Kharakov

Doesn't it seem likely that the brain is the creation of the mind since the mind is what percieves the brain?

Kharakov

So would you say that even if matter is only an idea the mind uses in order to interpret and manipulate itself- that it is a material.

I am saying that the material that a rock is made of does not exist anywhere but within the mind. When our attention is not focused upon the rock, the rock can still go through the motions of being a rock because the mind keeps going even when we aren't paying attention to every little detail of the mind.

Bookman

<amateur>If your point is that the image or idea of the brain is the product of the mind, well then sure. But it certainly seems to me that the explanation that there is something material there, not created by perception is simpler than any alternative I can conceive of.

To invoke metaphor, would you be willing to say: "The grand canyon is a creation of the camera because the camera is what photographs the grand canyon"? I certainly wouldn't. However, I'm more than willing to give the camera credit for creating the picture of the grand canyon. </amateur>

Bookman

Francois Tremblay

Well of course if one rejects the objectivity of reality, anything can be made of anything. But that's meaningless. I'm talking about the real world, not fantasy.

[ February 01, 2002: Message edited by: Franc28 ]</p>

theophilus

Although the argument may be poorly stated, its distilled argument is unassailable, viz, "matter can impart no knowledge; unless the "mind" has some transcendent quality, i.e., supra-material, then the mind can have no knwoeldge."

theophilus

Dialectic philosophy, of any stripe, is self-referentially incoherent and, therefore, self-destructs.
If it is true, it is false.
Too bad.

Eudaimonist

I'm no Marxist, but I'd like to hear what you mean by "dialectic philosophy" and why you think it is "self-referentially incoherent".

xoc

Positive evidence as you define it is a priori material, or material evidence. This puts "materialism" on the front burner to start because whatever is to be measured is measured by materialistic objects and related only to material things. But the typology, the consciousness, the sense of the individual etc. are not readily reduced to simple brain patterns. The "Socratic" soul is distinguished from the conscious individual we know now because things like the appetitive desires, the passions etc. are stripped away and only an essence is left. The Pauline "new man" or resurrected man(with the glorified body) is in a sense similar in that there remains a continuation of the individual but there is now the loss of the sinful nature, which in this body/life is a nature that runs throughout all of man's conscious faculties as a kind of widespread mange. The first follows a path similar to "reincarnation" (migration of soul to a different body and consciousness, a temporal hell for some and eternal hell for few in the meantime) while the second follows the soul to a "remade" body, sans the previous problems. Not that this is a proof.

What I consider a primary proof "dualism" is the inability to assert the mind in purely physical terms. The thinking man is different qualitatively than the inanimate object, or a substance of motion like a wind. His logical conception of things is not directly equivelent to his brain waves, although there is a correlation. Basically it could be seen as an abstract, or the abstract level of being. That allows the leap of communication. The bumps on a CD allow for a message to be put upon it and "translated" by computers and then to be understood by us. It is not the "bumps" that make the message; these bumps can only produce apparent meaning once they are put in a logical framework of a code of interpretation, that meaningless physical states have been injected with meaning to convey the abstract message. Physical media are the conductors of "intelligence", but it is symbolic. A picture of a 3-D box is a symbol of a greater-dimensional object upon a lesser-dimensional medium. The intelligence of a person represents(or can/should) be represented as another dimension as the mere physical actions of the brain are not the abstract ideas themselves but the interaction or symbolic representation with the physical.

One way to put this could be that "Meaning is not inherent in the physical itself" but it's claim to us that it exists and is important is enough for us to believe it exists as either a) apart or b) distinct from the purely physical.

On a side note, while the ability of neurologists to "hit" a certain part of the brain and produce an association in the subject is interesting, there are some greater challenges. This arrangement of subject-environment (the subject's apprehension of the environment) causes a sense of change of environment; what could as easily be done by actually "changing" the environment. But it is not as easy to change the "identity" of the subject, or his consciousness of his self, as it is to change the consciousness of his environment. It is the thread of the "individual being" distinct from mere physical reactions that I find most important, which is the harder thing to reduce than a particular "sense" or "feeling" that is transmitted to the individual. Admittedly though those kinds of experiments, if possible, are less likely to be done because of their ethical significance.

Francois Tremblay

To prove that would at best show that scientific inquiry in the question is not developed. That's not evidence. Like Creationists, anti-materialists can't develop any kind of evidence on their own, so they have to fall back on nitpicking.

excreationist

Well I wouldn't call 100 billion neurons each connected to about 10,000 others "simple". Though it can be described in a certain amount of detail in the same way that weather or the internet can be described to some degree.

What about if someone was asked to describe how Windows works in purely physical terms. They might say that it involves electron flow through the CPU and switching between magnetic poles on the hard-drive, etc. Does that person need to explain how Windows works in a purely physical way (on a molecular level)? If they are unable to do this, does this mean that computers are accessing a non-physical dimension? (like how brains access some mysterious non-physical dimension?)

Well is the logic in a computer or in the brain of an intelligent bee directly equivalent to the physical processes involved? If so, then why is the human brain different? Of course, the human brain is much more powerful than computers or bees, it is about 1000 times more powerful than the fastest computer in the world. (But it is very inefficient for doing maths)

Well I believe that meaning is inherent in the function or action of a system. If a system uses some information to count things then that's what the meaning is. It is related to how the information is applied and its purpose. I don't believe in Idealism which consists of a static world of ideas. For information to have any meaning it has to be used and part of a system - like a machine. We only get information to serve some purpose and we attach it onto our already learnt information and can use it later.

No, it is about neurons being electrically stimulated. Certain parts can consistently trigger intensely vivid memories - the same identical memories when the same neuron is stimulated. When neurons are triggered strongly I think their information is sent to the short term memory, where "we" become aware of that recalled long term memory.