What we must accept if we accept evolution

What makes it sentimental to my mind is that it has nothing to do with whether it is true or not. If you can believe something without also believing it true, just that you like believing it, that's sentimentality. Or at leaast that's what I thought you meant by the idea. That is, some people profess a belief in Jesus Christ or profess to follow him and yet can say it doesn't matter whether he really existed or not. That makes the belief completely a matter of wishfulness. Maybe sentimentality isn't quite the right word then, but this is how I thought you'd been using it.Sorry if I missed the context here. Just saw this last message on my way out the door.This message has been edited by Faith, 01-22-2006 11:40 AMThis message has been edited by Faith, 01-22-2006 11:41 AM

Oh, OK. That's a little different than I'd thought but I get what you mean. I've always thought it impossible to really believe something for emotional reasons, but self-deception/rationalization for self-serving reasons is certainly recognizable.This message has been edited by Faith, 01-22-2006 09:39 PM

I agree, with two questions:What if God set evolution in motion. Could it eventually arrive at a mind that reflects God's? {abe: maybe you've answered this somewhere. I've been getting lost trying to follow this thread}What exactly do you personally believe in all this? Do you believe that the aura of incorporeality IS an illusion? {abe: your own mind, feelings, communication with others etc.}This message has been edited by Faith, 01-23-2006 01:20 PM

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

Yes, HE does, but he's saying the ToE suggests something else, and that's what you just now agreed with, and so did sidelined in his last post. But then I haven't been having an easy time of following this thread so I could be wrong. I don't understand how mind could in any sense be called "corporeal" OR could have evolved by the processes of the ToE, but you and Sidelined apparently think it can be.How can the mind be corporeal at all? I'd ask you and Sidelined. IN order to say that don't you have to be able to locate it, measure it?If it is INcorporeal how can its existence be accounted for by the biological processes of the ToE at all? Some have asserted that this has simply happened somehow or other, but again I haven't been able to follow all the reasoning so if a coherent idea of HOW it happened has been given I've managed to miss it. That's what I thought you meant, but there had to be a beginning of it somewhere along that line whether anyone knows where it was or not.This message has been edited by Faith, 01-26-2006 03:40 PM

But the point where mind happened is crucial because it is a different order of things than the biological processes that supposedly brought it about. All anyone is able to say about it so far sounds magical -- Well it happened, so there! Yes it did, it exists, but it couldn't have by the processes of evolution, and if you think it could have you have to say more than that it did. It should count as an unanswered argument against the ToE.This message has been edited by Faith, 01-26-2006 03:52 PM

But, to repeat, if it is corporeal it should be locatable and measurable and this it is not. You merely ASSUME it is corporeal because that is consistent with the biological processes you ASSUME it arose from. But there is no evidence anywhere of the corporeality of the mind.I admit I got lost trying to follow this thread. Some of it made me quite dizzy. But maybe some attempt to define things here and there would help. Here I think I've failed to identify my own assumption clearly, which is that 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?

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2) Some who recognize that mind is incorporeal say that it couldn't have come out of biological processes for that reason.

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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. {abe: emphasize logical alternatives}This message has been edited by Faith, 01-26-2006 11:34 PM

This is true. I wasn't being clear. I should merely have stated it as my assumption at that point from which my conclusion was drawn. I wasn't arguing the assumption at that point but yes, it is also under debate. I think I laid out the different positions in my last post -- (to kjsimons?)

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? First, it's not a "sensation of" incorporeality. Incorporeality is an objective "quality" of mind. You can't locate it or measure it so it isn't corporeal. Second, we're trying to define WHAT it is, which is a different consideration than its fitness, as far as WHY it might have evolved if it did. So Robin doesn't need to explain WHY. That's not the question. The question is 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???? You can't get blood out of a turnip, or spirit out of earth. Or since you say you can, SHOW US HOW.You can't just say "I see no reason why not" as you just did. It IS what the debate is ABOUT. As I already said, as follows: OK, but the mind is still not corporeal. All you are measuring is its correlations with its physical instrument, the brain, not its substance. Yes, but evolution is not the only explanation for this. No doubt the explanations are problematic on both sides, but the scientists don't have one at all that I can see. What I meant by magical was the lack of interest on the part of the scientifically minded here in thinking about HOW it could have arisen given its incorporeality, which is of a different order than corporeality. You simply say abracadabra there it is, and feel no need to figure out HOW it could have happened. More ploddingly prosaic souls, perhaps, look at the thing and say couldn't happen.This message has been edited by Faith, 01-26-2006 05:18 PM

