My Beliefs- GDR

I agree it’s bizarre. You equate being able to see brain activity with being able to see a thought. It is like looking at a pond after you’ve thrown a rock in it and saying that the ripples just happened on their own and there never was any rock.You’ve asked how information can possibly come from anywhere outside of the brain. I obviously don’t have an answer just as I don’t have an answer as to how information is passed instantly to a particle from another particle on the other side of the universe without any discernible physical connection. Maybe someday science will have an answer to one or both of those questions, but what we do know right now is that information can be passed without any physical connection.You keep making these claims of yours and calling my view nonsense, or that I’m fantasizing etc and calling your views obvious. Just maybe you have a very distorted view of what is obvious.Edited by GDR, : No reason given.

where do YOUR thoughts happen GDR?

I don’t know. It’s my belief. However, I also don’t know anyone else who believes it either, and I don’t see anybody making any kind of argument that it does exist. Actually I agree that suggesting materially undetectable morality gremlins would be in the same category as an argument for Tom. I could just as easily called Tom the Chief Morality Gremlin. I don’t care what you call him/it/her as far as this particular discussion is concerned. This is about a generic theistic intelligent agency that is responsible for life. But that just isn’t true. We are creatures capable of differentiating between good and evil. We are capable of a wide range of emotions. We can see the impact of all of these things in the brain. Yes, I believe that there is more go on that what we can see in a brain scan but let’s assume I’m wrong. We are still left having to believe that all of this came from, (for the 4323rd time), either mindless particles through a mindless evolutionary process without any intelligent input, or whether life as we know it has evolved the way it has as a result of an intelligent agency.You can point to all of the natural processes that you like but there is no evidence that leads to the firm conclusion that the natural processes are not the result of an intelligent agency. Agreed. And what evidenced conclusion is that? When I first mentioned the something instead of nothing point I only referred to it in a general sense. Actually it was you that convinced me some time ago that arguing from that POV didn’t hold up, and that there was a better way of looking at it. I wasn’t just referring to evolution. We had a planet without life and now we have sentient life on it. Science is trying to find out what combination of chemicals would have to come together to form life. An atheist had to assume that somehow these chemicals came together without any intelligent cause to form cellular life and then evolve to life as we know it today. Sorry. I misinterpreted your point and so my response made no sense. Somehow we’ve crossed wires here because I completely agree with that and that was the point I thought I was making. Scientifically speaking, how do we know whether or not the judgement was moral or immoral? IMHO that is beautifully laid out and beautifully wrong. It is an interesting theory but it just doesn’t add up. Why are some societies far more prepared to sacrifice sacrificially than other societies still? Why are some individuals far more prepared to sacrifice sacrificially than other individuals still? If our moral basis relies on the fact that we have all evolved from small haunter gatherer societies that relied on the sacrifice of its members and now extrapolated to the world, then why is the level of sacrifice in the world so uneven now?Let’s quickly look at number 4. How about a 20 year old guy without kids sacrifices his life to save the life of someone who is beyond the age where he/she is going to reproduce? The 20 year old will never reproduce and the older one was going to any more anyway.What you offer is a rationale for altruism and morality that just doesn’t add up. Those small hunter gather groups were constantly at war with other such groups. The proclivity that we would expect from our ancestral environment would be to benefit ourselves and our societies at the expense of other societies — just the opposite of what you are suggesting.

I’ll re-quote Wright:

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Altruism, compassion, empathy, love, conscience, the sense of justice -- all of these things, the things that hold society together, the things that allow our species to think so highly of itself, can now confidently be said to have a firm genetic basis. That's the good news. The bad news is that, although these things are in some ways blessings for humanity as a whole, they didn't evolve for the 'good of the species' and aren't reliably employed to that end. Quite the contrary: it is now clearer than ever (and precisely why) the moral sentiments are used with brutal flexibility, switched on and off in keeping with self interest; and how naturally oblivious we often are to this switching. In the new view, human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their constitutional ignorance of the misuse.

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Wright says that the bad news is that they didn’t evolve for the ‘good of the species’ and aren’t reliably employed to that end. If we take a simply materialist approach to morality, as Wright does, then it seems to me that we should expect a more even approach that what we observe. If we are talking about Tom who has given us free will then it seems to me that the unevenness is more what we would expect.However, that isn’t a strong argument one way or the other. Just for the heck of it I just re-read The chapter Afterward - By the Way, What is God in Wright’s The Evolution of God’. Although he doesn’t agree with my position he outlines it pretty well in presenting both points of view.Interestingly enough, seeing as how Wright calls himself a materialistic agnostic, I found that book extremely helpful in many ways. It actually strengthened my belief and it certainly helped to flesh out just what it is that I do believe.

