Emotions and Consciousness Seperate from the Brain ??

Yet, that is exactly what has happened several times in the past, and what will probably happen again in the future. It's how progress is made.Whenever we arrive at new insights about something, the old 'truths', or 'heritage' as you call them, will inevitably be discarded. We no longer think the earth is the center of the universe, though that has been our 'heritage' for a very long time. Some courageous people did some very 'destructive' thinking and the result is that we are now a lot closer to the truth about our place in the universe.I'm not saying we already know all there is to know about free will, but to rigidly insist on keeping a static body of 'common knowledge' in place, and not allowing room for speculation, is not very constructive if we want to arrive at the truth about it.In an earlier message you said: Can you elaborate a bit about why you think acts of free will - you call them 'decisions' - are not effects? If, according to you, there is no effectual relationship between the brain and consciousness, and yet, as you say, they are not separate, then what would you say is the nature of the relation between the brain and consciousness?

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

It seems you have some difficulty expressing what you mean. You introduce 'probability' here. Why? And what change are you talking about? A probability becoming a reality? Or something becoming more probable, or less probable? It isn't at all clear to me. Suppose the truth is something else than what you believe. Wouldn't you want to know that? Wouldn't you gladly be prepared to destroy a fantasy if it helped you find the truth? And if you find that what you believe is the truth after all, then what harm is done? Where's the harm in being sceptical about what you believe? So they are well on their way to becoming part of our heritage, wouldn't you say? I'm guessing at what "common language" you're talking about, and my guess would be: some kind of inner voice that tells us what it's like to be conscious. I think you imagine that it's more or less the same for all of us, and that we all feel that we control our decisions.Well, what we feel isn't always the way things really are. I sometimes dream that I'm falling. I really feel that I'm falling at that moment, and my heart skips a beat. But the truth is that I'm lying safely in my bed. So I can't always trust my feeling.It might just be that we cannot trust our feeling about free will either. If the doctor hits your knee with his little hammer, do you make a conscious effort to produce the knee-jerk reflex?The brain is a physical object. So, for consciousness to control the brain, it needs to do physical things. And in order to be able to do physical things, it would have to be physical itself. The question then arises: what is the physical nature of consciousness? It's rather easy to say that "consciousness controls the brain", but if you think about it a bit longer, you run into problems.This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 12-23-2004 04:36 AM

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

I agree. But you must realize that "try[ing] to formalize it a bit, and see if it makes sense or not" is actually what science does. And the result happens to be that some of our intuitive notions about consciousness and free will - what you call "common knowledge/language" - appear not to be true. If you don't believe this, as I expect you don't, you can check out the literature. (Though even then you will probably not believe it.) This is dualism in it's purest form. It has been refuted ages ago. I don't know why you say this, but it borders on insult. If you want me to continue to talk to you, you must stop calling me a liar. If, on the other hand, you are trying to cut this conversation short, I'd say you're making a fine job of it. It's your choice.

