While it has been mentioned that electrons are most definitely involved in the brain’s workings, and electrons are not atoms, but parts of atoms, let’s move on from there. N.B. This is why a discussion between a scientist and philosopher is so difficult, unless both are at least somewhat well-versed in the teachings of the other. Of course electrons aren’t atoms, but this philosophy professor is obviously not in charge of the Philosophy of Science course.
Atoms (collections of protons, neutrons, and electrons), do move about in the brain, thus I think it would be difficult to argue that these motions have no effect at all on thought processes. The presence or abscence (ie ‘levels’ in med-speak) of certain compounds in the brain can explain psychiatric disease. Ions like Na+ move about, causing synapses to fire.
If you explained this to your unscientific philosophy professor, she would give the same answer: “The motions of atoms and other entities you describe are necessary but not sufficient to explain thought and conciousness.”
Now a little GD…
She’s right.
But that doesn’t mean God exists. It means we don’t understand our universe and our own bodies well enough yet. Thousands of really smart people aren’t working in quantum physics and neuroscience for nothing.
Says who? I have no doubt that the interactions of various molecules, ions and electrons are completely sufficient to explain thought, conciousness and everything else we experience in our brains. These interactions are so insanely complex, however, that we are only just beginning to get a grasp on them.
You’re right, and so am I. By that, I mean, you misunderstood me. Sorry.
I meant that my description (take that to be the human race’s best scientific explanation) of brain chemistry and wave mechanics and such is not good enough yet to fully explain conciousness to a philosopher.
Therefore, our current description (science) is necessary yet not sufficient to explain consiousness.
To folks who don’t believe in science, God is all the science we haven’t learned yet.
I would be careful when discussing Crick’s analysis of vision. Vision, first and foremost, is not something that is well understood from a mathematical point of view. If it were, computational studies of tuning curves in the primary visual cortex would be more statistically fit and artificial intelligence would be able to better facilitate the sensation of vision.
Duke University neurobiologist Dale Purves [‘Size contrast and assimilation explained by the statistics of natural scene geometry,’ Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2004:1] argues that perception is based on experience through time and plasticity in the primary visual cortex. We can illustrate this phenomenon by looking at any good optical illusion: boundaries between color and dimension, while not actual present in the object in question, are present due to our experience with colors in different light settings. Such plasticity is present in all mammals.
With regard to Crick’s ‘astonishing hypothesis’: As a neurobiology student, I find it astonishing that Crick believes in his argument for the rejection of the soul because of the lack of current evidence. Until he can unequivocally prove the nonexistance of the soul with scientific data, I reject his hypothesis.
I would be wary when reading Ramachandran’s book. While the study of phantom limbs is interesting, and shows a lot of empirical evidence supporting certain arguments in the mind-body problem, his experiments have never been reproduced.
Once again, that’s not how science works. First there’s the problem of "proving’ the non-existence of anything, and second, science can’t prove or disprove things outside its boundaries, i.e. the physical world. The onus is on people claiming that there is some sort of non-physical “spiritual world” to explain why anyone should accept that as a reasonable account of reality, as opposed to being, say, just wishful thinking.
Scientists can hope to show, as they have with evolution, for instance, that the physical processes can account for the observed phenomena without reference to outside mystical forces (like God or soul). This may not persuade people who have a stake in believing in those supernatural entities, but it will be sufficient for those who are willing to accept the simplest and most obvious explanations.
I am not claiming that science can now explain all phenomena of human consciousness as brain functions, but I have no doubt that progress will continue to be made in this area until virtually all of the subject is understood.
Oh, I agree with you. I understand that no search for truth really has any end, and this is most true for the search for the soul and the understanding of brain functions. I just found it troubling that Crick would use scientific observations to seek such an end.
Like I said, I only skimmed Penrose’s book. I felt he was making some big claims about processes that we really know very little about.
Do you mean that people have tried to reproduce his work and failed, or that nobody has published any duplications yet? My degree of wariness will vary accordingly!
Read a short article in Scientific American, years ago, that spoke of new research on smell, specifically what happens to an area of the brain called the olfactory bulb.