Of course the selfless act can have an undesirable outcome. You might jump in to save someone drowning with both of you drowning. So what? That’s hardly the point.It isn’t that the universal standard is necessarily vague - it is just that we as humans aren’t able to be sure whether any specific act is moral or not. Somebody gives $100 to a food bank. Is he doing it because he genuinely wants to help or maybe he is doing it in order to impress someone?It boils down to that we are to love others as we love ourselves, which appears to us as doing unto others as we would have them do unto us.

If we talk about dealing with a moral issue, in your analogy, we can see both the rock (the cause of the brain activity - in this case an external stimulus, the moral problem) and the effect of throwing it into the pond - the brain lighting up under fMRI.We can also see that if we remove the pond (watch a psychopath's brain) but still throw the rock (use the moral puzzle), there is no splash. (The brain does not light up.)It's QED. It's as simple as that - it all happens in the brain.
(That and the plain-as-your-face fact, that there's nowhere else that it CAN happen and no-one but you suggesting that it does) You do have an answer, science tells you the answer - the brain and the brain alone is responsible for your thoughts and moral feelings. But for some inexplicable reason you don't want it to be true. It's not a claim, it's a proven, scientific fact. If you can find a single neuroscientist that is publishing evidence that our thoughts and moral feelings originate anywhere other than our brain, please produce him/her. Meanwhile I'll point you to the hundreds of thousands of papers describing how the brain does it.

I didn’t claim that the article said anything about consciousness being metaphysical. The point was simply that it isn’t as simple and straightforward as some posters here would have us believe. We should be learning all we can in whatever way we can. Actually what I do believe is that in many ways the study of QM will tell us more about consciousness than studying the physical brain ever will. In the study of QM we can see the effect of consciousness on how we perceive our reality. However I’m the first to admit that any knowledge I have in that area is limited to what I can read at the popular lever. No question that there is a great deal I don't understand. That is the least debatable comment so far. Thanks for the links. Your post is one reason I enjoy this forum. There seems to be no end to what one can learn here.I don't actually hold to any particular view on consciousness, except that there is more involved that what at least appears to us as physical.The question I asked about where the screen is meant to indicate that there is no screen. I can look at things on my desk and reach out and touch what I see. But where is it that I actually see it? Essentially we are photon detectors and the brain sorts out the protons giving us information on our surroundings and then presents that to us. But, the information is in our head and yet we see that information in front of us.I don't have an answer or even a theory about what that all means but it is just to point out that there is more going on than what is obvious in a brain scan. That's only one item on a long list.

Why on Earth do you think evolution based on selfish genes would necessarily result that which is for the good of the species or be reliably employed to that effect? Why?You think science logically predicts a form of morality that is falsified by observation? That is quite a claim. Frankly this suggests to me that you haven't really understood the scientific conclusions regarding the origins of morality under consideration.Wrights book 'The Moral Animal' is something you should take a look at if you haven't already. But as we have already established you see absolutely everything and anything as indicative of Tom's existence so this is hardly surprising.

Certainly as far as science is concerned both are equally unteneable when put forward as the cause of ANY observable phenomena (e.g. human morality). And that is without even mentioning the evidence that these are human constructions anyway. Then it is a case of evidence Vs belief. There can, rationally speaking, only ever be one winner in that contest. Do you consider belief itself to be evidence upon which to base belief? Can you see that justifying belief based on belief is circular? The "You can't disprove what I choose to believe" position is patently and obviously flawed. It's the final retreat of unshakeable belief in the face of evidence.In terms of "can't disprove" belief that Tom is the cause of morality is no more justified than is belief that our old friend the Immaterial Pink Unicorn is the cause of thunder (or indeed anything else). I honeslty don't see how you can say that without actually denying the scientific evidence available. I think the reason you get so het up about this is because you conflate "mindless" with "random" or "directionless". Evolution is "mindless" but it is not a directionless or random process. That which is adaptable is best able to survive. The human brain is a remarkably versatile and adaptive organ. It allows those who possess it to survive and procreate because it enables them (i.e. us) to adapt and survive.If instead of thinking in terms of "mindless" you think in terms of a process which positively promotes survival in a changing environment you might find it easier to understand how an organ such as the human brain can evolve. That human brains evolved and that things such as morality and language evolved with them. Now you are conflating our evolved instinct for morality with individual judgements about what is moral or immoral.Human morality is like human language. We have evolved the brain equipment to construct languages to communicate and moral systems to live in social groups. But given the massive adaptability of the human brain there is no more reason to expect every culture to come to the same moral judgements than there is to expect every culture to develop the same language.In fact we can reasonably expect human systems of morality to be varied in the same way that human langauge is varied. Because some cultures place more emphasis on that than others. I am utterly perplexed as to why you think uniformity would be anything other than desperately unlikely? Again - Variation is the norm. Our moral instincts can make us feel the pang of needing to do something when faced with the image of a suffering child half a world away whilst our tribalistic instincts of dividing people into 'them and us' can make us blind to terrible suffering of those we choose to effectively dehumanise on our doorsteps. Because moral instincts and proclivites aren't calculating in that way any more than are any other of our instincts. Except that we do that too!!!! It is this sort of inconsistency that Wright was talking about:

