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Author Topic:   What we must accept if we accept evolution
Parasomnium
Member
Posts: 2224
Joined: 07-15-2003


Message 159 of 318 (281449)
01-25-2006 8:06 AM
Reply to: Message 146 by nwr
01-23-2006 7:59 PM


Re: Thoughts are not physical
From an exchange between nwr and Robin Rohan:
nwr writes:
I don't believe that thoughts are any more physical than the money in my bank account.
Robin Rohan writes:
Then where did they come from? How did thinking evolve? What are thoughts made out of?
nwr writes:
Obviously, thoughts originate in neural activity. The neural activity is partly learned and partly evolved.
Why do thoughts have to be made of anything? What is music made of? What are numbers made of? What is the money in my bank account made of?
There are lots of things in our lives that don't match what we think of as physical. If you still want to call them physical, then you owe us a definition of "physical" that fits.
Here's my take on the matter.
Thoughts are not made of physical stuff, but reside in the dynamic arrangement of physical stuff. They are the patterns in which the underlying physical stuff is arranged and is constantly changed.
Thoughts are only physical in the sense that they are caused by something physical. But that doesn't mean that thoughts are made of some tangible stuff. You can't pick up a thought, roll it in the palm of your hand like a marble, and say: "This thing in my hand is a thought".


Take a look at the picture on the right. The box on the left contains eight marbles, neatly arranged in a pattern that might remind you of the number zero. You might say that the pattern of marbles represents the number zero.
Now, suppose I give the box a good shake. Then, afterwards, the box might well look like the one on the right. The marbles are in disarray and their pattern most likely does not remind you of a number. Yet, in a material sense, nothing has changed: the box still contains eight marbles which weigh exactly the same as before. Matter wasn't added nor removed. But the representation of the number zero is gone.
The question is, was there a zero in the box before the shake? In a sense, there was. It wasn't a tangible zero, but if the pattern of the marbles reminded you of the number zero, then you can say that there was some kind of zero in the box. This kind of zero existed in the same way that patterns can be said to exist, i.e. not in a material way, but in a symbolic way.
However, a pattern can only exist if there is something physical for the pattern to be arranged in. Therefore, without the physical, there can be no patterns, no symbols, no thoughts, and, finally, no minds.
This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 25-Jan-2006 01:30 PM

This message is a reply to:
 Message 146 by nwr, posted 01-23-2006 7:59 PM nwr has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 168 by nwr, posted 01-25-2006 1:28 PM Parasomnium has not replied
 Message 171 by robinrohan, posted 01-25-2006 4:38 PM Parasomnium has replied

Parasomnium
Member
Posts: 2224
Joined: 07-15-2003


Message 172 of 318 (281567)
01-25-2006 5:31 PM
Reply to: Message 171 by robinrohan
01-25-2006 4:38 PM


Aboutness
robinrohan writes:
Well, they are either something or nothing.
Right. They are something: they are patterns.
robinrohan writes:
If one is not a dualist, I would think one would have to be a materialist: everything is physical.
One can be a materialist and at the same time know that patterns exist that make a difference. A random heap of building materials is not a house, but if put together according to a certain pattern, it becomes a structure you can actually live in.
Likewise, a random configuration of bits and bytes in the memory of a computer generally isn't very useful, but a certain pattern of bit and bytes can cause a screen on the other side of a big ocean to light up with a picture of marbles in boxes.
The crux of these patterns is that they are not random, they are about something. Their aboutness is what makes the difference.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 171 by robinrohan, posted 01-25-2006 4:38 PM robinrohan has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 175 by robinrohan, posted 01-26-2006 8:07 AM Parasomnium has not replied

Parasomnium
Member
Posts: 2224
Joined: 07-15-2003


Message 186 of 318 (281718)
01-26-2006 9:48 AM
Reply to: Message 185 by robinrohan
01-26-2006 9:42 AM


Re: non-physical existence
No such mushrooms exist.
Not anymore, they don't. You've had one too many, it seems.
(Just teasing.)

