Deputy42

wtym-
the answer to your question lies in the nt.
everyone knows jesus died on the cross and was buried. after jesus was entombed mary his mother and mary magdalene went to the tomb to annoint his body with oil. when they got there the stone covering the entrance had been pushed aside and jesus wasn't there. mark 16 in luke 24:36 we see jesus appearing to his disciples. they think he's a ghost and he says in verse 38 "why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? look at my hands and my feet; see that it is i myself. thouch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you se that i have" clearly jesus had been resurrected in FLESH AND BONES. the last part of the answer lies in Romans 6:5 "For if we have neen united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his" heaven should be a rocking place to chill out with your body and spirit and god and jesus and a whole bunch of cool people.

Tercel

I believe you.

Time for the radio analogy. A radio recieves an external influence (the electromagnetic signals aka radio waves) and uses that to produce physical sound. What happens if you damage a radio or otherwise "operate" on it? It has a tendency to cause changes in the radios performance which include anything from tone changes, decreased volume or the radio going kaput. Therefore we can conclude that there is no external invisible influence or "signal" affecting the radio and the entire thing must simply be based on the complex electronics inside the radio... right?
Or so one would conclude using the same logic being attempted here to disprove mind/body dualism. I think the reader should be able to work out, given the radio analogy, why such logic is faulty.

What "evidence" am I supposed to produce? The conciousness probably acts through the brain on a quantum level. If you could give me a quantum scan of a brain then you could test my beliefs by analysing whether the quantum indeterministic functions occured with the normal probabilities or whether they occured erratically in the brain. Since our technology is not that good, empirical evidence would appear to be out of the question so any evidence I give would have to be philosophical. I outlined in my first post my philosophical reasons for dualism. The mind is self-aware, matter is not, therefore the mind is more than lots of matter. You can argue that self-awareness is an illusion or that matter is really self-aware or you could try to hand-wave away the obvious differences between self-awareness and non-self-awareness: But I don't find any of those impressive.

Probably their brains. According to you it must be their brains, mustn't it?

I don't know. Probably the same thing that happens to everyone else's souls.

Tercel

MrKrinkles

Tercel,

That is an interesting analogy. However, what reason do you have for believing that our consciousness exists outside of our bodies?
Do you, for example, recall anything prior to the formation of your brain? Has your consciousness ever left your body and gone into a different body, or "radio"? If our consciousness is not in our bodies, where is it, exactly?

What do you believe this?

Are you a "quantum level" physicist?

I understand that, as a Christian, you must believe that the mind and consciousness are separate in order for your other religious beliefs to make some kind of sense. However, is there any actual, real life evidence that you can point to to show that consciousness "acts through the brain" as some sort of independant entity? It seems quite clear that consciousness is a function of the brain, that consciousness emanates from the brain and not from anywhere else. As far as I know, we have not detected soul transmissions into human brains.

So people who appear mentally challenged because they were born with brain defects or who suffered brain injuries, these people are actually NOT mentally challenged, but we just can't detect that fact because their brains don't channel their souls properly? Is that what you are saying?

Where is our consiousness located if not in our brains? Where do you believe it emanates from?

And what, exactly, is that? Could you be a little more specific?

Sorry for all the questions. Obviously I don't believe that consciousness exists anywhere but the brain, and I don't think Christians have any solid, genuine reasons for believing that consciousness can exist without the brain.

Brooks

[ February 14, 2002: Message edited by: MrKrinkles ]</p>

Tercel

MrKrinkles,
Most of those have been answered, but not the last very clearly so I'll cover that now.
When Newton proposed his laws of motion there seemed to be a problem for Christians (although Newton was a Christian and he didn't agree this was a problem). His laws seemed to suggest reality was entirely deterministic, this seemed to destroy the Christian idea of Free Will, which is pretty essential to the Christian doctrine that we are morally responsible beings etc. Quantum mechanics fixed that: At the lowest level we find that reality isn't deterministic and we can only speak in terms of probabilities. This gives a huge opening for free-will etc. It also introduces a way consciousness could operate through the brain. The consciousness could interfere at the quantum level with the appropriate things and given a correct material brain structure that would snowball into the appropriate electrical impulses being activated.

Because it's meant to be in our brain. There are instances of near-death experiences where the consciousness apparently leaves the body for a time, however the reports of these experiences are not exactly uniform and it is difficult to derive much from them.

Tercel

Datheron

Tercel,

I was interested to see this argument, Tercel; obviously, you're familiar with QM, but here it seems like you just want to run away with "non-deterministic universe" and pursue from that point on, without noting that QM's probabilities and randomness itself is a problem for free will, just as much as it solves one.

As I recall, the premise of free will is to allow the individual to choose his actions - such choices are made without coercion. At the same time, one expects those choices to actually be meaningful - if I choose one thing, I expect the outcome to be the logical result of what I chose. With QM, you remove the coercion of determinism, but you add the factor of randomness and probabilities - meaning that there is a chance the ultimate result may not be what I chose. If I chose to be apart from God, there is a finite probability that I actually chose God instead; QM requires that my choices are not, in fact, absolute. They are dependent on the whims of our chaotic universe.

So, does that mean that we may not have free will?

