Brain and soul : seperate or the same?

I am going to restart this topic in the hopes that it will not be allowed to degenerate into a discussion of quantum decoherence.As the original post said it best I will enter it here. There it is. I hope this will have a better outcome.

---

"Calling Atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color."
--Don Hirschberg

It seems to be a common mistake to think of the soul as somthing that makes the mind "aware" and this is telling.The idea is that the brain and the self are two seprate things and that the soul is somehow "looking" at the brain and this causes conciousness.To quote someone else, "Thats like looking at a car, asking how it works, and answering 'Another smaller car inside." Apparently, even today, young neuroscientists try to find a "seat" of concuiusness in the brain. It's not hard to see how this becomes an infinite regression: If a mind needs to have a seprate lesser mind inside it then doesn't that mind need another mind inside of IT etc.?I think these kind of mistakes in reasoning are what gave rise to a beilef in the soul. We imagine our bodies as sepreate from the self and then start imaginging weird homuncui sitting in our brains.I personaly don't see how conciuosness needs to have anything non-material about it. Why is it nesessary to imagine a non-material component to the mind? Why do minds need an observer to be conchious?

TDD Well since we are not aware or our brains in the same way we are aware of our body then without properly investigating we can fall into the trap of seeing our"selves" as seperate from our bodies and side with dualism. Before this gets off track again let us clear this up.In the previous posts on this topic there was an offshoot concerning quatum physics and observation.Observation is not necessary to collapse waves functions since the interaction of our measuring devices are the ones that actually interact with the observed phenomena and subsequently record such in our data.This is why an experiment can be performed, a measurement made all without the presence of a human observer.In point of fact we do not observe the phenomena{radioactive decay} ourselves but only the record of the event.The error comes in the limit imposed by the structure of matter that allows not precise determination of events but only probabilty amplitudes in these cases.Also,if we state that consciousness is non-material,we are left with the problem of how to explain how consciousness maybe altered by application of physical means.
A blow to the skull induces an electromagnetic interaction through the skull that disrupts the electrical activity of the brain and the resulting probable loss of consciousness.For anyone who has had an operation the chemicals introduced into your body also serve to alter the electromagnetic activity within you.

---

"Calling Atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color."
--Don Hirschberg

I have read somewhere about experiments,(very fancy double slit experiments.) Where the wave function is 'fooled' into a path and then another instument attempts a measurement opposite. Trying to observe Velocity and postition at the same time. The electron seems to always know.
I do not want to sway off topic but I think that the concept of dualism and monism are bound to take you to the fundlemental particles/waves that manifest into reality as we know it. I am of the belief that separateness is an illusion. The brain and mind are co-dependant. The brain is the hardware and the mind is the rest that results. Take out the hardware and you have no means to generate thought let alone conciousness. IMO

Carl Zimmer's recent book, Body and Soul, is a pretty decent read on some of the history of ideas about the brain. Up into the mid-1600's, doctors viewed the brain as a cooling unit to keep the blood from overheating, and saw no connection at all between it and mind or soul - those were in the liver or heart.I'm firmly in the materialist camp on this one - when the voltages all go to zero in my brain, I'm gone. No soul, no mind, no spirit - just dead, not-real-attractive meat.

So wait, it seems that you are saying that the brian is the source of the mind but that the mind is still distinct from the brain. Is the brain like the hardware of a computer and thoughts the programs that it runs or are you saying that the brain somehow produces a seprate soul so that the brian is like a consiousness factory?This message has been edited by The Dread Dormammu, 11-14-2004 04:28 PM

Yes you could say the brain is a "conciousness factory". If you are clinically brain dead your body is still alive and functioning, but your are not concious. You are no longer processing information, you are no longer able to maintain basic bodily functions, such as breathing. So where does the mind go when the brain ceases to function anymore? I contend the mind goes nowhere, it is dependant on the brain. The mind is like the sum collective of all your brains memories and thoughts. No brain, no mind.IMO. The soul or life force or what ever you care to call it is what was your mind. So when you die so goes the thing that you called you. You and your memory and those whos lives you touched and your offspring are what is left of what was once "you". But I do not believe a invisible soul trancends into heaven or enters into a collective conciousness. I believe you are gone, and what remains of your body recycled as all things are in the universe.

