RE: Mind is the brain?
March 17, 2016 at 3:09 pm
(This post was last modified: March 17, 2016 at 3:14 pm by little_monkey.)
(March 17, 2016 at 1:31 pm)bennyboy Wrote:(March 17, 2016 at 1:25 pm)little_monkey Wrote: If you believe that MIND = BRAIN ACTIVITIES + something else, then it's upon you to show that you can perform a mindful activity without any activity in the brain. Otherwise, you are grasping at straws.This isn't about what I think or don't think. It's what I know or don't know, and why. You say that smiling is an activity of the mind; however, some robots can smile, and nobody thinks they have minds as far as I know. It's one thing to have correlates of mind, but how will you show your correlation, being unable to observe a mind?
I've already addressed that issue: it's not just smiling you need to consider but ALL activities. For instance just to name one activity: when android can create new ideas, like humans have done from Plato to Heisenberg, then you can say maybe these androids have a "mind". Until then android proves nothing about what the mind is. (hint: bringing androids to defeat my argument isn't going to work).
Quote:Either you will have to beg the question by defining mind in terms of the correlates themselves, or you will have to make a philosophical assumption.
What begging? This is how science is done, has been done since Galileo. We correlate things: in math, it's called mapping. All math is mapping. If we can correlate in a one-to-one mapping between mind activities with brain activities, you have no choice but to say that mind = brain activity. You can't change the rules just because YOU don't like it.
And you haven't answered my point: If you believe that MIND = BRAIN ACTIVITIES + something else, then it's upon you to show that you can perform a mindful activity without any activity in the brain.