I’m still confused. I said that the computer is an analogy, and you agreed. I said that a computer’s running software is a sum of a whole bunch of semiconductor physics, and you agreed.
But then I said the next logical thing, that consciousness is the sum of a bunch of neurochemistry, and you disagreed. It would seem that if you agree with the first two, you should agree with the third.
He’s trying to bend the debate so that being “spiritual” isn’t an overt act of intellectual laziness and stupidity.
You can see where he was about to run away from the thread for being called on his foolishness earlier.
Actually what I said was that I agreed with it to the limits one can agree with an analogy.
Well then I made a mistake because a computer is greater than the sum of it’s parts also, and there is an abstract functionality that is not adequately described by the low level functioning.
Again, what I am saying is really basic subjective/objective stuff. We’re not even talking about the controversial aspect here.
For instance, software is not a sequence of electrical signals being turned on and off. It is abstract information conveyed by the signal. We are talking about the difference between a medium and the message here.
Lobohan I’m reporting your post for threadshitting. Either talk about the subject or don’t but stop trying to get people to stop debating and making it personal the way that you do. As you can see I am more than willing to discuss it with someone who wants to understand as opposed to someone who just wants to PALATR, especially since in this case my position is an extremely basic epistemological concept taught in every philosophy class.
Except, you can describe the ‘abstract’ functionality in terms of the low-level functioning. It would take a very long time, or a large amount of paper, but it’s certainly possible. In fact, it’s called a “core dump”.
Everyone here agrees that the mind, like the browser, is an intricate and complicated system that to the layman is made up of wishes and dreams, with no possible relationship between the wild imaginations of a human and the static-looking grey matter of a brain, and no possible relationship between the fancy html graphics and that boring-looking circuitboard. The thing is, though, that layman is wrong - every fancy html graphic can be broken down to electrons in circuits, and described that way.
There is no reason to think the way the mind is created in the brain is any different in that regard - that it can’t be completely described in terms of electrochemical reactions. Or at least there is no scientific or cognitive-sciencey reason to disbelieve this.
This forum is not “Great Understands”. This forum is “Great Debates”. And if you really wanted to make us ‘understand’ things, you should probably approach that by stating your position in such a way that simple logic and calm, reasonable argument doesn’t prove it to be nonesene.
(What is PALATR? I assume by it you mean me.)
Good luck with that. You’re the one asserting gibberish and not willing to back it up.
Except that no cognitive scientist would agree with you. It’d be nice we could get Shagnasty or Sentient Meat to weigh in on this. It is not possible to tell what a person is thinking by examining the neurons and no cognitive scientist will tell you this. There is a difference between the informational contents of a thought, and the firing of neurons. You can map out my brain and show a model of the neuronal firing, but it cannot tell you what it feels like for me to hug my daughter. If you dispute this, then you are the one who is making extraordinary claims that you need to back up with cites.
The purpose of a debate is to further understanding, not to ‘win’. If you disagree with that, then that’s a fundamental disagreement. You are just incredibly frustrating to debate with, but I don’t doubt your sincerity. There are others whose sincerity I doubt.
Point and Laugh at the Retard, and by that I meant Lobohan’s desire to bait me as opposed to actually discuss the topic at hand. You’ll notice that his entire contribution to this thread is personal attacks. He didn’t offer a rebuttal to my point of view he just went with a variation, “Take your ball and go home you crybaby.”
Not a single one of you has of course offered a cite supporting your position that we can completely and totally describe love through neurochemical reactions.
So here it goes, I would like to see a citation for your extraordinary claims.
Hmm? Perhaps one of us is confused about what is being debated here, and I don’t think it’s me.
Nobody here is saying that we can, now, with today’s technology, do a quick scan of your head and tell you what you’re thinking. And it’s not becuase your brain doesn’t store the info; the problem is one of decoding. Which is an entirely separate question. I mean, let’s look back at core dumps, which analogize quite nicely to that neuron model you mentioned. Can core dumps be read and can things about the state of the program be learned from them? Obviously yes; that’s what they’re for. But can I interpret a core dump? Nope! I do have many of the tools I’d need to do so (a HUGE help is that I have an idea about how data is encoded in computers) but I don’t have all the tools I need. Odds are it’s a dying art, nowadays.