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

I would hesitate to call the mind a thing. I would tentatively say it's an activity. It's a process of sorts that goes on in a functioning brain. Hence, if the brain stops functioning, there is no mind.I think, and I'm just speculating here, that the mind is the result of a very sophisticated system of recursive monitoring. Let me explain what I mean.To let the body function properly in the world, the brain has to monitor all kinds of things: the position of things in the environment, the position of parts of the body relative to other parts, the position of the body itself relative to everything else, the forces exerted on and by the body, the ambient temperature, light coming in, sound coming in, and so on.But, in order to regulate this monitoring, the brain also has to monitor itself while it's monitoring other things. Call it meta-monitoring. And it might also be monitoring itself monitoring itself monitoring other things, meta-meta-monitoring. There may be several layers like that.If monitoring means gathering knowledge about something, then monitoring the monitoring means gathering knowledge about the gathering of knowledge. In other words, the brain knows things, and it also knows that it knows things. But then it also knows that there's an 'it' that does the knowing. This is, simply put, how I think consciousness and the notion of 'self' emerges out of the convoluted heap of monitoring processes.But that's just me. But there is a correlate in the brain. The neurosurgeon could poke around in your brain (while you were locally anaesthetized of course), and you'd possibly report that the elephant changed from pink to yellow. So, clearly there is some connection between certain brain activity and your experiencing the pinkness of the image.The colour pink as such doesn't exist in reality. Objects that appear to be a in particular shade of pink to us, just reflect light of a certain wavelength. That's as close as we can get to an objective description of colours. In essence, the same shade of pink always corresponds to the same wavelength.Representations of the colour pink however, are different in different contexts. In language, it's represented by a word, in the memory of a digital camera it's represented by a group of bytes and in the physical brain it's probably represented by the electrochemical state of a group of nerve cells. And in conscious experience, which is yet another context where the colour pink can be represented, the representation is what it's like to see pink. We may have come to think that what it's like to see pink is the real essence of pink, is pinkness per se, but that would be confusing the representation of a thing with the thing itself. What it's like to see pink is nothing but a way of representing the fact that light of a particular wavelength has reached the retina of our eye, or that other parts of the brain are simulating this (when you remember or imagine seeing pink).Now tell me what you think of this.This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 12-24-2004 02:41 AM

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

You can see how it's done by clicking on the 'raw text' button below each message. If you want more information about how to use UBB codes, there's a link to an overview with examples when you reply to a message. Just look left of the text window where you type your reply, and click on the link "UBB Code is ON". Ask away. How true. Tell me, what colour is your elephant under a streetlight? If colour is nothing but reflected light, then the nature of the light must have consequences for the perceived colour, mustn't it?It gets worse. What colour is the elephant in a pitch dark room? Doesn't the absence of light entail the absence of colour?The conclusion I draw from this gedankenexperiment is that the knowledge that the brain gathers about the elephant is actually not about its colour at all. Instead, it's knowledge about what the elephant looks like in certain lighting conditions. And that knowledge is represented in conscious experience by what it is like to have light of a certain wavelength fall into one's eye. In some circumstances we have an experience we would describe as 'pink', in other circumstances, 'orangish' or 'what elephant?' might be the words of choice.Merry Christmas to you too.

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

dshortt,I'm going on a short skiing holiday, for a week or so. I may be able to reply from there, but I'm not sure. So I will get back to you, but don't hold your breath, ok?P.S. Nice one with the pink quote. Now I'm snowblind before I've even seen the slopes. Thanks a lot.See you.

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

Well, it seems I have been able to secure regular access to the internet from Switzerland. Believe me, I am not arguing for dualism. Although each and every one of us is somehow seriously afflicted with dualistic thinking in our daily lives, to which I am no exception, on a rational level and based on my understanding of current scientific ideas, I don't subscribe to dualism. I think the mental perception is not another reality, it is a representation of a part of the only reality that exists, and the representation itself is also part of that same reality. But who is to say what the physical is really like? Take light, for example: we don't have an unequivoval description of it, it can be described as being a wavelike phenomenon, or as having properties of particles. Which of these description fits best at any one moment depends on what aspect of light we are looking at. However, both descriptions are just models, and reality is unlikely to conform exactly to either of them.Models are all we can ever have of reality, because the only medium we have to contain these models is our brain, coming with a physical reality of it own. The physical reality of our own brain is what limits the exactness of any mapping we can make between reality and a model of it. I am inclined to say that I agree. Since all we can have of reality are models, and since our models are dependent on the medium - our senses and our brain combined - we create these models with, and since we know other media are possible in principle - insect eyes, non-human brains, etc. - we must conclude that there are indeed no "ultimate truths". I am afraid I can't point you to any source material, because the term 'meta-monitoring' is something I came up with myself when I described my idea to you. I can point you to someone who inspired me to this idea though: Daniel Dennett. His "Darwin's Dangerous Idea", "Consciousness Explained" and "Kinds of Minds" contain some very powerful ideas.Another way of thinking about it is to realise that the brain is constantly using models of everything it has to deal with. (To say the brain "uses" a model is another way of saying that it monitors certain aspects of the object of the model.) To steer the body around in the world, the brain needs a model of that world. But it also needs a model of itself in that world. At some point, a model of a very peculiar situation may arise in the brain, namely that the object of a certain model is the same as the thing that uses the other models. I surmise that this last model is at the basis of the notion of 'self'.But again, these are just my private musings on the subject, not to be taken too seriously.

