consciousness?

[genkaus]

Professor Plumb, you have only restated an argument already made, adding only that an authority shares your opinion. The tacit assumption of his concluding remarks is that no causal mechanism between brain-processes and mind-processes is required because one is the same as the other.

Try not to conclude any "tacit" assumptions when so many explicit ones are given that show that you are wrong. Sherman has concluded that brain produces consciousness - not brain is consciousness.

Meanwhile his next sentence injects a straw man into this debate:

…the hypothesis that consciousness creates matter (does not) hold equal standing (as physicalist theories do)

Mind creating matter has not been part of this discussion.

Try not to confuse this discussion with the one that he was having. Mind creating matter was very much a part of his discussion as shown by the arguments made and evidence presented by his opponent. That you may not be suggesting the same thing (though I suspect you are, but just won't state it outright), thereby making that portion of discussion irrelevant is - well - irrelevant.

No one denies the intimate connection between minds and brains. The authority you cited does not actually address the full relationship between mental events and brain events.

Actually, he does. He says that the full relationship is not known and the problem is not solved but the current evidence suggests the latter causes the formal.

He only looks for efficient causes and observes only third-party physical facts. Empirical study of the brain takes for granted the formal relationships, logical relations, and assigned values (all immaterial) that allow us to feel, think about, and will to act upon what we observe.

Not quite. Any empirical study is incomplete without taking those into consideration. That the said authority chose not to mention those in his argument does not suggest they are taken for granted.

In the example you provided, physical events produce both physical and mental effects. Following the initial physical cause you get both a second physical event and mental one. Now you have two potential causes, one mental and the other physical, for the next in line physical event and its associated mental one. This means one of the following:

1. Mental properties are side-effects without causal import. This means the feeling of being alive, making choices, and contemplating ideas have no power. And because mental processes are inert they can have neither function nor use.

2. A pre-existing harmony exists between mind-states and brain-states. This creates two parallel chains of causation that co-exist but do not interact.

But there is a third option that atheists refuse to consider and dismiss out-of-hand, because that is one that undermines their materialist worldview.

3. Causation, broadly defined, goes both ways. Mental causes inform physical effects, just as physical causes constrain mental effects.

Because this third option does not restrict causality to one direction, from physical cause to mental effect, it allows the possibility of interaction between two real and distinct realities, a materially substantial one and an immaterial formal one.

And this is the crux of your problem. The only way to conclude that only these three choices exist is to apriori assume that there are two distinct, two separate, real and distinct realities - one pertaining to the material and the other to the mental. Implicit within this is the idea that these two can exist independently. Further evidence of your straw-manning is given by the your assumption that all atheists are materialists who'd refuse to even consider the third option.

As a matter of fact, the closest you come to my position is in the third option. I do not recognize the physical and the mental as two separate realities but as aspects of a single one - this reality. The fact that we can consider them separately (as in your example of reflecting upon our inner world) does not mean that they can or do exist independently. However, I do consider the so called mental aspect to be ultimately dependent upon and originating from the physical. Not to belabor a point, but once again, consider the computer analogy. If you consider your hardware to be the brain and software to be the mind, then you can see that there is a definite causal link. While they can be considered separate and appear to work independently, there is a definite undercurrent whereby any changes in the software (or caused by it) are reflected in the hardware and vice-versa. However, the software is still ultimately dependent upon the hardware, since it cannot exist without its specific configuration - while hardware has no such constraint upon its existence. Therefore, hardware produces software and in the same way brain produces mind.