RE: On naturalism and consciousness
August 21, 2014 at 5:24 am
(This post was last modified: August 21, 2014 at 5:43 am by pocaracas.)
(August 20, 2014 at 11:17 pm)FallentoReason Wrote:Quote:
Correlation doesn't mean causation; yeah sure, memories are found in the brain, but that doesn't directly imply that a set of particles are in relation to something external in the world - whether past or present. I forgot who I said this to in this thread, but it seems to me like our memories could be seen as books at a library and we as the conscious being are the person browsing through the library accessing different books. Therefore, we're still at square one: a bunch of particles arranged in a particular way (the books) can't be arranged in such a way as to represent "beliefs". It takes an already conscious being to give meaning to these particles, but particles don't intrinsically hold any "belief".
Ever wonder why fMRI is so much better than a CAT scan when trying to map the brain?
What does one do that the other doesn't?
Hint: one goes for structures, the other goes for dynamics.
The structures or particles in a processor, inside your computer, are the same whether the computer is on or off, right? Something is happening in there, when it's turned on, right? There's a sort of flow of electrical signals, which, in certain sets, represent certain operations.
It's this flow, these operations, that we see as the working processor.
The working brain should be no different, albeit more complex and, as yet, not fully understood. We don't even know how to group the flow of electrical signals into simple operations, but we can map a few higher operations to certain areas of the brain.... that's what we get out of fMRI.
A belief is an assumption about the world, in the face of missing information. Assumptions are operations that our brains carry out quite efficiently, I'd guess...
Extra: Have you ever heard of Milo?
The kid from Project Natal, which has since been renamed Kinect:
