Lekatt

Let me just give you a quick outline of your questions and if you are really interested there is a lot of links and material to back them up.

You are created in the spiritual world and after a while you may want to come into the physical for accelerated learning in a linear environment.

So you pick your parents and wait until the baby is born. At birth or slightly before you enter the tiny body, much too small for all your energy so some will have to remain close but outside. Now, your task is to learn to animate the body as it grows. Using the brain as an interface you must learn to move the limbs and torso as well as learn to speak in the language learned from your parents. This takes a great deal of time, many years to accomplish.

When we drink a poison such as alcohol it causes damage to brain cells which is the interface used by you (spirit) so your control of the body is no longer as good as it could be depending on how much you drink.

If the interface (brain) receives permanent damage whatever function that was controlled at that point can no longer work. But spirit can move that function to another part of the brain and through the same kind of training as before restore at least part of that function.

As the body ages it loses the brain like the rest of the body loses some of its ability to act as an interface to spirit. At death you return to the spirit world.

Well that is the beginning.......

badger3k

WTF?

Seriously. What does that even mean - you are created in a spiritual world? What does a linear environment mean? Why should our learning be accelerated in a physical environment, when we are going to end up in that spiritual world anyway - assuming it is not linear, how does our living in this world prepare us for that - do I prepare for free fall in orbit by going spelunking? No, you go to an environment that is similar but safer (such as water tanks or the "vomit comet").

Since you say "you may want" to come to reality (my words), that must mean that there are others that do not want to come into our world. It also implies that you are intelligent "energy" (I assume you are not using the real definition of this - the capacity to do work - but are using the nebulous concept that most people think of).

Since we choose our parents, then some people must choose drug users, abusive parents, child molesters, underage mothers, aids and syphilis victims, poor and starving parents, and the like - this seems like the "blame the victim" mentality of the like of "The Secret" and many religions. Is this energy not intelligent enough to know good parents from bad?

Since there is not enough room in an infants brain for this thought energy, does this mean that intelligence is correlated to brain size? Can a smaller, more active brain hold more energy than a larger, less active one? If this energy is related to the size (or even the development of the brain), then it should in some way be measurable, no?

Now, if it takes some time for us to learn to use the interface properly, it seems to me that we should progress at an accelerated rate once the basics are mastered. There are people that can master the interface of video games within days - shouldn't the situation be one of which we have seen in movies - the alien takes over, it is jerky and whatnot, and once it has adapted, it can use it's full capacities - to speak and all. Why does it take so long for the thought energy to adapt (and in some cases, it seems to never adapt). Why does this thought energy have no memory of the (no?-)-time it spent before it wanted this "accelerated learning"?

Assuming this is your theory, how can we test it?

modernPrimitive

I would propose that you be skeptical of the claim that consciousness arises from matter primarily becaue this is based on the unnecessary and unparsimonius assumption that matter is separate and independant from our perception and cognition of matter. (which is unfalsifiable / unproveable).

This does not however indicate that we require a so-called "supernatural" metaphysic in place of the physicalist metaphysic just that we do not make unecessary assumptions about reality.

Moreover, what is completely insane about the physicalist hypothesis is this:

It claims that there is a world of matter independant of our perception and cognition.
Given this notion it values objectivity over subjectivity because objectivity implies that we move towards a noumenal knowledge of reality. It values noumenal knowledge above phenomemal knowledge becasue it attempts to remove the subjective component implicit in all knowledge.

However the absurd thing is that it does not value noumenal knowledge of our own consciousness - the only thing that we can possibly have noumenal knowledge of in the first place!

Therefore the answer to your question can only be to explore your own mind to fullest extent possible.

LeoM

Read this epiphenomenalism belief is that mental events have no effect on physical events

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epiphenomenalism/

NumberTenOx

OK, I take it back, we're far apart. I'll let badger3k take up the guantlet you've thrown.

NumberTenOx

Thank you for that entry. Clearly I'm out of my depth here.

However, in reading through that, I reject dualism. There is no difference between the mind and the brain, or rather, our experience with consciousness is an illusion formed by the workings of our brains.

