A question regarding proof

[Fred]

So where exactly do you usually "find" thoughts.

Excellent question.

I can appreciate the correlation between brain activity and perceived thought, but it is another leap of assumption to say that "thought" is physically found in "electrical impulses".

It's the 'other' ghost in the machine. Brain activity, check. Electrical impulses, check. Pony? Uh, nope. No matter how you tear it apart, the damn thing never shows up. A physical entity using physical processes somehow produces something that has no physical location or attributes, hence doesn't exist by materialist parameters, yet everybody accepts there's a goddamn pony. Why? Lots of people see ponies. Last I checked, that' wasn't a valid answer, but I guess it's down to who is giving it.

Hindu philosophy regards "thought" as the instigator of physical phenomena in total reversal of the western materialist view.

Yup, the primacy of Consciousness.

Modern understanding in philosophy and quantum theory is questioning the westen materialist viewpoint.

Yup. It doesn't seem to be holding up too well upon scrutiny, hence the favored position of the materialist is the defensive crouch.

(see "On physics and philosophy" Bernard d'Espagnat). The fact of the matter is that at the moment we simply don't understand, either viewpoint requires a leap of faith.

Yup. Why that is somehow a bad thing, I have yet to figure out, but it's positively poison to some.

"The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment." Bernard d'Espagnat

Whether they exist independently may be arguable, but the fact that whatever they are, they are not what we perceive them to be seems to have been nailed down tightly. This seems to piss off some people so much that all they can do is kick rocks in response, but there's little question that the rock they observed bears little resemblance to the rock that is actually there. In fact, the rock they observed turns out to exist only in their head, along with the pony.

Here's a nice rendering of the situation from a physicist's pov:

"Although we may not know the external world directly, we can draw conclusions from our experience as to what it might be like. This, in essence, has been the focus of our scientific endeavors. Scientists have sought to understand the functioning of the world around us, and draw conclusions about its true nature.

To the surprise of many, the world "out there" has turned out to be quite unlike our experience of it. Consider our experience of the color green. In the physical world there is light of a certain frequency, but the light itself is not green. Nor are the electrical impulses that are transmitted from the eye to the brain. No color exists there. The green we see is a quality appearing in the mind in response to this frequency of light. It exists only as a subjective experience in the mind.

The same is true of sound. I hear the music of a violin, but the sound I hear is a quality appearing in the mind. There is no sound as such in the external world, just vibrating air molecules. The smell of a rose does not exist without an experiencing mind, just molecules of a certain shape.

The same is also true of the solidness we experience in matter. Our experience of the world is certainly one of solidness, so we assume that the "thing in itself" must be equally solid. For two thousand years it was believed that atoms were tiny solid balls—a model clearly drawn from everyday experience. Then, as physicists discovered that atoms were composed of more elementary, subatomic particles (electrons, protons, neutrons, and suchlike) the model shifted to one of a central nucleus surrounded by orbiting electrons—again, a model based on experience.

An atom may be small, a mere billionth of an inch across, but subatomic particles are a hundred thousand times smaller still. Imagine the nucleus of an atom magnified to the size of a golf ball. The whole atom would then be the size of a football stadium, and the electrons would be like peas flying round the stands. As the early twentieth-century British physicist Sir Arthur Eddington put it, “Matter is mostly ghostly empty space.” To be more precise, it is 99.9999999% empty space.

With the development of quantum theory, physicists have found that even subatomic particles are far from solid. In fact, they are nothing like matter as we know it. They cannot be pinned down and measured precisely. Much of the time they seem more like waves than particles. They are like fuzzy clouds of potential existence, with no definite location. Whatever matter is, it has little, if any, substance.

Our notion of matter as a solid substance is, like the color green, a quality appearing in consciousness. It is a model of what is "out there", but as with almost every other model, quite unlike what is actually out there.

Even the notion of mass is questionable. In his General Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein showed that mass and acceleration are indistinguishable. A person in an elevator feels lighter when the elevator accelerates downwards, and heavier when it decelerates to a halt. This is no illusion, scales would also show your weight to have changed. What we experience as mass is the resistance of the ground beneath our feet to our otherwise free fall towards the center of the Earth. According to Einstein, we are being continually decelerated, and interpret that as mass. An astronaut in orbit experiences no mass—until, that is, he bumps into the wall of the spacecraft and experiences a temporary deceleration."

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Whatever matter is, it is not made of matter.
—Prof. Hans-Peter Dürr