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  1. F

    Freewill compatible with materialism

    Well, quite. I'm not sure what people mean by "mind" in the context of causing brain activity. ON the other hand we have good evidence that the brain causes mental activity, which mean that it makes sense to consider mind to be what the brain does. Sure. But we don't have any reason to...
  2. F

    "The brain is just how the soul expresses itself"

    But what did you mean by "we are ruling out"? I didn't understand the relevance of the comment to my post. Sorry about that, probably need coffee.... Science doesn't deal in proofs. We don't prove things in science. We fit models to data. Proofs are for mathematicians, who can define the...
  3. F

    Freewill compatible with materialism

    There are certainly feedback loops between "higher" and "lower" brain centres, the "higher" centres being what you might want to call conscious "mind", but probably better described as executive circuits as opposed to primary sensory circuits. But if you are characterising "mind" as some...
  4. F

    "The brain is just how the soul expresses itself"

    I am not sure what you mean by "we are ruling out a purely mechanical awareness". And we are making an inference from correlations between objective observations of behaviour, reports of subjective experience (what Dennett calls "heterophenomenology") and measure of neural function.
  5. F

    "The brain is just how the soul expresses itself"

    Well, if so, only because of previous studies that showed that blindsight was associate with ventral stream disruption. The reason we know about the different functions of the dorsal and ventral stream is by observing behaviour. We couldn't even talk about blindsight if it wasn't apparent from...
  6. F

    "The brain is just how the soul expresses itself"

    Well, again, I have to ask: how did the experimenters know that she wasn't? The answer, as I recall, was that she was unable to tell which way the slot was turned unless she reached for it, and was unable to say, after successfully posting the shape in the slot, which way it has been. In other...
  7. F

    Atheists: WOW proof this Book is from God.

    Whoever wrote that didn't know much about science.
  8. F

    "The brain is just how the soul expresses itself"

    OK, well, here's my point: we know that they are not conscious of visual information in the way that normally sighted people are because of their behaviour. So when you said: (my bold) ...it isn't "at odds" because if they behaved as though they were conscious of visual information, then we...
  9. F

    "The brain is just how the soul expresses itself"

    No, my question is for you. I know a fair bit about patients with blindsight - I've even tested one in the lab. I want you to think through what you are saying: how would you know that they lack conscious awareness of visual information? ETA: in cases it isn't clear: I'm not saying that they...
  10. F

    "The brain is just how the soul expresses itself"

    OK, so how do you know that they lack conscious awareness of that information?
  11. F

    "The brain is just how the soul expresses itself"

    Well, what about blindsight?
  12. F

    "The brain is just how the soul expresses itself"

    I haven't read "Sweet Dreams". But your comment was: I note that in Susan Blackmore's review of Sweet Dreams, she says: which would fit with what I have read of his, but is NOT a claim of "unconscious zombies being indistinguishable from conscious people", but that the very notion that a...
  13. F

    Freewill compatible with materialism

    In that case, your sentence becomes rather circular: "Naturalism implies we are determined by what we seek to describe in science, and our identity is molded into the rest of the activity of what we seek to describe in science". On my calculations, the first clause therefore boils down to...
  14. F

    "The brain is just how the soul expresses itself"

    First, it's Dennett, not Dennet, secondly, I'm not sure that "taught" is the right word - I read some of his work - and thirdly, Dennett, AFAICT, would dispute the notion that "unconscious zombies" are possible, so could not hold the position that they are "indistinguishable from conscious...
  15. F

    "The brain is just how the soul expresses itself"

    The same way that I can tell that you are conscious - by interacting with you, or observing your interactions with others. Well, I know that that is the argument, but I don't think it holds water. Sure, we can't quantify the smell of a rose, but there is no reason why we should. If we knew...
  16. F

    Freewill compatible with materialism

    Nice to meet you too. Well, I agree. I do think that we have free will, in the sense that I am a chooser. The more difficult question is: what is this thing I call "I"? But because my "internal self shouts" that it exist, then I assume that it does, as I do with all other things that shout...
  17. F

    "The brain is just how the soul expresses itself"

    I disagree.
  18. F

    "The brain is just how the soul expresses itself"

    There probably is genuine randomness (in the sense of quantum indeterminacy) in neural firing, but more interesting is that there is non-linearity, as in Strange Attractors and chaos theory.
  19. F

    "The brain is just how the soul expresses itself"

    Well, I'm a fairly recent convert to maverickdom. Well, I think that is the myth - that we don't know what questions to start asking. I think we do. Daniel Dennett raises a lot of them in "Consciousness Explained". My conversion to Easy Problem-hood came about when it dawned on me that most...
  20. F

    "The brain is just how the soul expresses itself"

    Well, as I said, my position is that I think the mystery of consciousness is a myth. I don't buy the "Hard Problem" argument. I think the Hardness is an artefact of the fact that we ourselves are both subject and object of the study. That is not to say that I think we know even a fraction of...
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