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Altruism, compassion, empathy, love, conscience, the sense of justice -- all of these things, the things that hold society together, the things that allow our species to think so highly of itself, can now confidently be said to have a firm genetic basis. That's the good news. The bad news is that, although these things are in some ways blessings for humanity as a whole, they didn't evolve for the 'good of the species' and aren't reliably employed to that end. Quite the contrary: it is now clearer than ever (and precisely why) the moral sentiments are used with brutal flexibility, switched on and off in keeping with self interest; and how naturally oblivious we often are to this switching. In the new view, human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their constitutional ignorance of the misuse.

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The same soldier who is willing to leap on top of a grenade to save an old woman is equally capable of brutally and indiscriminately shooting into a crowd of people he has psychologically labelled 'the enemy'.We are morally complex and inconsistent creatures. How anyone advocating unevidenced invisible Tom and the unevidenced invisble effects he has on some unevidenced and invisble aspect of our human selves can say that with a straight face I don't know.The evolutionary origins of morality overwhelmingly "add up" in terms of evidence, especially when compared to the alterantive you are advocating here.That is why one is a scientifically consistent conclusion and the other is not. And scientifically consistent conclusions are the most reliable and accurate conclusions available to us.

No one here has said it is simple and straight forward. That's not even close to being true. But you can believe whatever you want I guess. I thought your point was to actually learn something. How? Then you shouldn't say things like you said about QM/consciousness. Because it makes no sense. How do you come to that conclusion? What experiments have shown this? No there isn't anything going on beyond the brain. You're once again arguing from incredulity.There are plenty of answers as to what "all that means" - I would suggest you look it up. Just make sure what you're looking up is from reputable scientists and science depts.- OniEdited by onifre, : No reason given.

It's not a "materialist" approach to morality. It is an EVIDENCE based understanding of morality. Any other approach to morality is unevidenced. Or we just evolved complex enough brains that we are free willed. Why would god/tom or any other unevidenced concept be needed here?- Oni

