My Beliefs- GDR

I think perhaps a more explanatory way of saying this would be:The Universe doesn't care. In the end we are nothing but a collection of particles. We don't matter to the Universe at large - there is no love or hate or justice or sin outside of the mind.But we care about each other. The great moral imperative does not come from the Universe, it comes from us, our ability to care for each other, to empathize and sympathize with others, to recognize the feelings of others as feelings we might have in similar situations, and the extrapolation of that ability into moral action.

You probably have trouble understanding, then, that "morality exists, therefore human beings are more than biology" is a massive non sequitur.You don;t have any kind of logical link between "morality" and "nonphysical component." You can point to no mechnaism by which "nonphysical components" would cause morality, or that they would be the only cause for morality.In order for morality to be strong evidence, as you are claiming, for the existence of nonphysical elements of human beings, you need to show that moral behavior is more likely to be caused by nonphysical elements than by biology and evolution; another way of saying that is that you have to show that moral behavior is extremely unlikely without the introduction of nonphysical elements, and you have to show why nonphysical elements would be expected to result in morality.But what we actually observe in the real world is that moral behavior is simply a trait of social animals, of which humans are a subset. Many social animals exhibit forms of morality, of no greater difference than the variety of human moral systems that have existed. Chimpanzees, wolves, and many other species have been shown to reciprocate, to share food, to help member of the group, and so on. It's the same reason my dog will rush to defend me even at the cost of his own life if he thinks I'm in danger.You;re making an unfounded logical leap, and worse, your conclusion is contraindicated by real-world observation, unless you also claim that social animals as a whole, not only humans, contain these mysterious nonphysical components.

Which is a major contradiction of your claim that moral behavior is "strong evidence" of those non-physical elements. If you cannot ever show that non-physical elements are necessary, or even a strong nonexclusive causal relationship, you cannot claim that the observation of morality is "strong evidence" in favor of your conclusion. In fact, you've simply admitted that your conclusion is logically invalid on its face - a non sequitur. You could try, but you would be wrong as a matter of simple fact. We can watch thoughts form in the brain with MRI imagine. A thought is a pattern of electrochemical impulses processed through various groups of neurons in the brain. We've even managed to get primitive imaging from live scans of the visual cortex - literally, we've been able to take visual processing information in a live brain and project the image onto a screen. You're attaching unfounded value on semantic gobbledygook. An idea is a thought is an electrochemical process, GDR. You might be awed by your ability to think, you might think it's neat and mysterious, but identifying a mystery says nothing about the mystery itself - it's simply a statement of your own ignorance.To say "I wonder what an idea is?" and speculate about some form of non-physical center of being is to merely worship a sacred mystery, to be over-impressed with your own ignorance. This is especially problematic when the actual answer is well known and the mystery is not a mystery any longer. It never was "survival of the fittest." It's "survival of the fit enough," or "better representation in future generations of the most fit." Andwe haven't risen above that "code." We're still absolutely subject to it as a species. We're simply better able to adapt to changing environmental factors, making us very well-fit in comparison to potential competitors for resources.You've bought the illusion that we're no longer subject to natural selection, but that's simply because humanity is so adaptable that it takes an awful lot to cause evolutionary change more significant than genetic drift.But go back just a few hundred years to the Black Plague and you'll see an event that actually did represent an example of natural selection on human beings. Individuals who posessed mutations granting resistance to the plague survived more frequently than those who did not. THose mutations gained prevalence in the affected population - the relative frequency of those alleles increased in successive generations. They're still around today.And that's not the only example, because natural selection is not always so direct. Societies are also examples; traditions and culture are heritable information just as genes are. These still have a basis in biology, mind - there is no nonphysical component acting apart from the brain. We're merely talking about societies raising successive generations with the same patterns in their brains, children taught the same cultural norms as their parents, and so on. Societies and cultures have risen and fallen according to their relative fitness in a changing world and the persistent competition for resources. Indeed, one strong hypothesis for the evolutionary impetus behind the development of human intelligence is social interaction, particularly when we talk about maneuvering for social advantage (conferring better mating rights, directly or indirectly) within the clade. We so far outstripped competition from other species by getting into an intellectual arms race with each other, a perpetual spiral of selective pressure with no end in sight. No. It's not. You;re pretending that this is a matter of opinion, like a kindergarten teacher telling students that everyone's opinion is equally valid.Thats true when we're talking about whether blue is better than green. It's not true when we talk about matters of objective fact.I'm not giving you my opinion, GDR. I'm not giving you a subjective interpretation of some navel-gazing philosophy. I'm giving you facts, or rather theoretical models of reality with an extremely strong observational base whose predictions have been shown to be extremely accurate, and whose probability of accurately reflecting the actual way the world really works is sufficiently close to unity as to be fact for all practical purposes. It's not a ladder, GDR. It's not like DnD where you get to be level 20 and other animals are only level 7. Our sense of morality is based on the same cornerstone as other social animals - empathy. We're simply better equipped, with our increased intelligence, to extrapolate moral action from that empathy, and to consciously dictate who to apply it to. Which is yet another reason that morality differs by culture, and another contraindication of your own hypothesis. No, they don't. If they did, you'd be able to show it. They already do, sometimes. Lions aren't just engines of violence. If you're not a threat and they aren't hungry, often they'll leave you alone. You should read some of the accounts of police who try to catch poachers in Africa in regions where lions are common.But really, GDR. Your entire post simply begs the questions, "what do you think you know, and how do you think you know it?"You answered the first, and your utter inability to answer the second beyond "there has to be something, it feels obvious to me" is a major indication that you've been sucked into belief in belief. You believe that believing this thing is good, which is separate and distinct from believing that a thing is actually true. You want there to be some non-physical component to human consciousness, and you believe in the belief that there is something, even when all of the evidence lies stacked against you, even when you know that you know that the evidence is stacked against your preferred belief.Cognitive dissonance is a bitch.

