The Brain=Mind Fallacy

[StatCrux]

So because a brain has electrical activity and neurons hold and exchange charges as a natural process it means ghosts/souls are real? If the video memory of your computer is used to draw on screen a fantasy character in a video game does that make that character real? That memory has a couple of million of transistors that hold information in a dynamic mode (it changes many times per second to give the watcher the illusion of movement). Your brain has several billion neurons that hold information. The change in that information is what we call thoughts. I can't explain it in a more simpler way, honestly.

Stop introducing ghosts/souls, I've never mentioned them or even alluded to them, that is simply your presumption. The character on the screen is still made up of physical material (Liquid crystal etc) everything you describe about a computer is physical, so the analogy is false, also a computer doesn't think, it simply performs operations, that required a mind to program it in the first place! A computer is simply a machine that manipulates on and off (0 & 1's) It cannot think for itself.

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For information, interesting and relevant to the topic, *not my work*

The Game of Life as an emergent phenomenon.

One of the most familiar examples of emergent behavior is exhibited by cellular automata, such John Conway's Game of Life and its variants (eg Brian's Brain). These are available as animations on the web:

http://www.math.com/students/wonders/life/life.html

http://www.bitstorm.org/gameoflife/

http://www.argilo.net/funjava.html?lng=en

http://el.www.media.mit.edu/groups/el/pr...tants.html

The Game is what a computer programmer would nowadays define as an object, which consists of a datastructure (the two dimensional pixel array) and associated algorithms (the rules which determine whether pixels switch on or off according to the state of their neighbors).

The algorithms are extremely simple:

A dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell (birth).
A live cell with two or three live neighbors stays alive (survival).
In all other cases, a cell dies or remains dead (overcrowding or loneliness).

Amazingly, out of these simple rules operating on a simple datastructure, a complex system of gliders, oscillators etc appears.

But is this really an emergent phenomenon? If the gliders were to emerge out of the screen and glide around the top of our desk (as distinct from being pixel patterns gliding around our PC desktop), then we should have to concede that something had emerged. But all we can say is that an appearance has emerged.

So, from where has the appearance emerged?

If we search carefully, we come to the conclusion that we cannot find the complex behavior within the object. The movements of the pixel-structures are algorithmically compressible, with no remainder, back into the rules that generated them. There is no mysterious addition of procedural complexity.

The two-dimensional pixel array remains an array of pixels in two dimensions - it hasn't suddenly changed its nature and become a cube or magically sprouted chess-pieces.

Yet we can't deny that we have observed a phenomenon which has properties which 'look different' and 'feel different' from its constituents.

But if the phenomenon hasn't emerged from the object, then the only other place from which it could have emerged is the mind of the observer. We are therefore left with the conclusion that emergence is a psychological, not a physical phenomenon. The pixel array is 'nothing but' sequentially illuminated squares on the computer screen. All else is imputed by mind.