Your little plea to keep with what we know is laughable Rhythm. It is only you who is insisting on something unknown... ie that thought definitely is physical.

There is no conclusive evidence to support what you are saying at all. I don't know how many times you want other people to say that of course the mechanisms producing thought are physically based and in the brain, without you castigating them and then repeating this bullshit once more. No, no one is claiming faerie pixie dust as a cause, that's just your straw man to excuse your own beligerance.

The loop the loops you are performing to hold onto your bullshit pre-supposition is embarrasing.

/rant

No conclusive evidence that mind and brain are directly related? How did you come to this conclusion?

Oh FFS

(September 9, 2011 at 2:41 am)Ryft Wrote: Fred, you are missing two rather important issues.

Heh. Holy shit, Ryft. Where the fuck have you been? Oh, hell, never mind that. I'm just damn glad you showed up because a Logic Enforcement Officer is just who I have been looking for.

Quote:First, whether or not Rhythm has objective evidence of your dream pony is entirely irrelevant to the existence of your dream pony.

Certainly. I was playing Rhythm's advocate back there with my insistence that there was no evidence. I left out the "objective" qualifier on purpose, because it's a given in some circles that the two are synonymous when they aren't.

Quote:One is an epistemological issue regarding Rhythm, the other is a metaphysical issue regarding your dream pony—and throughout this thread (and consistently everywhere in these forums) these two issues are being conflated.

Ok, metaphysical is one of those terms that has been stretched all out of shape, so to be clear about my take on it for this discussion, let's use this:

"Metaphysical studies generally seek to explain inherent or universal elements of reality which are not easily discovered or experienced in our everyday life. As such, it is concerned with explaining the features of reality that exist beyond the physical world and our immediate senses."

I'm all good with that, but as you can see, translated into quick and dirty materialist terms, that amounts to "concerned with explaining what doesn't even even exist." That, I'm not at all onboard with, so you can see that it's problematic terrain.

Quote:For whatever it is worth, that is one of the most ironic things about metaphysical naturalists: they never hesitate to abandon the metaphysical question as quickly as possible.

Yup. That's a huge part of my point. It's best used as a club to beat off challenges, but it's put away quickly when it comes to navigating actual experience.

Quote:Whether or not your dream pony exists (metaphysics) is distinct from whether or not there is evidence for the existence of your dream pony (epistemology). Even if we were to suppose that there is zero evidence for it (as we seem to have done), what has that to do with the existence of it?

Uh, depends on who you ask. Me, I don't think the fact that there is no objective evidence has any bearing, since I find the notion that only objective evidence is real is one that has no merit whatsoever beyond being a pacifier for those who need it.

Again, to be clear, I believe there is ample evidence, but it's not objective evidence and cannot be by it's very nature.

Quote:"Without that evidence, I have no reason to believe him," says John Q Materialist. Not to put too fine a point on it, but so what?

Heh. Well, there's that aspect, yes.

Quote:Second, while people have been making noise about the causal relationship between the neurological activity of your brain and the dream pony of your mind, have you noticed there has been zero evidence provided to substantiate that causal relationship?

Hell, yes. Have you ever wondered why that doesn't seem to have any effect on their stance? Just wave the "it's merely" magic wand over it, and--poof--the whole problem disappears just like that. Like the wag said, Dennet's book would have been far more accurately titled as Consciousness Explained Away.

Quote:There is evidence of your neurological activity on the one hand, and your testimony about dreaming of a pony on the other, and a causal relationship between the former and the latter is concluded based on... err, wait, how do we know there is a causal relationship?

We don't know, sir. That's the part that gets left out when the "it's just an artifact of brain activity" chorus starts singing. No matter how beautiful the sound or their harmonies, if you look at the libretto closely you will see that for all that's there, the only thing missing is the damn pony. It's the ghost in their machine they cannot account for, but that doesn't seem to bother them, so they just keep on singing.

Quote:Perhaps you might pursue that issue.

Officer, I'm trying as hard as I can, but I'm getting drowned out by the choir. Can I lodge a noise complaint, because if they would just pipe down for a bit, maybe we could continue this discussion under more reasonable conditions. Flash your badge, sir.

Quote:(P.S. It also seemed a little ironic that you were asking whether objective evidence could exist for a subjective object.)

Heh. A little ironic? Uh, I can swing with that in the sense that Hurricane Irene was a little bit of moisture. Nobody even challenged that simple point, yet it's a hole big enough to drive a bus through.

---

(September 9, 2011 at 7:16 am)little_monkey Wrote: You can have evidence of a dream, but you don't have evidence of its content.