Hi GDR,You have what I'd like to call extraordinary misconceptions about the nature of evidence and the difference between fact and opinion. Unfortunately your misconceptions are entirely ordinary. "Supported scientifically" is a semantic trap. It means different things to different people, and so additional precision is required. "Opinion" is similar. So let's detail the nature of "belief," "opinion," "fact," and "evidence," with as much brevity as I can muster.We are faced with uncertainty every day. No person is omniscient, and even the species as a whole is far from all-knowing. Yet we still create models of the world we observe in our heads, and we realize that not all uncertainties are equivalent. There are degrees of confidence with which we associate our internal models of reality.In some cases, we have extremely high confidence in part of the model. For instance, I am extremely confident that the sky is blue. When our confidence approaches actual certainty (though we can never actually reach certainty), closely enough to be identical for all practical considerations, we identify that model as a "fact." It is a fact that the sky is blue.In other cases we have more uncertainty. We might have some good supporting evidence, but we aren't sufficiently close to certainty to rule out some similar but alternative hypotheses. We wouldn't call those parts of the model "facts." Still, there are infinite degrees of certainty in this region; in any given situation we could present examples where we are less or more certain of one idea than another.In yet other cases we have no supporting evidnece because the question is itself not testable by any means. I don;t simply mean that information is not available, I mean that it would be logically impossible to increase or decrease our certainty on the matter even if we attained omniscience. For example, if I say that "blue is better than red," this is not a testable claim. It's not even much of a claim at all - I've simply stated some personal preference for blue over red. Even an omniscient being would ony be able to confirm that yes, I prefer blue over red; there could never be any actual confirmation that blue really is better than red, not unless the statement is modified to include a specific purpose for which the performance of two colors could be compared (for example, blue really is better than red when it comes to writing data onto optical media, because its smaller wavelength allows for increased data density; this is why blue-ray discs contain more information than DVDs).In all cases we have multiple competing hypotheses, alternative models by which the real would could actually work. The sky could be purple, or there could be no sky at all. Yet we are more confident in the accuracy of some models than others. Why?The answer is "evidence." We don't usually think about it, of course. But evidence is the determining factor for rational, logically consistent determination of which hypotheses should be associated with what degree of confidence. Evidence is any observation which adjusts the likelihood that one or more hypotheses accurately reflect the real world. My consistent observation that the cloudless daytime sky is blue, combined with independent verification from others that they too consistently observe that the daytime cloudless sky is blue leads me to attach extremely high confidence that the sky really is blue.The false answer is "faith." Faith is what we call attaching confidence to a hypothesis that is not justified by any evidence. A non sequitur, like your reasoning that moral behavior is strong evidence for a nonphysical component of people, is not necessarily an example of faith, but it's one of the consequences of faith. You have faith that there is a nonphysical component to the human self, and so you draw unfounded conclusions based on that unfounded premise.Each of us has a set of "opinions," and this word has different meanings depending on context. In one context, the degree of confidence I attach to a hypothesis is my "opinion." My belief that the sky is blue is indeed my "opinion" on the matter of the sky's color. This opinion is not unfounded - it's based on evidence. One person's opinion in this context may be more or less valid than another person's opinion, depending on the evidence available to each person and their relative abilities to consistently update their beliefs based on new evidence. My opinion that the sky is blue is significantly more valid than the opinion of someone who believes the sky is red with yellow and green polkadots.But another context for "opinion" is that of the unprovable non-assertion, the statement of utterly subjective preference as in the "blue is better than red" example above. In this case, all opinions are equally valid - personal preference is personal preference and has nothing to do with statements about the nature of the real world.Your belief in Tom is not a valid opinion, GDR. You have the absolute right to hold it, of course, but you have a preference, not a hypothesis supported by observational evidence. All