OK, I was somewhat, sort-of wrong. Incorrect. Well, kind of. Pejorative, a little, but I was… yeah, in error.
Sorry, Sentient. The “offal” thing got me worked up. Enormously.
Yeah, well, I’m not sure that word means what you think it means, either. Offal isn’t exactly complimentary, and it can mean any waste or rubbish, but its primary meaning is the unused portions of a butchered animal. So unless you have an abiding passion for headcheese or brains-n-eggs (and yes, some people do), I’d think brain would be considered offal.
I don’t know whether it’s true or not that “most people are unwilling and unable…”, but certainly not most people who are educated in the subject. Studying split-brain patients has cast serious doubt on the former belief that we all exist as some sort of homogenous “self” of consciousness. There’s a good deal of evidence now that conciousness is an illusion, an artificial synthesis of disparate impulses in the brain, concocted “after the fact”. Many people may indeed be unwilling to accept it, but I think that is more a reflection of their stubbornness.
Not necessarily. The idea is that the entire brain acts as a 2-way interface between the supernatural. If there is a soul, then it is observing the firing of neurons in the sensory cortices (consciousness) and influencing the firing of neurons in the motor and language cortices (free will) along with the areas involved in thought. IOW, the whole thing is the tuner.
The only theory I have seen that seems remotely plausible to explain this interface is the idea of “quantum consciousness” - that certain organelles of the neurons (microtubules, IIRC) can exist in quantum entangled states, and that the agent of consciousness (“soul”) collapses the entanglement by acting as an observer.
If a machine is built that uses quantum entanglement, and the machine starts channeling dead people, then the tuner will have been duplicated. I, for one, am not holding my breath.
Agreed, in fact the idea of qualia itself doesn’t really hold up either. Qualia are an attempt to ask why sensory input is so vivid; why life is so immediately obvious. There is no reason why sensory input wouldn’t be so vivid. The brain doesn’t realize what a small piece of the universe it is. All it ever “knows” is encased in a skull, therefore the whole range of neurons firing is its universe and it has nothing to compare that to.
What it seeks to explain is where all that sensory input goes. If it merely circulates through a closed system which produces output, then how is that system conscious of itself? If there is a supernatural component, then it is the part that receives experiences and imparts free will to behaviors. But we cannot know if we ourselves have such a component, since our own thought processes would lead to the same conclusion either way.
To call consciousness an illusion merely begs the question “who is it fooling”. This does not eliminate the need for a “soul” in the minds of people who already believe in one. Consciousness is something real, in the sense that it actually exists or occurs. People are aware of themselves, and either that is caused by the brain’s cognitive centers contemplating their own existence, or by a supernatural component that knows of its own existence.
Insist if you must that consciousness is purely physical in origin, but that doesn’t make it an illusion.
The unique string of memories which creates the illusion of a “self”.
(Incidentally, I agree that “illusion” is perhaps not the best possible word to use. A rainbow might similarly be said to be an “illusion” but one would not say that a rainbow does not exist, merely that it has a physical explanation.)
What entity or experience do you appeal to which shows that it is necessary (in an Ockham’s Razor sense) to appeal to the supernatural? Like I asked lekatt, would the difficulty in explaining all aspects of a computer solely by electronics cause you to posit that the computer was an “interface” with some other domain (in the same way that you are positing that a brain is in communication with another domain due to the difficulty of explaining it solely by neurophysics)?
Yes, but which disparate impulse do you blame for the stubbornness?
Actually, here’s the odd fact about split-brain patients that is rarely mentioned (though I have done my own research on this on the net): they don’t feel weird! Yes, you do get some anomalous things such as an ability to say what an object is when it’s in one hand other than the other, but, if anything, split brain patients would seem to provide evidence for a pattern (spirit, soul, whatever) that transcends the brain but is still limited by it.
Call this impulse stubborn, if you will.
The irony being that your own brain right now feels that it can transcend all that and put it all in perspective.
