My first post in this thread sank like a rock but I’ll raise the issue again.
A spiritual person pays attention to things not just of the material, but also of the spirit.
Like justice, honesty, kindness, patience, etc.
I’d wager most folks here agree that those things have meaning.
No need for gods or the supernatural.
Well, those words do have meaning, but I don’t think ‘spiritual’ is it.
Good insight. Don’t believe in the supernatural, if it happens regularly then it is natural and spiritual events do happen regularly. God is a given, but not to be worshipped. The goal is unconditional love. Not so easy, but the closer you get the more you understand.
This nailed it.
This translates to, “I know I’ve been shown to be wrong, and I’ll be running away and declaring victory now with my tail between my legs.”
[Ontopic]
Spiritual means stupidly accepting bullshit without evidence. It means trusting what you *want *to be true instead of your senses and mind. I would say that spiritual is the subset that many religious people belong to. They are “spiritual” but choose the framework of a religion to latch on to instead of Chigung or Ear Candling.
A spiritual person want’s Chiropractic Medicine to cure their renal failure. A spiritual person wants John Edwards to talk to their long dead best friend. A spiritual person wants horoscopes to give them insight to lead a better life. A spiritual person wants homeopathic water-echos to cure their blood cancer.
Spiritual people are just those who don’t want to bother thinking and learning to find a solution so they put their trust in snake oil.
That might be what you mean by it, but I don’t think it’s that common. Those are things that a humanist would concern himself with, but I think most humanists would avoid the “spiritual” word.
No, he really isn’t.
I want to walk away and leave this alone but I just can’t.
Something you’d learn from the first couple chapters of the book I recommended is that subjective experience of emotion is not adequately explained by neurochemical response. Seriously this is like Freshman 101 stuff that you two are failing miserably at.
Why do you guys think I need to argue with you when you really have no clue at all what you’re talking about? If you don’t understand this problem of cognitive science, you don’t understand thing 1 about cognitive science.
It’s not about victory for me, it’s about not discussing things with people who don’t even know that 2+2=4. The difference between us, is that I don’t argue for victory, I argue for furthered understanding. So if I am leaving because someone is saying things that are just too dumb to argue with, it’s out of frustration, and not because I won at the internetz.
The thing is, you haven’t won. You’ve declared victory and tossed a book up as a cite. Is there now a book tax to be a part of this thread? What of the books I’ve read? Can I simply throw one one and cut off discussion unless you’ve read it?
Never mind the fact that you almost certainly mis-understood the book, given that you’re prone to flights of fancy and believe in rubbish like Chi.
Stay and talk or run away, it doesn’t matter to me. Just don’t declare victory while stomping off in a funk.
I forgot, no real definitions of spirituality allowed. But to real spiritual people God is a given.
But you see, it isn’t a given, it’s an assumption.
Given that we are spirit, the non-existence of god is the assumption.
Yes. And given that we are made of cheese, us not tasting good on crackers is the assumption. 
That, too.
Can I get caught up here? Sorry if I haven’t been paying enough attention.
Does this book say that the subjective experience of emotion (from here on out I’m referring to this as simply “emotion”) is currently not adequately explained by our understanding of basic brain neurochemistry, or is it saying that they have some reason to think that there’s more to emotion than simply neurochemistry?
My own understanding of cognition is that we have no reason to doubt that emotion can be explained neurochemically, it’s just really complicated and we have a lot of work to do yet.
Do you have the idea that emotion is NOT an emergent property of neurochemistry?
The bolded sort of. It’s that the subjective experience of an emotion is not explained by describing it’s neurochemistry. IE, knowing the sequence of the neurons fired doesn’t tell you what it feels like for me to hug my daughter. IE, consciousness is not the sum of chemical interaction, it is an emergent property that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Right, but it’s apples and oranges. The experience of the emotion is not described by the neurochemistry, nor is that experience even MEANT to be explained by neurochemistry.
Nope. I am saying that the neurochemistry is the medium, but not the message. Saying that emotions are adequately described by neurochemistry is like saying you know what I printed out on a piece of paper by describing the process of the ink bonding to the paper.
I’m still trying to grasp what you’re saying here, and whether you and I really disagree or are just expressing it differently.
My idea of consciousness as an emergent property of neurons, is sort of like how the function of an advanced microprocessor is an emergent property of semiconductor physics.
