Materialism

I suppose you do like your own position.What you are calling your point is just an assertion, and the closest you've come to defending it is putting up some analogies, at least one of which you say you don't like anymore.What you are doing is not much of an argument. You are just stating your position.We all seem to agree that the mind and brain are tied closely together, but obviously we disagree about the nature of the tie. What is the most persuasive argument you have for your model? Is there some situation in which the difference manifests itself in some sharp way?

The "assertions" are observations that any rational person ought to be able to confirm with half a minute's consideration. Guess it isn't going to happen here but it should. Have a great day.

Please describe one of these observations.

"The medium is the message."
-- Marshall McLuhan

quote:

---

The "assertions" are observations that any rational person ought to be able to confirm with half a minute's consideration.

---

Please explain how to confirm them if it's so easy.

Well, this picture of what's going on seems to raise some questions (apart from "do you have a shred of evidence", of course, we'll come back to that one).For it would seem that when we combine this model with what we know about brain damage, my mind doesn't actually know anything. It has no memories, it can't understand English, let alone read or write, it cannot identify commonplace household objects or their uses, it can't recognize faces or remember names ...But, you say, if someone has a normal brain, then the mind has access to these faculties as it chooses. But what's puzzling me is on what basis could it possibly choose?By analogy, if I knew how to read and write, but nothing else, and I was set down in the British Library and allowed to read any book I liked, what are my chances of forming a coherent picture of the world? How would I know which books to read? Suppose I start with Alice In Wonderland, or spend my whole time reading the books on the art of macrame. Now suppose me to have no long-term memory, so that I have to build up this picture of the world by taking notes as I go along ... You see, a library is only useful if I know quite a lot of stuff to start with.Now consider the analogous behavior of the mind in your model. Suppose the sofa in the corner of the room catches fire. What my mind needs to do is look up in my brain certain important facts about fire, how it spreads, what happens if I get some on me. But it doesn't know that these are the important facts before it looks them up. For all my mind knows, it might as well look up the history of sofas or the Italian word for "haddock" or the lyrics to Does Your Chewing-Gum Lose Its Flavor On The Bedpost Overnight. This would be impractical --- and also it is clearly not what's going on.

I'm not sure how much of what you say here I agree with, but I did give up on my own post that you are responding to, because I realized I really don't believe the mind remains intact when the brain is damaged; we are a mind-body unity as long as we are in the body. Although I do think some of the experiences of accurate perception during temporary cessation of heart action are probably real. It can occur even without the near-death experience. A person I know, in a normal state of mind, not through any special experiences, trauma or meditations or that sort of thing that might provoke it, described hovering above her body and looking down at her feet on the bed during what might have been a dreamlike state, but that's an unusual dream if it was a dream. I don't have any reason to doubt people when they describe such things myself, although you may feel you do. I've also had people describe to me seeing angels and demons during ordinary waking states, and have no reason to doubt them either. I don't think that's quite what I said. I assume stored experience and the person/mind/soul is always limited by what it knows, has learned or experienced, but to whatever degree it has been acquired, all that is available to the normal mind with a normal brain, however that occurs in normal experience. I was only trying to say something about the relation between mind and brain without reference to any particular history, just "normal" history whatever it might be for a particular person.The point remains that mind is nonmaterial and brain is material, entirely different things though intimately connected, and simultaneously active, and connected I believe as driver is to vehicle. How all this comes about or how much experience is involved in any particular case, is another subject, I'm really not at all sure what you are trying to say here or how it relates to what I was saying. I might quibble with your statement that your mind looks things up in your brain, though, since if it can be said to go through an action describable as looking something up which I think is doubtful anyway, it looks things up in memory which is a function of mind, the brain, again, acting merely as material housing that makes it possible in a material world. As far as the incident you describe goes, whatever knowledge the person already has about fires should be readily available to the mind through memory. One might have to stop and think a bit about the best method for escaping it or putting it out of course, or in most cases the mind will just say "run" anyway, and that should do it, a body with normal ability to run having no problem translating the message from the mind for the purpose. Through the brain, no doubt, but it's the mind that creates the message.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I cannot, but that's not the same as saying it is impossible to do this in principle. The latter is not proven, but might be true. We can certainly infer mental states from studying the brain, to the point where we can tell before a test participant when they decided to press a button (see: Benjamin Libet, Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action, THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1985) 8, 529-566 :

quote:

---

Voluntary acts are preceded by electrophysiological "readiness potentials " (RPs) . With spontaneous acts involving no preplanning , the main negative RP shift begin sat abou t -550 ms . Such RP' s were used to indicate the minimum onset times for the cerebral activity that precedes a fully endogenous voluntary act . The time of conscious intention to act was obtained from the subject's recall of the spatial clock position o f a revolving spot at the time of his initial awareness of intending or wanting to move (W) . W occurred at about -200 ms... For spontaneous voluntary acts , RP onset preceded the uncorrected W s by about 350 ms and the W s corrected for S by about 400 ms . The direction of this difference was consistent and significant throughout , regardless of which of several measures of RP onset or W were used . It was concluded that cerebral initiation of a spontaneous voluntary act begins unconsciously.