A paradox, ain’t it?
That’s an interesting conclusion! Except I’m not very sure that we can speak of inner experiences at all, either. Unless that was his point, sheathed in irony…
My latest pet peeve is the number of things called “illusion” at the SDMB by various parties. 
Free will, self, consciousness, … with all this illusion it becomes more and more amazing that anyone even bothers trusting anything. Why, it’d almost be as if some, say, “demon” (or even “physical law”) has generated what only appears like substance, but its existence is not unambiguously determined.
Where have I heard this before? 
The problem here is what you are willing to consider as “supernatural”. Would you consider that the dualist’s “mind-substance” was supernatural? If what characterizes “the natural” is your ability to explain it, then surely we would all agree that everything we know is only natural. But that is not very interesting, is it really?
For example, SentientMeat, would you consider that consciousness might be an emergent property of large systems that cannot be explained reductively? Do large systems sometimes have properties that cannot be explained only as a function of their parts? Or, if we were sufficiently knowledgeable, would all behavior be explained by an appear the behavior of its components?
Even the behavior and property of molecules can be radically diffferent than that if the constituent atoms. H[sub]2[/sub]O–and we’re talking 3 little atoms.
But when it comes to a system like the brain, which is as vast in complexity as a galaxy, some are content to say, “Hyeah, it’s neurons firing. That’s thought.”
Suuuuuure.
By the way, pardon my typo, that sentence should end with “an appeal to the behavior”. Hopefully my intent was clear.
Aeschines, the reason I ask is that systems that can’t be explained by an appeal to their parts start to resemble dualist systems (to me, anyway, but that is good since I’m the one arguing about it). We start to have levels and contexts and so on, and this starts to resemble the claim that “the mind is not purely matter” [even though it is only made up of matter]. Emergent properties have always had the ring of an old friend in new clothes to me.
When you say consciousness is an illusion, are you implying that we are slaves of our brain? For instance, every decision we make is not ‘us’ making it, but ultimately our brains? We have no freewill; our brain controls us…?
Is that what you mean?
Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough. I don’t contend that the phenomemon of consciousness doesn’t exist, but rather that the idea of an integrated “self” would seem to be an illusion. The evidence seems to point to the theory that what we experience as consciousness is only a momentary focusing on one thing or another. As explained on the site I linked to earlier:
But experiments have shown that often, we act first and form our perceptions later. It would seem that the integrated “self” that we believe ourselves to experience only exists as a body of memories. The brain, being an excellent pattern-recognition machine, synthesizes these memories into what seems to us to be a unified whole. But as we all know, memories frequently turn out to be either distorted or outright false.
No, I didn’t mean to imply that there is no phenomenon of consciousness. However, those who argue that it must have a supernatural origin are engaging in argumentum ad ignorantiam.
I think the idea that we are ultimately mortal and simply a physical “machine” [albeit a highly-complex one] is psychologically disturbing to many people. Therefore, they are highly motivated to believe otherwise, since believing otherwise is psychologically comforting to them. Therefore, they will tend to resist believing evidence against their concept of a divine “self”. Hence the stubbornness. It seems to be a pretty straightforward algorithm to me. The brain is “wired” in such a way that it tends to avoid that which causes unpleasant sensations. This propensity may or may not outweigh the propensity to believe that which is empirically demonstrable.
Actually, that was exactly my point, although you seem to have drawn the opposite conclusion from me. Split-brain patients, when studied, display two unique personalities, which can even be diametrically opposed to each other! Yet, as you point out, they do not seem to be aware of this. In fact, they will even concoct rationalizations to try to explain their contradictory behavior. I see this as strong evidence that the “self” is an illusion. The split-brain patient believes himself to exist as a unified consciousness, while the obvious evidence would indicate that he does not. The evidence would suggest that this “pattern” you refer to exists only as a collection of memories, after-the-fact. I see no need to ascribe any supernatural qualities to it.