In looking at someone else, I would expect that ultimately (ignoring quantum effects) I would be able to exactly understand their actions - including communicated thoughts - with a complete model of the workings of their brain. (I know that there has been some discussion of our brains working as quantum computers at the lowest levels, but I'd respond that if so, that just provides the processing power needed to run the program of "us" and not an intrinsic requirement to the phenomenon of consciousness.)

What we experience as consciousness - the sense of self-awareness and of being separate from our physical selves - is a result of the fabulously complex and continuous model that our physical brains make of the world we live in and our place in it. When I say "I think move my arm and my arm moves", I mean that the part of my brain responsible for modeling "me" runs a simulation of my arm moving in my current environment and determines that the outcome is good, so sends the set of commands to the part of my brain responsible for arm movement. There is no dualism: it starts in the material and ends in the material.

Certainly the experience of consciousness seems "different" somehow. We've been struggling with this issue for as long as we've been conscious. But it seems obvious that if you could make an exact simulation of me, either in a computer or a physical copy, that simulation would experience "consciousness" identical to mine.

Lekatt

I can't give you an education in spiritual things on a message board, and since I think you are skeptical I will provide a link that shows something about the spiritual world. You could also just pick one question at a time to ask.

http://www.aleroy.com/blog/

This is a video of near death experiences, if they peak your interest then we will continue.

LeoM

The evidence of mind affecting brain is very important

Schwartz provides a nonmaterialist interpretation of neuroscience and argues that this interpretation is more compelling than the standard materialist interpretation. He arrived at this position as a psychiatrist specializing in the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). OCD sufferers recognize obsessive-compulsive thoughts and urges as separate from their intrinsic selves. For instance, after a few washings, the compulsive hand-washer realizes that his hands are clean and yet feels driven to keep washing them. It was reflection on this difference between the obvious truth (the hands are clean) and the irrational doubts (they might still be dirty) that prompted Schwartz to reassess the philosophical underpinnings of neuroscience.
Schwartz had OCD patients engage in intensive mental effort through what he called relabeling, reattributing, refocusing, and revaluing (the 4 Rs). In the case of compulsive hand-washing, this involved a patient acknowledging that his hands were in fact clean (relabeling); attributing anxieties and doubts about his hands being dirty to a misfunctioning brain (reattributing); directing his thoughts and actions away from handwashing and toward productive ends (refocusing); and, lastly, understanding at a deep level the senselessness of OCD messages (revaluing).

Schwartz documents not only that patients who undertook this therapy experienced considerable relief from OCD symptoms, but also that their brain scans indicated a lasting realignment of brain-activity patterns. Thus, without any intervention directly affecting their brains, OCD patients were able to reorganize their brains by intentionally modifying their thoughts and behaviors. The important point for Schwartz here is not simply that modified thoughts and behaviors permanently altered patterns of brain activity, but that such modifications resulted from, as he calls it, “mindful attention”–conscious and purposive thoughts or actions in which the agent adopts the stance of a detached observer.


No one argues that the mind is entirely unconditioned by the brain (psychotropic drugs make this abundantly clear). The issue is whether the brain determines the mind without remainder. For conceptual acts like Schwartz’s “mindful attention” to permanently alter patterns of brain activity that otherwise would remain stuck is therefore exactly what one would expect if the mind transcends the brain and yet is capable of physical effects. To be sure, the materialist has counterarguments here. A popular one these days is to treat conscious will as an illusion–we think that we have acted deliberately toward some end, but in fact our brain acted on its own and then deceived us into thinking that we acted deliberately. There’s even a recent book making just that claim in its title: The Illusion of Conscious Will by Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner.

Schwartz effectively engages this literature, especially the experiments by Benjamin Libet, which usually get interpreted as supporting the materialist view that conscious will is an illusion. Schwartz shows how these experiments are in fact better interpreted as leaving room for conscious will–and, indeed, a thoroughly libertarian free will. In this respect, Schwartz’s discussion of free will as “free won’t” (namely, the idea that free will consists in the ability to rule out possibilities) is deeply illuminating. It calls to mind the Judeo-Christian idea that creation does not add to God but rather subtracts from God: in the act of creation God rules out those worlds that are not actualized. The idea of ruling out possibilities is also the essence of the mathematical theory of information, in which information increases and possibilities get ruled out.



