madmax2976

<strong> I’ve been doing pretty good, just ridiculously busy.

<strong> Hmm. Such a loaded and unsupported statement I’m not sure where to begin. Even if your assumptions were all correct in the above claim, (and I don’t believe for a moment they are), your logic still confuses me. Just because neuroscientists hadn’t yet found physical evidence for the mind in the brain, why would you insist there “must” be another explanation for the mind that is not physical? The only way I can see you logically doing this is if you first assume neuroscientists have learned all the physical knowledge there is to learn about the human brain and also have invented all the tools that would be necessary for that endeavor. This would be the only way to justify the term “must” in any sense.

You could say that its possible that there’s something to the human mind other than the physical brain and its activity, but you don’t ever speak in those terms. Whatever evidence this surety is based on you’ve failed to present it. I fail to see why your so eager to grasp onto non-physical explanations when you’ve not even come close to exhausting all the physical ones. I fail to see why you think invoking the meta-physical even answers the question your asking. Even if I went way out on a limb and assumed your correct and that the mind is more than physical brain activity, it still wouldn’t tell me what it is. And thus your conjecture, even when assumed to be correct, answers nothing.

Your conjecture appears to only complicate matters as well rather than clarify or answer anything. If the mind were something non-physical, you then have to postulate some kind of an interface mechanism between the physical and the non-physical to support the acutal evidence we do have that physical events affect the mind. We have tons of evidence that drugs, injury, and disease all affect the mind. I think the layers of conjecture to support your initial conjecture would continue to mount.

From my viewpoint your continually seeking the meta-physical in the dark. The only “evidence” you present is our lack of understanding and/or our limitations. This is hardly convincing.

<strong> Ah, but you’ll notice that we weren’t having a conversation. You and Theo were have a conversation and I butted in which is why I worded my post the way I did. Now that we are having a direct conversation, notice that I address you directly.

<strong> It was an analogy given in the attempt to make a point. Unfortunately for you it was in error. You shouldn’t ask things of others that your unwilling (unable) to deliver youself. Your diagram would not show the workings of a printer in the same manner as you appear to be asking others to show you a mental image. Your analogy would also be more applicable if you were to show people “printing” and not a print-er.

Furthermore, if you just wish to invent a tool to help your analogy (special X-ray vision glasses) then I’ll just invent a tool that allows you to look into the human brain to see it in activity as it images something. Of course your X-ray vision glasses won’t even come close to doing the job since they will not allow you to see the program execution that enables the printer to do its job. At best you could just see some electrical charges moving around.

<strong> And as always I’m confused on the point of the argument. Its seems to be that it is logical to invoke the mystical/supernatural/meta-physcial if we can’t solve a mystery. Our caveman ancestors did the same thing thousands of years ago and thousands of different peoples have done the same thing since. Its no more logical or convincing an argument now than it has been for their beliefs.

Filip Sandor

I'll try. <img src="graemlins/boohoo.gif" border="0" alt="[Boo Hoo]" />

"The subjectively-accessed property of being a white-cat mental..." ok hold on a minute, I think I lost you on "subjectively-accessed"...

No offense dude, but it sounds to me like you really don't know what you're talking about... are you saying that if we just look at that part of the brain which corresponds to the mental image from the correct angle, physically, then we will see the mental image of the cat??

Are you saying that we should really be using Ultra-sound instead of MRI to view the mental image in the brain??

Actually.. I know exactly what you are saying, but it doesn't coincide with the fact even if you touch that part of my brain which corresponds to the mental image of a cat.. if you smell it or if you lick it with your tongue, you will still find nothing that even remotely resembles the [i]feel, smell or taste of a mental image (or a white cat). So like I said, either you or the scientist must be hallucinating or you are both perceiving entirely different things!

Unfortunately, no 'code' or computer analogy is going to absorb this massive, space-time distorting flaw entailed by materialistism and the more cocky materialists won't even be able to make the effort of investigating this contradiction because their pride depends on it.

I'm sorry if I rub off as rude, but please realise that I'm just mirroring the general attitude you gave me.

