Mind is the brain?

[bennyboy]

Okay, so in science of mind, what 2 things are you correlating?  Observed behaviors and/or brain function with what, exactly?

If you say, "mind," then you might also try saying "God."  Because both of those are equally observable in this Universe.

Hi benny, long time no see. I'm JP (click on my blog below) from atheist.com where we had many discussions on the "immaterial". Don't know if your position has changed since then, probably not from the nature of this post... LOL.

To answer your post: the correlations are done in many ways, but one of them is to look through MRI images of a brain and ask the patient to do certain things, like raise a finger, say "mama", and so on, and then correlate the parts of the brains that show any kind of activity - electrical, chemical, and so on. So, this is a mapping between activities the patient does, thinks or feels with areas of the brains that show signs something is happening. 

I cannot do that with"God". It would be nice if "God" would volunteer at any hospital on this planet and let us pick his "brain" if he has one. So no, you can't correlate with God in any meaningful way that is observable as this is the only way I can differentiate a good theory from a crackpot theory - empirical, verifiable, observable evidence.

Nice to see you again!  I remember you very well, and will not say what name you went by there, but I know exactly who you are (at least in the context of that other forum).

The problem is that you are making an important assumption: that a person you are studying is not a philosophical zombie.  You do not actually know whether the smiling, breathing physical structure in front of you is experiencing "what it's like" to be mindful-- you accept them at their word when they say they are, but cannot know it.  It is because people SEEM to you to be mindful that you accept them as so, not because of any particular observation or measurement you are capable of making. I'd argue as well that the objective world by which you are studying a person's brain SEEMS to be as you experience it, but in the end, the decision to believe that is also a philosophical assumption rather than a fact which can be made on observations. In fact, I'd say that we've learned enough through science to know that the universe cannot be as it seems.

At any rate, we will soon have virtual "people" on the internet which can easily pass the Turing test.  They will make friends, they will say ideas, some of them quirky and some of them conservative.  They will talk about preferences, favorite movies, and make spelling mistakes.  They will SEEM to be mindful, but I'd argue that they will not be.  Therefore, the seeming of mindfulness and the fact of it should not be taken as equivalent.

Given this, let's look at the Christian perspective.  They think it seems as though God is real.  They have experiences, and feel the "ring of truth" in them.  The power of their experiences convinces them that God is real.  It SEEMS to them that God is real, though none of us would accept that as proof (or even sufficient evidence) of that.


I think this will become very clear with the following question: given physical system X in the universe, how will you know whether it experiences qualia?  In the case of non-animals, it might seem to you that nothing else in the Universe experiences anything.  But how will you, using the scientific method, go about establishing this? I don't think you can-- I think we are stuck correlating not mind, but the appearance of mind, with physical observations of brain (or other physical systems).