Determinism Is Self Defeating

[bennyboy]

Now, go back and tell me where I used the concept of "mind"... -.-'

You didn't. You used the word "brain." You wouldn't use the word mind, because while it's central to our reality, it's not something that can be either seen or manipulated with any mechanical means.

Why is this important to this discussion? Because determinism is the argument that: 1) any physical system can only have one possible outcome; 2) the universe consists of nothing but physical systems.

Until you can adequately explain WHY brain function is experienced as sentience, then I consider that the elephant in the room.

But if you're so eager to use it, here: to me, mind is the high-order perception we have of brain functions.

Think of this "order" as programming classes.
You start with the basics: integers, floats, strings, functions. Build a class with them. Then build another and another, and another.... Then you start building classes that have these other classes in them. And then go up an order.
Keep going up and, at some point, you have no notion of the basics and everything seems to work as if by magic.

Okay. So lets say you came across Windows, and had no knowledge of the culture that made it. Would it be useful to say, "I don't know exactly what makes Windows work, but it's just a bunch of mechanical processes"? You might say yes. I'd say, there's something else going on, which is much more important than the specific mechanism upon which Windows supervenes. I wouldn't use the existence of Windows to prove determinism; if anything, I'd use it to demonstrate that behind apparently deterministic process, you may find mind.

No brain scan has detected an external energy floating by...
Missing parts of the brain represents missing parts of the person's psyche, the person's mind.
So, as far as I see it, the brain is the source of the mind and that should be the default position.

No brain scan has detected the existence of mind, either. You show me a magic Mind-o-meter 2000 that beeps when it detects "mind," and I'll show you a machine that measures brain function, and accepts the philosophical assumption that where function X occurs, mind has occured.

I don't want to derail the thread with mind/matter discussion exclusively, but I think it's important to determinism, as well. For most of us, I think determinism is really about whether we have free will, and the moral and social consequences if we arrive at a model in which we do not. It is my position that ideas have a kind of life of their own, supervient on SOME mechanism, but independent in nature of any particular mechanism.