But see, to say the brain "causes" concuousness is to say that the brain is distinct from conciousness becase it produces something seprate.Wouldn't it be closer to the mark to say that the brain IS concious, that self-awareness is a property of the brain? Just like my calculator has the ability to find square roots, the brain has the ability to be concious. The "square root finding-ness" is a PROPETIY of a calculator just as councouiness is a property of the brain.

Is running a property of legs? Is speech a property of lungs and vocal chords? Is juggling a property of hands and arms?

Jack makes a good point. All I can add is your calculator's calculations are a function of the hardware. If you drop your calculator it may not "function" properly if at all. Just as if you damage your noodle it may not 'function' properly. The brain is NOT conciousness, the brain is a collection of organic material nothing more. However, without it there is no input of data, there is no processing of data and there is no output of data. Hence no illusion of a self. Hence no mind. That thing you called "you" ceases to exist. Your body may still be kept alive artificially with drugs and life support but (YOU/your mind)exist no longer. This is just my personal opinion .

For me a big problem still exists. We look at the brain from outside, and assume a normal intact functioning brain, do we see consciousness? We can interview the person while doing a scan and satisfy ourselves that they our conscious. We can examine our sensory awareness and thought stream and surmise we are conscious, but what consciousness IS? That remains for me a near inpenetrable mystery.It is a fundamental mystery and in a sense I am the mystery that is trying to understand the mystery. I think the premise that the brain causes consciousness, or is consciousness assumes that consciousness is an emergent property of matter like wetness. At the temperatures that water is a liquid,oxygen and hydrogen are gases. Studying oxygen and hydrogen does seem to have any information that predicts water's behaviour. A molecule consisting of 3 atoms is of course many orders of magnitude less complex than a human brain.This is just my feeling but since consciousness is so fundamental to my being and to the beings I interact with I think it must somehow be fundamental to the universe. That is in addition to energy/matter, and space/time we have to assume consciousness either as a yet to be accounted for aspect of energy or space or as a separate principle. I am influenced in this by the accounts of exploration of the basis of consciousness by eastern sages such as the Buddha and Ramana Maharshi.So I will just state without having any idea how it could be proved that I think the brain states especially of memory are the individual but that consciousness is not the brain. Early thought first hit on the idea that the breath was soul only much later do we have the idea that consciousness is the soul which I think is closer and yet a mistaken identification.I'll offer Erwin Schrodinger's view that The deception ends, perhaps at death, perhaps before death, perhaps after death but consciousness continues. This is my understanding and I don't offer it as fact or true but as a possible direction to explore that I have the feeling is moving closer to the truth.lfen

lfen,I think you said a lot of good things. As someone who's been studying cognitive neuroscience for the past year, and who will (hopefully) be entering graduate school in the subject, I'd like to offer some thoughts.

• You're right--consciousness is not 'directly' observable. Our best explanation would come from 'theory of mind'--we all assume that people around us have minds like our own. Lots of behavioral studies have been done on children to investigate when this happens, and in what stages. It's been postulated by a fair amount of people (including Paul Bloom) that 'theory of mind' is essential for language learning. And certainly the consistent results obtained in 'lower-level' cognitive experiments (testing visual / auditory attention, testing episodic and semantic memory, etc) seem to suggest that we all have some common 'thing'. However, the problem of knowing EXPERIENTIALLY (i.e. consciously) if we experience the same phenomenon, that is known in philosophy as 'the problem of qualia,' and I've not seen any good answer to it so far.
  
• I would DEFINITELY describe consciousness as an emergent phenomenon. Consciousness is FAR from rule-based, and best studied as an emergent property. As the original post's links showed, Dr. Ramachadran has shown experimentally, and strongly motivates theoretically, the view of consciousness as an emergent property.
  
• As for consciousness being fundamental... I'm glad you found something that works for you. I definitely agree that Buddhism has some really important things to say, not only about consciousness, but life in general. So you 'get points' with me for that

Since there is no data on 'qualia,' (and many philosophers would argue that, in principle, we can't get it), then it comes down to a personal choice. Personally, I've chosen to think that, since most dualists propose that the soul / consciousness operates by interacting with the brain, and since you can change behavior (and therefore, I assume, consciousness) by lesioning the brain, then I feel no need to postulate anything separate. Even if there IS something separate, THAT thing interacts with the brain to produce everything we experience. So... I feel no need to go further. I think it's harder to live a life without a soul than with it. And since I'm doing fine so far without it... then I'll stick with this path.Ben

