Mind is the brain?

[little_monkey]

Benny, I'm waiting for your response...

I'm not sure what you are saying.  I'm talking about philosophical zombies, and you're talking about people faking smiles.  In correlations of mind with brain function, we cannot knowingly correlate mental experiences-- at best we can correlate words about mind with brain function.  In other words, it is taken at face value that if you think something SEEMS to experience qualia, it does.  But I don't think this logic holds true.

I was responding to your claim in post #48. You wrote: "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." 

The point I raised in #58: 

(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.

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You're saying one cannot know if (smiling, breathing... etc)  pertains to "mindful".  But if there is a correlation between the (smiling, breathing... etc) and the physical activities in the brain produced by MRI's, then I have:

(1) observable (smiling, breathing... etc)  → mindful

(2) observable (smiling, breathing... etc)  → brain activities

Therefore I have to conclude that,

(3) mindful = brain activities

If that correlation in (2) is reproduced over thousands of patients, you have no choice but to conclude (3). The only way you can deny (3) is to show that for some "mindful" activities, the correlation (2) is false.