of the evidence you've proposed so far is either not evidence at all (it doesn't actually adjust the probability of any of the related hypotheses one way or the other), or it actually turns out upon even cursory examination that the evidence weakens the probability of your Tom hypothesis, even as you claim that your belief is strengthened.And let us not forget Occam's Razor, the Principle of Parsimony. All things being equal (that is, in the absence of evidence that shifts the probabilities one way or the other), the simplest explanation, the equation with the fewest terms, is to be preferred. If there is no evidence suggesting that there is actually an intangible invisible silent dragon in my garage, then there is likely not such a dragon, even in the absence of evidence against its existence. Absolutely inaccurate. Einsteins theory was based upon mathematical extrapolation of observational evidence. He didn't come up with it out of whole cloth. It had a greater-than-50% probability of being accurate before we had the ability to test it so rigorously. Again inaccurate. Thoughts are brain activity. You cannot separate the two. When the brain is damaged, thoughts are altered. If thoughts caused brain activity, then thoughts would not be affected by brain damage or medication or inebriation. Since they are, we know that the causal diagram flows in the opposite direction - brain activity causes thoughts, and brain activity is subject to brain damage and chemical influences.You also don't understand computers very well. Computers pass input and output between each other all the time, literally faster than you can think, without human interaction. Some programs specifically wait for user input; others just run and respond to non-human stimuli. And the input and output are both computer activity. Every time you strike a key you're connecting circuits. The representations on the screen of this text are simply transistors in on/off states. The behavior of this webserver is the activity in its memory and processor. I'd like to direct you back to Occam's Razor. The null hypothesis is never "made up." It's the most likely hypothesis given no evidence to shift it. If I have a hundred absolutely unevidenced claims, the most likely hypothesis is that none of those claims is accurate. It's really that simple. This is both semantically and objectively wrong. For the semantic bit, the heart performs no computation; it doesn't think. It's a pump. One might as well say that driving is an engine thing, or more precisely a fuel-pump thing.But more objectively, morality is absolutely brain-based. We can detect emotions like love using MRI imaging. We can identify the electrochemical processes, we can watch living brains feel empathy, make decisions, recall memories, etc. Brain imaging has progressed to the point where we can watch live brains as they form new connections on the cellular level, that of a single neuron.Every decision you make is a thought. Every thought you have is an electrochemical action in your brain. Every moral choice you make is a decision. If a=b and a=c, then b=c. Morality is a brain thing. We're not conscious of all of our moral weights, we tend to flinch away from uncomfortable possible future decisions until the moment of required action, and in the moment we often make snap judgements without thinking them through...but it's all still in the brain. Nowhere else.You claim that there is a nonphysical element guiding the process, but you cannot show that such an element is required, what form it would take, how or why it would affect moral action, or any related question. You have no idea how you know this thing you think you know, you just think that it's good to believe it, and so you do, regardless of evidence - whether that be a lack of evidence or indeed even evidence to the contrary. You're shifting the goalposts, and I have no confidence that you understand morality, cognition, or evolution in any but the most abstract and flimsy sense.We cannot know the actual motivation for the actions of another (someday we may, as brain imaging continues to improve...), and therefore by your standard we can never know whether the actions of anyone other than ourselves are actually moral. And yet you feel perfectly comfortable making moral judgements about actions other than your own - unless you'd say that you cannot judge the morality of the actions of Hitler because you cannot possibly know his true motivations.Therefore it is impossible for you to know the thing you claim to know. This means you should question that belief, as it is likely wrong.The morality of an act is not inherent in its motivation, but rather its effects. If I sacrifice one man to save a dozen, I have performed a moral act, even if I really didn't like the guy I sacrificed anyway. If I help a homeless man get a job and a home and become a productive member of society, it doesn't matter whether my real motivation was just to not have to deal with him begging every time I walked past him to work - I've still performed a morally praiseworthy act.