Adrian Selby

"However, I have trouble imagining that neural nets can 'recognize' anything at all; just as I would have trouble imagining that a vehicle is aware of the parts that it 'utilizes'.. but that's a whole other debate. "

I'm sure you have trouble imagining it, I'm not saying I find it easy to imagine either, 'imagine' isn't a helpful term here. However, I can conceive of how an arrangement of neural nets sufficiently complex and attached to sense organs this species has, existing in a specific location that the system calls 'my' location has, in virtue of its complexity alone the nature that can holistically experience while interacting with memory to decide action, in this case, typing this response on a keyboard. One problem I try to get around when conceiving of the holistic experience a brain has when things are happening in different parts is to question the implicit reliance on 'I' of some kind of singularity in the conception. In other words, to relate to the point at hand, when I say 'I recognize words' its been helpful to think of the 'I' as some kind singularity that receives data from the multiple parts of the brain, in other words, a mind. The comforting thing for me about the concept of mind is it seems to reflect our experience as being a singular holistic one.

However, given to me the idea of a mind as ontologically distinct from the brain doesn't make sense, I have tried to conceive how a system which processes different things in different parts somehow 'creates' a singularity with regard to self awareness, but of course, the structure of the brain is so complex that all the parts interact on many different levels all the time, constantly. It is a unified object.

"What do you mean when you say that not all matter is akin to logic states? More specifically, how would you define a 'logic state' in physical terms?"

I never said it was easy for me to explain with my limited vocabulary, on that point I wouldn't so much agree with you that our vocabulary is too limited to deal with this kind of issue, rather the vocabulary is unsuitable for it, because its a vocabulary, being in the vernacular generally, that supports a dualistic view of the world.

Anyway, what I meant by logic gate was with reference to the 'on off' nature of certain matter like neurons and circuitry. I was being functionalist in that I didn't want to presume a material for my view. What I'm trying to offer is a crude foundation for deciding the issue of consciousness for toy trucks. By observation of those things we commonly take to be conscious, or otherwise able to act, we notice that they have arrangements of matter that, in the human case, are incredibly complex arrangements of neurons that just fire and don't fire in accordance with the neurons around them. The more complex the arrangement, it appears, the more conscious something is, and ultimately, the more self conscious it is.

I never pretended it was infallible, heh, far from it. But by the criteria of whether something has a given complexity in the arrangement of matter of a part of it relating to the central nervous system that responded to its environment of its own accord, and that this matter appeared to be a complex arrangement of neurons or other discrete entities linked in nets where each entity was simply on or off according to the entities surrounding it, one could ascertain whether or not that something was conscious. Toy trucks do not have these arrangements of matter we call central nervous systems and brains, ducks do, of a sort, so we are more comfortable ascribing consciousness to ducks than toy trucks. I concede readily any difficulties in drawing boundaries and suggest this only as a starting point for being able to draw conclusions about the consciousness of toy trucks and other inanimate objects.

Anyway, I don't think anyone's pretending brain explanations of supposed mental phenomena are easy, after all, we barely understand brains and how they function.


Adrian

Adrian Selby

"Actually.. I know exactly what you are saying, but it doesn't coincide with the fact even if you touch that part of my brain which corresponds to the mental image of a cat.. if you smell it or if you lick it with your tongue, you will still find nothing that even remotely resembles the feel, [i]smell or taste of a mental image (or a white cat). So like I said, either you or the scientist must be hallucinating or you are both perceiving entirely different things!"

Perhaps the reason for someone not being able to touch the brain and 'feel' the cat is because you have to be the brain doing the feeling or the imagining. They touch the neurons, you are the neurons, they are you. I tried to develop an analogy once that one should imagine a coin. I dont know how successful this is going to be, I'm sure you'll let me know!

The coin represented the neurons firing when you see or stroke a cat.

