lpetrich

I don't see what this has to do with theism, strictly speaking. There could be a deity or deities, and our minds could still be fundamentally physicalist, dying with the body, and sometimes before (Alzheimer's, etc.).

There is an example of that view right under the noses of many of us; the earlier parts of the Bible feature only a shadowy afterlife, if any at all.

And one way to get around the death-of-mind conundrum is to suppose a miraculous restoration and rebuilding of one's mind. This is not absolutely unprecedented, it must be said; according to some Hadiths (supposed sayings of Mohammed and the like), one will get a nice body in the Islamic Paradise, one that is in the state of being no more than 30 years old. And a miraculously-rebuilt mind is not that much different from a miraculously-rebuilt body.

crocodile deathroll

Could the soul be a top down process and the mind a bottom up process?
In the case of the emergence of the self, I have a theory that a form of top down processing is at work
A top down process the makes us possible to be born at all in the first place, because initially you are at one with all neural matter at its most primitive phase, like the collective principle of all fetal neural matter past present and future then repeated dichotomies and the bottom up processing of one one randomly selected brain gives you the illusion that this is the person you ever be, simply because it looks this way just like the Earth is flat because it looks that way.

With Alzheimer's this bottom up process of mind totally unravels and you ever forget that you have ever been born in the first place, which begs the question how was it possible for you born in the first place?.

I do think Alzheimer's has extremely serious implications of Christian eschatology, because if you forget that you were ever born, then how can you remember your sins. Let alone being in a position of being punished for them.

croc

[ August 21, 2002: Message edited by: crocodile deathroll ]</p>

Coleman Smith

lpetrich IIDB Regular Member # 492 said'As others have also noted, Alzheimer's Disease and diseases with similar effects pose an interesting quandary for the hypothesis of mind-body dualism. This is the hypothesis that the mind/consciousness/soul/spirit is composed of a different stuff than the body, which hosts it as long as the body is alive. When the body dies, the mind will depart from the body, either to live in some other realm or else to look for another body to inhabit.

Changes in personality can be induced chemically indicating a relationship between the chemistry of the brain and the personality. Chemical imbalance is implicated in bipolar personality disorders, schizophrenia and other mental diseases.

There is also empirical evidence that perception can be physically manipulated by surgeons on awake patients during brain surgery further suggesting that the mind is a function of the brain.

I do not understand how duelist accounts for the accretion of attributes of the so-called soul.

If it mirrors the mind then presumably a sick mind would produce a sick soul.

However, once you introduce the magic of theism any thing is possible, but nothing is provable.

Coleman Smith

[ August 21, 2002: Message edited by: Coleman Smith ]</p>

crocodile deathroll

If I showed you an image of a human brain and subtitled it "This is the human brain" and then have another image of the Empire State Building and subtitle that "This it the skyscraper". Can the Empire State building be a representative sample of all skyscrapers like a single healthy human brain be a representative same of all human brains?

Unlike the human brain, skyscrapers do no follow a general pattern, they come in all shape and sizes. But there is a general genetically encoded pattern for the human brain, which is why the human brain look so different to that of a rat, and my theory is it is this pattern you one become one with after overly advanced Alzheimer's or death. With Alzheimer's stripping away all your preexisting bottom up processing, you will once again become one with this pattern and the information processes that booted your sense of self into existence may well be become paralleled by another brain via a Gestalt Switching mechanism. From then on all the hard work of bottom up processing will start all over again an give the same illusion as last time that it is one life existence.

I take a more functionalist viewpoint and as so believe we exist by virtue of the functioning of the human brain and its information processing and not the physical material of the brain itself. If you were purely the material of the brain itself then will never fall into periods of unconsciousness at any stage during out lives.

croc

[ August 22, 2002: Message edited by: crocodile deathroll ]</p>

Hobbs

That, I think, is the problem right there: considering the mind to be a 'thing'. A brain is a thing, a mind is an activity that a particular brain performs. 'Mind' is an activity, a verb.

I've heard dualists argue for their position that the mind is something distinct from the brain, and some non-physical entity of some sort, by asking such things as "how long is a thought?" and "what is the boiling point of a thought?"

I responded by saying that a thought is as long as you think it, and that its boiling point is the same as the boiling point of a baseball game. Thought, like a baseball game, is real: it is a real activity. But it couldn't be done without an actor: neurons, synapses, and the like in the one case, players, coaches, and umpires in the other. Is a baseball game composed of different stuff than the players etc? Likewise, a society is real, but what is it other than a bunch of people interacting? They really are interacting, and the interactions really have real effects on those people involved, but does that make 'society' some non-physical 'thing'? Thoughts and societies are no more "epiphenomenal" than a World Series game. (I've seen a few phenomenal World Series games, and heard of a few phenomenal thoughts, but I'm not sure what an epiphenomenal game or thought would be; I guess I just wouldn't be able to recognize one if I saw it.)

RogerLeeCooke

The dualistic interactionist is merely playing with words, like the Aristotelian who thinks there is a thing called "substance" that exists independently of "accidents," like a baseball team that exists but doesn't have any players. Indeed, the concept of "mind" amounts to an attempt to resurrect "substance" in this context.

Hobbs

I don't know, it's looking like in a week or so we will have a lot of those around.

(Sorry for the interruption; you may now return to your regularly scheduled discussion.)

Plump-DJ

My own thoughts. I've thought a little bit about this mind/body dualism myself and it occured to me that the problem's often arise because matter is given such a large piece of the ontological pie, rather then the other way around.

In otherwords matter may in fact be a metaphysical abstraction of some sort, ala George Berkeley. (who did away with matter with a flick of Occies Razor)

In "The Matter Myth" (a book about QM) Paul Davies concludes that Descartes was right to be chided for his ghost in the machine, not because there is no ghost but because there is no machine. And this really made me think about the whole dualism thing. Maybe matter doesn't have as much substance as we think, perhaps it's simply an abstraction of some deeper reality.

I wonder if that makes "dualism" more palatable because matter isn't really the "real stuff" as it were.

[ August 27, 2002: Message edited by: Plump-DJ ]</p>

crocodile deathroll

My sentiments exactly, there is really no ghost in the machine because there is no machine, and it is the configuration of matter and not the matter itself the bestows our individual identity. If we were to totally strip the baggage of memory away in the same manner as Alzheimer's then we may then be collectively all the one entity, because matter at its most fundamental level is homogenous.

However, matter still really matters because I cannot possibly imagine consciousness or a soul existing out there in an empty vacuum. I posit therefore that the "soul" is a cooperation between matter and a critical level of complexity, but complexity in a strictly abstract and a mathematical sense.

Another point I like to drive home is, if you imagine a prominent neurologist like Susan Greenfield making an interesting discovery about the working of the human brain by say "studying how neurons grow in a petri dish" then she is also discovering something she previously did not know before about the workings of her own brain. So the properties of each and every one of our brains spills into each other, and there are no well defined boundaries.

croc

lpetrich

What strange topic drift -- to the viewpoint that the external world is nothing but a Matrix-like hallucination.