And you think that this is separate and distinct from the "morality of a person" why, precisely? Please be extremely specific. Explain as if I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about; as if you were trying to describe the distinction between the state of inebriation and being drunk.

We know absolutely no such thing. In fact, we have more than adequate evidence of precisely the opposite. Actual moral standards change from one culture to the next, even within the same culture over time.Slavery was considered perfectly morally acceptable in Western society at large, even morally praiseworthy in many circles (there were many who actually believed that keeping a man as a slave was good for him, better than letting him remain free in his home country), just 150 years ago! Today that moral standard has changed.Or look at homosexuality. Go back 50 years and homosexuality was regarded as unforgivably evil by the overwhelming majority of Western society. Alan Turing, the man responsible in large part for modern computing and breaking the Enigma code in WWII, saving thousands upon thousands of lives and radically changing the world we live in for the better, was convicted of homosexuality and eventually committed suicide over his reprehensible treatment. Only just a week or two ago did the British government get around to apologizing.These aren't people having difficulty adhering to their moral standards, GDR. The standards themselves are changing. It's blatantly obvious.And then look at cross-cultural differences. There are cultures where, even today, the consumption of human flesh is considered to be morally acceptable, even praiseworthy. Places where the live burning to death of "witches" is considered a moral imperative. I can show you video of that last, if you like.Again - these are not examples where the people think to themselves "well, I shouldn;t kill this person, it would be murder, but I really want to, so I'm just going to ignore my instinctual knowledge of the universal standards of good and evil and just do it anyway." These people actually believe in their instinctive emotional core that they are doing good.There is no universal standard of morality. It doesn't exist. Your denial is foolish at best.

You;re welcome, though I'm puzzled by the fact that you straight-up ignored most of it.Of particular interest is the fact that your "rebuttal" of my point that cognition is solely a function of the brain and that thoughts are brain activity was to simply disregard it, and in later posts to pretend that those points do not exist.The relationship is exceedingly clear.I'm sure you've been drunk and/or affected by other psychoactive substances before. You may have noticed (or perhaps you simply weren;t paying attention) that the way you think alters with some chemical interactions. The is also the basis of essentially all of psychiatric medicine - a person can be made to [i]think differently[i] through chemical influences. If your core bing, your sense of identity and self, your moral core, your intuition, are all at least partially driven by a nonphysical component of an undefined type with an undefined relationship to the physical brain, medication and alcohol and other purely physical chemical influences should not change our cognitive processes. Yet they do. Your hypothesis is strongly contraindicated. So strongly that I would call it outright falsification.Brain damage is a similar case. Brain damage has been observed to completely change a person;s personality. Brain damage has been shown to cause memory loss, and the loss of other cognitive abilities. Not simply operator/machine interface problems; if the brain worked like a person driving a car with the driver representing a nonphysical element with the controls representing the brain and the body being the car, we would expect brain damage to cause steering problems - that is, brain damage should cause physical impairment of the ability to speak or walk and so on, but should not impair the ability to think, to understand words if they're being heard, to change where the driver wants to go as opposed to simply limiting his ability to steer. What we actually see is that cognitive function itself, from personality to memory to identity and more is all affected by brain damage.There is a certain rare disorder that will cause a man, upon seeing his mother, to accuse his mother of being an imposter. He will understand that the person looks identical to his mother, and is in fact an excellent duplication, but will insist nonetheless that she is a fake.The cause has been identified as damage to a specific part of the brain. If this part of the brain is damaged, a person can lose their ability to associate a specific sensory input with emotional weight. The effect is that the visual stimulus of his mother's image will no longer connect to the emotional reactions normally associated with his mother, and he will truly and honestly feel in his heart of hearts that the person in front of him is an imposter.Have her leave the room and simply call to him, and he'll easily identify her as his mother - the link between auditory stimulus and emotion is handled elsewhere and remains unimpaired.Note that such individuals are perfectly capable in terms of vision, cognition, and hearing. They are not deficient in any other way. They understand that the situation is extremely confusing, but no matter how hard they try, they cannot associate the person with their mother.We can see this damage in high-resolution MRI scans. We can compare it to normal brain scans, and we can see the broken connection. We can see the emotional import of a person in the activity in specific portions of the brain. We can see the processing of visual data, the linkage to memory, the linkage to emotion.If such functions were handled by a nonphysical component, something that does not reside in the brain, something that causes brain activity in such a way that appropriate correlations are observed, then we should not see a causal link in the physical realm.And yet we do.The hypothesis that some part of cognition, of human thought and identity, of morality or emotion or memory, is controlled by a nonphysical component is wholly falsified. If that hypothesis were true we would expect certain observations that we do not observe - if your disembodied soul can process language without any brain at all, you should be able to go right on talking and understanding language right up until death or the loss of all sensory input. Similarly, if that hypothesis were true we would expect not to observe things like personality changes or the inability to connect a person to your emotional core as effects of brain damage.You;re simply wrong, GDR. Your entire model of human cognition is factually incorrect, not as a matter of opinion, but as a simple matter of evidence. No matter how much you'd like the world to work that way, it simply doesn't. No amount of faith or belief or wishful thinking will make it so. And ignoring the evidence simply means that you're deluding yourself.

