Biology is Destiny?

Of course I can Awe, darn. I thought it could. Okay, so its unfair. But it could still be there nonetheless.

Doesn't falsify the unfalsifiable notion of a disembodied spirit having some unspecified effect on behaviour, of course.It doesn't falsify the notion of the CIA controlling our behaviour through invisible thought-rays, either.Have you really thought about what role the spirit has in all this? It isn't making the final moral decisions since apparently (research that the OP puts forward) the brain seems to have veto powers, even when it has sustained damage.

Yeah, but I don't have any reason to think the CIA's involved... Not so much. Too much thinking is dangerous to faith-based ideas I've always thought of it as an underlying nudger rather than an all out controller. The mind controls the body and its actions, the spirit influences the mind, but so does the brain (because the mind stems from the brain). And I suppose the spirit can be affected as well... from the phyical world, to the body/brain, then through the mind on to the spirit.Edited by Catholic Scientist, : No reason given.

Well what would constitute a valid reason for thinking that the CIA were using undetectable thought rays? What do you think constitutes a valid reason for the believing that a disembodied spirit is responsible? You seem to be claiming the 'mind' as some sort of intermediary between the physical and the immaterial spirit. I am intrigued by this idea and how you see it working.Given the example in the OP what do you think happens to the spirit as a result of the physical tumour? Anything at all? Is this spirit self a version of 'you' that is free from all physical effects? Or just some? Is it a version of you that is free from behaviour affecting hormones (e.g. testosterone)? Free from disease (e.g. alzheimers)? Free from the effects of ageing? Free from the effects of all physical experience?Is this spirit version of 'you' something that exists unchanged your entire life? If it does change then what things cause it to change and what things don't? How do you decide?

What's the difference?

In a very practical sense I think you are right.

But given our knowledge of neurology, what is left over for the "spirit" to do? It is now known that changes to your brain will affect your moral sense, will affect your religious beliefs, will affect your sexual orientation ... and, if it matters, will affect your ability to identify fruit.What is left over for the "spirit" to do?Put it this way. Suppose someone could engineer a swap such that your spirit was attached to my brain, and my spirit was attached to your brain.What would your "spirit" do that would have any effect? If your spirit is the real you, then it would nonetheless be the case that "you" (your "spirit") would not merely have my memories and capabilities, but also "you" would also have my religious opinions, my moral judgments, and my sexual preferences. What would actually change?

Well fuck, I don't know. I supose I could speculate for you, but I'm just making this shit up:I'd see the mind as the gateway to the spirit. The mind is housed in the brain, lets say its a lense. If you mess with the brain, or mess with the glass in the lense, then what you see that has came through has changed. Not necessarily changed on the other side, but the result you see is different.The physical affects the mind, so when the sprit is comming through that affected lense, it could be distorted. Here, comming through would be the outward expression of your behavior and/or the inward experssion of your thoughts, which too, can end up deciding your behvior. Its as if we're all a bunch of spiritual beings tapped into this physical world as a way to interact with each other and develop in preparation for the afterlife, which is entirely spiritual. I also see the spirit as emerging along with physical body, as if there isn't a place where the spirit sits around existing waiting for a body, but rather that the spirit emerges as the individual does.So Fred (from the OP) seemed to not have a pedophilic spirit, but it came out as pedophilic after being distorted by his mind, because of the tumor in his brain. This assumes there's qualities to the spirit that affect our behaviors.I do think the sprit could change too. As you get older and have interacted with so many people (other spirits) and learned so much, you grow spiritually too. You might even get more bitter. I see young children as less spiritually developed as adults. I think our spirits need this time here in the physical world, so they can interact with other spirits through the minds of the people as they physically interact. So yes, I'd see things like hormones and disease having an indirect effect on the spirit, as long as they affected your mind. So the stubbing of your toe, itself, would not affect your spirit, but how that impacted you mind, say through anger or something, could and/or would.I suppose that underdeveloped spirits might have an afterlife similiar to underdeveloped people in the physical worlds do, a gradually limited view down to nothing at all. Too, maybe some of those monks have an overdevloped spirit that plays a more significant role in the afterlife.I think that there are some genuinely bad people, as if they had an evil spirit or something, and visa versa. I don't know if they'd have started out predisposed that way, or if it would have been a result of how their spirit developed, or maybe a little of both. I don't really take the stance that the spirit actually does exist. I honestly don't know. I approach it form the angle of, assuming it does exist, what would what we do know about our world mean for that. And I prefer to keep things consistant. So obviously the brain affects the mind... if the spirit exists, what would this mean for it... If the spirit doesn't exist, then this is just mental masturbation. You changed it from invisible to undetectable.... how would the CIA even know if they were using undetectable rays?"Have you fired the undetectable rays?" "I dunno, sir, but I'm not detecting them."

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So I wrote out my reply, and then have been distracted awat from my desk a few times, and then have been going back and adding struff in here and there so hopefully its not too disjointed.

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Well fuck, I don't know. I supose I could speculate for you, but I'm just making this shit up:

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Why go to all that effort when it looks like we're beginnning to get some realworld, actual answers?

I was asked, it isn't that much effort, and I like it. As I said, mental masturbation.Anyways, what actual answers are we beginning to get?

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Anyways, what actual answers are we beginning to get?

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Well, crudely, it appears that the orbitofrontal cortex Is responsible for morality. Not some weird spirit.

Well, we have learned that people's deepest attributes, such as their religion, their morality, their sexual orientation, their memories, even their fear of death, have a neurological basis.If you want to conjecture that this is somehow modified by the "spirit", then there's no particular evidence that this is so any more than it's modified by Saturn being in trine with Neptune, or whatever the astrological jargon is. There's no evidence of anything left over that we need the "spirit" to explain.

So basically you do think that the physical has an effect on this spirit self but there isn't really any rhyme or reason as to which physical things do and which things don't.It's just sorta intuitive and you know it when you see it?"It" being the physical things that affect the spirit in some way. I am delighted to hear of your recent convesrion to skeptically considering undetectables.Now - Tell me just how can this spirit-self you are advocating be detected as distinct from brain activity? Agreement at last....

Whilst I'm in no sense a dualist, I don't think we can be quite as flippant as that. We are still no closer to explaining the subjective experience of consciousness. We have no idea whatsoever what mechanism could create it, nor any adaptive explanation for its purpose.

I was ruminating about free will and the best I could come up with was akin the the ANS.We don't need to exercise conscious control when we breath (for example). We can go about our lives merrilly not thinking about controlling our diaphrams. It just works the way it is programmed to.I think, maybe our violition is somewhat like that: normally we go through life without really thinking about it and our personality template guides us through life and we don't really think about it.But just like breathing, if we need to, we can overide this 'auto pilot' at any time and exercise a higher degree of violition.I don't think we ever have the Aristotlian idealised free will because I'm pretty confident I could not drown a cat unless I was coerced: so my options on the cat drowning front are limted (so not trully free), (does this mean only psychopaths have true free will, in terms of behavioural options not inhibited by emotion?).But we can have a higher degree of violition by exercising conscious control. I've always though that maybe the only way a brain could deal with reality is to model it (this would be our experience) and react to the model (this is our violition).This would be our consciousness. A bit like running virtual weather patterns and making decisions based on the model.Perhaps the close approximation model we react to is close enough to reality to keep us functioning but not too overburden with 'too much reality' .I can't support this in any way, however.Edited by Larni, : more wisdom addedEdited by Larni, : No reason given.