You and others have essentially told me how obvious it is that my views are wrong. I was simply pointing out that it isn’t obvious at all which I’m not saying makes me right. It isn’t meant as a rebuttal. I didn’t post that to show that you are wrong but to show that it isn’t obvious that you are right.I don’t know which argument you are referring to. I’ve done my best to respond to what you have put up. I answered this in other posts. Just because someone is able to pull information out of the brain and gain some kind of picture really interesting but it doesn’t tell us anything we don’t know. Instead of vision let’s use hearing. When I hear a sound I hear it in effect outside my head. The fluctuations of air in my ears gets translated into sound which I perceive to be outside my head in that I can not only differentiate the sound waves but sense which direction the sound is coming from. Visual images also are perceived outside my head even though it is a brain function inside my head that is interpreting the information received from the eyes. I’m not putting God into that. Science may very well be able to come up with explanations. It is simply that I keep being told that everything is just connections in the brain and that answers the question about thoughts, emotions etc. The world we perceive extends well beyond our body. We are able to look at something and to know precisely where it is so we can pick it up. We get information from outside the brain all the time and we require information to be able to bring about any particular thought we might have. I do not see why it is so tough then to consider that Tom could be one of the inputs that influences our thought patterns. There are things in the world of science that look to be metaphysical such as particle duality etc but as we learn more it becomes part of our natural world. If our universe is part of a much greater reality then presumably science can continue to learn more about that greater reality and less and less will be considered metaphysical. None of that matters though. No matter how much we discover there remains the open question of the origin of what is natural Are we here because of an intelligent agent or mindless particles. There is no evidence that answers that question. All we can do is come up with a subjective opinion or belief. I just find it very persuasive that intelligence is far more likely to bring about intelligence than are mindless particles. I’d sure like to jump ahead a few hundred years to see where all that goes. The point though is this. If vision was not part of our existence and we only had 4 senses we would perceive a very different world than what we do, and we would not have any concept of what vision might be. I just wonder what other senses there might be, for which we have no frame reference, that if we had would cause us to perceive the world very differently than we do. At a basic popular science level I’m told that our observing or measuring a particle causes it to become what it is we perceive, and even then goes back in time to create the history that brings that result. Somehow that information has to get from the brain to the particle for that to happen which is part of the world of QM which involves physicists. I choose what I’ll have for dinner and I choose whether or not to cheat on my taxes. (Just in case the CRA monitors this site, I don’t ) Well, was what I said wrong? I’ve addressed that several times. I volunteer with dementia cases and I see all sorts of cases where people don’t recognize their spouse. So what? Brain injury or illness skews our thought processes. Yes we can use technology to retrieve an image from the brain, but that doesn’t tell us how we perceive an image as outside our body. Where is the screen?I’m not saying that this proves anything but it is just to point out that because we can monitor brain activity, and apparently we can even pull images from the brain, does not prove anything about whether or not there is more going on than we directly perceive.

In my brain. I do find it interesting though that the thoughts in our brain are perceived outside of the brain. The other question of course is are we only subject to input to the brain from what we normally perceive or are there other influences that we don't directly perceive?