The one side of the coin is you or rather, the 'being those neurons (and the rest of the neural structure of your brain)' the other is the external observer of those neurons firing. Their language is of synapse this and synapse that, your language describes it in terms of feelings because that's the vocabulary that we - the discrete brains that are conscious - use to define experiences. Both vocabularies relate to a single physical thing, the sets of neurons firing when receiving reflexively the responses from the sense organs, but one vocabulary is used when it is that set of neurons that is 'doing the firing' and the other is used to describe merely the neurons in a precise way. If a scientist cannot be the neurons having the sensations and reacting reflexively with them, does it make sense to suggest that could possibly experience the feeling of a cat's fur. The feeling of fur after all is a set of signals going from the fingertips to the brain, to put it crudely, the brain processes the signals and the experience of receiving and processing the sensations is categorised as 'furry'. The experience thus had is taking place in different parts of the brain and affects other parts in ways I expect we couldn't explain. A scientist touching the brain is not touching the cat. He or she couldn't feel fur, though they could feel the neurons that were taking part in the 'fur' experience!

I'm not going to suggest by implication that the vocabularies are clear and distinct, just that words like 'feel' and 'white' are words that describe the sensations a set of neurons(brain) receive and interact with when it is that brain that is describing its experience. Indeed, white happens to be a common word that could have as an equal explanation, 'arrangement of atoms that reflect light in x, y and z way' both describe the same physical phenomena, one is useful for communication, the other for description.

Adrian

[ January 28, 2002: Message edited by: Adrian Selby ]</p>

Filip Sandor

Please be aware that 'physical evidence' constitutes evidence of something physical which exhibits only the properties or qualities that are uniqe to it and not something else.

In the case of mental images or specifically, a mental image of a white cat, my argument against materialism remains in tact because with all due respect to neuro-science and neuro-scientists, it is a fact that we have not found anything physical in the entire human, living brain (which has been observed in it's entirety, while alive) which *exhibits the qualities that are unique to a mental image (or a white cat)*. Now if you seriously have any shred of doubt about this, you can investigate and confirm my claims using the information documented by some top of the line neuro-scientists of the <a href="http://www.hhmi.org/" target="_blank">Howard Hughes Medical Institute</a> at <a href="http://www.hhmi.org/senses/" target="_blank">this web-site</a>.

Then maybe you can come back here and continue the debate with a little more confidence, knowing that according to the latest neuro-scientific research, there is nothing physical in my brain that *qualitatively matches or even remotely resembles* the mental image of a cat that is in my mind. <img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" />

Theophage

As is the ineffible way of the Mighty and Benevolent Theophage, quotes by Filip Sandor will be in bold:

Let me just say, before I respond to your post, that amongst so much arrogance, I find it very nice that there are at least one or two individuals who respect me and my beliefs by not manipulating my words and claiming I have said things which I have not said.

You've simply caught me in a good mood, I'm as arrogant a bastard as anyone here :^) As for misrepresentation, I often misunderstand, but I would never misrepresent. Truth is much more important to me than "winning". BTW, my email address is open to anyone who doesn't find the message board format satisfying.

This may be somewhat difficult since I don't know how to describe the qualities of any thoughts in physical terms... [snip] ...and I can also tell you that they possess unique qualities to them, which are not possessed by the material 'code' in the brain that they correspond to. I can be sure of this through introspective analysis of my own thoughts, relative to what is happening in my brain.

This confuses me given that you said earlier:

The difficulty with the assumption that your thoughts are in your brain is that there is nothing in your brain that bears any qualitative resemblance to the mental 'objects' in your mind.


You make the assertion that the things in brains are qualitatively different from thoguhts, and yet you give no supoprt for this. What are the different qualities of which you speak? If you cannot list them (due to difficulties of language or whatever) why should I agree to the validity of your assumption? I certainly sense no qualitative difference in my brain and in my thoughts.

You did list two qualities, however, and I shall address them below:

-- I can however tell you that thoughts are real and that they possess qualities such as tangibility and temporal existence (existence extended in what we call 'time')

I agree here, thoughts do posess the qualities of tangibility and temporal existance. But so do the electrochemical brain patterns that I have mentioned before. So it would seem that even with the only two qualities of thoughts you could give me, they agree with materialism. Funny, that...