You;re making the very simple mistake of attributing your current moral outlook to some universal constant (even if, as you would say, you're only reaching for it), when what's really happening is that you're simply comparing the moral standards of other cultures past and present to that of your culture. There is no logical reason to extrapolate a universal constant morality from what you observe.This is the result of a normal cognitive defect in human beings.Let's say you observe a man angrily kicking his desk. You might think "wow, that guy is an angry person." But the man himself just found out that a tree fell on his car and his insurance won;t pay for it, and anyone would feel frustrated at that.Within ourselves we can see the chain of events that make our own actions and moral judgements make sense - we have access to the context.But when we observe others, we don't see their entire personal history. We only see them in the moment.And so the flaw in human thinking is the tendency toward attributing the behavior of others to permanent, enduring traits, when those behaviors would be better explained by environmental circumstance.You are attributing the moral standards of various cultures to a permanent, enduring universal standard, when those moral standards are better explained by cultural differences alone.We see that morality is becoming more uniform because cultures are becoming less distinct over time with the advent of increased global communication. 200 years ago American culture wouldn't have much of an effect on Japan; yet now Japanese and American culture affect each other very strongly. Objectively, that's true. We would say that such a shift would be for the worse, but only because we're using our own moral standards as the basis for comparison.There is no objective standard for comparison.Certainly I would not be terribly surprised if humanity will someday face another moral challenge similar to slavery, as artificial intelligence eventually gains sapience. And certainly there are areas even today where slavery is practiced and nobody thinks twice.Remember, to those who burn witches, those of us who do not burn witches are terribly immoral and have shifted our morality for the worse. They expect that our protection of witches will lead to disaster, even as we judge that their killing of witches is a disaster.Who is right Who has the better morality?The correct answer is neither. But I know which society I would rather live in.

You;re setting up a contradiction, GDR. If cognition is a function of the brain, then physical changes in the brain should affect cognition. THis is what we observe. Conversely, if cognition is a function of some nonphysical element that simply causes brain activity as a side effect, then physical changes to the brain should not actually affect cognition. This is not what we see.You can't have it both ways, GDR. Either cognition, including emotions, thoughts, memories, and so on, are a function of the physical brain or they are not. The evidence to tell which world we live in is readily available, and you claim to accept it...and yet you irrationally hold to the contraindicated hypothesis. Yet you are claiming exactly that when you claim that there are nonphysical elements involved in cognition. If you don;t know, then you have to say "I don't know." You can't say "I don't know, but this is what it is." That's not a logically consistent chain of statements. Read this.

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UC Berkeley scientists have developed a system to capture visual activity in human brains and reconstruct it as digital video clips. Eventually, this process will allow you to record and reconstruct your own dreams on a computer screen.