I don’t see the distinction you are making between “us” and “our brains”. We are our bodies, and our brain is the organ that makes decisions. Why is it necessary to posit an additional entity other than our bodies? What evidence is there for this additional entity?
Whether you believe that the brain negates the concept of free will is another topic. It depends how you define “free will”. I tend to avoid “free will” discussions, since they invariably tend to be too abstract for my taste. I don’t think the question of whether or not we live in a deterministic, or “clockwork” universe has been settled.
Though I sometimes have a hard time following discussions of this field, this seems to say similar things regarding the latency and intensity of neurons firing (see the section titled Neural Coding of Visual Stimuli).
The Laboratory of Neuropsychology homepage has other sections that seem to relate to this discussion, as well, though most of the papers may not be available online.
I think this is a crucial discovery. My big problem with the Chinese Room problem is that there is an assumption that what is going on in the mind of the person running the room is different in principle from the room. A sufficiently advanced Chinese room should be able to pass a Turing test, right?
One could argue that the Chinese room is not exhibiting real thought because we could look inside, and find the person following instructions to give the impression of consciousness before we see that expression on the outside. But that is exactly what we see in our brains also!
I’m not sure calling consciousness an illusion is useful, but the fact that we can tell a decision has been made before we consciously make it gives some evidence that this is true. There seems to be a lot going on beyond consciousness, in any case.
Me personally? None. However I used to be a pantheist who believed that every “soul” was part of the collective whole. Occam’s Razor would seem to remove the need for the supernatural, but explaining conscious awareness any other way is not easy.
No, because I understand the computer and can explain its inner workings strictly in electronic and binary terms. The computer is completely self contained, with all its influences neatly accounted for. The human brain is more complex, not as well understood, and not all influences are accounted for (or are they) so it may or may not interface with another domain.
I have posited that in the past, but am no longer trying to advocate it as the correct answer.
That’s a good point. A paradox, maybe, but a navigable one. Say you wore amber filters over your eyes your whole life. You might know of the existence of shades of blue, but you wouldn’t notice that they are lacking from your day to day experience since reds and greens are all you would ever have known.
The brain symbolizes itself within the universe, so in a sense it does put it into perspective; it just does so with an oversimplification.
This is different. The physical and chemical properties of water are due to its mass, its charge distribution, ionizability, etc. It is nothing more than a system of subatomic particles, more complex than individual atoms of hydrogen and oxygen.
Exactly, and until it is settled the question of the presence or absence of a “spirit world” will not be settled either.
You misunderstand. I’m not saying “self” is and illusion in the “life is but a dream” sense, but in an ordinary, everyday sense. There is no unchanging “self” that moves smoothly through time, seeing all that is around it in real time. Take this experiment, for example: A subject sits in a darkened room, and is shown two lights. The lights are seperated by a certain distance, and flash on and off, one after the other. But the subject does not report seeing this. The subject reports seeing a light start from one side of the room and travel to the other side of the room. Why? Because the subject’s brain has taken two individual events, both received as stimuli, and synthesized them into a single gestalt. It doesn’t matter that the perception was incorrect, the subject believes it to be correct. [That’s why we don’t see a movie as a series of still pictures]. There was no “self” that followed the light from one end of the room to the other, there was only a brain that received two seperate stimuli and synthesized them into the most likely pattern. The “self” that watched the light travel from one end of the room to the other only existed after the second light flashed. It did not exist between the time of the first light flashing and the second light flashing. It was an illusion, in a commonplace, non-philosophical sense.
Part of my job is figuring out why computers don’t work. External influences have a lot more impact than you think. Voltage and temperature variations speed up or slow down processing, and might cause incorrect results. Cosmic rays zap dense memories all the time, which can cause data to be corrupted. (This is checked for in highly available systems, but not all reasons your PC goes bonkers can be blamed on Microsoft.)
Still, the brain gets input that is harder to characterize than the computer . You have to show how these don’t affect behavior before resorting to supernatural influences.