This message is a reply to:
 Message 185 by robinrohan, posted 01-26-2006 9:42 AM robinrohan has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 187 by Omnivorous, posted 01-26-2006 9:51 AM Parasomnium has not replied

Parasomnium
Member
Posts: 2224
Joined: 07-15-2003


Message 211 of 318 (281927)
01-27-2006 5:31 AM


Mind Body problems
Faith has raised many interesting points in the latter part of this thread. Here is an attempt at answering them.
Faith writes:
How can the mind be corporeal at all? [...] IN order to say that don't you have to be able to locate it, measure it?
First of all, I agree with Omnivorous and nwr that the distinction 'corporeal / incorporeal' is inappropriate when talking about the mind. The mind is not a thing, it's an activity, like walking. No one in his right mind would ponder the question whether walking is corporeal or incorporeal. A better distinction would be 'physically caused / non-physically caused'.
By asking "don't you have to be able to locate it, measure it?", Faith implies that one cannot do so. But that is not true. We can locate the mind. Being an activity of the brain, it is located in our head. But again, the mind being an activity of the brain, and more specifically the result of the interactions of a hundred billion brain cells, it is smeared out, as it were, all over the brain. The precision of locating the mind ends there. Some aspects of the mind may be pinpointed more precisely as located in some specific areas of the brain, but if something is the result of the interactions of a large number of brain cells, then you cannot pinpoint it more precisely than that. It would be like asking in which country the world economy is located.
We can also measure it. Brain surgeons have done so in locally anaesthetized patients, by probing certain areas of the brain and asking the patients what they experienced. That's how we know that certain experiences are always affected in the same way if probed in the same way. Brain scans also reveal that certain functions reside invariably in certain locations. Certains drugs have a predictable influence on the working of the mind.
If it is INcorporeal how can its existence be accounted for by the biological processes of the ToE at all?
mind IS incorporeal, and that being the case it couldn't have come about through the processes of evolution. This is merely to say what Robin has been saying all along, that there's no way to see how the incorporeal could arise from the corporeal.
These are the competing logical constructs it seems to me:
1) Mind has to be corporeal because according to the ToE it had to arise out of biological processes. A couple of you have said this in the last few posts. So you now have the job of proving this. You can't merely state it. Mind does not have any corporeal properties. You can't locate it or measure it. So how can it be corporeal?
2) Some who recognize that mind is incorporeal say that it couldn't have come out of biological processes for that reason.
3) Some I think have said that it is both incorporeal and has evolved out of biological processes but I couldn't follow that argument.
I wasn't limiting this to human mentality. I meant ALL manifestations of mind, or consciousness, as far down the food chain as you want to go. KJSimons was saying that there's no way to locate the point of its origin and I was saying yes but it did HAVE a point of origin -- maybe instinct of some sort should be included in it or maybe not, but wherever you identify its origin it is something that happened after the evolutionary processes were underway. And the question is how?
Since the mind is an activity, it is susceptible to thinking about it in evolutionary terms, just like one can think in evolutionary terms about the mating dance of, say, birds of paradise.
how COULD this awfully real and yet incorporeal part of us, the mind, or soul, feelings and so on, the INCORPOREAL SUBSTANCE of the thing as it were (which gets paradoxical but forget that for the moment)-- how could biological physical processes EVER toss up such a phenomenon????
If a creature must respond to outside influences, it must have a way of internally representing the outside environment, or aspects thereof. Even non-living things can be thought to work that way. Think of a thermostat. To regulate the temperature, it has to have some way of measuring the outside temperature and representing it internally to compare it to an internal representation of the target temperature.
For a creature to survive in a changing environment, having representations of outside things alone is not enough. You have to have a representation of yourself with respect to outside things, and processes to monitor all those representations.
Having more and more ways to monitor the environment and the self within it at some point calls for a way to monitor the many monitoring processes going on. If monitoring the representations of the environment can be called "being aware of the outside", then monitoring the selfrepresentation with respect to representations of other things is "being self-aware". The monitoring of the monitoring must be "being aware of being aware", and lastly, the monitoring of being self-aware may lead to consciousness.
But these are all my private musings on the topic, I do not claim to have any authority in these matters. I can say that it helps a lot to read about it. But in summary, to use a cliché: it's just a theory.
Actually, regarding incorporeality, electricity is maybe a useful analogy here. You can do things with electricity, get it to run along wires and perform all kinds of tasks, and measure its effects in many ways, but you can't pin down electricity itself, what it is, can you? We know that the apparati that harness it for various purposes didn't create it, and that it exists independent of all those physical means of containing it.
That's not true. Electricity is generated by physical means. Without the physical, there is no electricity.
Objective simply means it's independent of our thinking about it. This doesn't require physicality. I think our primary evidence of mind is probably not our experience of our own so much as our recognition of it in others. The fact that we can communicate with each other about anything at all, agree about anything, recognize the proofs of a proposition or the solution of a problem and agree upon them. Somewhere in all that is the objective existence of mind. Nothing physical has to be involved in any of that. Just your talking to me ought to be clear enough proof of its objective existence.
You could be the only mind in existence, the rest of us could be zombies, automatons that respond by looking up suitable responses in a large database, or carrying out mindless routines to create responses, without really having an internal mental life. There's no way you can be sure.
isn't my I-ness the most important thing about me? It is *I* who tell my body what to do
You should google 'Benjamin Libet'. He's done some fascinating experiments that suggest that our consciousness is actually lagging behind events, i.e. that you may think that it's you who initiates a body movement, say as a response to a stimulus, but that in reality, your brain was already generating the commands for the movement, before you were conscious of the stimulus. In other words, your brain operates independently and tells you afterwards what it has done.
I realise that my making the distinction between 'your brain' and 'you' in the previous paragraph invokes all kinds of unwanted images about the mind, so here's another way of saying the same thing: your brain does something, and then tells itself about it.
Another frustrating bit here, to which I want to say Come o-o-o-n-n-n, I really don't get how anyone can deny this. Think of the thoughts that pass between you and me in this exchange. Forget all the instrumentality required to convey them. The thoughts themselves have NO corporeality whatever. Thoughts can cause all kinds of physicality but they aren't in themselves physical. Is this REALLY not obvious?
"Forget all the instrumentality required to convey them."
That's the crux of the matter: you can't do that. Without the physical means of having and conveying thoughts, there are no thoughts. Thoughts are (dynamic) patterns in physical substrates. Without the physical substrates, there can be no patterns and no thoughts. Isn't that obvious?
Our minds are powerful instruments for generating all kinds of things from ideas to illusions, to imagining to inventing to picturing what needs to be done etc. All this is incorporeal, and it comes from the *I* that is "in here," not from the brain.
In my view, you have it exactly the wrong way around. The mind doesn't generate anything. It is itself generated, by the brain. Those ideas and illusions? They are your mind. The starting point is the brain, not some ethereal, independent 'I in there'. The Cartesian Theatre is empty. Or better, there is no Cartesian Theatre.
This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 27-Jan-2006 12:11 PM