Yes, there is no evidence of its content, at least if you mean objective evidence. As to the evidence for the dream itself, we have objective evidence that brain activity is taking place, but that's all. That that evidence is connected with the actual dream itself, has not been nailed down by objective evidence.

By that I do not mean that it's not true, but that the acceptance of it being true was not reached solely by the means of objective evidence. It's not a small point, no matter how much some folks want to jump over it.

The only reason anyone at all knows what a dream pony is springs from their subjective experience of dreams and ponies. That this knowing has been supported by the objective evidence that brain activity corresponding to dreaming takes place may be true, but the knowledge of the dream pony that every one here readily attests to being possible was not obtained via objective evidence.

Take away that subjective knowledge, and nothing in the objective evidence of brain activity can demonstrate that a dream pony exists.

The fact that we all have no difficulty whatsoever in accepting the possibility of dream ponies is a given, but it was the subjective evidence that provided that acceptance, not the objective evidence.

(September 9, 2011 at 10:20 am)StatCrux Wrote:

(September 8, 2011 at 2:46 pm)FaithNoMore Wrote: Materialists know that thoughts are electrical impulses between neurons, therefore they can be ordered.

Thats a very bold assertion, could you elaborate a little more?

It certainly is, isn't it? I'm interested in hearing this assertion walked out beyond the "it's merely" magic wand phase, but nobody seems to be interested in that.

Quote:How are "thoughts" contained/consist of or in any way made up of electrical impulses? Can you explain how "electrical impulses" are interpreted as thoughts? Are you saying that thought has material existence?

My pony is supposed to be somewhere in there with those electrical impulses. Of course, nobody has the slightest clue where. The pony has no physical attributes, so it doesn't exist within the stated parameters of materialism, yet somehow, something that doesn't exist is accepted as a given to be exclusively located somewhere where it cannot be found.

I don't for a second question the existence of a dream pony, but I do question the sense in such an obviously garbled philosophy.

The impulses and chemical signatures would qualify as material characteristics or physical attributes. Much the same as sound waves qualify as material characteristics or physical attributes of thought as expressed in the spoken word. That certain concepts, or indeed speech itself appear to coincide with activity in specific parts of the brain is again an observation of this process, and qualifies as evidence of of the theory that describes our current understanding of said process.

http://csl.psychol.cam.ac.uk/
http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/brain..._brain.htm
http://www.tbiguide.com/howbrainworks.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/200...140733.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_brain

(September 9, 2011 at 1:13 pm)StatCrux Wrote: I would agree with that to a certain extent, I think we will in time have a better understanding of mind, but I believe the materialist view will be jettisoned as our understanding of reality grows, I agree with the famous quote "scientists finally reach the top of the mountain to find theologians sitting there saying "what took you so long to get here!""

What added value is there by crowbaring in supernatural elements. You acknowlege that the the electrical and chemical elements happen. The new neural pathways that make new memories can be observed.
That these chemicals and electrical interactions make up the mind is not really in doubt. Just becasue you cant imagine how does not make it not so.

As our understanding of reality grows so the idea of the supernatural becomes increasingly irrelevant.

(September 9, 2011 at 11:07 am)StatCrux Wrote: So where exactly do you usually "find" thoughts.

Excellent question.

Quote:I can appreciate the correlation between brain activity and perceived thought, but it is another leap of assumption to say that "thought" is physically found in "electrical impulses".

It's the 'other' ghost in the machine. Brain activity, check. Electrical impulses, check. Pony? Uh, nope. No matter how you tear it apart, the damn thing never shows up. A physical entity using physical processes somehow produces something that has no physical location or attributes, hence doesn't exist by materialist parameters, yet everybody accepts there's a goddamn pony. Why? Lots of people see ponies. Last I checked, that' wasn't a valid answer, but I guess it's down to who is giving it.

Quote:Hindu philosophy regards "thought" as the instigator of physical phenomena in total reversal of the western materialist view.

Yup, the primacy of Consciousness.

Quote:Modern understanding in philosophy and quantum theory is questioning the westen materialist viewpoint.

Yup. It doesn't seem to be holding up too well upon scrutiny, hence the favored position of the materialist is the defensive crouch.

Quote:(see "On physics and philosophy" Bernard d'Espagnat). The fact of the matter is that at the moment we simply don't understand, either viewpoint requires a leap of faith.

Yup. Why that is somehow a bad thing, I have yet to figure out, but it's positively poison to some.

Quote:"The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment." Bernard d'Espagnat

Whether they exist independently may be arguable, but the fact that whatever they are, they are not what we perceive them to be seems to have been nailed down tightly. This seems to piss off some people so much that all they can do is kick rocks in response, but there's little question that the rock they observed bears little resemblance to the rock that is actually there. In fact, the rock they observed turns out to exist only in their head, along with the pony.

