Mind is the brain?

[downbeatplumb]

I see it like this, you need an Xbox one to play Halo 5 but an Xbox one is not Halo 5, Halo 5 is what the Xbox does. Mind brain explained by a game.

[Cato]

A dualist is free to voluntarily get a labotomy and report back as means of demonstration, but they never do.

[bennyboy]

 Secondly, we know, again beyond all rational doubt, that every verifiable mind the human species has ever encountered . . .

Ummm. . . that number would be either 1 or 0, depending on how you view yourself.

[bennyboy]

You are stating as fact something which you assume.  Tell me, by what criteria will you establish an actually sentient being from a philosophical zombie?

Before you tell me that mind is altered, you have to tell me how you know that there IS a mind to be altered.  Cuz I say it can't be done.

Quote from you: " Qualia are the "what it's like" of experience-- what it's like to taste pineapple, for example, cannot be explained by any observations outside the direct experience of tasting pineapple."

So, have a person eat a pineapple for the first time (removing every other sense beside taste) and have them describe the "what it's like". Then (hypothetically) destroy the portion of the brain primarily responsible for taste. Have them eat pineapple again and get the description. The "what it's like" will have changed. This is seen in brain injury victims. Loss of taste, smell, touch, ability to understand speech, ability to speak, ability to recognize shapes/people/places. Their "what it's like" has changed.

You are then correlating not mind and brain, but words and brain.  You are relying on sounds coming out of a physical system to stand in lieu of mind.  Normally, this is perfectly sensible-- it's one of the more pragmatic assumptions that I've made, and makes communicating with people much more enjoyable.  However, it's still an assumption and not actually an observable fact.

Consider the case of a robot.  If you damage its language processor, or it's cameras, or whatever, it also will lose at least part of its function.  It also will describe things differently.  But does this mean that a robot experiences qualia?

I don't know the answer to that, but my hunch is that there's something unique to me that allows me to really experience what things are like, where a robot is just doing a bunch of processing 'n' stuff.  Whether a robot of equal or greater complexity could be said to have a mind is another issue-- Bladerunner being a perfect example of the philosophical implications of that.

Even if you look to the brain as the "source" of mind, or the system on which it supervenes or whatever, there are still layers of organization which are NOT unique to the brain, but happen to be contained within all brains. For example, the transmission of information, chemically or electrically or through the emission and absorption of photons, happens all over the place. It could be that a primitive "atomic qualia" is the most elemental unit of mind, and that ANY system of coordinated data flow will have some spark of mind. OR it could be that something specific about the organic process of the brain-- the chemicals involved, the way the systems are intertwined, is absolutely necessary, and no other system would be sufficient to actually experience qualia rather than just seeming to.

So even in a physical monist position, saying mind IS brain, or IS brain function, might be too simple a view to be useful. Then, bring in dualism or idealist viewpoints, and consider how many assumptions were required to start the process, and I don't think anyone should be very confident in their views about mind and brain.

[brewer]

Benny, since this a philosophy thread and your position is philosophical I think I'll back out of the discussion. You and I will disagree. I'll stick to my real life, medical, position.

Thanks.

[Brian37]

This was posted on another forum:

The central paradigm of contemporary psychology and neuroscience is that the mind = the brain.
This is taken for granted, but why believe it?  The main reason that is given is that changes in the brain seem to correlate with changes in the mind,e.g. put someone in an fMRI scanner and ask them to think about certain things, and parts of the brain 'light up' on the fMRI image.  Damage to the brain can cause damage to the mind, e.g. multiple strokes can lead to vascular dementia involving memory loss and personality changes.  All this shows an intimate correlation between the brain and the mind, so the mind must be nothing over and above the brain.
The fallacy of this argument is that correlation entails identity:  If two things occur together then they must be identical.  This is wrong.  If two things occur together, then they are linked, but not necessarily identical.  For example, take a radio.  Electrical activity in the circuit board correlates with the sound produced, and if you make changes to the circuit board you also change the sound, but we dont say that the sound is = the electrical activity or the circuit board.  Nor is the sound completely explained by the electrical activity, as this would exclude the radio presenter from the explanation when he is the actual cause of the sound.
Of course this doesnt prove that the mind is other than the brain, only that the main reason for thinking they are identical is flawed.  Here are some other bad reasons for thinking they are identical:


http://www.unc.edu/~ujanel/GIVING%20DUALISM.pdf

The paper is written by an atheist philosopher.

There is no "paradigm". There is no mystery.

You are literally your brain in motion. No different than a car with fuel will run and a car without fuel will not run. Human simply are stuck on old claims and gap fill out of a sense of false comfort and or fear. 

You smash up your computer into unusable parts it will not function as if it were int tact with no damage. YOU are your brain in motion. No, it isn't sexy, but it is reality.

[bennyboy]

There is no "paradigm". There is no mystery.

You are literally your brain in motion. No different than a car with fuel will run and a car without fuel will not run. Human simply are stuck on old claims and gap fill out of a sense of false comfort and or fear. 

You smash up your computer into unusable parts it will not function as if it were int tact with no damage. YOU are your brain in motion. No, it isn't sexy, but it is reality.

That's a lot of assertions, but you will have a hard time supporting them without begging the question, I think. But let's find out-- can you please support your many factual statements with logic, evidence, or ideally proof?

[little_monkey]

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.

Some clarifications:

(1) There are things that are visible to the scientists carrying those experiment: for instance smiling since you brought it up. There are things taking place on your face when you smile in terms of muscles being pulled, and all sorts of chemical reactions taking place, etc - all of these can be observed and measured.

(2) Scientists observe thousands of patients, so if you claim this smiling is a fake, for instance, then you need to believe in a conspiracy theory that all those thousands of  patients are faking it and why they would want to fake a smile???

So, we can definitely map the brain in terms of the activities we all do, whether it's about smiling or anything that involves thinking, feeling, mobility, etc. Now if you can show scientifically you can do some of these activities without the brain , that is, the brain being not involved in any possible way , then you have something to argue from. But so far, the science is not on your side.

[The Grand Nudger]

I don't know the answer to that, but my hunch is that there's something unique to me that allows me to really experience what things are like,

This, right here, is it.  This is your full and total objection to a material monist explanation of mind.  You've simply surrounded it with rationalizations.  

-Your- mind may be unique to you, even though mind is obviously not. I'm sure there are plenty of things unique to you, if it's any consolation.

[bennyboy]

I don't know the answer to that, but my hunch is that there's something unique to me that allows me to really experience what things are like,

This, right here, is it.  This is your full and total objection to a material monist explanation of mind.  You've simply surrounded it with rationalizations.  

-Your- mind may be unique to you, even though mind is obviously not.  I'm sure there are plenty of things unique to you,  if it's any consolation.

Wait a minute, I'm not arguing against materialism with the thing you quoted.  It is whether the unique function, properties or whatever that allow mind are of the brain specifically, or of certain kinds of processing more generally.