Mr Jack asks: Running is a property of legs when those legs are running. You look at a set of legs that are running and ask "what are the propetys of those legs?" and answer "They are hinged, they are composed of tissue, they are running". Perhaps I am using the word 'property' in a way you disagree with, so I will state my point like this:Self Awareness is something that the brain DOES just like Juggleing is something that arms do. Sometimes our brain stops "doing" conciousness, during some stages of the sleep cycle, when we are given anestheisa, or when we die.The point I'm trying to make is that there is no need to imagine a sepreate thing that the brain produces i.e. a soul. Why do people have a hard time imagining that something material could be self aware? I can imaginge this kind of mistake in reasoning BEFORE the invention of computers. But now we see that we can make something that can add subtract, play chess, invent, essentualy have thoughts.Why is it now hard to imagine our brains are simply more powerful computers with more complicated thoughts?Lfen says: You look at a normal intact functioning CPU do you see a chess game? You can plug a monitor into it and see that chess game. Or you can look at the code and then infer that a chess game is taking place.I agree that self-awareness is a bit more complicated than a chess game but that doesnt mean it has to be made out of something immaterial. I agree that these are hard questions but I don't agree that the soulution lies in somthing that is not composed of matter. It seems unessesary to imagine that their is some spirt mind in addition to a material mind.And also: You are not the first person to come up with such a theory. I rememeber reading a paper by an famous philospoher who said that since counciousness had to evolve from something that had slightly less conciousness. Since conciousness can't spring out of nothing all living things had to have some kind of conciousness and even inorganic matter had to posess a sort of proto conciousness! He imagined the intire universe was filled with a sort of proto mind.We can see how falacious this argumnet is if we apply it to somthing less confusing than the mind: since feathers had to have evolved from something that was similar to feathers, and since feathers can't come from nothing, then all living things have to have some form of proto feathers. In fact inorcanic material has these same protofeathers. This argument is just plain silly. Yet we feel a sense of awe imagining that the universe is filled with a self awareness, hmm.And also: So you think ALL the other properties of thought are soley in the brain, mathamatics, emotion, memory, every other kind of thought EXCEPT self awareness? Why not just assume that that is something ELSE that the brain does?

Hi Ben,Yeah, qualia is b*tch, frustratingly inpenetrable.I've been reading Antonio Damasio's popular books on consciousness particularly THE FEELING OF WHAT HAPPENS. If you know of some other books along those lines I'd appreciate you passing them along. I'm interested in what science can learn about consciousness and if it can determine it is emergent.My interest in Buddhism and Advaita is long standing and so I pursue this path out of my commitment to it. It feels right to me. I am however interested in what scientists are learning about the brain, it's functioning and consciousness.I am also very interested in what the Tibetan's call primordial consciousness which they describe as a the non personal uncreated source that get identified with an individual and all the desires and aversions that make up that individual. I suppose it's an aethetic preference and a psychological bent towards a certain approach to life on my part.Cognitive neuroscience sounds like a fascinating field to be in and I think that the discoveries are going to be accelerating. Thanks for the thoughtful reply to my post and I would love to hear more.lfen

Dormammu, How'd you escape that dimension that Doc had you sealed in?I don't know what is happening currently but back in the 60's at college I was a big Doc Strange fan. I still have some of those old comics. Haven't seen that name for an age and a half though, makes me grow nostalgic.Well, enough chit chat, to your reply to my post. I make no claim of originality but neither can I claim to have studied Buddhism or Advaita deeply enough to speak authoritatively on the subject. So the understanding is mine but is based on traditions in eastern thought. I usually include mention of interests in the nondual traditions or a quote or reference so that anyone reading has some general idea of where I'm coming from. Well, feathers are less confusing than the mind but they also are so different from mind that it's difficult for me to apply the analogy.
I'm also not at all sure what you were referencing when you wrote "inoganic material has these same protofeathers". What inorganic material is that and what features are you saying are protofeathers? Well that is an assumption that I'm happy that neuroscience is investigating. It is important and necessary and may in the end prove to be correct. You can reference my early reply to bencip19 where I discuss a little bit why I continue to explore the eastern nondual tradition's approach to understanding consciousness. It's my personal predilection and preference. I don't know which is true and think both assumptions are worth checking out.lfen