Mind is the brain?

[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.