This only seems to drive support for the long standing, scientific notion that 'brain mechanics' are at least partially responsible for and/or involved in the manifestation of thoughts and other mental phenomena, but the actual mental phenomena or this 'inner form' of the material code, as you might have it remains 'unseen' as it is. Except of course, by the 'possessor' of the mind in which it exists.

Ah, I think I see your confusion here. Let us examine the "inside/outside" idea a little more closely. But first, a quick answer to a related question:

What is information??

Are mental images 'encoded' in the computer as well as in the brain...?

The reason an image is called a "mental image" is because it is stored/generated/coded in a mind. The reason an image is a computer image is because it is stored/generated/coded on a computer. Same with a photographic image, etc.

The information is the abstraction of the image itself, stripped of any format or encoding. Note that it is an abstraction only, information itself simply does not exist outside of a format, but it can be "ported" between various formats.

When you view a sunset, the image of the sunset is encoded in the form of photons which enter your eye. Your retina then takes the photon encoded information and changes it into information coded in the "mental image" format. I have no idea what this format is, specifically, so don't ask me :^) This is similar to the same sunset being captured by a digital camera, which changes the photon encoded information, into a digital encoded format such as a .JPG.

If I were to view this mental image format from the "outside", say via sophisticated MRI scan, it wouldn't look like a sunset at all. Similarily, if I look at the .JPG file of the sunset from the "outside" (like a binary file viewer) it wouldn't look like a sunset either.

So what is "inside" then? Inside is the hardware that interprets the coded information. The hardware (actually its a software program, but for simplicity we will assume it's dedicated image processing hardware) can "look" at the .JPG and tell things like how bright the image is, etc. But if we view the .JPG file in binary, we would have no clue how bright or dim the picture it represents is supposed to be. This is because we are viewing the encoded data, not the information itself that is encoded.

Similarily, viewing a mental image on an MRI isn't going to show us an image of a sunset, because we are viewing the code itself, not the information the code represents. In order to view the information the code repersents, you have to view the code from "inside" the apparatus that handles the code. For humans, this apparatus is the brain.

I suppose if it were possible for us to somehow directly transfer this coded information from one brain to another, like from me to you, you would mentally "see" the image that I am thinking of. This assumes, of course, that the encoding is the same from person to person, but that may not be true. If it were one day possible to do this, then the "inner form" of thoughts as you mentioned before would be available to be seen by anyone.

To summarize, even though a sunset may be encoded as ones and zeros, proper imaging hardware handles/sees those ones and zeros just like it was handling the sunset image itself (in the photon-encoded format). Similarily even though the sunset is encoded in brain electrochemistry, the brain handles/sees the code just like it was handling the sunset image itself. "Inside" the apparatus, they are the same; we only see a difference from "outside".

[regarding the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind again]
Perhaps this is because the latter functions of the brain don't manifest as 'thought forms' and hence, are not perceivable to us.

I would agree to this somewhat. I'm sure that the heart beat regulation instructions are probably not in "thought form", but things like memories would be. But memories are not in the conscious part of the mind until you pull them there, they stay in storage otherwise. The conscious part of the mind, then, is simply the part that examines what it itself is doing in some kind of recursive loop. We are aware of what we are aware of, and we are aware of what we are currently thinking about.

As for what the perceiver the mind or the I is.. well, that is a whole other debate which I started here a few months ago, but which didn't quite make it to the press.

Yes, perhaps we shouldn't muddy this already difficult thread up with that yet, but I would consider the perciever simply the mind focusing on itself and what it is doing rather than on something else (ala a recursive loop).

Daniel "Theophage" Clark

Clutch

So why read such foolish interpretations into it, while failing to return and address it properly?

Uh-huh. And you didn't see the brown thing with your tongue, nor did your neighbour hear it with his fingertips. So what? Who's ever argued that the mental properties of brain processes are epistemically accessed by licking them?

