There’s no need to assume. The mind is fundamentally different from the body, for starters one has mass and one doesn’t.
Jesus man you just don’t get it… No one really knows how the mind works beyond some basic theories. Steven Pinkner at MIT is doing great work, the last 10 years in particular have seen leaps and bounds in our understanding of the brain and the mind. But even Pinkner admits that we have barely scratched the surface and many questions are just as perplexing now as they were to Plato and Aristotle.
The point is, your belief that the mind MUST operate along the same principles and within the same restrictions that apply to the physical world or computer science is garbage, it’s a fucking assumption. If we are to continue to learn how people think, the nature of consciousness and how it arises the last thing we need to do is rely on leaps of faith. Get over yourself, and learn to keep your options open.
Last thing, why the hell should I take your word over Spiritus’ on GIT, after seeing how blatantly and dogmatically wrong you can be?
Reading over my post I see a point of clarification that might be required: I’m not arguing that mind and body are separate, or that they aren’t. I’m arguing that presently the answer to that question is unknown, and no existing theory holds significantly more weight than any other.
So because we have only rudimentary ideas about how the brain and mind work, that means that the mind must be non-material? Don’t you think it is a little bit too early to give up on material explanations of human consciousness?
If the mind is non-material, then how is it affected by the material brain, and how does it affect the material brain? I know, I know, you’re going to say that you don’t know and no one else does, and so therefore you are proven right. Argument from ignorance.
Look, given the long track record of people assuming that things they don’t understand must have supernatural causes, don’t you think that perhaps we should learn our lesson? Nowadays, we assume that things have natural causes. Maybe we’ll be proved wrong someday, but leaping for the supernatural just because we don’t understand something is very odd.
If that’s your point, the quote you chose should have related to it in some way. I’ve seen a lot of TVAA’s stuff. He’s often curt and sometimes facetious, but a raving lunatic he is not. If you want to argue a point, do it IN THE THREAD. If you want to castigate someone in the pit, you ought to have a specific reason. Don’t just call someone a “lunatic”, because you happen to disagree with him, and don’t post a quote that has nothing to do with your complaint. That is, unless you enjoy looking like a fool.
First off, the word mind itself implies immateriality. Our thoughts don’t posses physical qualities that you can observe or measure. That said, I don’t rule out the possibility that the mind is actually a part of the brain, the net result of neural pathways, brain structures, and electrochemical interactions. All I’m saying is that to argue one over the other right now is tantamount to blind faith.
**
But, there is no two ways about it, ignorance is the answer. You could say that Agnostics are arguing from ignorance as well, and given current human knowledge theirs is the most logical of all positions. It’s another unknown.
I agree with you, but who said supernatural? Just because we don’t understand something doesn’t mean there are mystical forces involved. Is the “spooky” behavior of particles at the quantum level supernatural? No, we just don’t understand it well enough to definitively explain the phenomena we observe. No doubt we’re getting better, but this all really new stuff.
Pardon me, but I thought that’s what I was doing. I don’t care that he’s curt or facetious, a lot of posters are. I pitted him because he was claiming the board was full of idiots while he was making statements that I knew were incorrect, and defending them like a lunatic. So I pointed to his error.
Next, I addressed the fact that he gratuitously uses jargon and overly complicated language, and I posed the question of whether it was involuntary or if he was on a power trip. And last, I called him out because he’s was so damn infantile about decrying the response he was getting from the people he was calling morons.
Another thought occurs to me… it is possible to conceive of the mind in a non-traditional sense as possessing physical qualities. If you make the computer analogy, where the brain is a cpu and the mind is the software that runs on it, whatever the ‘code’ that the mind is written in would be physical in nature, be it chemical, organic, electrical, or a combination of factors.
But, it’s pure speculation, and thats the point. TVAA was passing speculation off as fact and then calling anyone who disagreed with him an idiot. The debate is still raging on GIT, but somehow I think he may come up short there as well.
Oh yeah? Then how come I still can’t get funding for my “tiny little gnomes” theory of neurotransmission? Answer me that, Mr. Smartypants!*
*Unless you’re a girl, in which case redact that to “Mr. Smartyskirt.”
Pardon me, this is fascinating and all, mysterious inner workings of the mind are so interesting, but it seems a little odd to attack or defend TVAA on the basis of that thread when he’s advocating that Jews abandon Judaism and cease to exist as a culture over in this thread.
Clearly the problem lies somewhere between phase one and phase three. I wouldn’t worry though these things usually iron themselves out. Also I’m a guy, and if you absolutely must call me names I prefer them in Spanish. Hola, mi nombre es Pantalones de Sr. Smarty. (can you tell I’m shellshocked from studying for finals yet?)
Must of missed that… well that’s the end of that, TVAA you are officially a bigger and crazier asshole than I previously imagined. Usted es un cabron estúpido y su pene es muy pequeño.
I’m not clear that TVAA was advocating that Jews stop being Jews.
He was saying that unless Jews stop being Jews, then Jews will cease to exist. Hence, for Jews to continue to exist, Jews must adapt to not being Jews.
You say you don’t want assumptions, yet you make the totally unjustified assumption that “the mind has no mass”. (If you can’t define mind, how can you say it has no mass?) Not only is this assumption not justified, but it’s a bogus point. As we have seen with computers, information can be stored as various states of matter – for example, memory is stored in RAM as electric charges (more or less). Changing the state of memory doesn’t change the mass of the system, but that * does not mean that there’s anything in the storage of memory or processing of information that is beyond the realm of every day physics. *. Nothing whatsoever that we have learned about computation or the human mind argues against this.
To state otherwise is to make an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proofs.
You’re are right, and I picked up on my own contradiction and remarked on it earlier in the thread. When I said the mind had no mass I was referring to cognitive processes themselves. That is, if you imagine a puppy, that thought has no physical attributes. Even if its a very complete thought with smells, sounds, and sights you aren’t actually sensing physical photons or molecules. Your mind is simulating all the sensations of being near a dog for you.
However, I later realized that if the mind was physical, which we can’t rule out, their could be things like neural pathways, chemical messengers, electric charges, and macro brain structures all working together in someway we haven’t yet determined to store and process information like the thought of a puppy. Similar to your RAM analogy. In which case their would be a physical record of a thought, even if it was only a temporary one.
blowero:
Cainxinth, you started a pit thread over this???!!!
[quote from TVAA]
cainxinth:
That’s not why I started this thread. That’s just the part of TVAA’s post that I’m qualified to refute. I started this thread to point out that TVAA is raving lunatic with an attitude problem, and that he needlessly obfuscates his arguments like Justhink.
blowero:
If that’s your point, the quote you chose should have related to it in some way
cainxinth:
Pardon me, but I thought that’s what I was doing.