You have one set of engineers who understand the low-level stuff - wave equations, work functions, doping profiles. Then you have another set of engineers who model transistors and other elements, and understand how their physical characteristics affect electrical performance like capacitance and transconductance. Yet another set of engineers know how to group various transistors together into boolean building blocks like NAND gates, or memory, and yet other engineers understand higher-level microprocessor functions like pipelines and caches. Then software engineers work with the algorithms that these processors perform.
I’d equate the scientists who work with neurons with the lowest-level semiconductor physicists, and clinical psychologists are the software engineers. We’re starting to get a handle on those intermediate stages of abstraction, but I don’t think we’re there yet.
However, I would be confident in saying that software running on a microprocessor is, fundamentally, the sum of the parts of a whole bunch of semiconductor physics. It’s an emergent property of them, but it’s made up of a lot of little stuff which we abstract to a different layer to help our meager brains get a handle on it.
Similarly, I would say that consciousness (or emotion) really is the sum of a bunch of neurochemistry.
Would you disagree?
The irony, it burns! Because I haven’t argued in bad faith, but you are accusing me of doing it to avoid having to argue in good faith, because to do so would require you to admit that you did not win the internetz, which is something you can never ever ever ever admit.
The telecommunication lines do not function as a nervious system either. For one thing, they don’t all or even mostly feed to the “brain” you seem to vaguely wave at postulating (which may/may not be the US government)…
…and you still aren’t arguing for self-awareness, I note.
This in response to not agreeing with you when you persistently misuse a word to try and provide a little fallacious support for a weird and non-standard definition of another word.
I listen to you just fine, 100% of the time - and hate your bullshit bad-faith ad-hominem accusations that anybody who doesn’t agree with you is failing to read or understand your arguments. Which you use every time you would otherwise have to admit you’re wrong.
Basically this is more of your standard “I’m losing, resort to insults and retreat while declaring victory” bullshit. It’s not even a joke - it’s not even slightly funny.
If you’re trying to further understanding, then why did you just wave at a book and not actually present your argument?
Regarding your accusations of ignorance based on the fact people don’t agree with you (argument by ad hominem, as usual) - nonsense. I haven’t read that book, but I’m well aware of cognitive science. The thing is, though, I come at it from a computer science perspective. I’ve studied artifical intelligence theory (at the 400 level, if you’re curious). And that knolwedge renders your distinction there, “that subjective experience of emotion is not adequately explained by neurochemical response”, simplistic.
The function of computer programs is not adequately explained by electronic response - there is nothing about your microchips that say “run IE” on them. And there’s nothing about the magnetic 1s and 0s on your hard drive that says “print the word ‘phlognostigon’ in this post” - not even when you parse them into a comprehensible program! So this is highly analogous to your protests against describing cognition as a material phenomenon - yet nobody thinks that browsers are spiritual manifestations. But they also don’t believe that the browsers exist as separate entities from the computers they’re running on. That is, yes the medium isn’t the message, but the message is still a part of the medium - it’s existence is sustained and embodied by the properties and behavior of the medium, and nothing else.
Or to use a simpler example, you seem to be arguing that when a gear turns, the turning exists separately from the gear. I don’t see that sort of argument as a credible position.
In the event that I am misunderstanding me, which I doubt, tell me what you actually mean. But don’t bother waving vaguely at some book and claiming that it proves you’re right, and don’t bother calling us all simple morons who should bow before your infinite Cognition 201 wisdom. Statements like that will not say what you hope they would.
I am talking about software AS IT IS BEING USED and you are talking about hardware as it interacts with the usage.
Right, I am talking about the user level.
Right. I agree with that analogy to the point that a computer analogy is apt.
Right.
No, it’s not the sum, it’s synergistic. The end result is greater than the sum of its parts.
Only in that I think the issue isn’t a matter of sums. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
I think we’re all talking about the software as it is being used, too. (I know I explicitly was.)
What it comes down to then is, how are we supposed to react to your “greater” assertion? What does it mean to be “greater”? In what ways is it relevent?
This browser I have open is analogous (roughly, very roughly) to the human consciousness. At the least, it matches regarding the fact that it too is something that is ‘running on’ the hardware, existing in the patterns within its interactions with itself. So, presumably, this browser too is “greater”. Certainly, it is something that doesn’t exist if you just had stacked the microchips and circuitboards and wires of the computer in a messy pile. And certainly it represents a greater degree of usefulness than randomly scrambled circuitry. And nobody around here will dispute any of this, regarding the browser or the mind; we all like our brains better with a mind running in them, as opposed to when you spatter them all over the pavement or whatever.
But all that usefulness and greatness doesn’t mean the browser is something that exists separate from the computer. Does it? What was the point being made about the mind/brain relationship again?