Emotions and Consciousness Seperate from the Brain ??

Can you give a more specific quote or page you want to discuss?Also, what do you mean "emotion" ? Are you talking about the conscious experience of emotion, or the behavioral responses? They have somewhat different responses.As for brain structures involved in emotion, the amygdala, a subcortical structure, is generally noted for its role in emotional response. Kandel et. al (2000) notes: To really understand the flavor of the quote, and what is meant by unconscious response, you really need to read about how emotion is studied and understood (p. 982-6).OK, I'll go for now and see how that strikes you.Ben

MissionForTruth,Hi, thanks for your response. I do agree with your thoughts and your direction of course. Here's some more comments:I was kind of looking for you to pick a quote, paragraph, or section (even single webpage?) to pick out for discussion from the website. I've been through parts of the website before, and I'm not really interested in fishing through the whole thing. Anyway, I think around here, it's generally on the question poser to break down a website and post concrete sections of it. So, I'd politely ask you to do that. Then I'd be very interested in commenting on what you find.But I would like to add that, whatever you bring up, unless it is new and unexpected, I'll be taking the view that behavior and mental states are caused by the brain. Thanks for clarifying. By the way, lfen was telling me before that actually, conscious emotional responses can happen AFTER action has begun. I don't have any data on that though. But it seems like something you'd be interested in. Well... the whole system is necessary. But of course, it is the dynamic properties of the system which give rise to dynamic behaviors. There's no doubt about that ! This book is THE book for neural science. It's a nice reference book, about 2000 pages. I doubt you can get it online. Maybe your library has it, but I'm not so sure. It's a technical book on a fairly narrow subject.But, like any good reference book, it's easy to get some answers straightaway from it Thanks!
Ben

Dennis and Parsimonium,I've been following this debate, and I'm enjoying it. At the risk of making things messier by adding a new voice, I did want to add my voice here. I've argued on other threads about epistemology and ontology, and I think they are important for grounding science (and I can see that Dennis agrees).I'd take a slightly different approach to Parsimonium to Dennis' statements: I completely agree.BUUUUT... Scientists are not after this "ultimate truth." It's not attainable. We're simply looking for the best way to model the reality.The question of imploring God or not comes down to this--can we model reality simply based on what you call "the natural" ? If we can, then there's no need to postulate the existence of God. If we fail at the present... well that's a different story. That's closer to what I would call "self-defeating" than the line you're taking."Ultimate truth" is in principle unknowable. But like you say, it has nothing to do with science. On other threads I've argued, then, to simply drop the idea of "ultimate truth". It has no value.

Well...I don't mean to insult you or to belittle your belief, but this is exactly what non-believers think about believers (a.k.a. God). So..."Exist" is a funny word, and I don't like it. So I'll try to work around it. You are you, right? And you can't get outside your head. So, if YOU imagine something, it basically exists for you. If 1, 10, or 2000 others imagine something but you do not, then it basically does not exist for you; although there will be effects (notice the societal effects of different religions on even those who do not believe). In that same vein, if everybody believes that something exists, then basically it does exist.Now, usually people coordinate their beliefs with evidence and consistency. Things that are simply imagined usually wind up being untenable--either they start to conflict with other measurements, or the imaginations of different people start to show differences.However, I would say that, since we can't ultimately know an "absolute truth," and that since our scientific theories are incremental and based on observation, this type of "consistent imagination", if it doesn't conflict measurable data, then it is not distinguishable from "reality."Ben

Dennis,Thanks for the welcome. And thanks for your attitude (interested, personable, willing) with this thread; it makes discussion enjoyable. Ah, but there's the rub. In my view (and of course I really want everybody else to think the same way!), there's only a very fine line (and only a philosophically interesting one) here. YES, we CANNOT know ultimate truth. HOWEVER, we are searching for knowledge, data, and theories that DO explain our experience consistently and completely. If we do actually attain consistency (with data and within the explanation) in our explanations, then there's really very little difference (and zero PRACTICAL difference) between "absolute truth" and what we've done. Here I think is the interesting question, and I thought this was one of the directions you are headed. ... (deleting many sentences, going for simplicity now). I guess the answer is, I don't know. I was tempted to say "there IS no 'longest time'," but now I think not. I guess it would be at the point where we stop making progress (i.e. stop creating theories that INCREASE the amount of data that we can explain) and where we stagnate on our knowledge for a long time.There is no "time," in principle, though. Science doesn't have to be "right." You can get the right answers through other means. Science is just a method to get some answers. It has its benefits and its shortfalls. Certainly all of those on this board reap the benefits of science. But it's not the only way to get answers. Maybe it's the only quasi-dependable, communicable way though. I'll bite--What is this? I don't understand what is more logical to you. Please explain.Thanks!

Cool, glad to hear it. I'm very interested to continue; I'm still not quite sure where you're coming from. So I have some questions Why do you say this? I am not sure what you mean "trusted." You mean there's no reason "a priori" reason to believe in something like causality (a.k.a. Hume), so there's no "grounding" reason to believe that things won't change at any moment? I'm just guessing, I'm really not sure.But to give you a peek at where I may come from after your response... I'm probably going to argue (unless you throw something at me that I'm not expecting) something along the lines of "the rub rubbing the rub is that this "knowledge" MUST be trusted. And if that applies, then I would also argue that the argument has nothing to do with science or anything else. Well... abiogenesis and evolution are ... by their nature, they are slow sciences. There's some crazy stuff out there--I just listened to a talk today (online for free!) about the molecular structure of ion channels. It's crazy!We have quantum chromodynamics, which according to the author can relate gravitational and intertial mass, marrying quantum mechanics with general relativity. That's new stuff.... but thinking more about it, I understand where you're coming from I think. 40 years isn't much time (it seems to me) in the history of the world. And I think that the actual building blocks that are being developed have not, in any way, stagnated. I think "revolutionary" thought is based on good, solid, unexplained data. I think we're still getting new, good, data. I think the new ideas are, then, only inevitable. But of course, maybe not. It's all personal viewpoint. And if you want to turn away from science, that is a choice of course you have. I started writing this up, but yeah, it's a bit long. I'll write it up separately, and post later if you're interested. By the way, can you think of any alternate forms besides religion, philosophy, and ignorance? Ignorance being the choice to stop asking questions of this nature. And don't laugh--for me, that's the closest viable alternative to science.Thanks!
Ben

Thanks.I'm tempted to "quit while I'm ahead," but reading your take on dshortt's posts in another thread, I'm interested to see what you think of the following:According to my understanding of your version of dshortt (confusing!), logic is not absolute--it is derived from physical beings in a physical world. if that's about right... I would agree. In other words, we can't get "outside ourselves" to see other ways of thinking.But again, I don't think that matters either. Either logic is absolute, or it is absolute FOR US. I don't think it's ultimately meaningful to try and pull those two apart--WE ARE "US" and we'll NEVER BE ANYTHING ELSE!Logic, to me, is just another system of deducing or predicting the future, given a set of assumptions (the "primitives" of logic) There's nothing absolute about it. Just like there's nothing absolute about Cartesian coordinates. All are based on "primitives" or "assumptions."Suddenly I'm feeling I went beyond what you'll like. But I know you're interested in this stuff, and so am I. So let's see what happens