Determinism Is Self Defeating

[bennyboy]

Why do ask a why question here?

Had you asked a how question, how brain function is experienced as sentience, I'd reply with something along the lines of highly complex neural network, bla bla bla... we can't determine that with present tools bla bla bla...
But you ask "why"...
And a why in here, presupposes that some entity had some reason to do it like that... you can see where such a question leads, right?

I ask why because all the other parts of physics that I know about are interrelated: if you remove one of them, the whole thing crumbles. However, mind neither contributes to, nor at least on a subjective level, is contributed to by, the rest of the mechanical model.

It's a weird universe in which something so unnecessary is also so important.

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.

fMRI.

Exactly as I said. No mind is being measured here. We aren't measuring sentience. We are measuring blood flow in the brain. It is a philosophical choice that physical monists make in equating them, and then saying: "Sure we are measuring sentience. See, look at all that blood flow."

That's why, if you lose a piece of the brain, you lose a piece of your mind, right?...

Nobody denies that the mind is supervenient on the brain (unless we get into idealism, solipsism, etc), or that there's a connection between brain function and mind. What is in dispute is whether it's possible to show that mind is ONLY brain function, and is therefore deterministic (assuming that a physical monism must be deterministic, which isn't guaranteed), or whether mind actually contributes something that pure mechanism can't. And if mind does NOT contribute something beyond pure mechanism, then why does it exist?