(October 28, 2013 at 8:51 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote: A scientific fact is often misunderstood or rather ambiguously defined by most non-specialists. It does not mean that science has demonstrated what the truth is nor that what science says is the way reality is. A scientific fact is a hypothesis...corroborated to a sufficiently high level...if the exact mechanism by which the phenomenon occurs is unknown or implausible, it is considered appropriate to require greater significance.
I like your take on scientific truths and dare say you're way more current on monism vs. dualism than I am. As well as filiing one's own posts for retrieval 2 years later. My computer's so cluttered I'm thinking I might be less prone to reject the null hypothesis inappropriately were my brain replaced by a Turing machine. Paul & Pat Churchlands' "luminous room" in Scientific American (Jan. 1990) is fascinating yet I'm unsure it overcomes John Searle's maxim that syntax cannot generate semantics, a thing nearly all linguists accept.
(April 25, 2015 at 5:23 pm)Pyrrho Wrote: Primitive people thought that fire was a thing or substance. The modern idea is that [mind] is not a substance, but a process [, and so for consciousness also.]
I'm sympathetic to this idea. Although I sometimes wonder if substance vs. process is a duality along the lines of particle vs. wave in quantum mechanics. Meanwhile, the brain scanner doesn't watch thoughts directly but watches the brain instead to look for activity signatures consistent with certain thoughts. It's not true telepathy, where a telepath experiences life from the perspective of the person who's mind she is reading.
I can accept that thinking requires a platform, much as software does. If your brain goes kaput it seems pretty clear any thoughts that were running also stop. Deciding whether computers "cause" software or the other way around is a bit of a chicken-egg problem, however. Software can't boot without hardware, yet once it's running it does seem to affect what the computer does. We might say the software instructions are "represented" by moving electric charges in the machine.
