bio evolution, light, sound and aroma

I suppose that depends on what you mean by "entity" and what you mean by "reality".Personally, I have standards that don't allow consider what you call "private entities" to be entities at all. Without standards, you would have to allow gnomes, gremlins, tooth fairies, ghosts, and all kinds of nonsense entities. I'm not sure what point you think you are making there. For myself, I do not suggest that everything has a mechanical explanation. As I see it, we value the mechanical explanations from science because they are very useful. There is no need to assume that they constitute a complete explanation of everything.

And yet apparently it does, which is something you'd have to deal with. For example, consider how electrical stimulation of the brain can cause the experience of memories, sounds, smells, etc. Consider how the loss of parts of the brain cause corresponding losses of conscious experience. Now, is this to be attributed to a physical deficit (in his retina, for example) or a defect in his immaterial soul? Which way would you bet?

I posted brain images earlier showing people with normal mental states but large loss of brain region.How could these missing regions be causally necessary for conscious states if these states and functions exist in their absence? There are also phantom pains in the absence of limbs and hallucination and dreams with the absence of external perceptual input.Also as is emphasized in the Majorek article brain stimulation is not sufficient too produce "normal" mental experiences that are isomorphic with everyday experiences rather they manifest tingling, simple shapes and colours but not of faces or elaborate percepts.Also brain lesion cases are often exaggerated and the areas to large to specify a clearly delineated functional role for an area.This happened in the case of Phineas Gage the most famous case. Phineas Gage - WikipediaEdited by AndrewPD, : No reason given.Edited by AndrewPD, : No reason given.Edited by AndrewPD, : Spelling

The case is used to illustrate how a lack of consciousness leads to a lack of knowledge. It is saying that there are things that can only be known about through consciousness. That means there is direct conscious knowledge pre theoretically. Correlation is not causation.Describing something as physical or material does not denote an identified distinct essence. Matter has loose definitions it does not indicate a concrete substance especially in quantum theorising and mental states cannot be described in terms of these material terms. You can't measure the qualities of thoughts and give it physical or quasi physical features.I don't see something as being less magically if you can couch the explanation in physics terminology, because why does any kind of "physical" entity or law exist anyway?

Removing consciousness to some realm away from the physical doesn't really solve any of the problems associated with the idea of free will. The consciousness would still have to interface with the brain which sends and receives the signals that control the body. The brain obeys the laws of physics and chemistry. So the transition from one state to the next has to occur in accordance with those laws. How does free will cause anything that is truly free if it is limited to sending signals out through the brain and those chemical signals are constrained to be the result of the previous brain state?It is possible for a particular action to be the result of a number of different brain states but it is not possible for the same brain state to result in multiple distinct actions. So then how could an immaterial consciousness or an emergent free will cause anything to happen since it is limited to working on the previous brain state and what is physically/chemically possible to follow from that state?

Brain plasticity is a wonderful thing. Nonetheless, brain damage does in fact impair mental function. Stroke victims, for example, really aren't just putting it on. Apparently the remaining regions are sufficient for conscious states. Show me someone who's conscious without a brain, then we'll talk. But not in the absence of a brain.And look what LSD can do "with the absence of external perceptual input". Why would this material substance so profoundly mess with the immaterial? But it does produce mental experiences, yes? It would be surprising from my point of view if the crude expedient of zapping the surface of the brain could cause every conscious experience. But that it produces some conscious experiences refutes the contention that "There is no reason why any activity in the brain should lead to a conscious experience." 'Cos this is a physical activity that does. And often they aren't. Perhaps we should look at the most informative cases rather than the least. If we can draw no conclusions from Phineas Gage, whom I never mentioned, let's look at someone else.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Certainly. Does it mean that we can know things without a brain?I can make little of the rest of your post.

