The Brain=Mind Fallacy

[Cato]

Emergence

Cool, another adult in the room. I’ve been arguing against emergence with respect to qualia. Right now I am rolling genkaus’s and apo’s ideas around to make sure I fully understand their points and see if our respective philosophies are really that far apart. The idea of emergence has a couple of different conotations and I may be confusing them or we may be talking past each other. I hope to jump back in to the conversation after thinking it through more.

"Arguing against emergence with respect to qualia" is fine tuning your OP. This is certainly acceptable as the conversation evolves; however, I hope you understand that even a strong emergence perspective is still monist. Strong emergence advocates must still invoke a vibrating energy or some other woo cause to support their ideas (idea, not philosophy, in a short lived deference to Brian), but they have all stopped short of the god cliff...the sad ending is that science will still push them over.

We may not currently have the ability to map the brain in such a way as to explain the mind ; however, we should all could contemplate that the mind is impossible without the brain without evidence to the contrary.

Take a blind physicist. This person would realize that what most people see as blue is simply the human's ability to perceive a gamma ray at a wave length between X and Z. The blind physicist can accurately describe X and Z quantitatively as certain wavelengths, but will also 'always' have to ask "what wavelength of light is the object I'm touching reflecting?". He/she cannot perceive what we call blue. Qualia in a blind person relative to color doesn't exist. I think it was Hume that first described this in simpler terms that those of us that can perceive colors can describe a Y (hue of blue) having seen X and Z, but a blind person could never do this. The blind person could of course predict Y as a wavelength with a value between X and Z, but could never really imagine the color of Y. Those of us that have perceived X and Y can imagine the blue color Y without ever 'seeing' it and can do so without reference to a specific wavelength.

(Keep in 'mind' here that we are relatively blind relative to the electromagnetic spectrum: credit Neil deGrasse Tyson).

This is where any dualist argument (typically ontological) fails. A blind person possesses mind; I trust you will not argue this. A blind person's mind has no concept of blue as those with sight can conceive it. Neurology has proven the causal link between the eye and the brain regarding perception of color. If the eye doesne't work then the brain cannot properly inerpret color (wavelength of light). If the mind, in the circumstance of a blind person, cannot perceive color it is because the brain cannot conceive color. This is enough for me to conclude that the mind is contingent on brain activity.

If the brain and mind are not the same physical 'stuff', the dualist then has to explain the method of communication between the brain and the mind. This adds another layer of complexity that violates the idea of parsimony, which goes beyond this thread.