Schwartz devotes its middle half to summarizing the last twenty years of research on neuroplasticity. This research is very exciting, and Schwartz and Begley’s description of it is worth the price of the book. There is a long tradition in neuroscience that sees neural circuits as laid down early in life, after which they become entrenched and any subsequent disruption leads to irrevocable deficits. Reviewing research over the last twenty years, Schwartz shows that this view is false and that the brain remains plastic throughout life. A key implication is that conditions previously thought to be untreatable are in fact treatable. Thus Schwartz describes how neuroplasticity offers real hope to everyone from stroke victims to dyslexics.

For instance, 600,000 people in the United States suffer a stroke each year. Of these, a quarter die immediately and half are left seriously disabled. On the assumption that neural circuitry is hardwired early in life and thereafter fixed, there is no reason to think that stroke victims experiencing serious disabilities should see any marked improvement. Like a shattered piece of china whose beauty cannot be reconstructed, there would seem to be no way to recover brain function once it has been lost. But Schwartz shows that this view is erroneous. Granted, damaged portions of the brain may never recover. But undamaged portions may be “rezoned,” and functions previously assigned to the damaged portions may be “reallocated” to the rezoned portions.


This view of the brain has radical implications for treatment. If the brain as a matter of course loses plasticity early in life, then the proper counsel for seriously disabled stroke victims is resignation. But if the brain retains its plasticity throughout life, then the proper counsel is a therapy that will help rezone and reallocate portions of the brain.

What does all this have to do with materialism? If materialism is correct, then mentation is the product of brain processes (much as digestion is the product of stomach processes, to use an analogy proposed by the philosopher John Searle). But this would mean that even though the brain can readily affect the mind, there’s no sense in which the mind can affect the brain except by way of the brain. That is, top-down causation in which the mind affects the brain must invariably presuppose bottom-up causation of the brain first affecting the mind. And yet Schwartz clearly shows that a conceptual act with no clear physiological underpinnings (for instance, the conscious decision by an OCD sufferer to implement the 4-R therapy) can dramatically and lastingly alter patterns of brain activity. And in such cases, top-down causation seems to operate without prior bottom-up causation.

NumberTenOx

Ever had a dream, Lekatt? Are those "real experiences"? Your spirit leaving your body and tooling around the spirit world? Or just the musings of a complex mind with no input from the physical world?

Ever taken a hallucinogenic? Same questions.

NDE's are nothing more than dreams, or the workings of brains under extreme stress of some kind.

It's funny that the spirit world get's so caught up with the physical world, yet the physical world cannot detect the spirit world. Why is that?

{Sorry, said I wouldn't respond, couldn't help myself.}

NumberTenOx

I'm happy for OCD suffers and stroke victims. But I'm not surprised that the brain remains somewhat plastic throughout it's life, nor is that at odds with my view of materialism.

So we're young and our brains are growing; we still experience consciousness. We change our brains through "mindful attention" all the time! We pick a goal - learn a foreign language - then proceed with a series of exercises and thought patterns that result in part of our brain "rewiring itself" and voila! we speak French. You might say that perhaps the primary advantage of having a brain is that it can program itself.

Guilty, I did say that consciousness was an illusion. But to say we're then "deceived" is dualism again, that somehow consciousness "tags along" just observing our actions and thinking that somehow it's effecting them. Our consciousness is the action of our brains, not something separate. You're saying there's this one thing: a hard-wired deterministic physical machine, and this other thing: an illusion of a being with free will that's chained to the machine. That's wrong, the being is the machine. They share the same "free will" and "self determinism", whether those actually exist or not. The illusion is that they are separate.

OK, didn't explain that to well. I'll try again later. And thank you for your thorough well expressed responses.