---

There are other examples of the brain showing activity for a decision is consciously made. Soon, Chun Siong; Brass, Marcel; Heinze, Hans-Jochen; Haynes, John-Dylan (2008). "Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain". Nature Neuroscience said they were able to predict with 60% accuracy which 50/50 choice a participant would make, up to 10 seconds before they had consciously reached a decision (the decision was to press a button with their left or right hand. A position held by a minority of philosophers. The people that study the brain and the mind, neuroscientists and psychologists, disagree with this assessment. I've read some of their papers and books and it seems clear they have a compelling case, which is why they hold the consensus these days, presumably.The dualists? I just see speculation from them. some of it is very interesting speculation, granted, but it's not persuasive speculation. They're still going crazy trying to explain the fundamental mechanisms. There are three schools of thought, I believe, over-simplified here: 1) The immaterial mind interacts with the brain, the brain interacts with the mind (traditional Cartesian view) 2) The material world interacts with the material brain, which interacts with the immaterial mind {the mind does not cause behaviour}. 3) There is no interaction, it just seems like there is.All of them postulate entities, which I have never seen a proper theory for let alone supporting evidence of. 1) and 2) and 3) require an immaterial mind or soul. 1) and 2) also involve a second entity: a medium of interaction between the material and the immaterial: an interface. Finally 3) basically requires a god as its second entity. I agree: but I say the mind is a process that takes place in a material medium rather than a thing that exists without matter. Well, the mind is thoughts, and the brain is the instantiation of or physical medium for this.

quote:

---

Neuroimaging studies have used classic moral dilemmas to identify the neural circuitry underlying moral decision-making in healthy individuals, but it is unknown how this circuit functions in immoral, psychopathic individuals. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we find that more psychopathic individuals show reduced activity in the amygdala during emotional moral decision-making, with particularly conning and manipulative individuals showing reduced activity in the entire moral neural circuit. These results provide initial evidence that psychopaths exhibit deficits in brain regions essential for moral judgment in normal individuals.

---

Molecular Psychiatry (2009) 14, 5—6; The neural correlates of moral decision-making in psychopathy, A L Glenn, A Raine and R A SchugWhat do you propose the amygdala is doing? Is it the mind that has no empathy and is not stimulating the amygdala as much? or is the mind healthy and good but the amygdala is a broken radio part and this results in a seeming lack of empathy, glib and superficial charm and a desire to exploit others for their own end, with a streak of sadism thrown in here and there? Maybe your foot is analogous to nerve signals being sent to towards the kidney and activating the accelerator/adrenaline glands, releasing fuel/adrenaline into the system causing it to react by accelerating/running away. The mind is part of the thing the engine is doing and when that fuel hits the engine it becomes excited, and this excitation leads to other parts of the engine to send signals and energy to the wheels to get out of there quick. The homunculus here makes a simple translation difficult.Do cows have immaterial minds? It is undisputed that they have mental processes, so this shows that this isn't beyond the capacities of a brain.In any event, if we propose a mind that is not something that the brain does, but is separate from it we are entering into the territory of rank speculation. We can't see this entity, or detect it in any way. We can't see how information arrives from it to the brain, and there is nothing in the brain that suggests a line of communication to a non-accounted for external source. Maybe it's like this, or maybe it's like the other way. For thousands of years and we're no better off than when we started the speculation. We just have books and books of ideas and suggestions and thought experiments and so on and really all that's changed is style and trends of discourse.On the other hand Psychology as a discipline can be said to have started in 1879 with William Wundt. Once the study had gone from speculative philosophy to a more empirical approach, actual progress was seen very quickly. Despite the huge amount of progress in understanding the mind and the brain, no evidence of dualism has appeared.

The paltry things that can supposedly be known about mind through study of the brain aren't even worth mentioning. Mind is far more than trivial voluntary actions, and the far more is what I'm talking about. When you are talking about actions you are always involving the body anyway, and that says nothing in answer to my point that it is always mind that initiates them.Also I've tried to make it clear that I'm not arguing at this point for physical separation of mind and brain, all I'm arguing is that they are entirely different things though intimately connected. You agree that mind is nonmaterial, hooray. Brain is of course material. So far so good. In fact that's all I really care to say here. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I doubt that any of the participants would disagree with this statement. I certainly don't.

quote:

---

Also I've tried to make it clear that I'm not arguing at this point for physical separation of mind and brain, all I'm arguing is that they are entirely different things though intimately connected

---

"Asserting" would be more accurate than "arguing" at this point.But no, they clearly aren't completely different things. The brain is too deeply involved in the mind for them to even be considered separate things.

Glad to hear it, that's two now. And you two treat it as something that you can just observe and assess as I do too.But read the next post. PaulK disagrees and if you go back up thread, so does Dr. A. I've given my view, I'm glad you and Mod agree with me, though of course you could yet change your minds I suppose, but in any case I've said all I want to say on the subject.

The mind is a function of the brain's operation. It is not separable from the brain in any way. It is no more separable than a punch is separable from fists. Yet a punch and a fist are two different things. Even after reading PaulK's response, I don't see much more than semantics in his disagreement.In the course of discussing the mind, it is conventional to characterize it non physical terms. But is that convention anything more than just language usage? I think not. That is the point we are asking you to support.More to the point, there is absolutely no evidence of anything non-materialistic about the mind's operation. Personality, memory, intellect, are all affected by brain injury and disruption in brain function. If there is some way to show that there is some separate, non-materialistic entity that operates the brain, you haven't managed to show any observation that demonstrates that. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Well, there's a nice bald unsupported assertion for you, sheer assumption.

It is an assertion yes, but not one I intended to prove. I did not want to leave the impression that you and I were in agreement.But I think we can verify that mental activity is attached to brain activity even if we cannot decode that activity. We know what areas of the brain are involved in different types of reasoning, in processing sensory input, in motor activity, in memory and recall. We know the effects of removing some portions of the brain and on severing communication between portions of the brain. That is at least some evidence for the my assertion. You are not able to cite any evidence at all for your position.Further, you don't seem to be able to describe any phenomena that would show some separate functioning. When I ask you to do so you respond with 'have a nice day'. Or say things like 'any rational person out to agree with me'.Can you cite any activity of the mind that you know or suspect does not use the brain at all? If you could do that, you'd at least have some real reason to complain that others don't see what you see. But you cannot.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.