My Beliefs- GDR

Once again, we can see stuff going on the brain but we don’t see an actual thought let alone a picture of what we visualize. As I said before it is like a computer. There is all the activity going on in the computer but it requires input to make that happen. Beats me. That is the million dollar question. One physicist I read suggested that our consciousness exists in another dimension but we experience life in what we perceive of this one.

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

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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.

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Here is the complete quote:

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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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So Wright is saying that these characteristics have a genetic basis, but IMHO in order for us to become moral that there must be more than that because, as Wright says, what has come from our genetic basis doesn't actually work out morally.

That isn’t how I understand morality at all. I’m not saying that I can judge what is moral and what isn’t. It isn’t what I or what you do. It is about what is behind what we do. Again, it is a heart thing. Is what I do motivated by selfishness or unselfishness. The universal standard isn’t something that can be laid out in a set of laws. The standard would be unfailing selflessness. But we can know the answer. Slavery is immoral because at its core it is selfish. The slave owner is benefitting at the expense of another. Burning witches simply put is selfishly putting your ideology ahead of someone else’s life. Again it boils down to the Golden Rule.

This is bizarre. You know beyond all doubt that the thoughts in your head are in your head. Not your heart, not someone else's head, not another dimension; your own head.Even if you didn't know this simply because it's obvious, you can sit inside an fMRI scanner, think your weird thoughts and see the parts of your brain that are thinking them. The operators can give you moral puzzles and tell you, in advance, which parts of your brain will go to work solving them and you can see it happen.When those parts of the brain responsible for senses like sight, hearing, morality, cognition etc are missing, damaged or interfered with by drugs, those senses and emotions also go missing too.The input to start your brain working on these things is the environment which you experience through your senses - sight, hearing, touch, smell.The evidence is as strong as it could possibly be that all this happens in our brains and you have absolutely no evidence that it doesn't - just some sort of delusional wish for it not to be so.Why do you need to fantasise about this? What is making you deny such obvious truths?

Wiki define cognition this way - "cognition" usually refers to an information processing view of an individual's psychological functions. The brain processes information. It gains information from the eyes, ears etc. The brain however is reliant on receiving information to process. I don’t hold to any particular theory on how this happens.You hold a particular scientific materialist view on consciousness and you present it as if there is consensus on it. However as this article shows it isn’t that simple. Psychology TodayCertainly the information that provides a picture of what we visualize is in the brain and can be pulled out and put on a screen. What I am asking is where is the equivalent of the screen that those scientists project those pictures on, in normal life? All there are these connections being made in our brains. How does that become the picture we perceive? None of this proves anything metaphysical but it is just to try and point out that there is a great deal we don’t understand.Actually, I’m not all that keen on calling things metaphysical anyway. I’m more inclined to think of it in terms that all things are physical and even natural but that we only perceive a small amount of reality with our 5 senses even when they’re enhanced by microscopes etc. That however is simply wild speculation.I bought and read a book by two physicists, Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, a couple of years ago called Quantum Enigma. As we both know I am no expert so I found this interview with Bruce and here is the link. Quantum Physics Encounters Consciousness.You posted more that I have no way of responding to. Yes brain damage or drugs cause our thinking to be altered. Yes we can see connections being made in the brain and I think that at some point we will find ways of pulling out thoughts from the brain. Still we have to make decisions in our lives and we have free will. We can turn left or right and the world as we perceive adjusts accordingly. As is pointed out in that book our observation of things creates our reality and even goes back in time to do it. Information passes between particles instantly over distance with no connection between them. Where is the physical aspect in that?I don’t have answers to all of this It sure seems clear to me though that there is a whole lot more going on than what we observe by a brain scan.

I'm sorry but there are several of you and only one of me to reply. I'm going through them in order one at a time and trying to maintain a life.