The 'screen' is the retina at the back of the eye. I suspect that's not what you mean - but trying to understand what you mean is difficult because your beliefs are confusing you. The image on the screen of the retina is interpreted into what we cause vision by the visual cortex of the brain.As usual with science, if you're not going to accept that as fact, you're going to have to do a lot of work to properly understand it, before making up stuff to contradict it. I don't know what that means. If you mean that we can see the thought process happening using fMRI, it certainly is interesting, but no more supernatural than seeing your bones using X-ray. We can only perceive that which we have receptors for. If we have no receptors for hearing ultra sound, we can't hear it. If we have no receptors for ultra violet, we can't see it.So far no-one has found a Tom receptor if that's what you're getting at. Though we do know that the need to believe in Toms is fairly universal - or has been in the past before we started to know more. The need to believe seems to be a side effect of consciousness - wanting answers to all questions. 'Tom did it' allows us to relax.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Most people don't even bother looking at the evidence. Even intelligent people when considering the issue don't actually think to test it, or how to go about doing that. Instead they look for observations that might lend support for their existing beliefs, if it occurs to them to look at all."Obvious" to me is not always "obvious" to everyone. But that's what evidence and argument are for - to drive attention toward that which brings the existing hypothesis into direct challenge, so that it can survive or be discarded in favor of ever-increasing accuracy.The number of things that are obvious to a computer engineer that are definitely not obvious to someone who can't tell a hard drive from a modem is rather lengthy. But a layperson can be shown the differences, and the distinction can become obvious once they're given actual attention. I'm going to restate a few things here, then. And I'm going to be extremely specific. I want you to look at my predictions, and my observations, and my conclusions, and I want you to tell me very specifically where you think my reasoning is incorrect, and why you think that.You have expressed a belief in "nonphysical elements" that make up some part of human cognition. You haven't been specific, and indeed I get the distinct impression that your beliefs in this area are exceedingly general - that there is "something," but you don't know what form that "something" would take, how it would work, etc. That makes testing such a belief difficult...but not impossible.I'm going to make some predictions based off of your simple claims. Later I'll explain ways to test these predictions, and then go into observational evidence and how those predictions turned out. Please note that when I make a prediction, what I'm really saying is "if x is true, then we are far more likely to observe y; if x is not true, then we are far less likely to observe y."If one or more components of human cognition are caused by "nonphysical elements," then we would expect one or more of the following predictions to be true:1) If motor control or bodily regulation is controlled by some "nonphysical element" and not exclusively the physical brain, then we should expect to see body functions and motor control continue to work even when the brain is damaged, exposed to chemical influences, afflicted with disease, etc.2) If memory is controlled by some "nonphysical element" and not exclusively the physical brain, then we should expect to see memory function regardless of brain damage, chemical influences, or disease.3) If emotion is controlled by some "nonphysical element" and not exclusively the physical brain, then we should expect to see consistent emotional reaction regardless of brain damage, chemical influences, or disease.4) If personality is controlled by some "nonphysical element" and not exclusively the physical brain, then we should expect to see consistent personality elements regardless of brain damage, chemical influences, or disease. Personalities do change over time naturally, but we should not expect sudden, drastic changes after an incident affecting the brain.5) If thought processes, the internal voice in your head, the images you visualize in your mind, are controlled by some "nonphysical element" and not exclusively the physical brain, then we should expect to see that those elements of cognition continue to function unperturbed in the incidence of brain damage, disease, or chemical influence.6) If language and communication is controlled by some "nonphysical element" and not exclusively the physical brain, then we should expect to see that the ability to communicate, if not specifically to speak verbally, continues to function unperturbed in the incidence of brain damage, disease, or chemical influence.I'm making these predictions on the basis of 'nonphysical elements;" some component of a person that is not dependent on the physical body. You believe in an afterlife - that means that you believe that all or some part of you, your personality, your identity, possibly your memories and emotions and so on, go on working even after the physical brain has died and rotted to dust. If ghosts or souls or spirits can speak or understand language, then you would expect even a brain-damaged person to be able to speak and understand language as long as they retain other prerequisite physical abilities. If ghosts or souls or spirits can remember their lives, then you would expect a person with severe brain damage to also remember - forgetfulness would not be a function of the brain, but of the soul or spirit. I don't know which of those components is supposed to survive death, but the predictions above should let us test at least some of them.1) Not many would claim that motor control is actually performed by "nonphysical elements." I included it for the sake of completeness. But the observation is that brain damage absolutely affects motor and other body function. Severing the spine in the right spot can eliminate even autonomous functions like breathing. Damage to the brain itself can cause a loss of motor control (though some individuals are able to re-learn how to use their bodies...but this is also correlated with the observation of brain plasticity and the shifting of function from the damaged area to a new one). This prediction is strongly contraindicated. It is highly unlikely that motor control or body function are driven by "nonphysical elements;" it is highly likely that these functions are controlled solely by the physical brain.2) One word: Alzheimers. If a degenerative brain disease can result in extreme memory loss, it is highly likely that memory is solely a function of the physical brain. Memory loss is also observed in other cases of brain damage. Neurology has identified those places in the brain which process the formation of memory, and which store it, and by what process memory is stored. A recent study in mice allowed memories to be induced from one mouse to another - literally the experience of one mouse was transferred to another mouse, the memory itself was copied. We have also observed the incidence of an inability to form new memories - individuals with particular brain damage who are trapped at a certain moment of memory while the world changes around them, who can never grow or learn. If memory were controlled even slightly by "nonphysical elements," we would expect memory to continue functioning without change regardless of disease or brain damage. This prediction is very strongly contraindicated by direct observation. It is unlikely in the extreme that "nonphysical elements" are responsible for any function regarding memory, whether retrieval, storage, or formation.3) We have observed emotional impairment due to brain damage of a variety of different sorts. Perhaps the most striking example is one I brought up previously: the man who accused his mother of being an imposter. This is a rare condition as it requires very specific damage to just one part of the brain, and it has just a few variations. The man man this particular example was unable to recognize his mother...but in a particular way. He could visually identify that the woman in front of him looked exactly like his mother. She acted like her, had all of her mannerisms, could respond to any personal query...yet he accused her of being an imposter. Investigation revealed that, if his mother called him on the phone, so that he couldn't see her, he would immediately identify her as his mother. Further examination of the neurology involved revealed the cause: there are neural links in our brains between individual sensory centers and a small part of the brain that associates that sensory input with appropriate emotional import. When you see your mother, you feel the bond of love you have for each other. In this man's case, that connection was broken, and so even though visually he recognized her face, her mannerisms, her responses to questions, it didn't feel right because the emotional response was not being factored in. He accused her of being an imposter, because that couldn't be his mother. Yet when he simply heard her over the phone and could not see, the emotional impact was correctly linked - each sensory input has its own connection, and so only the visual response was impaired because only that link was broken.This case, and others like it, strongly contraindicates the prediction that emotions are driven by "nonphysical elements." If you can go on feeling emotions without any brain at all, then brain damage shouldn't impair your ability to feel love when you see your mother. It is highly unlikely that "nonphysical elements" are associated with any sort of emotional process (other than the emotional attachment to the idea of "nonphysical elements" itself, of course).4) We have observed multiple cases of strong personality changes due to brain damage. Just from Wiki:

