So because a brain has electrical activity and neurons hold and exchange charges as a natural process it means ghosts/souls are real? If the video memory of your computer is used to draw on screen a fantasy character in a video game does that make that character real? That memory has a couple of million of transistors that hold information in a dynamic mode (it changes many times per second to give the watcher the illusion of movement). Your brain has several billion neurons that hold information. The change in that information is what we call thoughts. I can't explain it in a more simpler way, honestly.

(June 1, 2012 at 8:38 am)Bravo Wrote: So because a brain has electrical activity and neurons hold and exchange charges as a natural process it means ghosts/souls are real? If the video memory of your computer is used to draw on screen a fantasy character in a video game does that make that character real? That memory has a couple of million of transistors that hold information in a dynamic mode (it changes many times per second to give the watcher the illusion of movement). Your brain has several billion neurons that hold information. The change in that information is what we call thoughts. I can't explain it in a more simpler way, honestly.

Stop introducing ghosts/souls, I've never mentioned them or even alluded to them, that is simply your presumption. The character on the screen is still made up of physical material (Liquid crystal etc) everything you describe about a computer is physical, so the analogy is false, also a computer doesn't think, it simply performs operations, that required a mind to program it in the first place! A computer is simply a machine that manipulates on and off (0 & 1's) It cannot think for itself.

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For information, interesting and relevant to the topic, *not my work*

The Game of Life as an emergent phenomenon.

One of the most familiar examples of emergent behavior is exhibited by cellular automata, such John Conway's Game of Life and its variants (eg Brian's Brain). These are available as animations on the web:

http://www.math.com/students/wonders/life/life.html

http://www.bitstorm.org/gameoflife/

http://www.argilo.net/funjava.html?lng=en

http://el.www.media.mit.edu/groups/el/pr...tants.html

The Game is what a computer programmer would nowadays define as an object, which consists of a datastructure (the two dimensional pixel array) and associated algorithms (the rules which determine whether pixels switch on or off according to the state of their neighbors).

The algorithms are extremely simple:

A dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell (birth).
A live cell with two or three live neighbors stays alive (survival).
In all other cases, a cell dies or remains dead (overcrowding or loneliness).

Amazingly, out of these simple rules operating on a simple datastructure, a complex system of gliders, oscillators etc appears.

But is this really an emergent phenomenon? If the gliders were to emerge out of the screen and glide around the top of our desk (as distinct from being pixel patterns gliding around our PC desktop), then we should have to concede that something had emerged. But all we can say is that an appearance has emerged.

So, from where has the appearance emerged?

If we search carefully, we come to the conclusion that we cannot find the complex behavior within the object. The movements of the pixel-structures are algorithmically compressible, with no remainder, back into the rules that generated them. There is no mysterious addition of procedural complexity.

The two-dimensional pixel array remains an array of pixels in two dimensions - it hasn't suddenly changed its nature and become a cube or magically sprouted chess-pieces.

Yet we can't deny that we have observed a phenomenon which has properties which 'look different' and 'feel different' from its constituents.

But if the phenomenon hasn't emerged from the object, then the only other place from which it could have emerged is the mind of the observer. We are therefore left with the conclusion that emergence is a psychological, not a physical phenomenon. The pixel array is 'nothing but' sequentially illuminated squares on the computer screen. All else is imputed by mind.

Two theories are being presented to justify the material basis for mind. In the first case, various configurations and states of matter are said to produce mental phenomena that did not previously exist. The second position claims that brain-states are mental phenomena. Both theories try to get something for nothing and reveals how hollow materialist claims are, as I will explain.