The brain map would be even worse. Unlike the core dump, we don’t know anything about how things are encoded. And of course, we’d probably need something like an electron-level scan of the brain to even get started. So we’re not going to be doing that to any detailed degree any time soon. (We might be able to get a few things figured out, but not all of it.)
What does that mean? It means the brain scan is a code we can’t read. That’s hugely different from saying it’s not a code, though. I seriously doubt that any reputable cognitive scientist would tell you that your love for your daughter is not encoded in your brain state. Seriously, I just don’t believe it. That would be like a computer scientist telling you that your browser is being painted on the back of your CRT screen by fairies with paintbrushes. To say that brains don’t make minds would be a denial of their entire field.
So yeah. I don’t believe for the slimmest instance that any cogntive scientist would disagree with what I’m saying here.
Which brings us back to the question of, what are each of us saying here? What are we debating? What is the position you are advocating (as opposed to the position you are denying)?
I’m just saying that brains make minds. What are you saying? You seem to be saying that they don’t. That being the case, it’s not enough to dispute that the brain may, one day in the far future, be decoded. You have to support your alternate theory too. And as far as I can tell that is a far more extraordinary claim than anything I’m proposing.
I support my theory with the computer analogy and the rather strong lack of support for any supernatural theories. Basically, my explanation fits the evidence. What is your theory, how do you support it, and does it fit the evidence? It’s not enough to deny my theory, after all.
The purpose of a debate, particularly one about factual matters, is to seek out the truth. To get to the “straight dope”, as it were. Necessarily, to get there alternate incorrect theories will need to be shot down without mercy (if any such theories are present).
I appreciate that you realise that I’m sincere. I’m probably annoying because I don’t witness and I don’t “me too” - I mostly only interject to fight ignorance and error. (Or make the occasional mild not-very-funny joke.) So when I respond to you, I’m probably sticking a knife in the back of your favorite theory. And if I do say do myself…I’m pretty effective at it. Hence, the annoyance.
Ah. That, I don’t do. (Though I do get pissed when I’m told I lack sincerity or reading comprehension and lose debate grace as a result.)
Er, that’s not our position. We posit that it can be described, not that we can do it.
The cite is twofold: 1) your love is in your brain, as supported by the lack of ability to find anyplace else to put it and the fact that if we screw with your brain, we can screw with your mind; and 2) we know it’s decodable because you decode it. Logically, if the info is stored in your brain state, and you manage to feel things using that brain state, then your brain state is clearly decoding itself from neuron firings into the love feelings. If you couldn’t, you wouldn’t feel love; you’d feel neurons. So it’s clearly decodeable. We just don’t know how to do it yet.
Seriously, the thing to attack here isn’t the notion that your emotions are decodeable. With a fraction of the complexity of the human brain we model crude approximations of emotions in games like the Sims and the like. If we can do that by reducing the emotions to a dozen or two numerical indicators, and the computer can interpret them into something that drives emotionlike behavior, then why on earth is it implausible that the complex mutiprocessing thing called your brain could do something similar? It’s not an extraordinary theory at all.
So, that’s not the place to attack. What you need to do is demonstrate that the brain isn’t the house of the mind. (Or emotions, or whatever.) To do that you need to show that someplace else is the house of the mind.
Which is the extraordinary claim that needs to be made to unseat my theory.
Good luck with that.
Like others, I don’t think this is what most people mean when they say “spiritual”. I definitely don’t consider myself spiritual, but pay attention to these things, as do damn near every other person on the planet. They’re more ethical/philosophical/intellectual concerns than spiritual ones, IMO.
I didn’t attack you. You however, just called my a retard. You should pull that mote out of your own eye. 
Your point of view is gibberish. Your assertion seems to be that consciousness is neuro-chemicals… and something more!!!
What evidence do you have for anything but a mechanical basis for love?
I didn’t call you a retard.
begbert2 Lets pair this down to basics.
Do you believe in consciousness?
If the answer is yes.
Can consciousness be reduced completely to biomechanical means?
If the answer is yes.
Do you believe in Free Will?
If the answer is yes.
How do you reconcile Free Will, or individual choice with a biomechanical model. If it is purely biomechanical how can it be anything but purely deterministic?