Tercel

MrKrinkles,
As I noted above, my reasons are mostly philosophical. I observe that our bodies are made of matter, which by my understanding is completely non-conscious and non-selfaware and acts purely by following some basic mathematical laws of motion etc. The mind or consciousness on the other hand appears distinctively different to this. The mind is self-aware, rational etc. Given this difference it would seem reasonable to me to conclude that there is more to the mind than the matter in our bodies.

Nope.

Nope.

Why should it be at any specific location? If it is indeed a non-material entity then it doesn’t need to have a physical location.

No. I know a little QM, but not a great deal.

Not really. Some Christians have historically supported the belief of mind/body unity.

Not really. Possibly you might count demonic possession as such evidence, but I doubt you would believe it. If you are interested then there’s a really really long article on the subject <a href="http://www.christian-thinktank.com/eyesopen.html" target="_blank">here</a>.

I don’t know: It may be that they are a seriously disturbed soul. I’m not all-knowing you know! In most cases however, especially where the person wasn’t born that way, I would say it’s clearly a result of brain injuries.

I believe that God will provide us with new and better spiritual bodies.

I similarly I don’t believe atheists have any good reason for believing that consciousness exists only in the brain, other than they assume/presuppose (self-defeating) logical positivism to be true.

Tercel

YHWH666

oops

[ February 16, 2002: Message edited by: YHWH666 ]</p>

MrKrinkles

Tercel,

I don't know what you mean by "logical positivism." I simply don't see evidence for your theory. I see no reason whatsoever to suppose that consciousness exists anywhere else but the brain. However, I can understand that people do not want to accept the obvious, that when the brain dies, that is the end of consciousness.

I skimmed through that article. It was like reading a Church of the Subgenius satire of christian apologetics. There was a great deal of convoluted verbiage obscuring a dearth of "evidence." Here is a sample:

"The ASCs seem to give humans access to another 'dimension' of our universe, one in which group experiences can be had, and one in which non-human intelligences exist. Possession phenomena demonstrate that these intelligences can act within our space-time universe, as well. Spiritual theatre data suggests that even the 'non-intelligent' substrate of reality is less 'ordinary' that our popular models would suggest."

Do you honestly expect people to read this type of gibberish and take it seriously?

What are "spiritual" bodies made out of? Spirit? What is that composed of? And do our "souls" get transmitted into these new "spiritual" bodies from whatever location they currently emanate from? Are there heavenly soul transmitters?

A non-material entity that has no physical location. That sounds suspciously similar to nothing whatsoever.

It just seems bizarre to propose that consciousness exists somewhere other than our brains; that it is beamed into our brains from somewhere else much like a radio signal. Nothing in medicine or biology would suggest such a strange theory. When our brains are infused with chemicals or subjected to trauma, consciousness is directly altered. This does not jibe with the notion that our consciousness is separate from our brains.

Nothing outside of religious dogma seems to supports this idea.

My consciousness did not exist prior to the formation of my brain, and I am unable to imagine how it could exist once my brain dies. Nebulous terminology like "spiritual bodies" and dubious analogies of electromagnetic waves and radio receivers does not appear to make this brain-consciousness duality theory any more plausible.

Brooks

[ February 15, 2002: Message edited by: MrKrinkles ]</p>

Tercel

Logical positivism was a philosophy which was quite popular at one stage, but now seems to be universally agreed upon as failed. "The only meaningful statements are those which are based on empirical observation or logically derived from such observation" is an example of a philosophy which is self-defeating since the very statement is meaningless according to itself.
I have attempted to provide you with some reasoning to suggest that the consciousness may indeed be not purely material. If you don't agree with my thoughts or evidence, that's fine and you're welcome to say so. However it's not very nice just to declare again that there is "no reason whatsoever" for me to hold the opinion I'm just given an argument and evidence for.

I think you need to do some reading on understanding the limits of what reason can tell us and accepting that we don't/can't always know the answers to everything.
Why do you insist on viewing everything in material terms? Why must things have a "location" or be "transmitted"? Such things are simply ideas we have obtained from examining the physical world: Why should we expect them to apply beyond it? Look at some non-material entities which we deal with: Does logic have a physical location or get transmitted? Does the truth of the proposition that I have brown hair require an eminator or a transmitter for it to be as true on mars as it is here?

That's an interesting view: Are all abstract concepts "nothing" then? Logic, truth, happiness, hope? All are non-material and have no physical location: but are they "nothing"?
I would say a non-material entity that has no physical location sounds suspicious similar to something that exists outside our universe. It doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It simply means it has no location within our universe, and whatever form it might have is not directly comparable to anything we are familiar with.

True. I am not trying to argue complete dualism though. I believe our consciousness is completely integrated with our material brains while we are alive but separates at death.

To the contrary, many near-death-experiences would appear to support this in some form or another.

What you mean is you don't remember existing prior to having a physical existence. Whether or not you did exist is another matter.

And I would similarly say, mere assertions that it's "obvious" that the brain and consciousness are the same thing does nothing to make it more believable.

Tercel

Dr. Retard

Small point to help avoid a potential strawman: materialism doesn't entail identity materialism. There's always functionalism.