve a mechanism to orient ourselves in space? The spirit can do it, as shown by the fact that those having OBEs know where they are. Living things don’t spend energy on useless features. Why have such a big brain? Thought must be happening in the spirit, and a human with a smaller brain would need less energy, and thus less food, and would thus tend to survive to reproduce in conditions of famine which used to be common.
How do spirits evolve? Are there different souls for different species? What ever happened to the dinosaur and trilobite souls. Are they sitting in some cosmic unemployment office? Your problem is that you haven’t thought these things through.
You said it all, you have theories. BTW brain mapping is not accurate, it changes from brain to brain. UCLA Launches Brain Mapping Project Not a reliable method.
We have real evidence, by the scientific method already. In order to answer your questions about the spirit world I would need a book. But you can read up on it yourself. I recommend the “Seth” books by Jane Roberts, start with the one on consciousness.
This just isn’t true - we can observe brain activity patterns by a number of methods, we can also provoke brain activity (physically, chemically and electromagnetically) and record the thoughts/sensations reported by the subject.
Your point is starting to remind me of an argument I saw someone else make elsewhere - that our comprehension of objects - for example a chair - can’t take place in the brain, because if we cut open the brain, we can’t find anything that resembles a chair inside it.
The Seth books as evidence? 
:rolleyes: :eek:
It doesn’t apear that Cecil has dealt with Seth, but I can look up some stuff showing what a crock ti is if you want. But really.
And now it comes to me why my daughter is justified in hating Eugene, OR!
Okay, so your theory is that the human brain is an overcomplicated radio reciever that is picking up ‘spirit signals’ from the spirit world, which cause or influence the electrochemical state of the brain in some way, which then proceeds to control the movement of the body via purely physical channels; similarly the body’s sensory organs react to the environment in the form of electrical and chemical reactions, which are reported to the brain and from their ‘read’ by the spirit, allowing the spirit to know what is going on with the body. The will, mind, memories, and personality of the person are housed in the noncoporeal spirit; the body itself is merely a puppet and interface between the body and the world.
Now the theory begins to run into problems; specifically the problem that chemical additives to our bodies are capable of influencing our will, mind, memories, and personality; all of which are theorized to be housed in the spirit, which is nonchemical and would not be subject to chemical tampering. Take, for example, the drunk person. A person who drinks sufficiently will behave strangely and occasionally find themselves with no memory of their actions. To account for this, we expand our theory to include other, evil spirits, who take control of our bodies when we partake of the liquor.
Of course, nowadays, we have lots more chemicals than booze available, and we’ve found that different chemicals have different effects on people. Some of these effects can be explained away as the chemical interacting with the body, such as aspirin might be ‘unblocking the chi’ stopping the headache pain messages before they get sent to the spirit. Some, however, cannot be so explained. One example is marijuana. It certainly doesn’t have the same effect as liquor. Are you are possessed by a ‘laid back’ evil spirit? Another example I’ve encountered but don’t know the name of was a woman I knew took pills that made her hypersensitive and weepy. Was this another, ‘emo’ evil spirit?
What you end up with, is rather than a group of ‘evil spirits’, each grasping at any opportunity to possess the human body, you instead have a whole cadre of different spirits, one for each drug, patiently waiting their turn for you to partake of the specific drug that invokes them. Or perhaps you have one class of evil spirits, who upon posessing (or partially possessing) you, very carefully look up the effects of the particular drug in their handbook and faithfully playact those effects.
The more you think about this, the more unlikely it seems. You might as well assume that your own spirit holds the handbook and playacts drug effects as necessary; it makes more sense than having a bunch of obedient “evil” spirits patiently waiting their turn to play the role. (It also explains why that ‘drunk you’ that you blacked out about still sort of acted like you, had your memories, general feelings, etcetera.)
(Of course, even better than your spirit playacting going into a drunken rage, would be the explanation that your ‘spirit’ can’t help how the booze effects it, since the ‘spirit’ is a physical thing, subject to chemical interaction…but let’s not get crazy here. That sort of thinking might lead to accepting a theory that doesn’t require constant rationalizing.)