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

You assume wrong. When I conceded that there are no ultimate truths, I meant that we cannot say that reality is exactly the way we perceive it, so that we cannot proclaim our perception of reality to be the absolute truth about it. This is because we have a certain outlook on reality, biased by the limits of our own modelling medium - senses and brain combined - which I mentioned before.This does in no way mean that there has to be something beyond the natural, which I think is what you are trying to get me - and, I notice, some others - to concede. My answer is that anything you'd consider to be beyond the natural is either a figment of someone's imagination or something real, which then automatically becomes susceptible for investigation and thus part of the natural.I would like to turn the tables and say that it is the supernatural that becomes self-refuting. Merely by really existing, any so-called supernatural phenomenon becomes, by definition, part of the natural.

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

Normally, education is about teaching new generations practical knowledge for getting along in the world and maybe even making some progress, so I think there is no immediate need for concern. And even if, on occasion, education occupies itself with subjects as esoteric as the one we are discussing, then your 'ultimate conclusion' still means, for whomever reaches it, that something is learned after all. It seems I had a narrow escape there. You used "realities", "the physical" and "the natural", I just followed along. Yes, because if we can detect these things - the nuts and bolts - then apparently the machine doesn't operate "completely outside" of our universe. Besides, the word 'universe' means "everything that exists", so, if your machine exists, it must be part of it. In that case the "impossible" phenomenon you speak of is not the most interesting thing here. We should instead focus our attention on the cause of the suspension of the laws of physics. If it appears that we would find some sort of meta-law (there's that 'meta' again) that describes the suspension of the ordinary laws of physics, we would just have expanded our existing set of laws of nature. And if it appears that the suspension is a one time only event (we couldn't know that for sure, but let's suppose we could), then that's still nothing new. As far as we know the Big Bang is a one-timer also, but it poses no great problems for our current naturalistic view of things.

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

Do you have reason to think so?

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

Your story is clearly not about a pink elephant named Elsie, but about the meme of a pink elephant named Elsie. The meme exists, the pink elephant does not. (If you don't know what a meme is, google 'memes' to find out.)

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

Perhaps, perhaps not. However... This is a non-sequitur.

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

First, I don't subscribe to the view that emotions and religious experiences are seperate from the brain. And second, what you said about a true skeptic is true without resting upon that condition. Are you seriously suggesting that people should relinquish control of their decisions about what they believe in? What's the worth of their belief then? And how can you seriously expect to be respected for your belief, if you don't take responsibility for what you believe in? That sounded rather impressive until I reached "if we entertain belief in God." Because that condition undermines the whole idea. The point is that I don't believe in God, and therefore the conclusion is entirely yours and not mine. Anyway, if you think that way, you should be a little disappointed in God: I'm always told God made us, so if he gave us a nature that isn't in our best interests, then he wasn't doing us a favour, was he?

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

Regardless of whether it is true or not that human nature is not in our best interests, I'd like you to react to my point, which is that supposedly God wasn't doing us a favour when he gave us our nature. How do you reconcile that with the rest of your religious doctrine?Anyway, the main point of my message was: So, how about an answer to that?

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

Phatboy,Thank you for taking the time (at 4 A.M. no less!) to put your thoughts in writing. However, from what you write, it is clear that you base your worldview on a number of assumptions that are taken from the bible, from what your religious background taught you, and you probably throw in some of your own ideas. The problem is that none of these are susceptible to empirical testing or logical analysis. The title of your post is "It's all about Belief". That says it all, I suppose. The difference between you and me is that I question things before I believe them, whereas you believe things before (if at all) you question them.

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins