(March 13, 2016 at 3:41 pm)bennyboy Wrote: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.(March 13, 2016 at 2:31 pm)little_monkey Wrote: i would add strongly to your post is that in science that's all we do: correlations. Every laws of nature we discovered expressed as an equation is a correlation. Every scientific theory is based on a number of hypotheses which is translated into equation, which are correlations. If anyone thinks that correlations are not the way to go, then you've just denied science.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.
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.