The fact is, the ‘spirits’ theory might have worked for a largely uneducated mideval population with, limited understanding of mind-altering chemicals, an indoctrination in theism, and a desire to push the blame for their own drunken actions off on to “evil spirits”; but in the modern world, “The devil made me do it” isn’t a viable excuse. We’ve learned something in the last ten centuries, after all.
Unless you see a flaw in my logic? Am I incorrectly describing your theory of spiritual cognition maybe? If not, perhaps it’s time to reassess your theories.
In case you haven’t noticed, we are different from each other. If there were no differences in brain mapping between people, that would be evidence against it, if anything.
Yes, we can observe brain activity patterns by a number of methods, but those methods do not tell us whether the patterns originate in the brain or come from outside the brain. This question would not come up if there were any physical evidence of consciousness. There is no physical evidence of consciousness anywhere in the brain. Doesn’t it stike you odd that science over the past 100 years has been able to trace almost every thing the body does and how it does it. Digestion, respiration, liver function, kidneys, pancreas, and all other organ functions have been thouroughly documented. But we know nothing of the mind, not where it is, not what it looks like, not what it weighs, not how it works, we don’t even have a good definition of it. Isn’t that interesting, and the reason we know nothing about it is because it is not in the body. Science will know no more about the mind (spirit) than they know today 100 years from now.
But right now, this minute, we do have solid evidence that the mind is separate from the body and can live after the death of the body. We also know that the size of the brain does not correlate with intelligence. Einstein’s brain was a small one. alternativescience.com
http://www.mysteries.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/6,2.htm
I have no idea what you are talking about. What does Eugene, OR. have to do with anything?
I highly suggest reading Douglas Hofstadter’s book “I Am A Strange Loop”. He makes an interesting connection between consciousness and higher math that I don’t really understand. The gist of it is that a mathematician named Godel poked a hole in a very solid mathematical set of rules by finding out ways to force it to make statements about itself. This system was created to be utterly bulletproof against such self-referential statements, so it was quite an earthshaking discovery.
Anyway the implication is that this is a property of any sufficiently complex symbolic system. Hofstadter suggests this is what consciousness is, a complex symbolic system that has reached the point where it can recursively observe and make statements about itself. In essence, it is an algorithm which by its self-recursive nature is able to fool itself into thinking that it can be fooled into thinking. (That repetition is intentional, get used to it if you read Hofstadter’s book). I found it very interesting.
I did not say any of your assumptions of what I said, a reread is in order.
It is always been a mystery to me why people think they are of superior intelligence if they don’t believe in spirit.
You are ignoring the evidence that shows mind or consciousness is non-local and offering no evidence to the contrary. Well, except maybe how superior you are.
What you say must be true, right?
I think you’re just defining the mind in such a way that there couldn’t possibly be evidence for it. Try this thought experiment: if you were wrong and the brain was responsible for creating the mind, what kind of physical evidence do you think ought to be observable? What kind of physical evidence are you demanding?
Well, maybe so, but I am defining mind (spirit) as I have experienced it and know it. Remember science didn’t know about my definition when they were looking for evidence of the mind in the brain. They have found none. I realize that are many theories, but theories are not evidence. Don’t you think it is meaningful that science has studied and understand almost everything in the human body save mind.
OK. We now have research, done in the scientific manner and published in peer-reviewed journals from at least three countries, England, Netherlands, and America. This research shows that consciousness survives the death of the body. This is very important research, it is break-through research, that will clear the log-jam of theories about mind. Does it not warrant serious study by those who call themselves scientists. I think so. This just the beginning, so much more to learn. I hope you will give it the respect it deserves.
They have, as mentioned in this thread.
They haven’t. They are still figuring out the details of a wide variety of the bodiy’s functions, from DNA on up. Science has studied the mind, and has some understanding of it. And none of that understanding shows that spirit is even possible, much less real.
None whatsoever.
Replicated peer-reviewed research from respected journals deserves much respect. What few of them you have actually linked to over the years, that is. On the other hand, your bizarre misinterpretations of said research deserve no respect whatsoever.