The neurons there fire in a particular, complex pattern when you’re smelling, say, bananas. then if you go on to smell, say, wood, they begin firing in a completely different complex pattern. If you then go back to smelling bananas, the neurons fire again in in something very much like the banana pattern, but now influenced slightly by the wood pattern.
Since that time, I have wondered if the entire brain doesn’t function in a similar way. the pattern of neuron firings is one way for one thought, another way for a different thought, etc. Sure, you would eventually be limited in the number of different things it would be possible to think about, but considering the vast number of neuron and the even vaster number of connections to provide possible patterns, I think the sun could wink out before we exhausted the possibilities.
This is the same thing that Purves says, only his analysis lies with the visual system. Olfaction is interesting because smell processing, unlike the other sensory systems, does not involve a path through the brainstem. [The brainstem normally modulates sensory signals as they pass from the peripheral nervous system, up the spinal cord to their respective cortices.] Instead, receptors in a cell layer just above the mucous membrane of the nose send signals directly to the olfactory bulb [in the forebrain]. Here begins smell processing.
This whole phenomenon comes from the fact that the brain is plastic. In every facet of the brain, new information is going to force the networks within specific areas of the brain to either grow, die, or rewire themselves.
For a readable tratment of the philosophy from someone who believes thinking is simply a phenomemon of the brain with no metaphysical component, check out the various books by Daniel Clement Dennett, in particular “Conscuisness Explained.”
He writes like a college prof, but not like a philosophy prof.
Y’all are confusing a philosophical gap with a scientific one. There is simply no way that science can explain, even in theory, exactly why you perceive the smell of chocolate-chip cookies the way that you do. Science can never even prove that a person with the exact same neural pattern, with every particle in exactly the exacty same quantum state, as you have in your brain when you smell chocolate chip cookies experiences the same smell that you do. At a certain level, qualia (the technical term for the qualities of individual experiences) are fundamentally inaccessable. You can never know how I experience something, because your knowing it makes it your experience, not mine. I find all of this unproblematic and entirely consistant with a purely physical world, but that is a philosophical conclusion, not a scientific one.
BTW, there is no doubt that the argument that the posited existence of a non-material soul somehow proves the existence of God is simply too weak to be taken seriously. Nevertheless, it is true that many arguments against the exitence of God begin (explicitly or implicitly) with a physicalist assumption, and that any argument for the existence of God must by necessity reject physicalism. So the two aren’t completely unrelated. Cisco should tell his or her professor that disproving physicalism is necessary but not sufficient to prove the existence of God.
The brain is by definition made of physical atoms and their component parts. The thinking done by it involves the chemical interactions (we’re not sure how) of those atoms/ molecules.
This in NO WAY says anything about the existence of a soul. I HATE this kind of reasoning, because this bad philosophy lets bad philosophy come from the materialist side: “AH HAH!! I’ve proved that there is center of the brain for the feeling of love and attatchment. It is only a chemical interaction. You are now free to view it as something inanimate and animalistic, and you may now disregard it and commit adultery/beat your wife/murder your kids/throw away your religion.”
As otehrs have said, this is all about physicalism, the idea that all “mental” entities such as thought, mathematics, logic and so on actually supervene on (ie. can be explained by) physical entities.
This used to be called “materialism” but plainly not only “material” exists: energy, spacetime, fundamental forces - these are all obviously similarly physical by nature, as is a given arrangement of physical matter (eg. snowflakes and water vapour are different but still physical.)
The question she must answer is this: What entity CANNOT be explained by an appeal to the physical? Neuroscience cannot prove that thoughts are not physical. All it can do is provide a feasible explanation for the “illusions” of self, consciousness, free will and thought.
Gaaah! Isn’t anyone listening? SentientMeat, I can tell from your user name alone ( ) to say nothing of your posts in this and other threads that you aware enough of the arguments on both sides to recognize the flaw in your argument. You answered (begged, actually) your own question. Free will, the taste of chocolate, what-it-is-like-to-be-a-bat, what Mary didn’t know, and the difference between us and the Antipodeans (sorry, no good link) or a Chinese room CANNOT be explained by science EVEN IN PRINCIPLE!