No I am not saying that. I am saying that brains are the physical construct within which the mind resides but are not the totality of the mind.
You’re right, I took the Point at the Retard and Laugh as you towards me, my bad.
How about you admit that your argument is wrong now?
begbert2 Say you can map my entire brain at the electron level. Say you have a computer sufficiently powerful to model that map in real time. Say you have observed the map that you can see what neurochemical reactions occur during different subjective emotional states.
What that computer can do is tell you when I feel love.
It cannot tell you what that love feels like. Even if you were able to create some kind of mind machine interface like in the movie ‘Strange Days’ where you can see, feel and hear the experiences that I went through, it would still be mediated through the interpretive process that is YOU. You may be able to experience second hand my emotions, but they would be filtered through what you understand those emotions to be.
So no matter what, YOU, cannot ever know what it’s like to be ME. That is what a spirit is. I am a spirit and YOU are a spirit. Our persona, our being, that is spiritual. Yes, with a process orietation we can replicate certain emotions and isolate the centers they occur in, in the brain, but they cannot replicate my experience directly, that is unique. It is governed by the physical medium, IE the universe, in that I exist within the matter that I inhabit, just as you exist within the matter that YOU inhabit. But the direct ontological experience of being ourselves is unique to each us and cannot be replicated directly.
Say we had perfect cloning technology and you could clone me near instantaneously so that there are two copies of me. The moment you do that the two copies of me will begin to diverge into being their own unique entities with their own experiences. We’ll be extremely similar but not the same.
We come into an observation problem where the very process of observation changes the state of that which is being observed. My clone and I are experiencing different experiences. We could be in the same room but we are looking at the walls from different angles, we are sitting in different patches of air with subtle variations. Our noses will begin to itch at different times. We might eat different things for lunch and thus begin to slowly depart from having identical body chemistry. If we leave for the day from the building through different doors we will meet different people.
A spirit is a unique sentience. I am not arguing that the unique sentience isn’t determined by physical and temporal time and place that it is not subject to the rules of empirical reality. I am just saying that a persons experiences are as much a part of who they are as their neurochemistry.
That’s what I am saying.
Ahem!
If you folks can continue this discussion without resorting to further personal attacks, I will leave the thread open and will refrain from issuing any Warnings.
[ /Moderating ]
I’m not begbert, but can I play?
Yes.
Yes.
Depends on what you mean by “free will.” For my guess of what you probably mean by it, then my answer is “no.”
I think I guessed right, so my answer is “it can’t.”
That’s quite a claim. Do you have any evidence?
Why is it that I get the impression that I am arguing with people who think they know what I am thinking but likely have no clue?
I don’t know what you guessed so I’ll simplify it. The ability to make a choice.
Yes, loads, but really that’s what we’ve been arguing this whole time, and if you can’t get past the object/subject divide then it’s not going to mean anything.
Look, mswas, I have been sincerely trying to understand exactly what you’re saying. I have not been mocking or argumentative. But this question sounds condescending.
Well, that doesn’t clear it up. I am not forced by any external people into making the choices I make. Is that what you mean? Then I have that kind of free will.
Or do you mean some kind of free will that would be incompatible with the idea that our brains (and therefore thoughts) are deterministic? That would be like some little entity that’s not part of my material brain who makes choices and then moves particles in my material brain based on that? I’m not sure what that even means, but I guess I don’t believe I have that kind of free will.
So does saying you think you know what I mean but not trying to clarify it.
I am not talking about people. I am asking if your choices are physically predetermined by the motion of atoms that make up your body. Do the concentration gradients and open valences inside your brain control every aspect? Do you actually have a choice or is choice an illusion of consciousness, the choices already having been decided by the ordering of chemicals that make up your body?
Fair enough. That’s what I was asking. Could you expound on that by answering the question above?
Anyway, that is what it means to be spiritual to me. To believe that there is some spark that is you, that has the opportunity to make a choice. How it emerges from matter I cannot say, but I believe that there is something that is you, that is your spirit that when confronted by conflicting material choices can resolve them and take action.
To take your computer metaphor to it’s ultimate conclusion, the spirit is the user.
The Universe is clueless! It wants to know itself!