What do you mean by "the mind reduces to the brain"?
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Western Materialism
- Thread starter Rival
- Start date
That the brain causes the mind, determines it, that a brain is needed for consciousness and that when the brain dies the mind does as well. Material reductionism, Physicalism.
I'm not sure that's the way I see it. I see the mind as an emergent property of the brain. I wouldn't call that reductionism.
Ok, but we have evidence of magnets working, gravity etc.
I've personally never seen or heard of anyone overriding a signal from the brain to the body so I'm asking for the evidence that it actually happens
So you don't think it's good evidence that every morning when you wake up that your mind hasn't escaped and some ther mind has occupied your brain? Or that your mind has occupied some other body? Why do you think minds are 100% related to the brain they use? You don't think it's good evidence that no one ever sees a mind from a dead brain? I notice whatever alternatives you offer actually have zero evidence, unlike the cause and effect of materialism.
This is reductionism.
My bad.
Schultze-Kraft, Matthias, Daniel Birman, Marco Rusconi, Carsten Allefeld, Kai Görgen, Sven Dähne, Benjamin Blankertz, and John-Dylan Haynes. "The Point of No Return in Vetoing Self-Initiated Movements." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, January 26, 2016. Home PMC4743787/.
And now to the real point: I don't need an alternative to physicalism for it to be incorrect, so I will repeat the request for evidence one final time before I feel comfortable assuming there is none to give.
Because the two are connected? Literally nobody rejects this connection, it's just a straw man.
Not at all, why would a dead brain pick up consciousness? My dead radio doesn't pick up anything either, it doesn't work anymore.
Unfortunately fideism is a valid option, of course. I think we already went through this?
So you acknowledge that minds are specific brain's activity?
We can detect radio waves and know thay are transmitted and recieved. There is no evidence that consciousness is a similar thing at all. Feel free to present that your claim here is true and not some nonsense we can dismiss due to lack of evidence. You have evidence, right?
Only for those with certain assumptions that aren't supported by evidence. Are one such person?
You may have mentioned it. Why anyone would think it's true is yet to be argued.
According to your semantic definition perhaps, but allowing the soft existence of emergent properties which are not physical doesn’t seem to me the same as saying everything which exists is physical.
Its fascinating work, but I wonder if those signals had left the brain before they were over rided? One should in theory be able to measure where the signal discontinued after it left the brain according to your claim that a signal from the brain to the body can be overrided as opposed to a process internal to the brain which may have been what the study you referred to mentioned.
I dont see myself as a physicalist, so i'll leave others to take you up on that point.
However I do think that there being some non-physical things which have a kind of soft existence isn't a blank cheque to assume all sorts of non-physical poorly evidenced things such as ghosts and Gods exist. I mean you can just assume they exist, but it seems to me a stretch of the word logical to call such poorly evidenced assumptions as logical, which is what I think the OP is trying to sell us on.
RestlessSoul
Well-Known Member
Yes, Tononi talks in general terms in that clip, which is part of a much longer interview. The key point he is making here is that consciousness is fundamental to our experience of reality, indeed to all intents and purposes it is our reality. All of our experience is by definition, conscious experience; therefore any attempt to describe, define, or construct a theoretical model of objective reality must begin by giving some account of the consciousness of the observer. Starting with the material world, and arriving at consciousness as an output of that, is putting the cart before the horse. Consciousness has priority, he argues, because the material world is something we access via our conscious minds.
The ideas Tononi, and philosophers of mind like David Chalmers express, have echoes in quantum theory where the measurement problem, and quantum contextuality, dictate that the observer necessarily interacts with the system she observes, and therefore cannot see the world from a neutral perspective, as it would exist independently of her observation. Similarly in cosmology, Stephen Hawking wrestled with the paradox that the search for the objective 'Archimedean Point' from which to view the universe, is doomed since we are within the universe looking out, rather than laboratory scientists examining an isolated system from the outside.
"Our physical theories don't live rent-free in a platonic heaven. We are not angels, who view the universe from outside. We and our theories are part of the universe we are describing. Our theories are never fully decoupled from us."
- Stephen Hawking, quoted by Thomas Hertog, On the Origin of Time
Yerda
Veteran Member
Let's say it is an open question. What would evidence that the mind is caused by the brain look like? What about evidence of the contrary?
Nope, just that the two are connected.
You can't detect consciousness??
Yep you ignored it remember?
Nope that why I presented logic and evidence where you havent.
And how does X with mutually exclusive properties to Y arise from Y?
What?
So... absolutely no evidence the brain creates the mind?
It would look like any logic and evidence. I've noticed people only come to doubt what evidence looks like when they cannot provide any, and this is not exclusive to physicalism.
syo
Well-Known Member
I don't know what a materialist is.
Yerda
Veteran Member
Ok, I'm not committed to physicalism.
Are medical examples of people losing abilities when a part of the brain is damaged evidence that the brain causes the mind?
Or people reporting their experiences changing with stimulation to the brain?
OK, so you are a living person with a brain, and you have conscious awareness (your mind). You understand (your mind) you need to eat. You decide (your mind) to go to an Indian restaraunt. You decide (your mind again) to get tandoori chicken because it's your favorite (your mind experiencing pleasure). So why don't you think that tasting that tandoori is your brain experiencing that sensation? You say mind and brain are connected, but you reject that your brian having experiences is your mind?
We observe consciousness. It is a property of living brains. It isn't some force or phenomenon outside of brin. If you disagree, provide evidence. Thus far no one has shown that consciousness is separate from brain's functioning.
You made claims, no evidence. I'm asking for evidence, not more claims. If all you have is more claims, then you are done here.
No one sees this "logic and evidence", so is it imaginary? You present no more than baseless claims.