Like you, I find this trivial and non-problematic, but it is not obviously so! Nor does the burden of proof in this instance lie as one-sidedly upon the non-physicalist side as has been implied. I am astounded that I, an ardent physicalist, am the only one to step up and defend non-physicalism, which has a rich and compelling philosophical tradition behind it, with many contemporary supporters. Cisco’s teacher may be an idiot (and certainly appears to by from Cisco’s representation of her argument) but not everyone who agrees with her is, and it would hardly serve the interest of fighting ignorance to leave anyone with that impression.
I disagree here. Sure there are plenty of interesting paradoxes, but I happen to think that most of them are in some way navigable. In the Chinese room, for example, we must ask *“where is the memory in this system?” if we are to compare it to consciousness (it’s actually more equivalent to, say, the larynx than the brain IMHO).
Those explanations may not yet have undergone rigorous tests for falsifiability given the comparative infancy of neuroscience, but they can still be said to be feasible.
Apologies, Alan, I just read your other posts. I guess that, yes, some elements of philosophy are simply scientifically irrelevant. They are asking questions which are outside the purview of falsifiability.
However, I consider that when it comes to qualia, there is no particular reason to appeal to non-physical entities since they are unnecessary in an Ockham’s Razor sense.
The fundamental problem with dualism is that it introduces plenty of hypothesis, but it has no explanatory power whatsoever. If the soul or spirit world exists, then one must ask why and how it functions. And getting thought, consciousness, reason, and the like out of a soul (with no known rules describing it) is at least as difficult as getting all of those qualities out of a purely physical brain. The dualist explains a human by saying that there’s a little human inside the human controlling what the human does. But now we still have that little human to explain. Is it homoncouli all the way down? We haven’t explained anything, all we’ve done is added another layer to our lack of explanation.
And to answer the OP, no, thinking is not mere atomic motion.
The simplest models of “thought” are just sensory inputs connected to several layers of memory, as in Husserl’s tripartite model.
If one accepts that memories are mere “strings” of dendrites which “encode” those sensory inputs (and much more besides!), a physical basis for most mental entities can be constructed.
Careful, SentientMeat, shave with Occam’s Razor and you might chop off your head, or at least your mind. Most people are unwilling and unable to believe that conciousness and free will are illusions, even if Occam’s Razor seems to insist that they are, and I count myself cautiously among their number. I am reasonably convinced that I do in fact exist as a concious, thinking self.
This brings us to Chronos. You are wrong, Chronos, but you are wrong in the same way that most anti-non-physicalists are wrong, which makes your error pedagogically useful. (Remember, folks, if you can’t be a good example, be a dire warning!) You’ve set up a straw man by making the non-physical simply a parallel physical plane, subject to physical science. For most non-physicalists, it isn’t, nor does it function as an explanatory hypothesis in the sense that the edxistence of another particle might. For most non-physicalists, the non-physical is analagous to (and in some cases identical with) the mathematical. Mathematicians who attribute reality and existence to methematical concepts don’t (necessarily) posit a seperate “world”, nor does the posited reality of mathematical concepts function as a scinetific (explanatory) hypothesis. It is closer to being a semantic statement about the meaning of “reality” or “existence.” One doper (unfortunately, I can’t find the actual post) once characterised the debate as something along the following lines:
Q: Is the world purely physical?
Non-physicalist: No, the world consists of both particles and the patterns of relationships and interactions between them.
Physicalist: Yes, the world consists entirely of particles and the patterns of relationships and interactions between them.
If you haven’t read the link to Thomas Nagel’s article “What It is Like to Be a Bat” in my earlier post, you should. I forget how Nagel characterises himself, but he makes a convincing case that there is something to the world besides what can be explained objectively. My own opinion coincides closely with his, and I consider it to be a form of physicalism, but as I said, I forget how Nagel categorises his position.
) to say nothing of your posts in this and other threads that you aware enough of the arguments on both sides to recognize the flaw in your argument. You answered (begged, actually) your own question. Free will, the taste of chocolate,