Modal Argument: The Mind is Not the Brain

[Chas]

Unlike you, Apo, who provides both background and clarification for your posts, Chas calls mind an emergent property as if he need only pronounce it so for it to be the case. If Chas, or any other forum member, wants to call mind an emergent property, then it’s only fair that they should be clear as to what they mean.

Emergence comes in various stripes. You have emergent abilities like photosynthesis, emergent functions like bricks, emergent qualities like wetness, and emergent patterns like hurricanes. You could even argue that meaning emerges from complex arrangements of symbols.
Furthermore, even if mind is an emergent property, however vaguely defined, that status alone would not completely define the relationship between body and mind. Once mind appears does it have a downward causal role? Or is mind an epiphenomena? Perhaps the emergent property of the brain is its ability to receive, rather than generate, mental properties. Or perhaps, the mind operates simultaneously and parallel to the body, as proposed by Leibnitz. Not all forms of emergence lead to materialism.

Sorry to throw the bullshit flag on your "emergent properties" foul, Chas and company.

As for the idea that nothing mental happens without a brain, none of you have presented any way that signification, qualia, or intentionality can be properly attributed to any physical process nor any means for excluding it from simple physical systems, like thermostats. Oh right, emergent properties arising out of complex systems...that's the pixie dust to which you cling. Poor sods.

I thought it obvious that all of the evidence of neuroscience shows that there is no mind without brain, and that physical damage to the brain changes the properties of mind.

You have no actual evidence for your god, nor is there any evidence for dualism.

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I accept your challenge. When you set a thermostat to 72, it intends to reach it. Explain to me how this is different from a hungry dog that intends to eat a rabbit. From a materialistic perspective both exhibit mental properties. Only the thermostat has no brain yet shows goal directed behaviour.

A thermostat has no intention, there is no mechanism for intention there.