Let experts explain this since we can't trust religious people with a motive to find excuses to believe. Thus far you only repeat the same irrelevant assumptions, like assuming consciousness is not a product of living brains. No evidence, just an assumption.
PureX
Veteran Member
Years ago, when I was living in Chicago, I had occasion to ride a city bus every day at rush hour through a very busy part of the downtown. Busy in that there were many pedestrians walking in both directions on the sidewalks next to the bus, and that there was a lot of car traffic on the street, forcing the bus to make slow progress along it, and to stop at every corner for a significant amount of time. So for a while, out of both curiosity and boredom, I began running a sort of "experiment". I had noticed that when I sat by the window on the sidewark side of the bus, and I would idly stare at one of the passersby on the sidewalk, they would turn to see if someone, and who, was looking at them. And I became curious if they were somehow sensing that I was looking at them from on the bus.
To pass the time, I began to deliberately focus my attention on one of the pedestrians on the sidewalk near the bus that had their back to me, and wait to see if they would turn and look in my direction, as if wondering if and who was looking at them. And I was very surprised to discover how often this would actually happen. It's been many years so I don't recall the actual numbers, but it was somewhere near a quarter or a third of the time. Which I reckoned was WAY more often than would happen randomly. It appeared pretty clear to me that at least some of these people were able to somehow sense that they were the focus of someone else's attention. So then once I got off the bus, and walked among the throngs of pedestrians, I would see if I could sense anyone else looking at me. But there was too much noise and clutter and distraction for that. However people were sensing that they were being focused on, it was happening unconsciously.
Around that time I happened to stumble on an article somewhere about a bird species in France that had suddeny learned to remove the caps off of the milk bottles placed on people's porches in the morning. And what had stumped the people studying this phenomenon was that 1. both the birds, the milk bottles and their caps, and the outdoor delivery had been around and had remained the same for nearly 100 years. And yet suddenly, across and whole of northern France, in the very short span of only a few week, all the birds of that species had suddenly learned to remove the caps from the bottles. And what baffled the researchers was the 'medium' by which the information had been transferred from bird to bird.
The birds did not tend to intermingle with birds outside their immediate area. So it was not possible for them to "teach" the others by example in that short a time. Their bird songs were not particularly complex, nor had they significantly changed over many years. So it was not likely that the information was being transferred in any way, audibly. And the information spread far too fast for it to have been spread genetically. So, what was the medium that transferred the information?
They found no answer.
The point is that there is plenty of observational evidence around the world and throughout time to suggest that some sort of psychic medium exists. Perhaps a form of energy that we have no knowledge of, and so we have no way of detecting, or studying. Or perhaps some sort of 'particle' pairing that enables reciprocal responses even when those particles are spacially separated. Or perhaps by some other means that we are as yet not even able to imagine.
There are mysteries all around us that we don't even notice because we don't even know to look for them. Or we just blindly assume they aren't there. Or we write off as "made up" because we can't understand how they could even be "real".
To pass the time, I began to deliberately focus my attention on one of the pedestrians on the sidewalk near the bus that had their back to me, and wait to see if they would turn and look in my direction, as if wondering if and who was looking at them. And I was very surprised to discover how often this would actually happen. It's been many years so I don't recall the actual numbers, but it was somewhere near a quarter or a third of the time. Which I reckoned was WAY more often than would happen randomly. It appeared pretty clear to me that at least some of these people were able to somehow sense that they were the focus of someone else's attention. So then once I got off the bus, and walked among the throngs of pedestrians, I would see if I could sense anyone else looking at me. But there was too much noise and clutter and distraction for that. However people were sensing that they were being focused on, it was happening unconsciously.
Around that time I happened to stumble on an article somewhere about a bird species in France that had suddeny learned to remove the caps off of the milk bottles placed on people's porches in the morning. And what had stumped the people studying this phenomenon was that 1. both the birds, the milk bottles and their caps, and the outdoor delivery had been around and had remained the same for nearly 100 years. And yet suddenly, across and whole of northern France, in the very short span of only a few week, all the birds of that species had suddenly learned to remove the caps from the bottles. And what baffled the researchers was the 'medium' by which the information had been transferred from bird to bird.
The birds did not tend to intermingle with birds outside their immediate area. So it was not possible for them to "teach" the others by example in that short a time. Their bird songs were not particularly complex, nor had they significantly changed over many years. So it was not likely that the information was being transferred in any way, audibly. And the information spread far too fast for it to have been spread genetically. So, what was the medium that transferred the information?
They found no answer.
The point is that there is plenty of observational evidence around the world and throughout time to suggest that some sort of psychic medium exists. Perhaps a form of energy that we have no knowledge of, and so we have no way of detecting, or studying. Or perhaps some sort of 'particle' pairing that enables reciprocal responses even when those particles are spacially separated. Or perhaps by some other means that we are as yet not even able to imagine.
There are mysteries all around us that we don't even notice because we don't even know to look for them. Or we just blindly assume they aren't there. Or we write off as "made up" because we can't understand how they could even be "real".
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Yerda
Veteran Member
Fair enough. How could we go about showing that the brain is causing/creating consciousness rather than just correlating with it?
Can you provide any examples of a mind existing without a brain? Use facts, not guesses.
Correlation refers to independent phenomenon. Minds are not independent of brains, but products of brains, which makes @1137 claim absurd. Let's see what answer is given for my question. My prediction: no examples. The member offered radios and radiowaves as an analogy, but really the analogy would be transmitter and radiowaves. Break the transmitter and the radiowaves end. Kill a brain and the mind ceases.
Ostronomos
Well-Known Member
Ah, you have a strong argument for the limitlessness of mind. And it's expansion beyond the skull.