If you'd rather talk nonsense than learn something, that's your business. Nevertheless, your argument hinges on the claim that different properties mean different objects. This is trivially false. Hence your argument is just a very basic error.

Filip Sandor

Dear Theophage,

This debate is basically paralleling my debate with Synaesthesia on page <a href="http://www.randi.org/cgi-bin/ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=4&t=000287&p=9" target="_blank">Page 9</a> of the <a href="http://www.randi.org/cgi-bin/ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=4&t=000287&p=1" target="_blank">materialism debate</a> at the <a href="http://www.randi.org/cgi-bin/ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=forum&f=4" target="_blank">JREF: Religion and Philosphy Forum</a>.

The fundamental problem essentially boils down to:

Where is this 'information' substance?

If, as you suggest, the atomic arrangement of my computer's hardrive is only representative of the actual information and not the information itself... then I am afraid we are left with some 'missing information' (pun intended )!

Where is the actual, physical information, Theophage??!!!

Why doesn't my harddrive increase or decrease in weight when I add or subtract this physical information substance to or from it??

Is information a weightless, physical phenomena, like light?

Am I missing something??

Synaesthesia

Philip,

Information is a notion that relates to organization, not substance.

I see you persist in your uncharitable and simplistic construction of materialism. (The very notion of information as being measurable by mass!) While I cannot blame you for being unable to imagine mental representations being a physical phenomenon (habits of thought are damn hard to break- this comes from a person who develops bad habits faster than he can identify them), that materialism does not require that ontological dualism be entailed by epistemic dualism has been explicitly stated, reitterated and stomped and stomped to death.

Why do you continue to ignore this very consistent and clear message. That you make certain presuppositions about reality is totally understandable, that you maintain OTHER people must also hold the same assumptions - especially when they have repeatedly stated otherwise - is totally beyond me.

Madmax,
Although I undestand what you intend to say, the idea that there is no physical evidence for the mind in the brain is laughable. What are we doing at this time but engaging in intellectual discourse, an activity archetypal of those which require a mind? The behavioral manifestations of the mind are not the only evidence, (although it is the most obvious and ubiquitous) there is an exponentially growing body of neurological understanding of how cognitive mechanisms work and malfunction.

Regards,
Synaesthesia

madmax2976

<strong> What you continually fail to understand is that I can just assume your correct about all the above but it doesn’t help your case in the least. Your entire position still hinges on our lack of understanding – because neuroscientists haven’t found this physical evidence you think should be there if naturalism/materialism is true, you leap to the conclusion that it must in fact not exist at all. This is very strange and illogical reasoning. Human research into the understanding of the brain – even of all reality is still quite young. Why take such an unsupported leap to the meta-physical when you’ve yet to exhaust all the physical possibilities? Why take such a leap just because humans are ignorant of how the brain functions and does what it does? You still seem to be looking for the meta-physical in the dark, just like thousands of ancient peoples looked to explain the world around them and invoked all kinds of spiritual beliefs when they couldn’t do so.

Of course I also think your argument is awry for the simple reason that it seems to be just semantic confusion. Your "looking" for the wrong thing. A mental image is not a “thing” regardless of how we often lapse into conversation as though it were. It would be far more apropo to say we “do” a mind rather than we have a mind.

A mental image is an activity much like running or swimming is an activity. There are various components that allow me to engage in mental activity – memory cells and brain processing – just as my arms and legs allow me to engage in swimming. However no one is going to look at me in the act of swimming and find a “swimming” anymore than than they could look in my brain and find a mental imaging of a white cat going on. No one will look into a computer and find the image of a white cat it has on a JPG file. However, when its active, a computer can certainly generate an image of a white cat and even store it in memory - as can my brain. There does not appear to be anything "meta-physical" about these things. (whatever the term "meta-physical" is supposed to actually mean)

When you can actually produce something to support your case other than our own ignorance of how the brain works, something other than invoking more mystery in the attempt to solve a mystery (which doesn’t even answer your own question), then your conjecture might be worth a deeper look. So far, you haven't brough anything to the table that wouldn't fit in either of those two categories.