Atheism feels shunned...

[Kyuuketsuki]

Show me. How can you measure a thought? Are you talking measuring the electrical activity? Translating the electrical activity into something else? This still isn't the thought itself, just the transport, facilitator or receiver. Without substantiation your point is outside reality and only in theory. It doesn't count.

More fully dealing with your earlier claims ...

---

1. Thought passes all tests for something that doesn't physically exist: you can't hear it, see it, touch it, smell it.

Thought uses physical medium as transport but thought isn't the transport. Thought uses air, electricity, paint, ink etc. Thought is the rider on that transport. It's never the transport. It is always separate. Thought is created by a physical process in the brain, which is physical. Thought is communicated through physical medium but remains non physical. Thought can be enacted upon to produce physical effect but then ceases to be thought.

2. Thought fails all tests for something that exists.

Evie asserts that there is such a thing as a physical thought. I call bogus as there's no such allowance in the term 'physical'. Again thought may be born out of physical process involving electrical impulses in the brain but thought is more than those impulses. The impulses are dumb facilitators of thought.

3. I assert that thought doesn't exist physically. It isn't possible then to physically prove a negative.

Evie holds that theoretically, thought is a physical substance yet unknown. On that presumption Evie feels justified in classifying thought as a physical entity because everything else in this physical universe is physical so thought must be too. My far from perfect analogy was that because a playground consisted of 99 girls and 1 boy, by his logic Evie would conclude that the playground contains 100 girls. He dismisses the boy because the boy has no other comparable examples so then can't be evidence of something which exists.

---

So I spoke to a friend about your claim that thoughts are in some way not "real"/"physical", I showed him your post, and his response was:

Firstly I'd want to see his evidence that thoughts are more than just dumb chemical activity in the brain. My understanding of the brain is that the chemical interactions are in fact thoughts. If so then thoughts are entirely physical.

Moreover, to be a physical state there is no need to be able to identify it using just the natural senses. We can't detect air that way but we don't doubt it exists. We can however feel wind so we can (if I may stretch the analogy) feel the activity as evidence of a physical presence that is undetectable by our senses. Thought is not a physical entity in the way air is but it is a manifestation of that entity just as with wind.

We even accept physical states that are only identifiable by their absence (such as vacuum) so I really don't understand this idea that thoughts are not physical.

We are lacking perfect understanding of the physical processes that lead to the experience of thoughts, however bear in mind that this is very complex stuff and it may take much longer before we fully grasp it. Not that long ago people had no idea that air and wind were essentially the same thing, even more recently people didn't know that air wasn't homogeneous but a mixture, more recently still people didn't know that the air inspired and expired by an animal has different composition. Just because we don't fully understand it yet doesn't mean we won't in the future.

So, as I have previously said, most workers in the neuroscience filed seem to accept that thought is a natural process even if we cant understand it as yet.

If we were to accept your rationale that we cannot detect thought in any way we (science) would be well and truly buggered because we infer thoughts are real in the same way as we infer evolution is real and the big bang occurred ... we don't have any truly direct evidence for any of them (I know there are examples of species evolving but the time involved still allows the wingnuts to claim it's still just adaptation and none of us, not a single one, has ever seen the big bang). There are many things in science that are inferred, yet entirely accepted, yet for which we do not have the kind of direct evidence small minded individuals like you appear to demand.

Even though we don't yet fully understand it, the available evidence infers that thought is a physical process; that thought is no more separate from the physical world it exists in (the brain) than mind is, that we are able to detect some aspects of thought both in terms of measuring it and in the beginnings of being able to translate it back, that thought/mind changes in the event of damage to the supporting infrastructure (brain/nerves) and that there is no validatable evidence that mind/thought can exist outside of the physical infrastructure within which it is currently understood to exist.

I accept that the nature of thought is not yet fully understood, what I don't accept is that we know nothing about it or that we have reached the limit of understanding. Nor do I accept that our current state of knowledge means we won't know much more in the future ... you and I know as much as we do because we stand on the shoulders of giants, I fervently hope we have more such giants and that the human race in a hundred years will know 10 times as much as it does now, that we develop techniques and technology that further explain the universe and make more things (including thought) more resolvable ... the steps made by the Japanese research group in translating thought back is a promising first step. But I am reasonably confident of one thing about thought and that is that our current lack of a full understanding of the nature of thought leaves, AT BEST, an open question and does not "elevate" thought to the status of pseudo mystical mumbo jumbo and to claim that it does, that thought is somehow separate from all the physical structures that support and nurture it, is just another example of special pleading.

IOW sorry, but you're full of [expletive deleted] ... as usual!

Kyu