Evolution is a basic, biological process

robinrohan, Glad to hear it.

Yes. Why is this a problem?The brain is a physical object. The brain assimulates information. The brain stores the information. The information can be distorted. The information can be corrupted. The information can be lost. The information can be forgotten. The brian can imagine things that are not representative of reality. The brain can certainly have illusions.
If you do not think that is so then how do magic tricks work? Or why does someone cross a intersection they swore was empty and then get hammered by a car? Why would someone think they are Joan of Arc? When was the last time you misplaced something only to find it right were you left it?Are you losing your mind? How did you lose it? Where did it go? If it does in fact exist then there should be some way to show evidence for it. Like Crashfrogs gravity, I can not touch gravity but the effects are undeniable. How about the mind? Does the mind hold up to the same scrutiny? I can not touch it, I can not feel it's affects either. How do I know the mind exist?Because it doesnt...it is a word. MIND= word not physical. If you have some evidence to support your claim that the mind is anything more than the manifestation of the brain then please provide the evidence. If you have evidence to support your claim that the brain does not manifest illusions simply because it is physical then show that evidence as well. Other wise you are simply stating that you do not agree which is fine but not evidence. And I know already how passionate you are about the mind. Is it the last bastion that keeps you from your personal pit of nihlism? Well sorry to rain on your parade but the mind is a terrible thing to waste, especially since it is nothing more than a description of the process of thought.

Robinrohan, Evolution doesn't exactly keep assumptions to a minimum...heh. But perhaps you mean when examining specific assertions...something I'm just learning to do. And you try not to keep bring more and more assertions into the argument (because, then you have to defend those, too). I actually went to some atheist website and learned some neat stuff about logic and logical fallacies as used in debates.I have debated Baptists often about their theology (with which I severely disagree on important topics such as what is required to be saved)...for all my disagreement with them Baptists do some awesome, in-depth Bible studies as well as studies of creationists' arguments; so I have taken to saying, "You can learn a lot from a Baptist"--meaning even though I disagree with them severely, I can learn much from them in the areas in which we do not disagree.Now that atheists are teaching me about good argumentation (and I don't disagree with atheists about good argumentation), well, I have to say, "You can learn a lot from an Atheist." I still severely disagree with them, of course. The nice thing about debating Baptists is that we both start from the assumption that the Bible is 100% true, and if we disagree, we need merely find a verse that supports our position more strongly or refutes the other's position. But, when discussing things with evolutionists, I find, that I must go learn this or that about biology or geology or chemistry....ugh.(and biology is REAL hard to understand for some unknown reason...heh heh...just kidding ). Yes, whenever I see the opportunity to take advantage of the weakness inherent in abiogenesis, I intend to at least try.The mind? Yes, I think that is extremely interesting. I disagree with 1.whatever. I rather see the brain as an interface between the mind and the body and the body as an interface between the brain and the environment. But that is a personal belief, for which I have no evidence. One curious thing is the paramecium I saw in tenth grade biology...it seemed to be making several decisions and some of them at once (which way to go?, how fast to go?, etc.). Mind you, the paramecium wasn't putting the finishing touches on quantum theory, but still, since it had no brain at all, I thought it was interacting with it's environment fairly efficiently. But that's just some cool musings of mine...not really debate material for this thread.

What do you think happened to everything that didn't need to survive? When you say that, what do you mean, exactly? How would you know if it's "still" a bacteria or not?Did it ever occur to you that the words we apply to certain species are just words, and that they don't describe any kind of inherent specific essence or something that an organism possesses?What makes a dog a dog? The fact that it is decended from dogs, not some kind of inherent dog-ness. And it might very well become a new kind of organism, one never before seen, yet still remain a dog. All those things are new information. In a word, yes. Is "appear" a different word than "parapet"? Don't those two words contain different "information"?Does that cease to be the case when I tell you that those words are anagrams; that is, when I mix up the letters of one, I get the other? If all I have is "appear", and then I duplicate and mix the dupe up and get "appear" and "parapet", don't I have information that I didn't have before? Because the genetic sequences that result are novel, and the proteins they generate may be novel, too.It's like you're asking "can letters be put together to form words? If they can, how do they do so?" Don't you see what a meaningless question this is?

Well, now, wait a minute. You've consistently criticized evolution for cleaving so closely to materialism and refusing to even entertain the possibility of the supernatural; now you say that evolution makes uncalled-for assumptions?Which is it? It can't be both ways.