Here's a nice rendering of the situation from a physicist's pov:

"Although we may not know the external world directly, we can draw conclusions from our experience as to what it might be like. This, in essence, has been the focus of our scientific endeavors. Scientists have sought to understand the functioning of the world around us, and draw conclusions about its true nature.

To the surprise of many, the world "out there" has turned out to be quite unlike our experience of it. Consider our experience of the color green. In the physical world there is light of a certain frequency, but the light itself is not green. Nor are the electrical impulses that are transmitted from the eye to the brain. No color exists there. The green we see is a quality appearing in the mind in response to this frequency of light. It exists only as a subjective experience in the mind.

The same is true of sound. I hear the music of a violin, but the sound I hear is a quality appearing in the mind. There is no sound as such in the external world, just vibrating air molecules. The smell of a rose does not exist without an experiencing mind, just molecules of a certain shape.

The same is also true of the solidness we experience in matter. Our experience of the world is certainly one of solidness, so we assume that the "thing in itself" must be equally solid. For two thousand years it was believed that atoms were tiny solid balls—a model clearly drawn from everyday experience. Then, as physicists discovered that atoms were composed of more elementary, subatomic particles (electrons, protons, neutrons, and suchlike) the model shifted to one of a central nucleus surrounded by orbiting electrons—again, a model based on experience.

An atom may be small, a mere billionth of an inch across, but subatomic particles are a hundred thousand times smaller still. Imagine the nucleus of an atom magnified to the size of a golf ball. The whole atom would then be the size of a football stadium, and the electrons would be like peas flying round the stands. As the early twentieth-century British physicist Sir Arthur Eddington put it, “Matter is mostly ghostly empty space.” To be more precise, it is 99.9999999% empty space.

With the development of quantum theory, physicists have found that even subatomic particles are far from solid. In fact, they are nothing like matter as we know it. They cannot be pinned down and measured precisely. Much of the time they seem more like waves than particles. They are like fuzzy clouds of potential existence, with no definite location. Whatever matter is, it has little, if any, substance.

Our notion of matter as a solid substance is, like the color green, a quality appearing in consciousness. It is a model of what is "out there", but as with almost every other model, quite unlike what is actually out there.

Even the notion of mass is questionable. In his General Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein showed that mass and acceleration are indistinguishable. A person in an elevator feels lighter when the elevator accelerates downwards, and heavier when it decelerates to a halt. This is no illusion, scales would also show your weight to have changed. What we experience as mass is the resistance of the ground beneath our feet to our otherwise free fall towards the center of the Earth. According to Einstein, we are being continually decelerated, and interpret that as mass. An astronaut in orbit experiences no mass—until, that is, he bumps into the wall of the spacecraft and experiences a temporary deceleration."

*
Whatever matter is, it is not made of matter.
—Prof. Hans-Peter Dürr

(September 9, 2011 at 2:44 pm)Rhythm Wrote: The impulses and chemical signatures would qualify as material characteristics or physical attributes. Much the same as sound waves qualify as material characteristics or physical attributes of thought as expressed in the spoken word. That certain concepts, or indeed speech itself appear to coincide with activity in specific parts of the brain is again an observation of this process, and qualifies as evidence of of the theory that describes our current understanding of said process.

The issue isn't with observation of electro-chemical activity having a relationship with thought, but the nature of that relationship, which comes first? Does mind create electro-chemical changes or do electro-chemical changes create mind? As we have no way of detecting or observing "mind" how is it possible to determine which comes first? This may seem simplistic but the side on which you choose is a leap of faith. The only way of determining the truth of the matter is to somehow devise an experiment to observe "thought". At present all we can observe is brain activity, it is a leap to equate this with thought.

So, on the one hand we have observations, and indeed experiments that show how changes to the brain produce changes in the mind or self, and on the other hand we have the great unknown. I'm not sure I'd call it a leap. We could perhaps speculate that something else is happening, that there is an unobserved cause, but if our thoughts produced changes in the material world (which is most definitely where the brain resides) then theoretically we should be able to find some sort of "mind over matter" elsewhere. That's an area that's been hugely unproductive. It would be difficult to form a body of knowledge about anything if we were to prefer speculation over observation, and so I predictably side with observation (evidence of anything else would of course give us reason to reevaluate our position). I'd never argue for absolute certainty, but provisional certainty allows me to make statements which are correct to the best of our knowledge (which is always subject to revision), if I could not make such statements communicating an idea would be almost unimaginably cumbersome. One could bootstrap the unknown into almost anything and by doing so invalidate everything. The infamous "but where's the missing link for that missing link" argument. Criticisms of the lack of totality of knowledge are hardly support for any given alternative.