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Your brain is you. What your brain processes, you see. Your brain activity is your thoughts are you. That;s not at all clear. In fact the opposite is clear, and you're making an unfounded logical leap.GDR, you're behaving precisely as if you actually believe that cognition is a purely physical function opf the physical brain, but clinging to a contradictory belief anyway.I;ve brought up this comparison many times in other threads, but it's useful here as well. You;re telling me that there is a dragon in your garage. When I ask to see it, you tell me that it's invisible. When I ask to touch it, you tell me it's intangible. When I ask if I can hear it, you say it's silent. And so on - in every case, you can predict in advance the outcome of any experimental test, and it just so happens that you're predicting precisely the observations that would be made if your claim were completely false, and you're making rationalized excuses to retain your belief. This is "belief in belief," as I explained in an earlier post.You claim that there are nonphysical elements to cognition. Yet when I challenge that claim by pointing out the effects of brain damage and medication, you say "yes, when the brain is impaired cognition is impaired, but there are still other nonphysical elements distinct from the brain." You've tried to use the mystery of cognition as your excuse to retain belief, pointing out that we cannot yet read thoughts directly from the brain...and yet, as I've just shown to a degree we can do exactly that.In other responses I;ve brought up specific brain injuries that would seem to very strongly contraindicate any kind of nonphysical processing of emotions, such as with the case of the man who accuses his mother of being an imposter. You ignored that response.GDR, your position is utterly untenable. It's irrational. You;re not being logically consistent. You're violating Occam's Razor, you're playing God of the Gaps, and you're flat out ignoring evidence that utterly falsifies your hypothesis.

You clearly haven't read my posts yet today, because we can see exactly that.

You have an absurdly oversimplified view of morality. "Selfish" vs "selfless" are rarely mutually exclusive, and sometimes the "unfailingly" selfless act results in undesirable outcomes.It's curious that your "universal standard" of morality is so explicitly vague as to be undefinable in absolute terms. You call it a "universal standard," and yet then you claim that even given a universal standard you cannot judge what is or is not moral, and then you contradict yourself again by saying that morality can be judged by motivation and where on the "selfless" vs "selfish" spectrum that motivation lies.It's a tangled mess of nonspecific weasel words, GDR. It's almost as if you're defining your "universal standard" to be subjective and utterly relative and not really a "universal standard" of objective morality at all.

False. I present it as if my arguments demonstrate a significantly higher probability of accuracy than opposing arguments. I never claimed anything about "consensus." I'm neither appealing to authority nor popularity.I;ve demonstrated very specific observations that strongly contraindicate the hypothesis that one or more portions of human cognition are driven by what you call "nonphysical elements."Simply saying that "not everyone agrees" is not actually a rebuttal, GDR. You'd have to actually address my arguments to do that. Thus far you've simply avoided doing so. You haven't even tried to rebut even a single one of my examples. 1) You;re moving the goalposts. You specifically said that we couldn't see the images in people's minds. You even repeated that claim after I had posted my evidence, as you had not yet viewed it. I presented to you a direct falsification of that claim...and now you're saying "but we (meaning you, GDR, personally) don't understand how that all happens."2) You're just playing God of the Gaps. You can't keep shifting your nonphysical elements into the as yet unknown regions of neurology. It's utterly obvious that's what you're doing. But "I don't know" does not then translate into "there probably is, or even just might be, some nonphysical element involved in that." That's still an unfounded logical leap. A non sequitur. A logical fallacy. That's curious considering throughout the thread you've been debating on the basis of claims regarding "nonphysical elements" of human thought and identity. ...no, that's actually the most accurate thing you've said in the whole thread. We perceive a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum, and that's just our eyes. That's not speculation, it's easily demonstrable fact. We see more every year, though, with our ever-improving technological resources. It's strange that you think you should ask popular science authors with physics degrees about questions of neurology. When I want to know about the brain, I ask a neurologist. If I want to know about human behavior, I talk to anthropologists and psychiatrists and sociologists. If I'm curious about particle accelerators, I ask a physicist. I'm not sure why you think that an appeal to authority would be an effective argument when it fails to address even a single one of my examples and the authorities in question are not authoritative on the subject under discussion. We already have. You saw the video, unless you ignored it. We can see the visual processing not just as brain activity, but also as the actual perception represented by that activity. No different from measuring all of the various transistor states of a computer and then also reading the actual data directly from memory. Are you sure about that? What do you think you know and how do you think you know it? You;re reading popular science books. These are not peer-reviewed journals. This is the kind of tripe that convinces people that the Big Bang was actually an explosion in the sense of a violent chemical reaction. GDR, your comments are hopelessly scattered all over the realm of science, trying to find more unknowns in which to squeeze your "nonphysical elements."I've posted several very specific examples. These examples represent observations that would be unlikely in the extreme if some form of "nonphysical elements" were involved in human thought, human emotion, human identity, etc.I;ve directly challenged specific claims of yours, with exactly the observations that you claimed we could not make.And your response is to drift off into the realm of the pop-sci version of physics, as if that would somehow help you in a debate about whether the brain is entirely physical and performs the entirety of human cognition as purely physical processes.What's next? Are you going to post videos of Uri Gellar and claim we don't know how he beds spoons, and that somehow this too gives you an excuse to believe in "nonphysical elements" to human cognition?ABEWhat we have so far are a series of claims from you regarding "nonphysical elements" to human cognition with no supporting evidence; a series of "unknowns" or "curiosities" that you claim might eventually provide evidence of such "nonphysical elements;" a long-running theme of personal incredulity whereby you claim that the presence of morality is "obviously" evidence of "nonphysical elements," but where you are unable to show any hypothetical causal relationship between "nonphysical elements" and morality or indeed any sort of link at all, or even to describe what "nonphysical elements" are or what specifically they might do.We also have a series of observations that would be highly unlikely if one or more functions of human cognition were driven by anything other than the physical brain. From medication to intoxication to brain damage, you've been shown actual observations of both general and specific evidence that strongly contraindicates any function of human cognition, from thoughts to identity to motor control to personality to memory to morality and so on, being processed anywhere other than the physical brain.A series of claims and irrational arguments filled with logical fallacies, vs a series of real-world observations and evidence without any need to appeal to authority or popularity./ABEAddress my specific examples or concede. Specifically I'd like to see your actual response to the fact that I demonstrated that we can directly view the visual information, the actual perception, of a living brain, and also my example of the brain injury that causes a man to accuse his mother of being an imposter.Edited by Rahvin, : No reason given.