sorry, duplicate postThis message has been edited by Faith, 01-26-2006 05:06 PM

I'm not thinking of causality on that everyday basis, I guess. It's more a matter of my belief that the human mind/soul is immortal and will live beyond the body/brain. They are really of a piece -- we are all body-souls, inextricably in a sense, and yet at death the two are separated (until the resurrection). So I guess it's not a which-is-in-the-driver's-seat thing as much as a reciprocal thing. Anyway, I can accept that brain activity affects mental processes and that this can be measured without thinking this is the sum total of the mind or soul. 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. See, now this gets very frustrating for this ploddingly prosaic soul. 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. OK. I'm sure there are a variety of different ways we experience our selfness; Robin's appears to be its incorporeality. But you remind me, maybe it would be clearer if we identified our subject as the self, or the personality, or the "I" as in "I am 'in here?'" Didn't we all have that experience as children of pondering how come my I-ness is something so completely independent of the I-ness I see in other people? and how come I'm the I-ness I am? And nobody else knows anything about what's going on inside myself (and how glad I am of that sometimes, but other times I'm glad when someone recognizes some of it -- and that person often becomes a friend). And isn't my I-ness the most important thing about me? It is *I* who tell my body what to do -- except for its biological functions of course. It is *I* who am talking to you, and this involves nothing physical whatever. OR it was created by God for dealing with that complex environment, which He also created. Or at least some of it was. The part I was just talking about, the I-ness of each of us, seems completely superfluous in such a scheme. In saying that I didn't mean to exempt it from the debate, as I tried to explain in a previous post. It IS my position but it's also part of the dispute. And so is the position you are taking. 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? Hokey dokey, well I can say right back to you that you haven't given any reason to believe that one thing CAN give rise to a dissimilar thing. Show me a turnip that developed a brain and then we'll talk. You can't show love, only possibly maybe the fact that it is experienced at a particular time, makes certain brain waves happen, kind of the way you can't show electricity but can measure its effects within apparati designed to put it to use. And you'll NEVER be able to quantify the MOTIVES that brought it about, the I-ness that experiences it. Not sure what the point of this is. Robin already gave such an example, and I agree, of course not. 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. First, I was simply referring to the positions taken on this particular thread -- keeping up with all the possible ways of being misunderstood is impossible I guess -- and second, of course you must suspect I'm not so humble, but thinking of us PPS's as having superior thought processes. This is basically true, I'm sure. I used to ponder the mind-body problem some myself, as a pre-Christian I mean, and had pretty much the same position I have now, only now I simply KNOW the mind/soul is prior, whereas then I thought everything had to be established by proof.Nevertheless, on this particular thread I haven't seen any actual explanations given from the scientific side, as I said, for how mind could arise from chemistry, just claims that it must, because, well, it must, because, well, it did. A great big beautiful BRAIN? Is there such a thing at all as an EXPERIENTIAL state of having a brain? SO much more pleasant than back in the olden days when you called me every name in the book. This message has been edited by Faith, 01-27-2006 01:07 AM

But this I've already answered. The fact that you can affect the mind through the body and brain does not make the mind corporeal, any more than the fact that you can track and predict the actions of electricity through a physical apparatus makes electricity corporeal. Yes, but as you guys all tend to do, you are question-begging, assuming the ToE here, assuming that brains "get more complex" over aeons of evolution. From your opponents' point of view, they don't "get more complex" they simply represent varieties of brain design for various purposes. An efficient economy of design puts similar kinds of apparati where they are needed to do similar kinds of work. If a portion of the human brain resembles the brain of reptiles, this is simply because it is efficient at doing a similar kind of work in this physical world we live in. There is no need to assume genetic descent. The obvious greater complexity of the human brain above all other brains reflects the fact that God made us more complex than the animals, and equipped us for living in the physical world by physical means similar to those He used for all His creatures, but with differences according to what they were designed for.In other words, the observed similarities (and differences) in brain design don't prove the corporeality of the mind, or any causal connection between brain and mind, or that the mind evolved out of biological processes.{Edit corrected last sentence substantially. Hope it's not a problemThis message has been edited by Faith, 01-27-2006 12:35 PM

This is true. They are incorporeal realities. Why? They are in fact incorporeal realities. Well you are the one equating "incorporeal" with "abstraction," nobody else that I can see. And you are now also the one requiring that the mind float free of the body if we are going to use the term, which nobody else has required that I can see.The idea of incorporeality is very simple it seems to me. We all know we have a mind, we all know everybody else has a mind, and we all know we can't point to it. We can point to the brain but not the mind. The mind is in our communications for instance. You can't point to those communications. Mind is incorporeal in the simplest possible sense. There's no need for all these complicating notions. But its not being "made of stuff" is the sense in which it has been used all along here. Introducing some other sense of the idea merely complicates the conversation unnecessarily. Its not being made of stuff indicates this? It seems to me you have conceptual layers in there that don't need to be in there. It is quite possible to define the mind as quite real although incorporeal, not an abstraction, and not an artifact of language or an epiphenomenon of brain activity.

I have to be gone for a while but I'll get back to your post.All I want to say now is that it looks like you're begging the whole question by merely defining mind as an activity of the brain.

That's fine, maybe electricity isn't incorporeal, although you haven't demonstrated that. For that you'd have to define its physical properties apart from the apparatus used to channel it. So it's an imperfect analogy. In any case, mind remains incorporeal.This message has been edited by Faith, 01-27-2006 01:10 PM