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TBI may cause emotional, social, or behavioral problems and changes in personality.[116][117][118][119] These may include emotional instability, depression, anxiety, hypomania, mania, apathy, irritability, problems with social judgment, and impaired conversational skills.[116][119][120] TBI appears to predispose survivors to psychiatric disorders including obsessive compulsive disorder, substance abuse, dysthymia, clinical depression, bipolar disorder, and anxiety disorders.[121] In patients who have depression after TBI, suicidal ideation is not uncommon; the suicide rate among these persons is increased 2- to 3-fold.[122] Social and behavioral symptoms that can follow TBI include disinhibition, inability to control anger, impulsiveness, lack of initiative, inappropriate sexual activity, poor social judgment, and changes in personality.[116][118][119][123]

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What's more, the ability of medication to affect personality is the entire basis pf psychiatry. I've seen this one first hand - extreme personality changes as a result of the onset of mental illness, followed by still more changes every time a new medication regimen was started.5) and 6) Watch this TED talk. It features a neurologist who also happens to have experienced an actual stroke. Please remember that everything she describes is an analysis of her feelings...but pay special attention to how she, in detail, describes the internal experience of her mind as her brain suffered a physical trauma. The internal voice went silent for certain periods. She lost the ability to think in words at times. She suffered memory impairment. She felt strange sensations of euphoria coupled with extreme alterations in perspective with a direct causal relationship to the stroke happening in her brain. Her personal observations mesh well with the current neurological models for how the brain processes thoughts.I'm going to describe a little bit of brain function for you, now. There are specific regions of the brain that control certain functions (the occipital lobe processes visual input from the optic nerve, for example). But one of the distinguishing characteristics of mammal brains (and human brains in particular) is the formation of groups of neurons that form a hierarchy of pattern-matching structures. We've used lessons from analyzing the brain to improve the way things like Siri and other computer pattern-recognition systems work. These are purely physical functions and we know that because we've managed to replicate those functions in purely physical computers.When those structures are impaired or destroyed, you can lose the ability to recognize words as distinct from random shapes (which is one of the things described in the TED talk). Your ability to "think" in abstract language is driven by the hierarchical abstraction process of these neural groups. Each level up the hierarchy becomes more abstract, less specific, more general. You go from recognizing and processing individual syllables to recognizing words to associating those words with potentially many meanings and then assembling those words with meanings into sentences and so on...until you and I, right now, are communicating in abstract language. I'm writing what I'm thinking, basic stream of consciousness. Your brain is using its own pattern-matchers and hierarchy of abstraction to read my words and reassemble them into abstract language so that you comprehend the thoughts I'm sharing with you. When your brain is damaged, those functions stop. I'm reminded (again, those pattern-matchers, recognizing things in my memory that match the pattern of the abstract ideas I'm thinking about) of the book The Dead Zone, by Stephen King, where the main character undergoes a psychological exam after a traumatic brain injury, and they find that he's utterly unable to visualize a canoe on the side of a street by a stop sign. That story was fictional, of course, but it does accurately represent the effects of brain damage on internal visualization, the internal voice, and our basic ability to think.If nonphysical elements drive our internal visualizations, our inner voice, our comprehension of language, our association of abstract concepts, we would expect all of those things to continue right on working regardless of whether we had a stroke or suffered other brain damage. Yet we see that this impairment does occur. The final two predictions are strongly contraindicated. It is highly unlikely that any "nonphysical elements" play a part in thought or communication. It is highly likely that thought and communication are purely physical functions of the physical brain.I've gone on at length in this reply already, so I'll leave this for you to ponder for now. Please do take an honest look at the predictions, observations, and conclusions. Please do let me know if I'm taking any liberties with logic, from fallacies to simple non sequiturs. I would very much like to be convinced that there is a rational basis to believe that someday I'll be able to meet my dead grandmother again, that we'll be able to laugh about our mutual memories and that "goodbye" could really have been "goodbye for now." I really would like to live forever, and that's not a problem if we have some immortal "nonphysical elements" really running the show.But the world doesn't appear to work that way. Whatever I'd like, it looks like the only element of my grandmother that survives is my own memory of her...which is itself a purely physical and unfortunately alterable process within my physical brain.I'll respond to other elements of your post, including the QM bits, later on.