QM and cognition are sometimes used together to form new-agey mystical woo-woo rationalizations for reasons to retain a belief in spirits and souls and so on. It;s not too far different from the common movie meme where a "Scientist" character says that "energy can never be created or destroyed" as some way to show that the "energy" that makes up human consciousness can also never be destroyed and therefore we all live on somehow after death.It's utterly ridiculous, based on absurdly false concepts of energy and cognition. We are not "luminous beings" regardless of how cool it sounds when Yoda says so. Yes, there is a lot of energetic activity in the brain - most of a human being's metabolic energy goes straight to the brain. But that energy is not you - the specific pattern of energetic reactions as they are processed and move through your brain's specific arrangement of neurons is you. It's absolutely true that the matter and energy in your brain will never be destroyed and will merely change form, but it's the change in form that destroys what was identifiably human.If I were to look to anyone other than a neurologist to answer questions about the brain, it would be an artificial intelligence researcher. They're the ones trying to understand the human brain sufficiently well to build something analogous.

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.

QM is most emphatically not woo.Some people make up woo because of QM...but that's a problem deriving from their own irrationality, and often ignorance.Physics, including QM, observes and models the way that the world really is. Frequently, and especially with quantum mechanics, those observations are strongly counter-intuitive to human brains whose ancestral environment has no analogue and which has difficulty instinctively modelling even Newtonian mechanics.Quantum mechanics isn't weird, and our instinctual expectations of the world normal. Rather, quantum mechanics is normal, and it's out expectation that the world works in some different way that is the aberration.Many people, even many scientists, forget that...or it doesn't even occur to them. The world works the way the world works, and even when we add in things like "quantum entanglement," which Einstein once referred to as "spooky action at a distance," it doesn't provide rational justification for believing or indeed even hypothesizing that this opens a gateway for all manner of "spiritual" or other "nonphysical" nonsense.We don't really "observe" the world into its current state. We don't actually remake the Universe by observing it. That myth is borne of a misunderstanding of the Uncertainty Principle, and a conflation of terms from their usage in physics to their colloquial definitions. Indeed. And yet the reason is not that each of our conclusions are equally valid. Your position involves a massive amount of irrational handwaving piled atop shifting goalposts, logical fallacies, and desperate wishful thinking.I let my previous post stand, GDR. I'd like to see your reply, when you get a chance.