What we must accept if we accept evolution

Not neccessarly.. It could be 'conceptual'. The meaning conveyed by symbols aren't physical,yet it can concey a concept.IMO, you are missing out on some other alternatives.

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Men don't have minds; they just have brains (thus saith evolution).

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Where did you get this idea?

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According to evolutionists, and supporters of scientific research, there was no "before" to evolution.
I was just implying that evolution and materialism in human society go hand in hand.

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What edge was referring to was not evolution itself, but the idea of evolution as proposed a couple hundred years ago.His point was that people were materialistic (accumulation of wealth) long before people even had the barest inkling regarding what we now refer to as biological evolution.Please be careful that you are not mixing up the definitions for "philosophical materialism" (all there is is nature) and being "materialistic" (placing a high value upon material goods)

I thought it up.

Ok, nwr, I think I got it. I think we agree, actually. There was some confusion about the definition of the term "thought."A thought is a physical event in the brain--say, an electrical impulse. However, what the thought is about is not the same thing as the thought itself, even though you could not have a thought that was not about something.We can have thoughts about real things and we can have thoughts about unreal things. If I think about this chair I'm sitting in, I'm thinking about something real. But I can think about all sorts of things that are not real--that do not exist at all. I can think about giant mushrooms growing in my backyard. No such mushrooms exist.Or, I can have an abstract thought. "Symphony" is an abstraction: it doesn't exist. Nor does "money." Only individual things exist, not types of things.

Not anymore, they don't. You've had one too many, it seems.(Just teasing.)

Or one too few.

Or just enough. Clarity has been achieved.

A process can only be described a deterministic if you can say that for a given set of conditions a given outcome will arise. It doesn't make any sense to call a process deterministic just because the outcome had a set of physical causes. If we accepted this latter definition then all physical processes would be defined as deterministic - and that isn't the case.Evolution is a good example of a non-deterministic process. If evolution were deterministic, then given current conditions I could determine the exact range of animals that would evolve from my pet dog over the next 100,000 years. I can't do that because there are at least two things I can never predict: the random mutations that will occur within her descendants' genes ; and the precise environmental conditions they will encounter over the years.Similarly, the process by which you acquired your beliefs is non-deterministic. Given a complete knowledge of your physical state at age 20, I couldn't predict your beliefs at age 35 because I can't know what experiences you will have in the intervening years, and I can't know what choices you'll make.A previous poster gave the movement of a quantum particle as an example of a non-deterministic process. You dismissed this example with the argument that the final condition of the quantum particle must have had physical causes, therefore the process must have been deterministic. I hope you can now see the problem with your argument.(Just in case you can't!). The movement of a quantum particle is non-deterministic because, given an initial set of conditions, we can only give a probability of certain outcomes arising - we can never predict with certainty what the final outcome will be.

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The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

Just because it's "random," this doesn't mean it's not caused. Mutations are unpredictable because we don't know enough about the causes to be able to predict them.Think of a roulette wheel. Where the little silver ball lands is said to be random. But a very complicated series of physical conditions cause the ball to land in some slot. Theoretically, if we had some super-fine instruments to measure things like angles, velocity, and so forth, we could predict where the ball would land.We can't make these predictions, but if we knew enough we could.

The ToE in no way claims that the mind doesn't exist.

I'm saying the theory of evolution logically includes materialism. At one time in the history of earth, there were no "minds." Consciousness evolved. If minds are incorporeal, then one day in the history of evolution, corporeality produced incorporeality. That seems impossible.

The problem you are having is you are thinking in a binary fashion, no mind vs mind, when you should be thinking in terms of gradations, the degree to which something has a mind.Insects probably don't have what you would consider a mind, nor would many other forms of life. But what about cuttle fish, octopi, mice, cats, dogs, dolphins, monkeys, apes, and humans. Which have minds and which don't or to what degree do they have it? It appears to me most of the animals I've listed have minds. In fact it would appear that the more developed an animal's brain is the more developed their minds are. Seems minds are coporeal in the sense that they are a property of brain development.

So far as I've been able to keep track of this discussion, it seems to me this is what RR has been saying logically follows from the ToE. I'm not sure whether Lfen and nwr and others are saying that's not so, or something else.About gradations, wherever mind/incorporeality starts in the evolutionary process, that is its starting point, right?This message has been edited by Faith, 01-26-2006 03:06 PM

robinrohan Yet it is easily resolved if we assume that the premise "If minds are incorporeal" is not correct. If we simply assume its inverse "If minds are corporeal" then the issue resolves itself and the logic folows quite readily.