Firstly - How do you know the IPU doesn't exist? What leads you to this conclusion?Secondly - As far as science is concerned there is no difference between postulating Tom as the cause of observable phenomena as there is the IPU or any other equally unevidenced entity. If I said that materially undetectable morality gremlins were seeking to inaudibly sway our moral decision making I would be in exactly the same company as you and your Tom ponderings.We would both be flying in the face of the evidenced conclusion regarding these matters. Being social animals inferring agency and seeking to understand the world in terms of the motivations of others is a highly effective strategy because in most cases there is indeed actually agency. The agency of the other humans who make up a large part of one's environment.Of course we could have this proclivity because of agency gremlins inaudibly whispering in our ears or Tom telepathically inspring us or what have you.... But these sorts of conclusions again fly in the face of the evidenced conclusions regarding these matters. This is blatantly flawed thinking because saying Tom exists obviously fails to answer why something (e.g. Tom himself) rather than nothing exists.And surely you can see the problem with claiming that evrything and anything is evidence of Tom......? This is the very definition of assuming your conclusion and then calling your conclusion "evidenced" on that initial assumption. It's the whole cart before horse circles inside circles thing again. Well not really. Evolution isn't some random process is it? Surely you know that. That answer doesn't make any sense. We have evolved a highly pliable organ that gives us the ability to adapt and change. Given an organ of such plasticity social and cultural variance is entirely expected. I'm not sure why you think every cultural change be dependent on further brain evolution......? The point you are missing is that our moral instincts are as they are exactly because our brains reflect the ancestral environment they evolved in!!!!!! See the end of this post. But I'd agree with all of that and always have so I'm still not sure where you think Dawkins and I differ on any of this? You are conflating an argument about the genetic origins of morality with the completely different idea that one's individual moral judgements are wholly prescribed by one's genes rather than also the result of other (i.e. cultural and social) factors. I'd say that an individual's moral outlook is formed from social and cultural factors far far more heavily than genetic factors in all but the most extreme cases. Scientifically speaking wherever we have ever observed moral judgements being made. Right - We have been over this before. But you repeatedly make this point as though it is some sort of argument clincher. So I am going to answer this in quite a lot of detail.1) Our brains did not evolve in the environment of a globalised world economy consisting of billions of distantly related people.2) Our brains did evolve in small hunter gatherer communities consisting of closely related others.3) Our moral instsincts thus developed in an environment where those around us carry almost all of the same genes.4) Our moral instincts thus evolved in an environment where, from a genes eye point of view, the sacrifice of an individual gene carrier can promote the ongoing propogation of the genes in question.5) So when you say - "Morality can work against the survival of the genes we carry" you are making the mistake of looking at this fom the point of view of an individual in the modern world rather than the point of view of genes in our ancestral environment.I have previously called this "The Big Mac effect" - Why are we drawn to eat high fat, high sugar foods despite the fact that in the modern world these are more likely to kill us than make us successful gene propogators? Because the proclivity in question developed in our ancestral environment rather than our modern one.Same difference our moral instincts.

You think Wright is saying that human morality isn't moral......?I'm afraid you've lost me completely with that last statement. What do you mean when you say that genetic origins of morality result in morality which "doesn't work out morally"....?

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.

Either you didn't actually read the article yourself, or, you didn't really understand what you read.Nothing in that article said anything about consciousness being metaphysical. Those in the field of studying consciousness are focusing only on the brain. In other words, no one is looking for answers outside of the physical world (whatever that even means). We don't understand? I think it's better said that there is a great deal YOU don't understand.What you are asking about is Cartesian Theater and covered under Cartesian Materialism. Funny that YOU would ask questions that are actually the foundation of classic materialism.I should point out that Cartesian Materialism is not a widley held position in philosophy. So you're asking question that have not only been answered, but they've also been discarded as answers.The study of consciousness is far more advanced than you think.- Oni

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.

I agree. But interestingly enough, physicist (respected ones like Roger Penrose) are delving into the study of consciousness using their knowledge of QM, and then some.This is not to support GDR's position or even to lend credit to the article he linked "Quantum Physics Encounters Consciousness" which I read and quite literally explains NOTHING about consciousness. I'm just saying there seems to be a group of physicist who believe they can explain consciousness, or at least eventually do that. But of course it's not anything metaphysical that they're looking into.- Oni

Very well explained, Straggler. To me there needs to be no further discussion on the question of why we would sacrifice for the good of someone of a "different" gene pool.If we go back far enough to when our brains evolved the areas responsible for altrusim and in a sense morality you'll find we were from a very small gene pool.- Oni

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.