As pointed out chickens produce eggs.Chickens and eggs both fall into the same category of being. Both are physical objects. The car/speed analogy is more complex but follows the same logic. Speed is the description of a material state, a relationship of physical objects in time and space. The parts share the same physical properties as the car, including speed. Each part also moves through physical space in time. At smaller scales you have Brownian motion and at still smaller scales atomic vibrations. Motion can be described by even more fundamental physical properties, like mass. Yet in this case you also see that atomic particles have mass, the car parts have mass, and the whole car has mass. The parts share the properties of the whole. They can interact because complex material states are aggregates of similar simple material states. Likewise, you can describe complex mental properties, like a memory, in terms of simpler mental properties like sensation.

The difficulties arise when you start to attribute one category of being, mental phenomena, to another categories of being, like physical objects. If you attribute complex mental properties like emotions to a complex physical object like the brain, then you must attribute simpler mental properties to parts of the physical brain, like the visual cortex. Just as the whole brain and its parts have mass, the whole brain and its parts share an experiential component. Followed to its logical extreme, you conclude that conscious experience is a fundamental property of reality on par with mass.

The problem for materialism is this. Materialism only accepts four fundamental forces associated with material properties. There are no mental ‘forces’ or basic properties of mind from which to build complex mental properties like conscious self awareness. The materialist perspective has no place to insert mind.
It’s attempts to explain consciousness are on par with magic.

*Puts on jacket and walks out while lowering head and face palms again*

You know, there are times where I've been tempted to just add every religious nut to ignore. Really tempted.......

Well here is an article where scientists using MRIs read thoughts by looking at their PHYSICAL PROPERTIES. I think the bold is justified there.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4472355.stm

Is this game over?

(June 1, 2012 at 12:18 pm)downbeatplumb Wrote: Well here is an article where scientists using MRIs read thoughts by looking at their PHYSICAL PROPERTIES. I think the bold is justified there.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4472355.stm

Is this game over?

This thread got its head blown off as soon as it poked it out.
I believe what you guys just did was more akin to gatecrashing its funeral, headbutting its grieving widow and then relieveing yourself on its freshly chisled gravestone.
I couldn't be more proud right now. :'-)

(May 31, 2012 at 4:03 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: The typical atheist claim is that material processes, at the level of classical physics, i.e. elecro-chemical reations, produce non-physical subjective experiences.

Please refer me to all those atheists (you did say 'most here', right?) who claim that subjective experiences are non-physical and I'll set them straight!

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(June 1, 2012 at 8:10 am)StatCrux Wrote: [quote='Bravo' pid='292877' dateline='1338552238']
Where is the physical point of attachment between thoughts and the brain?

Where is the physical point of attachment between speed and a car?

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(June 1, 2012 at 10:49 am)ChadWooters Wrote: The difficulties arise when you start to attribute one category of being, mental phenomena, to another categories of being, like physical objects.

I think the difficulties arise when you take mental phenomena and physical objects being different categories of being as a given.

It's over when he refuses to justify his initial assertion, effectively making his argument vacuous, and continues to blather on with what is an obvious example of the . (Well, in fairness, it's likely obvious to all BUT his disembodied consciousness.)

Like a creationist with nothing to say, he simply repeats prior errors without correction, and refuses to answer basic questions.

He has boasted of advanced learning in another thread, so I can only conclude that the cause of the poverty of his thinking lies elsewhere.

(June 1, 2012 at 12:34 pm)RaphielDrake Wrote:

(June 1, 2012 at 12:18 pm)downbeatplumb Wrote: Well here is an article where scientists using MRIs read thoughts by looking at their PHYSICAL PROPERTIES. I think the bold is justified there.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4472355.stm

Is this game over?

This thread got its head blown off as soon as it poked it out.
I believe what you guys just did was more akin to gatecrashing its funeral, headbutting its grieving widow and then relieveing yourself on its freshly chisled gravestone.
I couldn't be more proud right now. :'-)

How does that in any way show anything other than a correlation between brain activity and visual perception? How does that show where thoughts emerge from or even reside.? Correlation is not causation.

Correlation is not necessarily causation. But there is no causation without controlled correlation. Causation is a wholely contained subset of correlation. You have no correlation, so you have no disembodied psych. Now go away.