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.
Did you know that most of the time your computer is doing nothing? What if you could make it do something really useful? Like helping scientists understand diseases? Your computer could even be instrumental in finding a cure for HIV/AIDS. Wouldn't that be something? If you agree, then join World Community Grid now and download a simple, free tool that lets you and your computer do your share in helping humanity. After all, you are part of it, so why not take part in it?

Replies to this message:
 Message 217 by Faith, posted 01-27-2006 12:49 PM Parasomnium has not replied

Parasomnium
Member
Posts: 2224
Joined: 07-15-2003


Message 299 of 318 (282465)
01-30-2006 3:12 AM


Mind Body Problems revisited?
Faith, if you have time and are still interested, could you address my Message 211? I'm especially interested in your views on Libet.

Replies to this message:
 Message 302 by Faith, posted 01-30-2006 3:31 AM Parasomnium has replied

Parasomnium
Member
Posts: 2224
Joined: 07-15-2003


Message 303 of 318 (282470)
01-30-2006 3:36 AM
Reply to: Message 302 by Faith
01-30-2006 3:31 AM


Re: Mind Body Problems revisited?
There's no hurry. Maybe if the point comes up somewhere, we'll get back to it. Maybe you should first read up in Libet.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 302 by Faith, posted 01-30-2006 3:31 AM Faith has not replied

Parasomnium
Member
Posts: 2224
Joined: 07-15-2003


Message 309 of 318 (282488)
01-30-2006 7:01 AM
Reply to: Message 296 by Faith
01-30-2006 2:56 AM


Morality evolved
Well, as long as this thread is still alive, I might as well throw in another opinion.
Faith writes:
Darwin was the great watershed. Though so many here deny this, historically it was THE philosophical problem of the times and it changed things radically. People who deny it now haven't solved it, they merely ignore it, don't recognize it. They manage not to notice the contradiction between the logical implications of the ToE and their attachment to religion or conventional morality, which they enthusiastically affirm.
Why is it that people always want morality to come from outside themselves and to be absolute? The logical implication of evolution may be that there is no absolute morality, but that doesn't mean that morality per se doesn't exist. Morality is part of human culture, which is just as susceptible to the principles of evolution as any biological feature you'd care to think of.
Morality evolved, it's real and it's existence does not contradict the theory of evolution.

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.
Did you know that most of the time your computer is doing nothing? What if you could make it do something really useful? Like helping scientists understand diseases? Your computer could even be instrumental in finding a cure for HIV/AIDS. Wouldn't that be something? If you agree, then join World Community Grid now and download a simple, free tool that lets you and your computer do your share in helping humanity. After all, you are part of it, so why not take part in it?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 296 by Faith, posted 01-30-2006 2:56 AM Faith has not replied

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