The Brain=Mind Fallacy

[genkaus]

Most of the atheists on this forum make a habit of dodging their burden of proof when it comes to defending the material basis for subjective experiences.

This again? Haven't I shown you before why your arguments are untenable?

The typical atheist claim is that material processes, at the level of classical physics, i.e. elecro-chemical reations, produce non-physical subjective experiences. That is a very extraordinary, though common, claim. The theory that subjective experience = brain state is so woefully inadequate as to be on the same level as creationism. And here is why.

Why do you assume those experiences are non-physical?

Mental phenomena have no mass or volume, so whatever is happening, must be happening outside of classical physics.

Wrong. Other phenomena, such as electromagnetism, also have no mass or volume and still lie within classical physics.

Explaining consciousness as an emergent property of matter at the scale of classical physics defies logic. The most common example of emergence is the relationship between a car and its parts. Drivability for example is a property of the car but not any of the parts. This analogy is flawed.

You do realize that giving an analogy and then showing the analogy to be false actually says nothing about the actual position?

First, it only describes a functional relationship. Functional relationships describe what thoughts do, not what a thoughts are, how they feel, or why they occur at all. Second, a car shares basic physical properties with its parts. Parts respond to heat and collisions in the same way that the car as a whole does.

All you have done here is show that why the analogy is not applicable. You have not given a reason as to why that position is incorrect in itself.

Try out this analogy. When an electric current flows through a circular wire, it creates a magnet. Magnetism in this case is an emergent property which describes both how it works and what it is. It also does not share basic physical properties with electricity.

Not so with brain matter and thought. Although they are functionally related, what we call mind and the brain have no shared physical properties. Physical trauma to the brain may alter the contents of consciousness, but it doesn’t make any sense to describe a thought as being physically damaged. For example, you could dye the brain green and it wouldn't make the thoughts green.

What you are ignoring is the distinction between physical and conceptual. "Thought" is a word denoting and describing a particular process - a mechanism. The same way, evolution describes a biological process, but there isn't one single entity or object that can be pointed to and said to represent "evolution". Even if one physical process giving rise to the mechanism is damaged, mechanism itself is still not damaged - it simply ceases to exist.

In previous threads I have defended a panpsychic philosophy. However, this time I want to see you, materialist atheist, defend the claim that mental experiences reduce to physical processes.

Your error here is thinking that just because it reduces to physical processes, it can be described by the sum of its parts.