When will we ever discover consciousness, we are evidence of it, so are other species. Are we looking for consciousness is rocks or in the atomic structure?
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Brain / Consciousness debate and age (please answer poll for psychological research)
- Thread starter 1137
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nazz
Doubting Thomas
Oh, the irony
Ouroboros
Coincidentia oppositorum
Mind is controlled by the brain.
Emotions come from the brain and biochemistry.
Alter either one, and you alter a person's mind and emotions. "Mind altering drugs" aren't supernatural. Parasites causing people having unnatural emotions aren't spiritual.
Sounds like either you have a problem with this yourself or you're trying to use it in hopes to scare people into your faith? We came from eternal darkness, it won't be different than it was before we were born. It's acceptable to me.
Anyway, no, your "spirit" isn't held in a substance box in the ground unable to escape for eternity. The "spirit" goes away completely and merges with the whole, with God. There's no "you" living after the end, but You with the All.
nazz
Doubting Thomas
Discover it? I'm experiencing it right now. But you will never find it in the physical world. Surely we've opened up enough brains by now to know it isn't in there?
Your experiencing it but can't find it in the physical world? Makes little sense.
Really? I'm being trolled, for reals. You know that's a strawman.
nazz
Doubting Thomas
Not at all
I wouldn't open up a radio and expect to find the music but I wouldn't hesitate to call music physical because it is an effect of something physically occurring.
technomage
Finding my own way
Ah, but there is a third possibility--if the supernatural exists, and can interact with the natural world (as many posit it does), those interactions are still real, even if science is not capable of analyzing them.
I have to admit, after years of looking for such interactions, I find the possibility rather unlikely. The accounts of supernatural intervention are ... too contradictory, too diverse, lack consistency, and many can easily be pointed out as either fraud or error. But I cannot completely reject the possibility.
nazz
Doubting Thomas
Music isn't physical either. The only thing physical coming out of a radio are vibratory waves of air.
It is a very physical affect. Sound is seen as a matter wave, a vibration of matter. Air is matter too.
nazz
Doubting Thomas
Yes, air is material, no dispute there. But sound is not. Sound exists only as a quale, a conscious experience. Some beings can hear sounds that others cannot. And some beings will experience those sounds as music and others will not. Do you think when a cockroach hears Beethoven's 5th Symphony they are hearing music? Music is a name we humans give to certain frequencies and modulations of sound. Heck, even humans will disagree on what constitutes music!
Dispute that with physics. Ask yourself why sound can't travel through a vacuum. No particles, no sound.
All this part is beside the point however you touch on something important about consciousness and its subjectivity. It matters little how it is perceived. We could hear like a cockroach and we would still interpret the sound accordingly through our intelligence. What other species hear is always subjective without the personal experience of the perceived thing.
nazz
Doubting Thomas
I don't dispute science; there is nothing to dispute. Sound doesn't travel period. But in order for sound to be experienced there has to be a vibratory wave in some medium. So what?
On the contrary it is PRECISELY the point. Looking for consciousness in the physical world would be just like looking for music. You won't find either because they are not physical in nature.
Well your disputing it right now. Sound is something physically happening plain and simple. Sound travels very fast just not as fast as light. The only reason it travels in the first place because something physical causes a chain reaction that makes a vibration of particles that travels from the source to the ear. Again sound is a matter wave, a vibration of particles.
nazz
Doubting Thomas
No, I am not disputing any science. I am disputing how you are defining "sound". Colloquially we may speak about sound traveling or the speed of sound but what we really mean in physical terms is the movement of air in certain waveforms. But it takes a conscious being to experience the quale of sound. If no conscious beings existed there would be no sound.
Right, movement of matter in waves. You agree air is matter.
More specifically it takes self awareness to know/be aware what your biology is aware of.
The wave would still exist just nothing to interpret it as anything.
Thief
Rogue Theologian
Are we moving to awareness without body senses?
Without knowing it without being aware of a fleeting moment.
Seems it's more like meaning that is being disputed, making this a semantical argument.
Kilgore Trout
Misanthropic Humanist
How novel.