Good, I thought for a minute you were losing it.
The truly disturbing thing here is, I honestly can’t tell if I wooshed you or not.
Wooshed or not wooshed, that is the question. Whatever wooshed means to you.
Does the wind exist?
I’d say it does. Not as a single entity, but as a force created by a number of smaller entities (molecules of air). It may seem irregular, but there are rules for how the wind acts. Since we can’t know everything, we can’t predict it down to the very gust that you feel on your walk into work… but we do alright with the weather - as a rule.
Electrical patterns are no different. Electrons, though infinitely small (more or less) are actually material. We just can’t see 'em. Kinda like air.
But we can see and measure their effects.
This much seems obvious to me, but I wanted to post it…
Not so obvious to me, everything is energy, nothing very predictible, not even the weather. They just see it on radar and tell us about it, don’t predict it. That’s my take.
So you don’t understand meteorology either? Wow. I mean, you don’t look at forecasts? You know, general predictions of what the weather is going to be like in the future for a given area? You’ve never seen one?
Long range predictions are based on current conditions plus past experience, nothing to get excited about. Most weather is “seen” forming on ground or satellite radar, tracked and then reported. I ran a radar for the Navy when I was young, picked up a hurricane that hit us about 45 minutes later, no satellites in those days. Mostly mathematics, wind speed, distance, surface speed, eta.
We were discussing spiritual energy equals brain activity, whether you wish to call energy matter or not is up to you, it doesn’t matter. Huh. Well anyway, the “I” that we know as ourselves is very important. I would like sometime to have a discussion on what we can do for “I” to make our lives more comfortable.
If even you don’t know if you were wooshed at this point, I’d say that wooshed means that you shouldn’t be worried about me losing it.
And I’m fairly sure that Anomalous Reading was just making another argument by analogy, in this case for the fact that emergent effects can arise from smaller, simpler, and invisible (but existing) things acting and reacting to one another, like air particles forming a tornado that rips a house off its foundations, or electrons in your brain forming a self-referencing pattern that directs a body to post on a message board.
The question of whether the future behavior of such a storm of electrons is predictable has more to do with the free will debate than anything else; Anomalous Reading seems to think that it’s deterministic; you appear to disagree. Either way, the storm of electrons is very likely no more or less deterministic than the average air storm, and if we find it difficult to predect the weather, it should be no surprise that we find it even more difficult to predict people - we don’t usually even get so much as a single radar map of their mental state to work from, after all.
Yeah, I know that arguments by analogy aren’t always the best, but sometimes they can touch on something more familiar - and therefore transcend some of the barriers to understanding.
I know, here, it’s a losing fight. Either way, while I believe logic leads to truth more oft than anything else, I find that emotion and intuition is usually what guides our judgments… ergo… I argue differently.
I know you’ve carried a large bit of building the case in this thread (and the other). I’ve rather enjoyed what you’ve had to say - and thank you for what you’ve had to say. I don’t know that you’ve said anything I disagree with yet.
(I feel lazy, but I only have so much free time (kids) and you’re doing a better job than I could.)
OK, let’s assure that smaller, simpler, and invisible electons in your brain form a pattern that leads to who you are, that it creates the “I” that is you. We would expect that when the brain dies the “I” would die with it. Also we would expect the creation of the “I” by these means to be without any knowledge or history save that learned since the creation.
The problem is that this “model” does not work when the realities of life and consciousness are compared to it. Millions of people have out-of-body experiences daily. The first thing they notice is a separation of their consciousness and their bodies. They know they can live without their brain or body. There is so much written material about this phenomenon that it can’t be ignored. Scientists have researched it and found evidence of its reality. No one has ever convinced an experiencer they were hallucinating that I know about. Then there are children, and some mentally retarded that can do things like play the piano without having any lessons. There are people with part of their brain missing who do just fine.
So the scientific model of consciousness doesn’t work, but the spiritual model of consciousness does work.
Oh, I didn’t mean to criticize at all; I happen to like the occasional argument by analogy myself! (Like the car thing in that other thread, for an example.) I was actually just trying to drag the ‘meteorology’ thing back in line with what I thought you meant with it, rather than having it spiral out of control into a debate about the possibility of predicting the future, of all things.
And thanks for the compliments! I’m not any sort of expert in this, but I’m a sucker for an ineteresting debate, even against an unpersuadable opponent. It gives me a chance to work out my mental muscles!
Okay, we’re entertaining for the moment the notion that our minds our caused by natural means, specifically our brains. (Why do I suddenly feel like cheering?)
You seem to be presenting three specific things as counterarguments: OBEs, extremely clever people, and people who function despite damage to the brain.
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OBEs. These have been covered extensively for you approximately seventy billion times, on this message board alone. Suffice to say yet another review of the subject in this thread will accomplish nothing; your mind is set on this issue, and I am entirely unconvinced that OBEs are not products of the imagination. I am also not interested in discussing it here - review other threads if your memory is fuzzy about the arguments typically presented.
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You have referenced children and retarded people who taught themselves to play the piano without taking any lessons. Now, I was never into piano, but I did teach myself to draw things quite realistically by the age of five, without lessons. And you know what? It wasn’t because the knowledge just leapt into my brain, of how to draw things. I learned like everyone else, starting with stick figures and working my way up; I just was a little faster at it. So, your piano players may be special and worthy of note, but they’re certainly not an example of prescient foreknowledge or whatever. It’s just that they were a little more clever than usual, in this one skill, is all.
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As for people carrying on despite damage to the brain. Well, first off, I think we can agree that this is a relatively rare occurence. The average person who takes a bullet or piece of rebar to the head simply dies. So, most of the time, trauma does have an effect. (Also interesting are the times that the damage occurs and the person lives but the person loses mental functions. This immidiately argues that the brain is directly causative of mental functions.)
But, as for the cases where people take damage to the head with no noticeable effect at all (if such people exist): To refer back to our favorite imperfect analogy, the computer: take a gun and just shoot that computer of yours. Still here? Probably not. If you are, it’s because the bullet didn’t take out anyhing critically important to computer function. You might have lost your printer or speakers or something, but your computer is still ‘alive’. And, you might not have lost any functionality at all, if you managed not to hit anything important.
Now, obviously, the brain doesn’t really run exactly like a computer. (Less metal, for one thing, and rather more juicy organic fluids than the average PC.) So, maybe it has some redundancy built in, and perhaps a system for internally repairing or routing around damage that typical PCs lack. I dunno, I’m no brain surgeon. Regardless, such systems aren’t so effective that they entirely protect the brain from the effect of bullets and rebar; in most cases we see exactly the same effect that you get if you shoot your PC. Well, with less metal and more fluid splatter, that is.
Well it’s just your opinion that Shakespeare is better. (I agree, but it’s only my opinion too.)
Now I know that Kasparov is a better chess player than me. I also know that modern computers are incredibly good at chess - for example they know that certain positions are a forced win in over 200 moves. :eek:
I am confident that no human will ever be able to see 200 moves ahead in chess. I also know exactly how the computer did it and could explain every physical process to you.