Oh, right, I was forgetting. Of course. When a man receives a traumatic injury to (for example) his visual cortex, and goes blind, those silly "neuronal reductionists" go about saying that the visual cortex is in some way responsible for the experience of seeing. But correlation is not causation. Obviously what's really happened is that his immaterial soul was injured, maybe by an invisible demon flying into it, and this caused him both to go blind and to bang just that part of his head in which erring neuroscientists locate his visual cortex.

I think AndrewPD is correct on this point. Science does not have a way to identify design in nature. That truism is one reason why ID is not science. In fact none of the stuff advocated by Andrew PD is science. AndrewPD asserts that design, intelligence, and meaning are present in nature. He then backs up that assertion with bad arguments.What you've described here is how we identify artifacts made by humans. In fact your process for identification explicitly requires features that do not occur naturally.

The way he want from talking about things "in reality" and then ended with "in nature", I didn't think he was using nature as a distinction from being artificially made by humans.I was thinking along the lines of, if you found an arrowhead in nature, then yeah, you could determine that it was designed.But maybe that's not what he was talking about.

More likely along the lines of your typical IDologist bait and switch tactic:You can see that the arrowhead was designedTherefore when something in nature appears designed that then there must have been a designer.The problem is still how design is realized: with the arrowhead we can find the cores and hammer stones and we can replicate how they were made, but with apparent design in nature we need a mechanism to realize the design, and the only one in biology is evolution ...

I don't see how evolution or natural selection are actually mechanisms. I thought a mechanism was a physical structure like a mill.I have been discussing dispositions at length here and pointing out that things can only emerge if reality has the disposition to allow them. The posited mechanism in transforming organism is mutating DNA I thought.New features can only be created by mutations if reality has the disposition to allow them.The discussion about intelligence and design is in relation to the invisibility of cognitions and experience in the brain.We don't say consciousness doesn't exist because we don't see it in the brain. It is in a private realm of subjectivity.It is easy to say you have a sufficient explanation for something after the fact more without having to genuinely replicate the totality of events. It is like someone feeling they have a compelling lone suspect for the Jack The ripper murders.

I can show you someone who is unconscious with a brain.Neural plasticity is problem for a causal correlations and functional correlations in neuroscience. In the cases I have illustrated it rules out the necessity of any of the missing or damaged areas in consciousness or cognition.If someones brain was missing entirely they would not be able to control their body their body to indicate they were still conscious. On the dualistic version of consciousness consciousness does need to interact with the brain.Like when a radio is damaged you may not receive the radio programme any longer but the programme itself isn't damaged. there are different ways of describing the mind brain relationship.A wide range of complex issues arise in the study of consciousness such as a the binding problem where we have coherent unified, multifaceted experiences but activity spread across the brain. There is not a simple step form one brain region to a conscious experience. You seem to be aiming for the crudest form of correlation.The biggest puzzle for me is how we become conscious of being ourselves as opposed to all the other billions of consciousnesses that exist and have existed. That is the problem of arriving at a particular conscious location. Consciousness has a location where one has a unique portal to reality from a self perspective.It is possible that many light years away someone else is conscious on the planet zorg and asking the same question.If you don't understand this issue of unique conscious perspectival location you won't be suitably puzzled and that ain't my problem. If you take a trivial attitude towards consciousness it will seem less problematic to you. It will be hard to reason with you then.These twins Abigail and Brittany are an example of a united body but two separate conscious locations to occupy.

We can also note the two heads on that united body. Surely you saw that too? For which side are you arguing here?Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Unfortunately for you, that's not the same thing. But not the necessity of the brain. Why not? They'd still have a body. They just wouldn't be able to control their brain in doing ... wait, what is it the brain does, according to you? Sometimes "the crudest form of correlation" is exactly what we observe. Calling it crude doesn't make it go away. The inability to identify living things, for example, really is correlated with damage to the superior temporal sulcus and the lateral fusiform gyrus. You may call that "crude" all you wish, it's also a fact. Specifically, the location of my consciousness appears to be inside my head. Say, what's inside my head? My brain, you say? Hmm, could be worth looking into. Two brains, then. That would fit in with them having two heads.