To the OP, your topic is what frustrates me about die hard evolutionists. My biology 101 teacher at least admitted that evolution was a theory. When going over the origins of life according to the theory, he told us, "And from step 4 to 6, we don't know what happened."That was at MSU.I have a buddy that went to UT. He swore up and down that evolution was an established fact. His teachers taught him that.Now when I cornered one of my teachers, I asked him, "Did evolution happen."He said, "Without a doubt, yes. Evolution is change. Change has happened and is happening." He wouldn't elaborate as to whether or not species mutate into other species.So do you guys with PhDs intentionally attempt to run word circles around the young, impressionable minds? Or are you simply geared to be biased?

---

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?" And I said, "Here am I. Send me!" Isaiah 6:8
No webpage found at provided URL: www.1st-vets.us

Robin,If I may just have a stab at your problem:If someone says that "consciousness is an illusion", then they don't necessarily mean that consciousness doesn't exist. They could also mean that consciousness isn't what it seems. The illusion might be in our perception of the nature of consciousness.Most people have a strong feeling that their mind, their consciousness, or 'self', is some incorporeal entity, which they imagine to exist separate from the brain, yet somehow connected to it, and in control of it. We also have a hard time imagining not to exist as such after we die. We must somehow persist, is the feeling.I think that is what the illusion is about. It might be that this feeling of incorporeality is some sort of by-product of being conscious. If someone were to ask a conscious being: "What is it like to be conscious?", they might answer: "Well, it's like being incorporeal". It's what it feels like to be conscious, you might say.In fact, it's one of the few questions you can actually answer when asked what it's like to have a certain experience. When asked: "What is it like to smell the sea?", I think a lot of people would be lost for words to express this experience to someone else. But when asked about the experience of being conscious, the above might be a very adequate response, one which would convey the feeling remarkably well.There is still the problem of how this feeling arises, of course. Well, how about the following scenario: The brain is full of representations of things in its environment. It might have a respresentation of an apple, for instance. This might take the form of a convolution of interacting electrochemical states, distributed over different parts of the brain. Some parts might represent the greenness of the apple, others its roundness, yet others perhaps the anticipation of its taste. And there might be a part responsible for integrating these states into a coherent representation on a higher level of abstraction - of the apple as a whole.Now, the apple is really out there. The brain can look at it and map its representation of the apple to the physical thing itself, saying to itself: "This image of an apple is about that particular apple out there." The difficulty arises when the brain tries to map a representation of its own processes onto a real object, because there is no real object out there. A process is not an apple you can hold in your hand. It's something that happens, not something that is. But the brain may be so used to mapping that it tries nevertheless. Maybe what happens is that the brain recursively maps the representation of its own processess onto the very representation itself, thereby promoting the representation to object status. But the new object has no real world properties, such as a proper location the brain can pinpoint, or being made of stuff the brain can look at. And perhaps that is what creates this feeling of incorporeality.As I said, it's just a stab, nothing more.This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 01-05-2005 05:07 AM

---

We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

quote:

---

The brain THINKS it created a mind but the brain is mistaken?
The brain perceives (mistakenly) a mind?

---

I think thats a pretty fair description.IMO the starting position for understanding the brain is its basic fucntion, which is to coordinate inputs from the external environment and respond to them (or, to command responses to them, might be more precise). This implies that the brain must by dfault have an open channel to the external world - a perptual monitoring. Furthermore, in order to react reasonably to cuasality, the brain has to organise its inputs temporally even if they are perceived in different media.The sense of self that we have that carries over from moment to moment is an accidental consequence of the engineering requirements of this sensory system, a system that is "always on" and "alway monitoring".

The language of science is often confusing and/or unintelligible to non-scientists. This is not, as you implied, an attempt to obfuscate or blow smoke. The terminology used by scientists is a shorthand that is designed to facilitate communication between scientists in the same field. Since specialists share a common framework, it makes sense to assume the person to whom you're talking understands the basic concepts. However, this also means that it can be opaque to non-scientists. This is one of the biggest failings of modern science: it's so specialized and so esoteric that explaining what they're talking about to the average person is problematic. Teachers - even college professors - are not always better at it, either.However, discussion boards like this one are excellent places to ask questions and get clarification of what you don't understand. Most of us are willing to explain in detail and understandably the areas of science we're most familiar with or passionate about. For example, you say: Guess what? S/he was right. This is an example where the terminology of science has a completely different meaning from the definition used colloquially. A scientific theory is a collection of explanations that unifies a whopping number of observations. It has been tested six ways from Sunday, and has always passed. In addition, most often a scientific theory has spawned innumerable new lines of investigation, and often whole new sciences. It is about as unshakeable as it gets. However, it can be overturned as new evidence or new technologies are uncovered. Understand though that to overturn a scientific theory, the new idea MUST be able to not only answer all the questions and explan all the observations of the old theory, but also to answer questions that the old theory did not. This is why you most often hear that a theory has been modified, rather than discarded. What they mean by modified is that one or more of the underlying explanations has been changed or discarded - not that the theory as a whole is invalid or needs to be scrapped. See the difference? and And again, your buddy and your teacher were both correct. The "fact" of evolution is that species change over time. Moreover, new species arise, others go exinct (the complex, detailed evidence for this needs to be addressed in a separate thread). Some of the explanations for this fact, globally contained in the Theory of Evolution, may or may not be accurate - and have been subject to many modifications over the years. Thus we have a double confusion here: evolution is both a fact (the observations) and a theory (the explanations) which coupled with the common misunderstanding of the scientific use of the term "theory" leads to confusion. Hope this explanation helps. Probably for lack of time. This is a very complex subject, and one again that needs to be more fully addressed in another thread. It's not something that can be answered successfully in a one-line verbal response. You'll have to forgive your teacher for not elaborating. However, for the time being I'll give you the gist.In the first place species don't "mutate" (this term is another one that has a very specific meaning in science and is thus inapplicable in this context). Species can split, slowly change internally, or remain the same.In a split, there is some barrier (geographic, genetic, behavioral, etc) that arises between two different groups (called populations) of a species. Since the barriers (whatever they are) prevent mixing of the gene pool between the populations, and since each new population is subject to new environmental factors that don't effect the other, gradually the two populations diverge to the point where scientists state that the populations represent different species. This takes a looooooong time in most organisms. We have observed it in short-generation-time species of insects, bacteria, algae, etc. It's a bit harder to detect in "higher" organisms because of the time required. You have to have recourse to other sciences (like biogeography, ecology, geology, paleontology, etc) to see the lines of evidence that allow us to conclude speciation in higher organisms is the same as speciation in the lab. Again, the details should be covered in another thread.A slow divergeance, where a species changes into another species, is only detectable in the fossil record. It takes geological time scales for this type of phyletic evolution ("phyletic" means "within a lineage") to happen. This was what Darwin thought was what happened, btw. There are a couple of points worth mentioning:1. It's only observable in a few, mostly marine, species (like trilobites, foraminiferans, and ammonites) where an exceptionally good (read: unbroken) sequence of fossils exists.2. It's often pretty arbitrary where scientists draw the line between species in this type of evolution. At some point, a decision is made by concensus that more recent versions of Species A are now different enough from the original type to state they are Species B. Obviously we can't use the biological species concept (reproductive isolation) here - it's based entirely on morphology (what the critter looked like).3. One of Darwin's original ideas - that more recent species "replaced" older species through competition - has been shown to be wrong. The old idea of orthogenesis (speciation in a linear fashion from one to the next) is invalid. He wasn't wrong that this type of evolution occurred - just that the parent isn't always replaced by the offspring. Sometimes they co-exist for a long time.Sometimes, evolution is a conservative process. Some species or lineages remain relatively unchanged for a really long time. This is called stasis, and again is only observable in the fossil record. A new way of looking at stasis was proposed under the name punctuated equilibrium. The jury is still out on whether that new idea is completely valid and should be incorporated whole cloth into the ToE. However, it doesn't change the theory - it's neither a new idea nor a revolutionary one, in spite of the hype to the contrary. PE attempts to explain a pattern observed in the record, and is essentially a subset of the ToE, rather than a new theory.Hope this helps a bit.

perhaps the "mind" is also a curvature in space-time caused by the electrical activity ... more activity, more curvature

illusion could just be a loose connection ... or a short-circuit through muddy waters.

---

we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

Not bad... You posed some reasonable questions. I'll let the others have some fun with them. I'm interested to see if Tal responds to my most recent post on the thread.

Hello, this is (l. whatever) I do not suppose you know the Golden ratio Phi so I wont hold that against you. I do not suppose you approximate your check book balance to one significant digit either. Since my views are held in contempt I can understand wanting to bastardize my chosen screen name in a feable attempt to show contempt. I think thats funny, immature, juvenile, but funny non the less. You see the brain as a interface between the mind and body? Then what happens if the brain ceases to function? What does the mind do? Take a vaction in the lungs? Or perhaps it just hangs around the Cerebellum knitting a sweater. Or What happens if the brian is damaged? does the mind suffer damage too? How can something that is non corporal be damaged? Unless the mind is simply data. I keep asking proponents of this kind of 'beliefs' this same questions and get no answers. Why? Perhaps because it is easier to suggest ignorant claims than it is to support them?

---

"One is punished most for ones virtues" Fredrick Neitzche

Or.....simply "a bad bit of something I ate...there is more gravy to you than the grave." Scrooge "A Christmas Carol"

Great post, Parasomnium. A very original way of approaching the problem.I have to study your post more carefully before I respond fully.And you are right in calling it "my problem." I really wasn't trying to argue a particular position--just to introduce a problem in TOE that I have and nobody else may have.